Those Daring Young Men

Those daring young men on their flying trapeses really are not. They are dazzling, but somehow, ultimately fraudulent. Dancing on the high wire they are indulged and glorified, praised and magnified forever. They sparkle and shine; they do not grow old with grace and wisdom, like twenty-something year old prima donnas who have lost their bloom, going out with a flash or a splash, comets in the night, pebbles in the stream, and not with a wimper, with a bang!

What is it with this fascination with premature death, with all these premature ejaculates? They are sick; their deaths are sad, tragedies. I am confused by Spaulding Gray, and Hunter S. Thompson, Richard Brautigan and the biggest tuna, Ernest Hemingway, dead swashbucklers, dead by their own hands.

How is it admirable or acceptable to overlook Hunter Thompson's blowing his brains out at home while on the telephone with his wife, with various household members, a son, a grandchild present? She thought he had just put the phone down for a moment when she heard the gun. How is this "going out" before the downward trajectory begins; how is this noble, brave, or anything more than cowardice and vanity, except maybe in sports? How is living up to one's self-created gonzo, wild and crazy guy image warped into a signal of greatness and self-perception? This is not perspicacity, nor is it wisdom.

It troubles me, as a product of many of the same indulgences and appetites. I, too, harbor dreams and illusions and share some, maybe many, of the same sensitivities. Thompson's suicide unsettles me. Hunter Thompson's bored and idle choice to die crossed my line in the sand: it will not stand! in the words of Papa Bush. It is wrong, wrong, wrong!

What is this fantasy of obliteration by guns about? The end is almost certain, a violent, messy, bad end. Maybe it is not as destructive as that idiot who derailed an Amtrak train, copping out in time to save his own backside while injuring hundreds and killing tens of people. Hemingway and Thompson used shotguns, elephant gauge no doubt (like the one in Jumanji, the movie), as they were such brawny guys. Brautigan was found weeks after he had died, killed by a high caliber bullet. His death was decreed a suicide. Spaulding Gray slipped silently overboard a Staten Island Ferry alone one winter night. "Some say the world will end in fire, others say in ice, I prefer. . ." Gray had been in a serious accident, he was depressed, he had attempted suicide before. Not that this makes it right. It is sad, a waste, a tragedy.

I am predisposed towards Kevorkian, dying of boredom in a Minesota jail, forgotten hero with a cause. And I'm all for the Oregon legal suicide program, and I support the Hemlock Society's views about euthanasia. I have known terminally ill cancer patients. Most of them endured the erosion of their lives until their spirits floated away from the living sedated on a cloud of morphine. Some were in a hospice, while others were at home. One man shot himself in bed at breakfast time, knowing that it might be his last chance to control destiny, his anger and his pain. I have no issue with those who do themselves in when it gets too bad, too painful to endure, without prospect of improvement and of living on their own terms. I guess it is the definition of quality and on their own terms where things can get tricky for my argument. I've always admired the Princeon Doctor who had Alheimers's and dealt with it by swimming out to sea. He was both his own doctor and patient, witness to the familiar, irreversible pattern of the disease's ravages. He knew he could no longer control his life. On his final day of life he did the things he enjoyed, bid good-bye to those who he loved, and left a note under his pillow, swimming out into the summer sea off Nantucket. His body washed ashore the next morning, drowned.

I am not often as judgemental. But as one prone the cycles of what must be mild depression, I have glimpsed despair. Unmedicated and undiagnosed, I am surrounded by many who have been. What I know is that there will be an upturn of fortune; I know that what goes up will go down, and I trust that like the sun and moon. There will always be another day. But these guys, not Richard Coreys perhaps, yet who have it just quit. They bailed, jumping ship when all was not lost, it was not their final recourse, not even close to it. Of this I am sure. These men knew as much or more than I do, yet they gave up, and it seems like it was for vanity less than desperation, especially in Thompson's case. They undermine my fundamental faith and basis underlying my will to live. Bad news, sickness, an episode of depression--they are all downers, with a destructive siren song, suggesting the ease of ending it all. It is the wrong song to listen to. Resilience is the word of this age. Bear with it, chin up. Fight the powers of darkness. We must learn to tie ourselves to the mast, to turn off the devil's music, full of sin.

And with experience, one comes to terms with these things, as life seldom grows any easier, as we weather many storms. "Such are the vicissitudes, my roommate Lanneau loved to say. Like a sovereign, tossing ship, a tiny vessel in the turbulent or tranquil sea that is our lives, we must stay afloat and will ourselves through sometimes harsh realities. We must hope for a ray of sunshine through a break in a cloud and a calmer stretch of sea and the reprieve of the end to a storm.

And so, of course, these self-obsessed, self-orbiting boys foreswore their trust in life. They could not grow up, they won't grow up, no they'll never, never grow old. Like Peter Pans, only grounded versions, six feet under grounded versions. They've clung to their own rigid images of themselves, and, when their fortunes dipped or their creative juices dried, they lacked the grace to grow or to crawl back in Yeat's words, to the "foul rag and bone shop of their hearts," the place where all [creative] ladders start, the energy to rebuild themselves. These men lost vision in the end. They could not see the forest for the trees.

I think it will be a grave mistake to laud them for their choice of death. I remember my mother's caution, "to walk a mile in someone else's shoes" before issuing criticism. I think I may have, so I speak. The message from these deaths should be 'do not follow me!" This was the wrong turn in the road, the short-sighted way to live and die. For all their greatness, these deaths are magnified and even more tragic. It fills me with sadness that these creative sensibilities have perished. No one can approach Spaulding Gray and ask him about the thrill he wrote about driving up Windmill Hill in Little Compton, and ask him some new question that he had never heard before, or share an insight or familiarity with a great grandchild. These lives a stopped prematurely and now their stories are forever stilled.

It seems like such a wimp-out, macho acts by girlie-men, such dubious acts of distinction, of self-extinction.

Saturday Morning

No heat yet, so I read in bed. And I read. a luxury, waiting for the pounding of the pipes, the hiss of steam from the radiators. The heat. All winter, it has been too hot; this day, it has yet to come. I await the sounds, expectantly. It is usually too hot.

Finches cheep in little flocks of five or eight or twelve. A squirrel rats itself up the branches, over bare winter wood. It pauses to scratch a flea vigorously. The sun is out, but it is wan, not warm. The girls are sleeping in and I do not awaken them. They were up very, very late, although I'll hear about not getting her up earlier from Sophie. Her friend Katie prefers to sleep late on non-school days. Where did Sophie get her not wanting to lose the day asleep in bed ethic? It is so admirable! I wait. There's still no heat. You can see your breath in the air. Something must be wrong!

There is a new sound. The Accela train leaves the Providence station on the northbound track, bound for Boston and the end of the line. It is a modern whistle on an old form of transportation. Did the train originate in Washington or New York perhaps, to be here at this time. There's still no heat. It is time to make a move.

Objective

Objective

My hope is to find work within one of Providence’s private foundations or an academic institution of higher learning, where I may utilize my diverse life and work experiences in both the “NFP” and the for-profit worlds, and use my skills to everyone’s best advantage. I have always proven a quick study and an asset to the team. I have developed strong communication skills and held responsible positions where independent initiative, discretion, integrity, professional manner, mature judgment and the capacity to address diverse, complicated problems were essential for survival and success. Today, I seek a salaried position and work for a larger cause than is conventionally found in a for-profit business. . . I would like to speak with you about the possibility of finding work. . .

Personal

Personal

Married to [Name] (artist)
Daughter [Name] [Name] School
Memberships: Ivy Club, Princeton; Sakonnet Yacht Club; New York Yacht Club
Interests: Sailing, perennial gardens, old house restoration and photography

I have lived in NYC and the New York metropolitan region since graduation from Princeton University. All of my life, I spent summers in Little Compton, Rhode Island and own a house there. When I moved my family to Providence, it was in order to be closer to our home in Little Compton, to put our daughter into an excellent private day school and to put my family into a more stimulating, urban environment. Living in Providence is part of a larger plan, and although living here is new, it also feels much like a homecoming. I took some risk in making such a change; so far, the immediate changes are all good ones. Finding rewarding new work remains the challenge and the unsolved variable in solving our family’s equation.

Experiencing Mediocrity

I am experiencing mediocrity. Yesterday I was cleaning out the toolshed, woodstove burning to warm me among all those mouse-eaten, sawdusty boxes filled with old papers from boarding schools in America and England, from Princeton and Harvard, reviewing my entire university transcript, old journals and notes, I read nothing of interest. I found nothing imbued with insight, and I saw very little art. What I saw was years of vanity and conceit, and ordinary efforts, nothing singular or rare. The profile of a privileged, rather unexceptional person emerges. It is me. I am depressing.

Not once was I singled out positively. Well, yes, I was. By some readers at Harvard. And there was an A on my thesis on Thoreau from a man for whom I have the highest regard; it was my sole academic redemption. Lots of Bs. A comment from a teacher on her disappointment in what she called "my elusive essay about Melville." I remember how disappointed I was with her grade and comment. I guess the best thing to say about it was that she had actually hoped for more, based upon my class participation. I did not come across my "Lock and Key Imagery in Ulysses" essay, though I only remembered it just now. Perhaps that might have perked me up, with its comment "the best essay about something non-extant that I've ever read" and its A. I did encounter my first Princeton essay, "Truth and Soul 323" with its "C+" and two comments about its being "very well written" and "I liked this essay" before the other foot dropped, the "But. . ." part. I saw several of my efforts in Art History, good, but never great, or so it appeared. I remember working hard on those essays, too.

Not once do I seem to be pointed in a special direction, and here I am, nearly forty years later, and "the more that's changed, the more it has stayed the same." I endure. My journals are not so entirely different and seem just as self-indulgent as ever. Am I my own harshest critic? I am living a rapidly expiring lease on a life that appears to be vanishing fast. This is my mid-life crisis time, to be sure. I have no purpose, aside from helping my wife and daughter, from amusing a handful of friends, from a few small volunteer efforts. I will never measure up to my dreamas of grandeur, though I have been surrounded by many--disproportionately many--who have proven outstanding already.

This is my self-assessment, at least at this very point in time. Yet I cling to the hope, however vain, that things will change, as I must in order to survive. I do not mean that I intend to quit and not try. What I say is this: I have yet to make my mark. I have no other choice. I must try, and try harder still, with more focus as there must be, with a sense of desperation in the air. Is there some way to zero in and redeem a misspent life, a life of illusion, of disillusion and unaccomplishment? How can I ever measure up? I must, I must, for myself, for my family. For people who believe in me, if they are still out there.

Cashing in on a Friendship

I just did something that I have never had to do. Ask a friend if he will loan me money. I am 54 years old. I am supposed to be the master of my ship. Instead, I am unemployed and housebroke. On paper, I am worth millions. In the checking account, I am overdrawn. I have many wealthy friends. Asking one of them for money feels distinctly like I am trespassing on the relationship. They have something in abundance that I need. "Neither a lender nor a borrower be." Well, I am a borrower, that is, if my friend will help me. What recourse do I have? This is about economic survival. Am I cashing in on my relationship? Dear Abby, what do I do now?

Move Equals Death?

When we decided to leave New York for Rhode Island last spring, we made a one-way decision, knowing we cannot go home again, once we leave. When we committed to Wheeler for Sophie, it was the first irrevocable decision in a string of decisions. We started the process of selling our house and of finding a new place to live. We began telling our friends and it was exciting, and they participated vicariously. Everyone contemplates a move to a new place; fewer actually make the move. People share your excitement, merging it with theirs, at first. They probably do not lie awake in bed at night, sleepless, second guessing themselves. This is the difference between someone else's dream and your own reality.

The limbo has lasted a while too long now. It has been about ten months, stretching on and on. Our resources, always thin, are back down to none. I have yet to find a job. Sally is still in South Salem with the dogs. School has worked out for Sophie, thank goodness, although we are now $20,000 further in debt. My sense is that we have made a good "large view" decision, but that it is just taking longer than projected, and that I have lost sight of the goal. As far as it goes with the friends in our old town, we are dead and gone. It really is not much different. You die, you move. You are buried, you are out of sight, either way. You are gone. Although it is a non-terminal sentence, it is like my Uncle Courtney, with Alzheimer's disease, or like someone with cancer of the pancreas. They, you, we are culled out and segregated from the daily flow of humanity that we once swam amongst. They are like the dead, still walking, One ceases to be anything but a memory. It is a lesson to learn, or to remind oneself of often. Count your friends. There are truly very few. Stay in contact with them; make an effort to remain in touch, not only when they are needed, and do not count them for granted. Focus on your own survival, that of your own nuclear unit, hunker down and "keep on keeping on." as the song says.

What's This?

All this writing! It sits here in the computer. No one ever reads it except for me. Just like the book I once wrote years ago, stillborn, never published. Time for Change is available, it just doesn't have a flag waving, "read me, read me" in the wind. Who knows what might happen, were some one ever to read it? I must be seriously traumatized about showing my work, that's all I can say! It has been rejected before, perhaps worse, it has been ignored as though I had nothing interesting to say. And that's why it is so safe here, never printed, unrejectable. I work on it as though it would be seen. And at this point, I would say that I need to open it up and let the chips fall as they may. Let someone see it, Mr. C. You know that you have things to say, many thoughts to share. But my ego's like an eggshell, probably less thick. Maybe it's been cracked and is not strong? Or maybe, who knows right now, it is stronger than I know? There comes a point when you have got to let it out, to see the light of day, risk nothing, get nothing. Take a risk, what can I lose? Words certainly can hurt me, sticks and stones or not. It is just about that time right now.

Youth

I took Sophie to our Landlord's cocktail party last night, and then to a special Valentine's Day medley of songs in the Providence Opera House, an old theatre out on Broadway Street designated as a historic landmark. The evening was fun weighing the sum of the parts. The fact that it was something special to do on a special day in the calendar, the fact that our Landlord keeps extending his welcome to us and we have met neighbors and friends through him, the fun of doing something modest and different, and the universal appreciation that the guests seem to have for Sophie all make for a good experience. She attracts positive attention everywhere she goes. Youth is appealing to middle-aged people, it is abundantly evident. Someone asked whether Sophie and I were brother and sister. I laughed, noting that I am 54 and she is 13, a mere 41 years between us, and how although I appreciated the comment. Sophie could not possibly have welcomed it, or maybe, she might like it when someone mistakes her old father for someone far, impossibly more youthful. Youth is wasted on the young.

Suzanne's Pearl

Suzanne is the mother of all wisdom. "How you do the little things, is everything." How simple, pure and true. If you get potting soil all over the terrace and do a sloppy job sweeping it up, guess what? You are a slob. It is not "the Sanctuary way." [This was the name of the company where we worked]. You cheat a little and you are a cheat. This keeps us clear of situation ethics and compromise, for the better. Work your best, trying to perfect whatever the task, and--presto! You are a perfectionist. You work, you are lazy; you give, you are a giver; you take, you are a taker; you fake, then you are a faker. Nobody's fooling anybody, and let's not fool ourselves. You can see it in each revelatory gesture.

So, in accepting so vast and decisive an extension, nothing is unimportant. Turn it around: everything is important. How a homeowner treats their garden help reveals their inner spirit completely. It is a good, clean way of thinking, imparting significance to the most modain, everyday chore. And where did this concept evolve for me? With Suzanne in the perennial gardens of Greenwich, with Sanctuary under Queen Cora. It was not her philosophy, unhappily. This pearl belonged to Suzanne, and now to me. There is no such thing as a "trickle up philosophy" in American capitalism. It all comes from the top. When the boss doesn't get it, the project is doomed to that person's limitations and the goes-around-comes-around rules of retribution. This, too, is a very important, crucial truth, a corollary to Suzanne's first pearl. Get beneath the right tent and under the appropriate umbrella if you can, and it will protect you from the rain or sun. Which reminds me of yet another one of Suzanne's pearls, to "Water low." And this is because you don't want to knock the foliage down with a cascade of water from a hose or a bucket, you might encourage mildew in the leaves by soaking them late in the day. And remember that we are working in nature, that nature tolerates imperfection and our mistakes. All the same, we can aspire to do things perfectly It's in all the little things where you will find everything, if we will only look, if we could only see.

Get a Job!

I wonder what are people saying about me, behind my back? Are they thinking "Why can't he get a job? What's wrong with him? He's got so much to offer" and a litany of similar questions, just as I ask myself? Are they saying what my wife and daughter say when they are frustrated or angry with me and the tightness of our circumstances, hoping to provoke the beast inside me, saying: "Get a job!" and "Loser!", as I also tell myself at times. I am raw on the subject, yet passive, really numb.

It is the numbness of self-protection, I assume. A state of being that cuts off feeling. I am a lobster who feels no pain ("I am a rock, I am an island. And an island never cries, an island feels no pain...") in the steampot of death. I am green; I am red. My passage from alive to food is painless according to a recent report and inconsequential, nameless. A consumer may think about a once great meal, as in "I ate a tasty lobster," indefinite article, along with a flinty white or a fume blanc, fresh corn from the fields just over the stone wall, drawn butter, a vegetable fresh and green, your choice.

It would be interesting to measure a life of luxury in terms of lobsters. Would it be quantitative or qualitative? One great crustacean, homaris Americanus per season, or an everday lobster? Indentured servants in colonial New England could not be fed lobster all of the time, when lobsters were plentiful and cheap. Often it was expressly forbidden by contract to feed sevants lobster more than a specified number of meals per week. How far things have changed! So, am I numb as a lobster and a rare or an unappreciated foodstuff? Which one am I? Perhaps just numb, or dumb, less rare than I may think.

Which brings me back to wondering: what is this job that I must get? What is my speciality? Will I provide someone their daily soup du jour, or do I wake, or sleep? Get a job, lobsterman. Feel the pain. Cry like a squeezed rock! Get out there.

Who Do You Think You Are, Winston Churchill?

Such lassistude in the face of economic chaos! A walk uphill to school and back again with the New York Times under arm. A second and then a third cup of coffee, toast and jam or fruit or cereal or all three, even a chunk of chocolate. A leisurely perusal of the Editorial, Op-Ed, Obituary and Sports sections, not necessarily in that order follows. Well, I don't drink or such on cigars generally, let alone imbibe a tumbler full of single malt in the morning. And I'm productive, if only in my own mind, with no audience to review what I have wrought. There really are not many who find knowing what I might think of merit or any significance at all, aside from my wife who finds my state of mind affects her and therefore what I am thinking and writing have an immediate impact, and my daughter, who has no choice but to weather my many moods.

Which brings me to the point. We had a pleasant walk to Wheeler this morning. She even remarked about how much different, as in better, it was today, than yesterday, when both of us were raging. After a bath and a few hundreds or thousands of redacted words, Winston might have trooped outdoors in his Wellingtons to work on building a pond or some folly on the estate. That option's not available to me living here in town, but it will be, come spring. I hope I may be gainfully employed, but then, maybe I don't? Or quite possibly, I won't be regardless of my sentiment. Somewhere inside, I must be thinking of how I am Winston, to the manor born!

Residual Impact

The Dad and the Daughter are not at peace. I have noticed this happens in the wake of wife-and-mother visits. A period of readjustment, a realignment of loyalties follows! Nothing unusual about this, it is just good to remember these things. The question would be: is there sufficient reason to have these interuptions at all? The answer is: of course there is! These are speed bumps in the road, that's all! Maybe there will be a rapproachment soon, but the day after's disruption and its ugliness are not themselves good for much. Commited relationships face huge challenges. They must be worth it, they just take work, patience and trust, no matter what height the hurdle.

Conjugal Visit

The Wife arrived on Friday. Actually, I drove to New York, picked her up and drove her back to Providence. Everyone has a different set of skills. Sally's is not driving. I mind the waste of pick up and delivery and my unnecessary round trip far less than I mind the stress of worrying about her on the road on her own.

So the two dogs and the wife arrived for the weekend. We've established that. All is fine enough. Lying awake in bed the night before, I realized while tossing and twisting through most of the early morning hours, just what a problem the dogs are going to be here in an apartment. Especially the red one. He's a nutbar. A lunatic that I love and cannot stand at the same time. His name is Woody and he has never lived in the city before. He is aggressive with other dogs. Maybe it is a dachshund thing. After we all settle into our surroundings a momente, I take Cosi and her son out on their leashes for a good long walk around the block. She is easy.

Upon return, I see the result of Sally's eyeballing our new place. You can see her eyes flicker, pupils darting any time she enters a new place that interests her. Within an hour, she has moved a dozen things from one place to another. In the length of the time I've been out, the apartment has been transformed for the better, and these changes continue all through the weekend. Little things, big things; subtle things, some basic ones. The pictures have moved, along with a small mirror. It is so much nicer.

We drive to dinner at an Indian restaurant on Wickenden Street, student territory. The young collegiate couple at the next table amuses us. The girl is kind of flabby, slack-mannered, with a slight drawl. She is not from Rhode Island, but in the snatches of conversation that I am able to overhear, it is clear she possesses a naivete, and she has a nice laugh. Sally, seated in a better place to watch, notices that the girl has a pierced belly button, and that she scratched it at length when she stood up to leave. I missed this amusement. She revealed a wide expanses of her gut, a la mode these days. Let me note here that I don't think too much of this vogue, especially on the soft and fleshy bodies of American youth today. The amount of bared midriff and backcrack that so many young women reveal these days would be more appealing were they more taut and athletic. I hope this sloppiness in appearance does not mirror a deeper indolence, a deeper, societal failing, the sin of self-indulgence. What more is there to say?

As the weekend continues, we walk all over town. The weather is fine, especially sunny and warm for mid-winter in Rhode Island. We don't need to wear overcoats for the first time since before Christmas. We walk down the street to visit the wonderful Athenaenum and wander past some stores. Sophie is proud to show Sally our new hang-outs, in as much as we have any. We watch an Italian DVD titled "Bread & Tulips" at night and Sally, in her cusomary way, goes to sleep within the first ten minutes or so, just like at home. Sophie and I really like the movie, and wish that she would have watched it. Before bed, I take the dogs out for a walk. Woody barely makes it past the porch before pissing copiously, poor guy.

Sunday dawns upon another mild, sunny day in Providence. Sally and I get up while The Adolescent sleeps in a bit, and we take in the length of Benefit Street while walking the dogs, returning a block higher on the hill along Pratt Street. We have to be very careful because there is black ice on the streets and sidewalks. One false move and that's it. An old person's fear. We have close calls, but no disasters. This is dangerous stuff. Sally says I walk like my old man.

Later in the morning we go to Petco to take advantage of its discounted innoculation services for rabies and distemper. Woody and Cosi get overdue vacinations, while creating general pandemonium among the other pets there, not to forget the ride in the car as well. Cosi gets so frustrated with her son that she bites him. Woody wants to eat a little cocker spaniel and a bichon frise. Frankly, the dogs are not much fun to be with. So much noise and aggression! This makes me wonder whether on balance, they are worth the time, energy and money invested in them? It is not black and white for me, especially Woody. He is such a challenge. We drive around, trying to discover what is nice about Pawtucket, Woody moaning and jumping from one seat to another, back to front. Pawtucket's charms have eluded me one more time, as they have in several other meanderings there. It remains a mystery to solve another day.

On Sunday afternoon we hit the East Side Pocket place for a Gyro and a Felaffel, just like the old days in Greenwich Village. Cheap and tasty, and we sit in the window watching a never-ending stream of students and collegiate-looking types line up by the grill to order. We eat mostly in silence, seated in a row, looking out. Thayer Street is as busy as I have ever seen it, with college in session, a beautiful afternoon, and a Superbowl lined up for the evening, pitting the local favorite Patriots versus Philadelphia's Eagles, it is a great weekend afternoon to view the river of humanity before us. Afterwards, around the corner we discover a terrible leak in a house that we admire. It has water pouring out its foundation. I ask my landlord's wife about it; she says they do not care much for its owner, and elect to let the water run. It's a sick, sad world, is it not?

Sophie and Sally are off together at this point. I have had enough of the daughter's adolescent rudenesses and Sally's contentious spirit and one too many of her undermining, insidious comments. Sophie has issues with any eating or chewing sights and sounds that emerge from my mouth. If I swish my tongue around my teeth, or make vile crunching noises, I am censured. She is aggressive in her pursuit of my flaws, a storm trooper, heedless of her own transgressions. I discipline the dog for repeatedly trying to, and finally succeeding to eat shit, literally. The daughter decries me as cruel and horrible. I have no more time for this. Sally pretends to make nicey-nice while fanning the flames. She's no peacemaker, that's for sure. I walk home alone. And in the evening the Superbowl comes and ends with the hometown's team declared a "dynasty." The television ads, often the best creatively inspired examples of their craft were lame, especially considering their $2.4 pricetag per minute. And what about Paul McCartney of Beatles fame? Is this the best 'halftime entertainment' the NFL can muster?

Monday morning comes quickly. A walk with the dogs, a trip to school to drop the sullen kid there for the day, a cup of coffee at Olga's, along with Sally's onion rolls and we are out of town. Sophie has to go to school and accept her mother's going back home along with the dogs in a moment. We are gone, ruptured. There is a lot of domestic debate at full volume between Providence and New Haven. It is just the thing to make time fly, to ruin a half, no more than half of a good weekend. And then a quick touch and go in South Salem for me, switching cars, watering, an important money transfer from account B into account A and back to Providence. I pick up Sophie within a few minutes of the normal time. Mission accomplished!

The dogs are gone. The wife is back at the hacienda in New York. The matter of the virus-laden computer has been fixed, sort of. The kid's been excessively rude, pushing this part of the parental envelope that is feeling limited and inelastic. Here I am, wondering what it is all about, wondering if these interuptions are a positive on balance, or not. I am really wondering.

So much never happens and what are the relationship's rewards? The food is better and the pictures move around and the interior decor improves, if not the decorum. But the tension and the frustration levels are so high. The answer is not a plain one, the jury's out, and I am it, as well as judge. It is all the same, the dogs, the wife, the child. Lurking beneath all this is, I am sure, the crisis of the fifty-something male, unemployed and seemingly unemployable, filled with failure and regret. Will this pass soon? I look with idle curiosity at the cialis and the viagra and the other ads before me in the sports section, like what's going on, all this sexual stuff? Who gets any? It is surely not me. I look at the pretty undergraduates out on the street and wonder, resignedly. They makes me feel beside the point, irrelevant, a kind of walking dead. It is as though this life has passed me by, and if that's not bad enough, I cherish no illusions that there is something more, an afterlife. Our life is here and now, and I'm not feeling very good about very much. In short, my here and now has up and went. Have I missed the boat? Herewith are some reflections upon the aftermath of a visit with the wife. All that is domestic is not bliss, to be sure!

Pam

I dragged around for a couple of days. Living in Providence next to Brown University kept reminding of an old flame who graduated from Brown eons ago. A peer, at least in age, as it turns out. I googled her name plus the university and voila, up pops her picture and biography. She's been an incredibly dedicated, hard-working lady these twenty something years since last we met, roving the world as a journalist and working at places like the Baltimore Sun and the Boston Globe and The Washington Times. She lived in Central and South America, and in India and Southeast Asia as the Bureau Chief for one of the papers. And there have been awards galore, and a book written.

So, delighted to have found a way to say hello via the internet, I sent a brief note and never heard anything back again. On the third day, however, I received a note. She said her return messages kept bouncing back, sent and unreceived. By now there have beensseveral exchanges back and forths, and I have promised to read her book. She says there is something about Princetonians that I will want to read, that there is much about tigers and WASPs. She calls me "Uncle," a name that will gain meaning when l discover it in her book.

She asked me if I remembered the red fox in the field by my house in New Canaan the last time I saw her, and I do, barely, now that she has reminded me. Was the fox a metaphor, I wonder? I told her what I remembered was holding her hand. She chose not to respond to that memory. I asked her whether she remembered asking my blueblood publisher friend how he deserved all the fancy things he had surrounded himself with, looking him straight in the eye and asking him: "How is it that a redneck, son of a bitch like you has all this?" And he, being my "asshole buddy" over the years was not amused, and glared at her in disbelief. And I, being the other asshole of the pair, kind of viewed her bluntness as a liability rather than the virtue it now seems. I remember the sudden silence. Where had I found this one, he seemed to be saying.

Worst of all, I have always felt badly about her misplaced letter to me when she returned from a business trip to the South Pacific with the head of IBM. She was so excited to see me, it turned out, and she had folded a beautiful letter in a 45 RPM record with some kind of music, Hawaiian I think, which reminded her of us. We had just begun to date, and now it was all over, almost as quickly as it had begun. I had another relationship evolving, with the women I would eventually, some twelve years later, marry. That fall, I was at the height of my charismatic powers, whatever they might have been, feeling full of myself. I did not commit to relationships or call women in this obnoxious time of total self-centered Assholiness. I waited for them to find me, and call they did. Weeks after Pam's return from the South Pacific, when packing up to leave my NYC loft around New Year's, I found her note. Reading it, I recognized what I had not appreciated: that someone had loved methat I might have loved back, and that I was so full of crap I didn't even know it.

So here she is, from out of cyberspace, but very real. And here I am, no longer a match for one so accomplished, married and a father. She said I would like part of her book which mentions her uncle, a Princetonian. And I messaged her back, "is he..." a man I have always thought of as being a hero, and, as it turns out, yes he is. How ever did I miss that back then? I don't even know if Pam is married or has a family. So that is that for now. I wonder if I will ever see this special Pam again? I want to, even if it is just hold her hand.

Who Are You?

The way it was presented on the WPRO station yesterday, it was not an April Fool's Day spoof. "Some stoned intern pressed the wrong button," the reporters joked on air. They seemed half serious about the cause; but were fully serious about the statement that "All Connecticut residents are requested to leave the State." At midday yesterday, February 1st, the announcement was sent across some of Connecticut's radio stations, without the "this is just a test" part. Alarming? Kind of, reminiscent of Orson Wells' prank in Grover's Mills, New Jersey!

"A humped shape is rising out of the pit. I can make out a small beam of light against a mirror. What's that? There's a jet of flame springing from the mirror, and it leaps right at the advancing men. It strikes them head on! Good Lord, they're turning into flame!" - Eyewitness at Grovers Mill, NJ, October 30, 1938
In 1938, the Martians landed in New Jersey. This, however, was just a prank.

Does this mean that when the real thing happens--a less pessimistic person may be content with saying "if"--no one will jump. The cry of "Wolf!" has been heard one too many times, the color orange (or whatever) signifies high alert code has been flashed too often.

As for me? I've already moved away from the NYC metropolitan region, past Connecticut, a scant 150 miles east and slightly north to Providence, not far enough downwind for many dire NBC holocaust scenarios. Reading the survival stories from the World Trade Towers, it is clear that those who hesitated were lost with very few exceptions. Survivors appear to be the ones who recognize the decisive moment of peril for what it is, summing things up in an instant, who pick up and go. Are not these the ones we label selfish if they reveal themselves to be self-aggrandizing or to arrogate dominion, or to want three purple hearts, when the moment proves to be less urgent?

And, of course, there's the hero stuff, and dulce et decorum est. Right: I don't think so. Die for Bush & Cheney, Hastert, Newt and Frisch and their ideals? I'm feeling jaded and cynical about this option. It may not sound very nice, and it certainly is not politically correct or charitable or even attractive, but I am not leaning towards nobility these days, not feeling very Sidney Cartonesque. Just the truth, the reis ipse locquiturs of the bottom line interest me now. One question is: is this the age or my age? Is it my grand education or someone else's uninformed or naive ignorance? It makes me question the meaning of patriotism and faith, and my own patriotism and faith. Maybe I am, or think I am, like some of Orwell's animals, "more equal than others"?

There have been other times when I have been more Samaritan in volunteer efforts, giving blood and lots of time, stopping to help reassure a victim at the scene of an accident. But here, set in the context of middle age, career changes, constant self-reinvention and frequent unemployment, my personal reservoir of philanthropy and altruism are at their historic lows. I'm feeling stingy and unbountiful, uptight. I'd rather be a 'live chicken than a dead duck,' a selfish bastard than a dead one, I am thinking. And for me, when you are dead, you are just that, gone and dead! Would that I could swallow the intensive religious indoctrination of my youth, hook, line and sinker. That would make things so much easier. Bah to martyrdom and the prospect of all those celestial virgins for Little Big Man.

Who here among us would have gone to Vietnam, had they been called up? Would you have proven a Bush or a Clinton, a Kerry or a McCain? Or worse, a name chiseled into stone on a wall in Washington? Who were you back then? Who are you today? Would you serve in Iraq and die a patriot for someone else's dubious ideal of democracy? Or would you move to Canada to dodge the commitment? Would you donate a kidney to an unknown person with your genetic match in need? Would you sacrifice your life for your wife's or husband's? Would you sacrifice your life for your child? Would you jump off a bridge to save a drowning stranger? Would you defy a mugger in a street robbery or help Kitty Genovese on a sidewalk in New York? Much of this may hinge upon one's belief that there is or is not an afterlife, or whether you think it is all 'here and now'?

I am not saying I know myself well enough to say what I would do. In some instances, I believe I would take a calculated risk. In others, there is no way. I am more likely to avoid pure impulse, more apt to weigh my chances than to throw myself away than years ago. People seem to forget very quickly, so for what cause is it worth dying?

This began on a light note with a slight, humorous mistake and ends on several heavy notes. It is not intentionally provocative. It is just that am in this place and time right now, and although I doubt that I am entirely on my own, I find myself wondering how alone I may be with these thoughts.