Tony Platt GoodToGo

SLOW DOWN

   

    I’m up in Humboldt at our cabin in Big Lagoon for a few days in April. I’m here to start a new project on the history of the area, but there’s also time to unwind too. I have Wilbur, our eight-year-old terrier mix, with me for company.

    My first day I wake up to gray skies and a fog-shrouded lagoon, an edgy chill launched off the placid ocean. But by early afternoon the sky has cleared pale blue and there’s a full warm sun as far as I can see up and down the coast.

    I walk Wilbur down to the lagoon. He sniffs, I look everywhere. The spring flowers are glad to have made it through another dour winter. The hedges are ablaze with wild iris, purple and red poppies, and white daisies.

    The lagoon is full and fat, ready to burst its banks. I walk to the end of the jetty and lie down on my back. Wilbur agonizes from the shore. He doesn’t like to be in or on water, and he’s phobic about gaps or metal on the ground. To get the twenty yards to me he needs to walk on the planks of a swaying wooden jetty, over metal attachments and gaps that he imagines will suck him into unknown depths.

    I call him to me, a whistle that signals food and comfort, and he eventually dares all. With his stomach almost on the ground and his ears pinned back, he slowly, oh how slowly, sidles and tacks his away along the jetty until he can burrow his body into mine. We both lay flat on the warm wood, eyes closed against the sinking sun. I relax by listening to Wilbur’s anxious panting, the lapping waves under my head, the steady rumbling and shushing from the ocean a quarter of a mile away, my slowing breath, and, eventually, Wilbur’s too.

SIGHTLINES (SUMMER 2007)

France: It’s early morning and I’m riding a beat up trail bike up a sizable hill towards the Gorge Verdon in Haute Provence, telling myself, “Attaquez la montagne comme Lance.” This is my penance for last night’s feast at the Bastide de Moustiers, and my insurance on tonight’s indulgence. Each day I go out, I try to beat the previous day’s distance. My tactic is to get into a steady groove, think about anything but what I’m doing, and keep my head down, looking only at the tiny piece of road that’s in my tunnel vision.

    On the way back down, I realize what I’ve been missing: huge wild forests, craggy foothills and alps, the piercing blues of Lac St. Croix, the crisp air warming in the morning sun, the smell of pine trees. They were all there as I was riding up the hill, but my mind was on other things.

Germany: I am in Berlin for a week, learning about remembrances of the Nazi past. Cecilia and I take the metro to the Bavarian quarter (Bayerische Viertel) and wander around what used to be called the “Jewish Switzerland.”  In 1933, more than 16,000 Jews lived here quite prosperously. Today it’s hard to find Jews in this neighborhood, but it’s easy to find the memorials that recall their presence. If you look up, sooner or later you’ll see some of the eighty metal plaques pronouncing anti-Semitic regulations. They are mounted on poles and lampposts next to run-of-the-mill signage that you see in any neighborhood. Interspersed with signs for “bus stop,” “no entry,” “open 9-5,” and “free parking,” you can spot “At Bayerischer Platz, Jews may sit only on yellow park benches,” “Jewish veterinarians may not open practices,” “Jews are expelled from all choral groups,” and “Post Office officials married to Jews must retire.”

    The eighty plaques are two-sided. On one side are simply designed pictograms that nostalgically recall glossy visuals in primary colors from favorite children’s books: a pair of golden braids, a cake on a doily, a bunch of cherries. On the other side are sparely written customs, edicts, and laws that document the gradual identification, segregation, humiliation, and disappearance of Jews, beginning in 1933. Though numerically dated, the texts are written in the present tense: “Jews are forbidden from buying newspapers and magazines”; “Jews are no longer allowed to have household pets.” When their designers, artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock, first erected the plaques in 1993, local residents called up Jewish leaders and the police to report that neo-Nazis were installing fascist propaganda in their sedate neighborhood.

    When I spoke with Renata Stih about the plaques, I made a common mistake by referring to them as an installation. She corrected me quickly and sharply. “They are not an installation. They are a memorial, a Denkmal.” It’s an important distinction. Stih and Schnock submitted the idea for the plaques to a competition for a Holocaust memorial to be located in the Bavarian quarter. It was a surprise to many when the Stih-Schnock proposal beat out ninety-five competitors. Government officials no doubt had in mind something somber and monumental in the plaza, a site for reflection and wreath-laying. The plaques are the opposite of a grand monument: they’re decentralized and ordinary, catch you by surprise, put you to intellectual work, are open-ended, and blur the past with the present.

    It’s possible of course that you could walk by these plaques every day and not see them, or look up and see them, but treat them as just another visual stimulus. But if you look only down, you’ll eventually walk into a “stumbling stone.” This is the name given to plaques designed by Gunter Demnig in 1996. You can find them all over Berlin, cemented into the sidewalk, outside what used to be the homes of Jews. The stones provide information about the people who used to live there, when they left or were deported, and what happened to them. There’s no central authority that approves location and design. Local communities, schools, and churches decide to do something and create their own stones. You never know when you’ll stumble into one. They can stop you in your tracks.

California: It’s early afternoon, the tide is ebbing, a good time for my daily foray along the beach that runs from beneath our cabin at Big Lagoon down to Patrick’s Point. Along with the other penitents who make a pilgrimage to this wondrous place in Northern California, I move slowly at water’s edge, head down, scouring the millions of rocks for the rare black-green glint of jade that surfaces naturally polished from tributaries of the Klamath river and roiling Pacific Ocean. Suddenly, I hear a voice shouting from the nearby cliffs. I look up at the silhouette of a man with binoculars pointing out to sea and follow his direction in time to see whales spouting in plain view.

EXCEPT FOR SEX

    On a visit to England (February 2008), I spend some time with friends David Edgar and Stephanie Dale in Birmingham. I’m there to help David celebrate and ease his transition into the big 60. I’m also curious to see how his father, Barrie, is doing on his journey towards his 90th, scheduled for 2009. I last saw him almost a year ago.

    In March 2007, Barrie Edgar, David’s then 88 year-old father joins us for Sunday dinner in Birmingham, as he does most Sundays when his son is in town. Last year his wife of sixty plus years died and he moved into a fancy retirement cum nursing home, inappropriately titled “The Sunrise.”  It has three floors, he tells me: “a bistro and lounges on the ground floor, suites on the second, and the memory impaired on the top floor.” He’s in a suite, but he knows the layout and what might come next. “I can always tell,” he says, raising his eyebrows skyward, “who’s next for the third floor.”

    Barrie is recovering from a fall and a brief stay in hospital. David was very concerned that he might not make it, but here he is today, walking slowly and stiffly with a stick, but impeccably dressed in white shirt, tie, grey slacks, patterned socks, and smart cardigan, his hearing only a tad impaired.

    Father and son are very close and tuned into each other’s nuances, despite being on different sides of the barricades: David is a left-wing playwright with an impeccable pedigree, going back to the days of agit-prop; Barrie is a lifelong, resolute Tory, with a whiff of nostalgia for the good old days. Yet David makes sure that his father gets a good seat at his latest plays, and Barrie basks in his son’s success. In this case, family trumps politics.

    At night Barrie doesn’t like to drive and asks to be picked up, but during the day he drives his own car. He tells me proudly that he recently passed the driving test. David worries about him on the road, but, Barrie tells me, it’s his salvation. “Oh, it would be dreadful to give up my car. Dreadful!”  He sits straight up at the dinner table, his elegant hands punctuating the conversation. As a former theatre man, he talks with precision, even posh, listens carefully, and participates fully. David clearly gets his dry wit from him. Barrie adores David, and treats Stephanie, David’s partner, with loving courtesy.

    And there’s nothing wrong with Barrie’s appetite: he eats the whole three-course meal, with wine before and during the meal, followed by a snifter and black coffee afterwards. The meal is a traditional Sunday works – smoked salmon followed by roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, and cauliflower and cheese sauce – exactly the lunch I had most Sundays with my family during my teen years when we lived in “the country” outside Manchester in an immodest mansion dubbed “Gainsborough.”

    As Steph and David clean up in the kitchen, Barrie and I talk. He has a smoker’s cough, which prompts me to say, “All we need to finish off this great meal would be a cigarette or cigar.”  He smiles, and we talk about our history of smoking. He gave it up some four or five years ago, reluctantly. I gave up nicotine some twenty-five years ago when my son was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Barrie’s wife died from smoking-related cancer, my son made it to his 40th. We both miss smoking.

    He tells me this story, as I remember it the next day: “My idea of heaven would be to work all afternoon in the garden, digging and planting. Then I’d come in tired and aching, and run myself a hot bath. I’d sit in the bath with a glass of wine and my pipe. Always had my pipe. My father gave me my first pipe when I was 17, never a day without it until I gave it up recently, doctor’s orders. I would lie in the hot bath, all my aches going away with the steam of the hot water [he raises his arms and flutters his poetic hands in the air]. I can hear my wife in the kitchen banging away at steak and chips, my favorite dinner. Ah heaven, can’t think of anything better. Except for sex.”

    We both sit there under a chandelier of candles at David and Steph’s dining room table, smiling to each other and enjoying memories of the hot bath and good dinner to follow, and the sex. “No pipe, but I think I’ll have a brandy,” Barrie says, wanting to prolong the pleasures. And he does.

    In February 2008, I’m back in Birmingham. Recently, Barrie has been in hospital again; he lost a great deal of blood. But there’s no sign of him losing steam this weekend. He’s still on the second floor at Sunrise, still driving during the day, and still holding his own with the best of the drinkers and trenchermen.

    Barrie participates in all of his son’s birthday hoopla, including a pre-party dinner on Saturday evening and a kick-off celebration of David’s 60th at a tapas restaurant the following day. And he stands out from the dressed-down artsy crowd in his white shirt and immaculately knotted silk tie.

    Plus, the old trouper has a plum role in the family-produced, postprandial entertainment, “The Life and Adventures of David Edgarlby,” a satirical take on David’s most popular play (“Nicholas Nickelby”), currently in a very successful revival.  For once, David has no hand in writing this drama. He sits with the rest of us, as his relatives ham it up, panto-style. Meanwhile, Barrie relishes lines that poke fun at his “little boy,” who towers about a foot over his dad. “Calls himself my son! Can’t sail, can’t put up a shelf, no interest at all in the garden – calls it ‘That green stuff outside.’ What kind of block is he an old chip of?”

    At the end of the show, Barrie takes his bows with the rest of the cast as the guests whoop and holler, then he strut-limps back to his chair. He graciously accepts accolades and modestly apologizes for fluffing one of his lines. As the party dissolves, family members and a few friends return to David and Steph’s house for gossip, the opening of presents, and later a light supper. Barrie, his tie still knotted firmly in place, is one of the last partygoers to leave.

A MAN WALKS INTO A CHURCH ....

    I’m in England for almost three weeks. Sandwiched between my brother’s 60th birthday party and David (Edgar’s) 60th birthday party, I get to play in London and visit old friends, as well as friends getting older.

    I was looking forward to reconnecting with Stan Cohen. We were both part of the 60’s radical criminology movement, though from different perspectives and sites. Political sectarianism kept us – well, me  – in different revolutionary camps. We’re not personally close, but with the collapse of the New Left in all its permutations, we are now on the same side, even on the Israeli Question, which usually divides Jews in the Diaspora. I’ve always appreciated his intellectual work and his activism, the two intimately connected.

    We are about the same age; and we’ve both moved about a lot during our careers. When I was an undergraduate at Oxford in 1960, he was studying at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. While he was in transit from South Africa to England in 1963, I was leaving my homeland for grad school in Berkeley. For a while he was teaching in southern California in radical Santa Barbara; my activism cost me my job at Berkeley and, luckily, landed me a job until retirement at a local state college.

    Stan was an important figure in post-60s radical sociology, best known for helping us to understand how “moral panics” fuel law and order campaigns against “muggers” and “wayward teens.” He’s been a committed public intellectual all his life, battling apartheid in South Africa and Thatcherism in England. He tried without success for several years to bore from within Israel (at Hebrew University, 1979-1995) against its militarist state. Since 1997, he’s lived in England, teaching and helping to nurse his wife through a chronic illness to her death from cancer. Now he’s the sicko.

    He’s been ill for several years with Parkinson’s and various other maladies. Not too long ago, he had spinal problems and was in hospital for a few weeks, immobilized, unable to move his legs. He was “reet poorly,” as they used to say in Manchester when I was a kid – a euphemism for “at death’s door.” A couple of years ago when he took early retirement because of health reasons, his friends organized a conference and book of essays in his honor.

    When I told a friend that I was planning on seeing Stan, he said, “You better steel yourself. He’s not in good shape.” But when I called Stan at home, he said, “Let’s meet at my office at LSE.” He’s only been “back at work” a few weeks, coming in once a week to teach a class on “Crimes of the State” to visiting NYU undergraduates. (I doubt if they’ll like what he has to say about Israel.)

    It is something of a shock to see Stan. Sitting in a chair, he moves continuously like a marionette pulled by hidden strings until he finds a comfortable position. This only happens some days, though his body is usually in pain. Not surprisingly he has trouble, he says, with memory and finding the right words. Don’t we all?

    But there’s nothing wrong with his mind or his politics. One of his most recent essays is a blistering critique of he fawning complicity and self-induced myopia of Israeli intellectuals (“The Virtual Reality of Israeli Universities,” Independent Jewish Voices, January 2008).  He is now writing a new introduction to the second edition of his book, States of Denial. And despite his physical limitations, he’s into teaching again, trying to jump-start overly compliant students.

    Stan takes me out to a local café for coffee and we slowly walk the bustling neighborhood. He’s hoping that exercise will ward off another surgery. Our conversation turns personal, to our families, and our losses.

    Close to Covent Garden he takes me into his favorite men’s shop, J. Simons, where he buys stylish American jeans and a shirt, and reminisces about working as a teenager in his immigrant father’s clothing store in Johannesburg. He encourages me to buy a vintage 50s jacket that I spot but, for now, resist. Life is still up for grabs.

    Stan also tells me about his partner, who is “a Ph. D. student, Swedish, thirty years younger, beautiful.” Some people object to the liaison, he tells me. To hell with them, I reply, and he laughs. Another reason they get on so well is that she also has a chronic illness.

    Which reminds him to tell me the first of several jokes. He’s a lovely storyteller, skilled at peppering his conversation with parables. “Talking about Jessica [his girlfriend] reminds me of a joke,” he says. “A man walks into a church, goes into the confessional. The priest asks him why he’s here. ‘I’m an old man and I have great sex every day with my young girlfriend,’ he says. ‘What’s the problem,’ asks the priest, ‘Are you a member of this parish?’ ‘No,’ says the old guy. ‘I’m not even a Catholic, I’m a Jew and I don’t even believe in God.’ So,’ says the priest, ‘Why did you come here to tell me this.’ ‘Because,’ says the man, ‘I’m telling everybody.’” 

    Before I leave, I ask him to sign a copy of the book that has just come out in his living honor, both of us chuckling at the irony.  And with that, we say our surprisingly intimate goodbyes. 

February 17, 2008
London

HEART-TO-HEART

I’m in England for my brother Steve and friend David’s 60th birthday parties. During my time in London, I take a day off from festivities to travel by train to Cheltenham to see Juanita, my “godmother.” This is my fourth visit to see her in the last three years. It’s a pleasure, not a duty.

“Not brilliant,” she tells me on the phone when I ask her how she’s doing the day before my visit. Unlike previous visits, Juanita does not meet me at the train station.

A few days ago she had “tremendous pain” in her chest, “almost unbearable,” she says. “I thought I was having a heart attack.” She was in the local hospital for two days, where they lost her medical records and gave her no treatment. They put her in a “short stay ward with a lot of elderly people.” The staff took off for about two hours for some kind of event, leaving the ward unattended. When a bed-ridden, disoriented woman tried to get out of bed, Juanita got her back into the bed, fetched a bed pan, helped the woman do her thing, and took the filled bed pan away to the nurses’ station.

The next day, she basically discharged herself.  “I’m glad to be home,” she says.” “I need the rest.”  She attributes her problem to “leakage of my heart valves.” Not clear to her yet what the treatment will be.

I arrive to find anybody but a recuperating patient. She’s dressed in a stylish tailored suit, accessorized with an amethyst ring and purple earrings. “I have a lowdown passion for jewelry,” she once told me. Her hair and face immaculately in place, smiling and gracious, she looks a decade or so younger than her age, with no apparent signs of the illnesses that have preoccupied her body, but not yet her mind, since she was eleven years old, the year of her father’s death in 1937.

On a previous visit, when she showed me two of her photo albums – organized in seemingly random, non-chronological order – I could see that from her earliest years she always had a zest for life, not traditionally beautiful but a looker with pizzazz and smarts, who attracted men and looked them right in the eye. She’s outlived three husbands. From her attentive father to the two men who, she tells me, have proposed marriage within the last two years, she’s always had suitors.

During my afternoon visit the phone goes several times. She’s glad people are concerned about her wellbeing, but can’t stand telling callers all the medical details: it takes up her valuable time. After a while, she just lets the phone ring until the answering machine kicks in.

Today, rather than taking me out to a restaurant, as she usually does, she’s driven to Marks and Spencer’s and bought a “prepared” smoked salmon appetizer, a lamb and veg Sunday lunch, and pudding. She pops them into the oven to “cook.” “Eileen would not be pleased to hear about this,” she says, referencing my mother’s sharp tongue and preference for homemade meals. “And Monty would be even more critical,” she adds even-handedly about my father’s propensity to have his meals home-cooked from scratch by somebody else. We both laugh at these irreverent criticisms of my dead parents, her old friends. Then we dig into the meal; she can’t taste a thing – two years of steroids have erased her taste buds – but she eats along to keep me company. “I eat from memory,” she tells me.

She talks a little about her health issues (Crohn’s disease, polymyalgia, off-the-charts cholesterol), more about the disgusting conditions at the hospital. Then she wants to move on to other matters. So we discuss presidential politics in the US, the Middle East, the state of London theatre, and my new writing project, of which she approves, and gives me the thumbs up. Whew!

As for her work, she’s busier than ever, busier than most people twenty years younger (she’s 82). “Achievement. That’s why I think we’re put on this earth,” she once told me. “To get things done. That’s what life is about.” The new illness is annoying because it’s taken her away from her beloved books and editing projects. She’s reading and editing several manuscripts: novels, memoirs, books on aviation, and philosophy. Aspiring authors somehow find their way to her and get her rigorous editing services for free. She shows me one of her edited books that just came out (Flying in Defiance of the Reich), a novel she’s submitted to Routledge on behalf of the author, and another 500-page novel that she’s about to reject. “It’s so boring.”

She’s more up to date on literature and the arts than I am. Her gifts to me are Bernard Schlink’s latest novel (Homecoming) and a new book of unpublished stories by Primo Levi (A Tranquil Star). She knows my tastes well, but she’s usually ahead of them. When I ask about her bedside readings, she shows me a new book on Walter Benjamin (Archive) and a coffee table book of Tracy Emin’s controversial work. She flips open the pages and shows me the artist nude, the artist semi-nude, and the artist with legs spread-eagled in a very unladylike pose. Emin’s texts refer to fuck and fucking in many inventive permutations on just about every page. “Well, some of this is silly,” says Juanita in her ever-so-polite and measured English, “but I think she’s saying something interesting, don’t you?”

We spend time going through her impressive collection of poetry, first editions back to the 30s, many signed. She also opens up one of her cabinets to show me various collectibles and keepsakes, many with stories attached. “A poet gave me this hookah … I collected these ivory elephants in Africa… This is my father’s humidor the way it looked the day he died.” Inside the glass and silver container are two cigars and a box of wax matches, seemingly unopened for 70 years. “This sculpture” – the head of an older black man – “reminds of the Africans who worked in my family’s home in Johannesburg. Look at his lovely expression.”

At the end of the visit, I return to the state of her health. I wish her well on her visit to her personal doctor tomorrow, and hope the best for her heart. “It’s still painful here,” she admits, sweeping a hand over her chest. “But perfectly bearable.”

“I’ll call you to find out the results,” I say as I reluctantly leave. “I’ll answer the phone if it’s you,” she smiles. We hug without words. The night air has become very chilly, but she lingers outside her front door waving until the taxi takes me out of sight, away to the London-bound train.

Valentine’s Day, London

TIME OUT

    During the last eighteen months, I've spent quite a bit of time on the road pitching my book. Making it to New York was a big deal. As a surprise bonus Cecilia joined me for a few days of museum and theatre-going, classy meals, and walks through unseasonably warm Central Park – our first time together in New York after more than two decades of togetherness. 

    We needed this time out: we were out of synch. To spice things up with a little gender-bending experiment, we decided that I’d surrender and she’d don the timekeeper’s uniform.

    Normally, I watch the clock in our relationship, getting us wherever in an opportune fashion by alerting, coaxing, and ultimately herding Cece out of the door. Planning ahead has been low on her list of priorities ever since she was on chemo some ten years ago.

    She rarely wears a watch, tells time with the help of the gods, doesn’t care if she’s a few or many minutes late, and doesn’t appreciate it when I sigh loudly and hover by the door.  “We’re going to be late,” I whine. And when we get there fifteen minutes early, she takes pleasure in rubbing it in. “Early enough for you?”

    Barely. I generally wake up before the alarm clock goes off; arrive at 7:01 p.m. for 7:00 p.m. dinner parties; prefer to be seated in the movie theatre ten minutes before the thirty minutes of ads and previews; and am never late for my classes. Maybe I inherited this trait from my middle-class mother, who recognized the obsession with propriety as a curse, but couldn’t shake it. Or maybe it was drilled into me in my formative years in England in the 1950s during my training for a career in the meritocracy.

    When I reached my 30s and the first rung of the ivory tower, I slowed down enough to imbibe the time-bending vibes of the counterculture. But soon I joined an activist political organization that took pride in scheduling its comrades’ every waking second, even our dreams. I was back on the clock for good.

    At least until Cece and I embarked on our kinky experiment in time-swapping. While in New York, we agreed that she would count the minutes and I’d try to mute the tick tock, tick tock in my brain. When we did stuff separately, the agreement was suspended. I was sure that I’d find it easy to go with the flow and that Cece would miss the boat on several occasions.

    As the co-researcher of our book, she joined me for a promotional event at Barnes & Noble’s Upper West Side store. But this time she left the talking to me. “Don’t go on too long,” was her succinct advice: “Remember, you’re here to sell books.”

    With a sympathetic claque of old friends from my past and the local book-buying literati on hand, I quickly lost track of time. Fortunately, after a rambling twenty-eight minutes, I caught sight of Cece semaphoring gestures of throat cutting and wrist slicing. I reluctantly complied. We had a deal. After the talk, I lingered in the store until Cece tapped her imaginary watch.

    Later, she passed on keeping me company to a middle-of-the-night gig on AM radio. I was on my own time. So, no surprise, I arrived forty-three minutes early for the Joey Reynolds show.

    I’ve done quite a bit of radio in my time, but this was new to me. I’m used to the lefty Pacifica stations with their nicely lobbed up anti-establishmentarian questions: “So, Tony, what does your book tell us about the history of racism and anti-Semitism in the United States?” Or NPR-type stations where the host arrives with post-its all over the book and an orderly sequence of questions, beginning with “So, Professor Platt, how did you decide to write this book,” and ending with “What lessons do you want readers to take away from your study?”

    Years of training in time-management did not prepare me for AM talk radio. As Joey’s doo-wop jingle played in the background and the show got under way, I loosened my jaw and abandoned my measured cadence.

“Joey Reynolds over night, he’s a radio delight/ it’s time for Joey Reynolds/ Joey’s on the air/ With interviews and chitchat/ all with that Joey Reynolds’ flair. … Thank you Joey for having us on your show.”

    Against all my cultivated instincts I doubled the speed of my delivery. I spoke before I thought. Eventually I stopped thinking. We served up rat-a-tat radio for the ADD crowd. One minute it was a riff on Nazism, next a repartee about the bloodlines of the British royal family. “So Hitler believed in better blondes,” cut in Joey, summing up my discourse on the Nuremberg Laws.

    After Joey’s “feel-good” radio show, I was relieved to get back to speaking engagements that ran on schedule and expected me to connect the dots. Unlike Cece, I’m not good at improvisation.

    Meanwhile, the two of us made the most of our time together in New York, lapping up all its vibrant pleasures. I couldn’t bring myself to take off my watch – I just couldn’t – but I managed to get through the whole visit without saying “We have five minutes before we leave,” or “We’ll be late if we don’t get going.” But silently I harbored a large knot of anxiety as deadlines approached.

    Cece got us everywhere in timely fashion – plays, restaurants, museums, and meetings. It’s a mystery to me how she pulled it off. On our last day in the city, I secretly hoped that she wouldn’t blink first and we’d miss our early morning plane from JFK. But right at five AM, the alarm from a desk clock went off, followed by a rousing version of Cancan from Cece’s cell phone, and belatedly the beeps from my Palm Pilot.

A NAUGHTY NIGHT IN LONDON

    The last time I was in England – during the summer of 2007 – I didn’t make any plans to meet a dominatrix. Especially given that I was with the wife and a grandson.

Cecilia and I were visiting London with then 12 year-old Jonah. We’ve been coming across the pond together from the Bay Area for more than twenty years. Much longer for me since I was born and lived in England until I came to grad school in Berkeley in 1963 and made it my new homeland. We were giving Jonah his first trip out of the United States and a rare departure from small town life in Chico. I took a similar trip alone to London from the industrial north at about the same age to visit my godparents, but already I had traveled widely with my class-savvy parents and was getting schooled in how to find my bearings in new places. Crossing boundaries was all new to Jonah.

This was also his first extended time away from his mom Anna since his dad, our son Daniel, died in July 2006 after a lifetime of illnesses. It was a journey of new experiences for all of us, trying to live beyond the shadow of Thanatos.

We’re used to being Jonah’s grandparents – indulging his whims even before he can imagine them. But on this trip we had parenting responsibilities: keeping him safe from cars speeding by on the wrong side of the road, prodding him to bed before midnight and out of bed in time for the first museum, getting him to eat right occasionally, and teaching him the basics of a foreign language (loo, k’yew, wanker, sorted, etc.).

I hope Jonah will remember this trip many years from now, and that it will open up some new worlds of possibility. And maybe he’ll realize that I don’t usually spend precious days in London this way. It was my first time, as well as his, taking the double-decker bus tour of the Sights of London, ditto a boat ride on the Thames, shopping for schlock at Camden Market on a Saturday amid hormonal teens in studs and tatts, going to see “Oceans’s Thirteen” (having somehow missed Eleven and Twelve), picnicking with the lions at Trafalgar Square, seeing a cheesy blockbuster musical, and eating fish and chips at Ye Olde – I-kid-you-not – Cheshire Cheese. I said a firm no to the Eye in the Sky, but I couldn’t avoid lining up four-deep-cameras-aloft at Buckingham Palace at 11:30 a.m. on the dot. And because I lost the toss to Cece, I was dragooned into the Tower to witness the gore of yore.

The trip was going well, but it was a pleasure also to have some time to ourselves when my brother Steve and sister-in-law Claudia came down from Edinburgh to take Jonah and their son Josh off to see a musical gender-bending version of “Billy Elliott” (which I wish we’d chosen over the “Lord of the Rings” extravaganza that we sat through for three long, long hours). For our evening off duty, Cece and I considered a highbrow outing to something suitably postmodern at the National Theatre, but opted for lowbrow pleasures instead. We walked about ten yards from the flat where we’re staying on Fleet Street to El Vino, a long-time watering hole frequented for years by the male scribbling class when this neighborhood used to be headquarters of the fourth estate and before women crashed the party in 1982. Now its customers are nouveau toffs, well-heeled female and male professionals, upwardly mobile neophytes and their managers, mostly straight lawyers who know their plonk.

We were still a few weeks away from the smoking ban taking effect in England, so many customers in El Vino had lit up. We managed to find one table with a sign that announced “Non-Smoking Zone,” presumably an in-joke because the closest smoker was about three feet away. Despite the haze, we liked the place – olde enough, cozy, leathery but not too clubby, a fabulous wine list, and a 1950s menu. I was happy to order battered prawns and cubed cheddar with my French sauvignon and Australian Shiraz. Cece scoured the menu for something not fried and enlisted the help of our blonde, sexy waitress. “Hmmmm,” said Dana.  She looked over the tapas list, tapping a pencil against each item. “Fried, fried, fried, not fried, fried, fried, not fried, fried.”  Cece chose one of the non-frieds and got something vaguely Asian in a sluggish cream sauce.

When Dana returned with our second round, I pointed to the sign and said, “So you’re going to have a healthier job on July 1st” (first day of the new smoking regulations). “It doesn’t bother me,” she replied in a New Zealand twang, “I like to smoke and drink. I do everything,” she said, deadpan, “Everything.” A Pinterish pause. “I’m a naughty girl.”

Dana helped to put us into a relaxed state, despite the lawyers. We unwound over the drinks, first discussing how the trip was going with Jonah before moving on to our own lives. Both of us are in transition from the steady work of professors to something not quite clear yet. In the middle of a discussion about Cece’s future – how she wants to make the most of her artsy predilections – Dana squatted in front of us in her retro fishnets. “I heard what you were talking about,” she said without a hint of deference. “I’m interested in theatre too. I’m a performer. Never went to university. Left school when I was 13. Now I’d like to go back, but I’m not sure what I want to do.” She introduced herself; we did too, a three-way shaking of hands.

Later, Dana slipped us a piece of paper with her web site and her nom de stage: Killpussy. “Don’t let the manager see,” she said. Playful bondage and nude sex shows seems to be her thing, I found out the next day at her x-rated website. “I mostly do my stuff for gay and lesbian audiences, but you’d be OK,” she said, praise indeed.

We passed on the third round, deciding in favor of Eros: it was time to get back to our childless flat and do our own naughty things before Big Ben struck eleven and Jonah returned.

LIFE AFTER DEATH

    I’ve traveled all over the world but one of my favorite places is close to home. A few hours in the car is all it takes to get me up the northern California coast to a sparsely populated resort, surrounded by ocean, lagoon, and forest.  I’ve been coming here to Big Lagoon, as it is called, for thirty years. I’m here as usual to see in the new year.

    I first brought my son Daniel to Big Lagoon as a small child, and his deep love of the area is one of the reasons I’ve held on to my share of a cabin. Now that he’s gone, I irrevocably associate him with this wondrous place.

    A few weeks before Daniel’s death in the summer of 2006, I was here with his son, my then seven-year old grandson. On an unusually warm Father’s Day, I stretched out in a sand dune next to the placid lagoon, watching Nathan dig a hole he dubbed “the world-wide web fort.” Further down the beach, a woman I’d later meet was watching her son swim off a fraction of his boundless energy.

    Behind us to the west I could hear the kettledrum booming of fierce waves. If you stand exactly in the middle of the barrier beach, one ear is deafened by the ocean’s roar, while the other can hear the whoosh of brown pelicans as they alight clumsily on the lagoon. And this détente has lasted for at least a millennium, as we know from stories passed on by the Yurok Indians, who thought of Big Lagoon as the center of a universe regulated by spirits that inhabit the off shore sea stacks and under-water caves.

    Nathan is an openhearted kid with a hard-working imagination. I’d brought him to Big Lagoon knowing that he would enjoy himself in much the same way Daniel enjoyed himself here when he was the same age. Nathan had all he needed – water, sand, rocks, and wood – except for kids his own age. Luckily, seven-year old Lonnie appeared out of nowhere to join my grandson in his construction project.

    Nathan-the-knight and his new pal Lonnie-the-dragon, a wiry and agile kid with eyes in the back of his head, quickly turned the peaceful beach into a battleground, defending their kiddie-pool fort with an arsenal of puny driftwood sticks and a beat up tennis ball, magically transformed into ray guns and electric spears. When I offered them peanut butter sandwiches and juice, they quickly negotiated an armistice.

    Soon, Lonnie’s mother – a tall muscular woman in her 40s who fits easily into a dancer’s body – came over to collect her son. After two minutes of pleasantries befitting strangers, Stephanie Silvia and I quickly got into more serious stuff about the boys. Recently I’ve become more open to telling my stories to strangers, and hearing theirs.

    Stephanie and her husband had recently adopted seven-year old, tri-racial Lonnie after he had spent several years in the hardscrabble world of foster care. She told me she’s doing her best to make sure he doesn’t go through the rest of his childhood flinching, as she did. 

    I immediately liked Stephanie: the way she wears mismatched earrings and acts so sure of herself. On the surface, we have little in common. I’m a retired professor with a pension, health benefits, a brown-shingle house in Berkeley, and enough savings to buy a share in a second home on the coast.

    Stephanie rents a funky mobile home in nearby Trinidad and scrapes by as a teacher’s aide. She’s always looking for full-time work in this economically depressed region, hard hit by clear-cutting, the damning of rivers, and government neglect. In Humboldt, where the once plentiful salmon are dangerously depleted, local fishermen, like Stephanie’s husband Scot, spend months of the year away from home, trawling in Alaska.

    I was in Big Lagoon for a vacation with my grandson at my son’s request. A few months earlier, Daniel took me aside for some straight talk about why I needed to pay more attention to his two boys.  He had experienced four close calls in his forty-year life. I had rehearsed his death many times, but I’d also come to expect a last minute reprieve.

    We shared an unusual intimacy, forged during grim visits to oncology and lung clinics, and hilarious consultations with urologists.  We had been best man at each other’s wedding.

    “You need to stop worrying about me and spend more time with the boys,” he said, pointedly.

    Of course, I couldn’t stop worrying about him, but thereafter my partner Cecilia and I made a special effort to relate to Daniel and Anna’s two sons as more than dutiful grandparents. Thus this trip with Nathan to Big Lagoon.

    A few days after I met Stephanie, we got together for coffee in the local Beachcomber Café, and discovered some surprising threads of common history. We are both secular Jews, both transplants to the west coast: she came from New York in the late 1970s in search of deadheads; I arrived from England more than a decade earlier in search of the beats. We discovered that we both aspire to wake up and write early in the day.

    Before we parted, I asked Stephanie to send me her poetry. I told her that I’d be glad to give her feedback on her work. A few days later she filled up my email box with her poems.

    But it was a long time before I had the energy to seriously read anything. In the middle of the summer of 2006, Daniel died.

    Back home in Berkeley, I retreated into a small world. It took a blind-sided jolt – a young man running a red light and totaling my car – to help get me going again. Glad to be alive, unscratched no less, I began to resume my routines. Returning eventually to Stephanie’s poetry, I found myself drawn to her more sorrowful pieces, spiked with a gritty toughness I recall in myself before I lost my good friend, my son.

    A piece she calls “Today” snagged my moody attention:

waking up and writing first thing
this is a purpose
this is not getting out of bed
taking care of the dog
(I love the dog)
doing an errand
after having green tea because of giving up coffee because
green tea is supposed to promote weight loss
and planning on cleaning the house
and going back to bed
to lie in an awful stupor
(like the bed sweats with no sweat)
between asleep and wakefulness
somehow summoning a force field
to make it to the kitchen to grind strong black coffee while
scouring the cupboard for good/bad  things to eat
before getting on with the day
much better yet with a hint of  lingering daze

none of that today
today
toasting a bagel at 8 am
(8am!)
walking with a mug ( a coffee mug) in my hand
to the cabin next door
like I have something important to do
like I am working
like I am whole and awake
and not longing to be hit over the head
to end my yearning misery

    Like Stephanie, I know what it’s like to plunge into creative work in the hope of shaking off the numbness. I’ve been writing my everyday stories for more than twenty-five years, going back to Daniel’s first near-death experience, when a surgeon removed a tumor the size of a small orange from his brain. He made it through that and another brain surgery, a stroke, and lung failure.

    “I’m baaaaaaaack,” he’d exult after each recovery, and rush to fill up his abbreviated life until it spilled over the edges.

    But this time, there would be no deus ex machina. And he knew it. “When my well-used body gives up,” he told me about a month before his death, “I’d like a Viking funeral.”

    We honored his request some hundred yards north of the place where I had stretched out on the beach a few weeks earlier, watching Nathan and Lonnie fight off their imaginary enemies. With his family gathered under the stars, we placed his ashes in a cedar box on top of a driftwood pyre and sent him ablaze into the distant heart of Big Lagoon.

COVERED

    When it comes to access to health care, I’m up in the privileged tier, but the ground still feels a little shaky.

Arriving in the United States in the mid-1960s from England, I was put on the fast track to get my green card. So, unlike the eleven million immigrants without legal status in the United States, I didn’t have to choose between getting health care versus risking deportation.

During my professional career, my family was well covered. I was lucky to enter academia in the 1960s during the short-lived era when there were mostly full-time positions, solid benefits, and a decent pension plan.

My children, Daniel and Rebecca, born in 1966 and 1968, received their first regular check-ups in their mother’s womb. I didn’t have to worry about them getting enough nutrition in their early years, as is the case with some 100 million children worldwide whose growth is stunted or worse by the age of two.

Until now I’ve been fully covered by my HMO plan, though co-pays are on the increase. I’m one of the six out of ten folks who get their medical care through employer-insurance programs. You can count me among the gluttons – the twenty percent of the population who use eighty percent of the country’s medical resources. I’ve been loyal to Kaiser since they shelled out a few million dollars to get my teenage son through his first and second rounds of a brain tumor.

I’m not one of the 47 million folks in this country that try to get by without health insurance. I don’t have to wait until I really need care, then head to an emergency room and engage competitively with other sickies for attention in a system that, officially, is “on the verge of collapse” and “dangerously overcrowded.”

If you’re unlucky to head to a metropolitan ER at night, be prepared to first meet a couple of poorly paid, chunky security guards who ask you, “What do you want?” And if you get past them, you’ll eventually get to see a triage nurse, or at least her head as she pokes through an opening in the wall and tries to find out if you’re sick enough to be there, that you’re not a malingerer who gets your kicks hanging out in a claustrophobic, over-lit, over-heated room, surrounded by coughers and bleeders, watching Jerry Springer turned up loud enough to wake the comatose.

I’m not just better off than the uninsured, I’m also better off than most people in my position. We own our home – in realty-rich Berkeley, no less – have no debts, and pay off our credit cards every month. We own two new, albeit modest cars and a share in a cabin up the California coast where redwoods meet ocean.

Cecilia has a secure, full-time teaching job at a local state college where she has a pension plan and enough health insurance to pay for most of the extravagant costs of her illness. And given her diagnosis, it helps that we live in the San Francisco Bay Area where, thanks to a large middle class and feisty feminist movement, she has access to a female surgeon, a collaborative health care team, drugs and herbs, and yoga for breast cancer survivors.

We’ve also amassed a sizable chunk of cultural capital that enables us to find our way through the medical labyrinth and access the latest information about treatment options.  “If only more of our patients had people like you to support them,” the Lung Transplant and Advanced Lung Disease Coordinator at a local university hospital e-mailed me during Daniel’s last year.

But most patients and their families, even solidly middle class ones, don’t have our resources: a brains trust of medical friends for third and fourth opinions, and the confidence to assert our rights against stubborn bureaucrats. We could be the poster family for “patient-centered care” – we know how to demystify esoteric information, how to network, and call in our chips.

We also know how to plan ahead. Anticipating retirement a few years ago, I invested in supplemental health coverage that promises me $205 per day in a nursing home. If I prefer to receive care at home, my plan allows for $3,079 per month (after I’ve paid off the first three months’ deductions). On paper I felt reassured by this coverage until I read that it costs about $75,000 a year for nursing home care and a whopping $166,000 if I want to pay a health aide to take care of me at home (at $19 per hour). I’m a little short.

It would only take a major disability or an expensively chronic illness to take us quickly from the crème de la middle class crème to social insecurity. “Unless you’re Bill Gates,” says a Harvard researcher, “you’re just one serious illness away from bankruptcy.”

TAKING THE PLUNGE WITH BLONDIE

    After the papers are graded and the holidays spent, it’ll be my time to leap into the void.

This is my last semester of full-time teaching. December 13th was my last official day in the classroom; my grades are due the first week of January; and my Sacramento State University paychecks stop in March 2008. I’ve been doing this for forty-one years, back to 1966 when as a 24-year old neophyte I jumped into the deep waters of the University of Chicago and tried to avoid the sharks.

Five years ago, at age sixty I took advantage of a university deal I couldn’t refuse: officially retire and get my pension, and get paid at the top rate for teaching halftime for another five years. Plus, be exempt from committees if I crammed my teaching into one semester.

The transition in 2002 went smoothly with few anxieties about rites of passage. Probably because I threw myself into completing my last book, a labor of passion that has consumed me for the last few years. When I wasn’t teaching in the spring semester, I was either writing furiously or on the road pitching the book.

And it was a relief to be off academic committees. For years I made recommendations about promotion and tenure, sat in on confidential discussions, and was a big fish in a little pond. As soon as my status changed, I lost the plum office with windows and illusions of grandeur. An occasional colleague still asked my opinion, but most gave me a polite smile reserved for the elderly. “Still teaching? Enjoying your retirement?”

I don’t like being a recipient of paternalism, but there’s an upside to being out of power. One of my first liberated acts was to scream scatological invective at a colleague in my office with the door open for all to hear. I could never do this when I was chair of the personnel committee. “You asshole,” I yelled. “Don’t ever fuck with me again in a faculty meeting.” It felt good, increased my hall rep, even as it marked my descent into academic anonymity.

I started off this year with the same enthusiasm that I had during my last transition. By week two of the semester back in September I had destroyed scores of useless files, thrown out forgotten memorabilia, and packed up eight boxes of books to be donated to the library. Nine weeks later, I’d done nothing else. The boxed books were still stacked in my office. And it’s not as if I’ve had much to do but teach courses I’ve taught for many years. The book tour has dwindled to an occasional talk, and I’ve just laid off my publicist.

This transition is quite different and much more difficult than the one I experienced at sixty years. Maybe it’s because I’m getting documents about Medicare, being targeted by health insurance companies and the Neptune Society, and signing up for my first social security check. It’s a mixed blessing when people tell me, “You don’t look your age,” or “Wow, you’re playing racquetball?” because I know that they’re thinking, “He’s getting old, and I’m not.”

I still feel vital in the classroom, though I find myself leaning in to hear soft-spoken students and need more written notes to prompt my memory. When I taught radical ideas about history, race, and inequalities at Berkeley in the late 60s, most of my students were shocked but open to the new information. That’s not changed. Many of my state college students, undergrad and grad, are angry that “we weren’t taught about this stuff before,” troubled by what they now learn, and morally engaged by ideas of social justice.

I no longer look out at mostly white students with a sprinkling of African Americans representing The Race. Now, it’s not unusual that white Americans are in the minority, surrounded by a sea of colors and languages. Immigrants are the new Black students, bringing in differences of language, sensibility, politics, and history. For many of them, the United States represents something better than what they experienced before they arrived here. African American women and Chicanas – the men are still missing in action – try to educate them about the dark side of Amerika, “You’ll find out soon enough,” they tell the newcomers

When I started teaching in the 1960s, the optimism of The Movement pervaded the classroom. In the 70s at Berkeley I remember bringing United Farm Workers’ officials to my class of several hundred students to talk about their struggle to form a union. They brought with them workers straight from the fields, carrying their flags and flyers, transforming the classroom into a site of activism.

Today, it’s hard to teach the optimism I don’t feel. But I keep trying. The students in my graduate class on International Social Work voted this semester to do projects about the war in Iraq. One group is papering the campus with antiwar leaflets; the other group is making a video about students’ views on the war, which they hope to distribute through YouTube. For the last class, my students drove from Sacramento to my home in Berkeley, where I made them dinner in gratitude for connecting me with my roots.

A few days ago, my partner Cecilia and I returned to an old haunt, the Fillmore in San Francisco, to see Deborah Harry close out her national “Necessary Evil” tour. There was a decent turnout of baldies and greybeards – but no walkers – to witness the 60-something rocker do her thing. “We shall persevere,” she told us, encouragingly.

Wearing her signature blond-spiked hair over a scarlet-red shirt, a mini, black tights, and boots, she looked real good for her age, but didn’t hide it. She sang some oldies – “I have to do some Blondie stuff,” she said, “otherwise there’d be no tour.” But most of her material was new, fresh, and feisty.

“Watch out for the rising tide,” she warned us as we danced into the night with the surging, joyous crowd bobbing around us on the Fillmore’s sticky floor. “Jump right in,” I imagined her saying. “Let’s take the plunge.”