I went to a garden party...

This weekend I made the three-hour drive to Boston to attend the 60th birthday party of a friend whom I know from what I call my Boston days (1976 - 1995). I met David originally through his long-time partner -- now his husband, since the enlightened state of Massachusetts made that possible -- as Robert and I worked for the same organization. The three of us share a love of music, and attended numerous concerts together, including some in which Robert played (viola). Even now David brightens up my Facebook page with numerous links to opera singers singing their hearts out.

What's really shocking is that despite living only a three-hour drive apart for the past 6 1/2 years, we hadn't managed to see one another since 1999. On my part, I fear it's been this tremendous inertia that has pretty much kept me from going anyplace, at least by car. Is it aging, I ask myself, this aversion to driving? I made a trip to Pennsylvania in 2009, to attend the graduation from college of my goddaughter (see Note of May 24, 2009), and a trip to Binghamton, NY, in 2010, to attend the graduation from high school of the only son of one of my college roommates (Note of July 1, 2010); other than that, there was a trip to the same area in upstate New York for some genealogical research, a big interest of mine. Other than that I can't seem to make myself move.

As far as trips to Boston go, I've been down only three times in the past 6 1/2 years, twice at Christmas time, at the invitation of another friend from my Boston days, when the desire not to spend Christmas alone was sufficient motivation to get me moving. The other time was at the invitation of yet another friend, and I felt that weekend was hers, did not want to be running all over the Boston area seeing other people.

But to return to this weekend's party: it was a terrific party. There was lots of food (I thought the hors d'oeuvres were it, so was consuming great quantities of shrimp with cocktail sauce and spanakopita, when suddenly the barbeque arrived, followed by the vegetarian pizzas!), lots to drink (I had three Jesse James Bourbons on the rocks -- have you ever heard of Jesse James Bourbon? I certainly hadn't -- while most people were drinking one of the several kinds of beer available, white wine, or Margaritas), and lots of people, most of whom I didn't know, but with many of whom I spent at least a few minutes chatting. Despite being a basically shy and reserved person, I can do this fairly easily at a party; actually enjoy getting little capsule explanations of who people are, what they do, how they know so-and-so.

The most interesting conversation I had was with a second generation Cuban, whose parents came to Boston in the '50s, before the Communist takeover. His older brother was born in Cuba; he was born here. Said this country had been very good to his parents, and to himself; the American Dream busy getting realized.

I'd have to say the most unusual aspect of the party were all the little Shih Tzu running around underfoot. David raises these cute little dogs that look like walking dust mops for show & selling; a number of the people there knew him from having bought puppies from him. Fortunately, Shih Tzu don't usually bark -- my biggest objection to dogs -- and they are pretty darned adorable, so i didn't mind them, even though you had to be careful that you didn't step on one!

Although David was busy buzzing about from one group to another, and greeting the almost non-stop flow of guests, so that we were not able to talk much, I was able to have a couple of good chats with Robert. We share an interest in genealogy -- it was a long-held belief of his that he was related to Jesse James (a belief that has now been dashed, alas) that resulted in a short-lived obsession with all things Jesse James-ish...hence, the Jesse James Bourbon.

David and Robert, by the way, have been together longer than many heterosexual couples, and as far as I know have not adversely affected a single hetero-sexual marriage in all that time. They're sweet, funny, generous people, and it was good to see them both, and to see that they're "still crazy after all these years." I just hope we don't go another 13 years without seeing each other.

Let it roll!

Well, I just got up because I couldn't sleep -- a not-infrequent occurrence these days, since I tend to consume coffee and Diet Dr. Pepper to keep me going all day, then find it keeps me awake at night -- and I turned on the T.V., just to see what there might be, not expecting much at 11:30 on a Saturday night.  And there, on Maine PBS's Front Row Center, were the vestiges of the old Canadian rock group from the '70s,  Bachman-Turner Overdrive, i.e., [Randy] Bachman and [Fred] Turner, singing and playing their aging hearts out.  It was terrific!  I stood there, bobbing up and down, while these two old guys and the rest of their re-invented band sang, full-throttle, LET IT ROLL...DOWN THE HIGHWAY...LET IT ROLL...DOWN THE HIGHWAY!  Then they sang another of their old hits, Takin' Care of Business, and the audience, all on their feet, were bouncing up and down and singing along.  Great fun.

I've gotten sort of jaded about aging rock stars continuing to tour, or trying to tour again, after a silence of many years.  We get a lot of such acts up here in Maine, unable, apparently, to attract more current acts.  For example, the Beach Boys 50th Reunion Concert (which has received scathing reviews) is coming to Bangor on June 22nd (tickets are being offered at 50 % off, I notice).  As Brian Wilson himself has said, "We're fucking 70 years old, man!" Exactly.  Time for rock stars to be (or stay) retired.

But Bachman & Turner showed me tonight that you can be at least pushing 70, and still have what it takes, in the world of rock music.  They had energy, high spirits, voice, and great guitar playing.  I've talked before about the allure of the guitar for my generation (see Note of Nov. 29, 2008), and here it was again: the guitar, in all its pulsating glory; I loved watching Randy Bachman's fingers fly up and down those frets.  As Lionel's father is always saying in As Time Goes By, "Rock on!"

By the way, I recently discovered that I had done a draft of my review of HBO'S version of Game of Thrones, but had failed to post it.  It is now posted, but at the date when it was originally done, April 26, 2012.  So take a look, if you're interested.

The pause that refreshes

Today as I was coming back from the post office I decided to take a ride up a street I'd never been up before. I do that every now and then, turn up (or down) a street I've never experienced before, just to see what's on it and where it goes.

The street I was on was Cony Street, on the other side of the river in Augusta. I live in Gardiner, but there is no Saturday mail pickup at the Gardiner P.O., so if I want something to go out before Monday afternoon, I have to make the 20-minute drive to the Augusta P.O. Anyway, it wasn't long before I was driving through a woody area, with only the very occasional house. This frequently happens, whether you follow a street in Augusta, or in its little bedroom communities of Hallowell, Farmingdale, or Gardiner: in no time at all you hit "country." I drove 'til Cony Street ended at Cony Road, then turned around in the parking lot of a dancing school surrounded by woods, and headed back the way I'd come. And suddenly a deer stepped daintily out into the road ahead of me and trotted into the woods on the other side of the road. I immediately slowed to a stand-still, delighted. What is it about suddenly seeing wild deer that enchants us? We're driving along, pretty much oblivious, and suddenly there they are, as if by magic, these beautiful, elegant, peaceful creatures. We are being handed a treat, out of the blue.

I sat there for a moment (no traffic), hoping to see some more, for there is never just one deer, there are always three or four or more. But either they'd already crossed, or were hanging back in the woods on the right side of the road, waiting for me to pass. And in my rearview mirror here came two more cars, so I drove on. But my day was made, by this not-too-close encounter (like when your car going 60 miles an hour on a dark road suddenly hits a deer) with one of God's loveliest creatures.

When I first moved to the Augusta area, and lived in a cabin out on Lake Cobbosseecontee, there would occasionally be a few deer foraging in the field that lay beside the gravel road that wound in from the paved country road. Usually they would freeze as my car passed, ready to take off at the slightest suggestion that I and my automobile were a threat. Likewise when I lived in Colorado, and would occasionally take the back roads rather than oh-so-stressful I-25 on my daily commute between Denver, where I was working, and Colorado Springs, where I was living with my sister: sometimes I would round a bend, and there would be a family of deer, serenely crossing the road. Practically no traffic on those back roads, so the animals were accustomed to being able to cross unaccosted. I would always just sit and gaze happily at them, as they made their way into a field.

Seeing wild deer in this way almost makes you feel that God's in his heaven, all's right with the world.

Calling a spade a spade

The situation in Syria, or rather the world's response to the situation in Syria, is such bosh. Words, words, words. According to this national spokesperson and that, what the Bashar Assad regime is doing is "totally unacceptable." Yeah, so? So what are we going to do about it? Nothing. Wring our hands and say the murder of innocent women and children must stop. Yeah? Or what?

I keep hearing people saying there's the danger of civil war in Syria. What do they think has been going on for months now?

I am not saying the United States should rush in where angels fear to tread. I am as tired of our being embroiled in one military engagement after another as everyone else is. And we certainly should not do anything unilateral; any action should be made in conjunction with the global community. We cannot be the police of the world, particularly not of that part of the world, where we are almost universally despised.

But I would like the stupid, hypocritical talk to stop. We, Europe, everyone else, are apparently going to let those poor people just get ground down by their ruling faction; no Arab Spring for them. Let's stop pretending our "sanctions" are going to force Assad to bow out; let's stop pretending there is anything we can do, short of military intervention, which no one wants to commit to. Members of the Arab League are apparently slipping weapons to the opposition, helping them to that extent. That may be the most we can hope for. The rest of us are going to wait to see what happens. So let's do that, and stop talking about it!

Learning a thing or two from a snob

I'm reading an interesting book right now, Past Imperfect, by Julian Fellowes, the "fellow" who wrote the screenplays for that Masterpiece Classic series everybody loves, Downton Abbey. Initially I didn't think the book was going to be so interesting, mainly because the tone of the narrator was almost insufferably stuffy. It's about a group of upper-class young people in the London Season of 1968, who were participating in a tradition that was beginning to be touched by the radical changes of the late 60s/early 70s, even as it clung to the "old ways," and certainly the old attitudes, that went back generations. The story deals with particular events during that season, in flashbacks from the present, when the narrator is a reasonably successful writer with an unsatisfying personal life, who is called upon by one of the young men he knew back then -- now filthy rich, and dying -- to try to find out which of several possible women was the mother of the child that this no-longer-young man believes he has out there somewhere.

As I said, initially i was put off by the snobbishness that seemed to ooze from the author as much as the narrator, as well as by the almost-constant habit of the author (narrator) of adding little philosophical asides to every bit of action, practically every bit of dialog.

But gradually I began to be won over by the insightfulness of many of the narrator's observations. For example, at one point, when the narrator is telling his elderly father about this task he has taken on, and how distressing he has found the lives of some of the women he has been visiting, the father is disapproving, for an intesting reason. "You've been made to go back into your own past, and compare it with your present. You've been forced to remember what you wanted from life at nineteen, forty years ago, before you knew what life was....Eventually, in old age, almost everyone with any brains must come to terms with the disappoint-ment of life, but this is very early for you to make that discovery."

And of course this is true, as I and so many of my peers have been discovering over the past few years, as we've realized our youthful dreams are never going to come true, as we have grappled with accepting that we simply have not been able to make our lives turn out the way we wanted them, that we are not now in the place we thought we would be at this time of our lives (retired for example! How many of us can retire?!)

Another example, on the subject of social survival-of-the fittest: "It is a fact that in the brutal periods of history, what changes is not the cutting edge of every new market, or the ambition that drives a new factory owner or new hostess, or a new conquest from the performing stage... All that is constant. It is the level of coasting that goes on behind the bright and harsh facade that is different. In a gentle era -- and my youth was passed in a fairly gentle era -- people could drift by...at every level of society. Jobs were found for them. Homes were arranged. Someone's uncle sorted it out. Someone's mother put in a word. But when things get tough, when, as now, the prizes are bigger but the going is rougher, the weaklings are elbowed aside until they fall back and slip over the cliff. Unskilled workers or stupid landowners alike, they are crushed by a system they cannot master..."

Certainly that is what is happening today, with so many people out of work, lacking the skills and education the jobs that are out there are demanding, in stark contrast to 1965, when an 18-year-old girl with absolutely no experience and only a high school diploma could apply for what she thought was a clerk-typist position, and find herself hired as a trainee assistant buyer at a major department store. But now...40 years on, desperate as that same girl is, has been for much of the past six years, for a different, a more satisfying, and better paying job, she has lacked, in particular, the computer experience and savvy that all libraries are demanding these days, and which all the young whipper-snappers fresh out of library school have in plenty.

To a certain extent Past Imperfect is at its best when comparing that past, "gentler" period with today. For example, on the public drunkenness that is so common in Britain today: "It's not often that I walk at night, though more from laziness than fear, but when I do I am amazed at the changes that have come about in London during my adult lifetime, the main one being...not the muggings and the general crime, not even the dirt and uncollected rubbish...It is the drunkenness that has transformed the streets, not just of London but of almost every town, into a lesser hell for lawful citizens. The kind of drunken-ness that in years gone by used to be talked of in Siberia at the height of Stalin's iron rule as a reflection of the misery of the oppressed... Why did it happen here? I used to think it was a class thing, but it isn't..."

And at another point, as he talks about the thrill he and his friends experienced when they realized that the Spencer Davis Group -- most famous because of its lead singer, Stevie Wynwood -- were actually playing live at this particular dance: "We are a jaded people, these days. We see film stars and singers and every other permutation of fame wherever we go; indeed sometimes, judging by the magazines, it seems that more people are famous than not. But this wasn't true in 1968, and to be in the same room as a real-live band playing and singing its own hit number...was to be inside a fantasy. Even Lucy was silenced, if not for long. 'Can you believe it?' she said. I couldn't. We were sweet, really."

And yes, really, they, and we, were.

*All quotes from Fellowes, Julian. Past Imperfect. New York, St. Martin's Press, c2008.

Ruining a good thing

O.K., here's my critique of the HBO production of Game of Thrones, which one of my staff had ordered, and lent me to watch. It looks great, perfect, some things, like The Wall, so much better than I'd imagined in reading the book; the music was mesmerizing, the opening credits amazing, the acting, virtually without exception, excellent. But but but.

Bob had warned me that there was a lot of "gratuitous sex," and as it turned out, that gratuitous sex ultimately ruined the show for me, and made it impossible for me to continue watching it. Just way too much totally unnecessary sex, nearly all of which involved women -- usually totally naked women -- being thumped soundly from behind, bare breasts flopping. The only time I witnessed what you might call halfway affectionate, facing-each-other sex was in the scene where Princess Daenerys convinces her barbarian husband to try it that way for a change. And interestingly, that was her only sex scene in which she was allowed to keep her clothes on...presumably because they had to cover up the man's penis (still that particular double standard?).

I ignored this stuff for as long as I could, but when we finally reached a scene that could in no wise be described as anything but pornographic -- two totally naked women having sex, in various positions, accompanied by much exaggerated heavy breathing, under the gaze and tutelage of a man -- I decided that was it. I couldn't even just fast-forward through this tasteless scene, because I realized the man was doing a helvua lot of talking, while gazing at his two whores, and when I turned off the mute, sure enough, he was giving all this information that was actually important to the story. But doing it to the accompaniment of this totally distracting heavy breathing. Boo hiss.

Although the show did such an excellent job otherwise in adhering to the book -- one of its many pluses -- none of this beat-the-bitch down sex is in the book, not an ounce, not an inch of it. There is a sex scene between the Queen and her brother, while they are visitors at Winterfell -- which the boy Brand inadvertently witnesses, which brings about his near-death -- but it's nothing like what we were shown on the screen (brother pounding sister from behind, though in her case she's clothed, just has her skirts hiked up.)

Some folks will respond with irritation: well for heaven's sake, you don't have to watch the thing. If someone was watching it when it was being shown on HBO that someone could switch it off and not tune in again; in my case, and that of anyone else watching the DVDs, rather than the original show on T.V., we could simply stop watching it. Which is of course true, although while in my case I could just return the borrowed DVDs to the gentleman on my staff who had lent it to me, and be out nothing, if one had ordered the DVDs, started to watch them, and discovered how much offensive sex there was in it, one would just be out of luck, and that much money.

But here's the real thing, the big thing: what a shame that what was otherwise such a well-done production of a fascinating story that so many of us enjoyed in book form, should be ruined for what must surely be a goodly number of us by the addition of scenes of pornographic crudeness and offensiveness that had nothing to do with the book. If all that had been left out, the men in the audience would be no worse off -- you can't miss what was never there -- and the women in the audience would not have had to sit through so many scenes that one begins to suspect represent the director's fantasies about putting women in their proper place. Frankly, I feel sorry for all those actresses who are forced to agree to perform in pornographic scenes, in order to snag what are otherwise excellent parts. Boo hiss.

Potpourri

Lots of things to talk about. First, it's been a gorgeous day, a perfect day, here in central Maine, the third in a row. A few weeks ago we had several days of false spring, when we all got excited because it was sunny, and the temperatures got up into the 70s, even 80 degrees one day. But we all knew that wouldn't last, and we were all right; there followed several weeks of coolish, often overcast (though rarely rainy; we are way behind on our rain quotient) weather, when we were all still wearing turtle necks, jackets and gloves. But the last three days have reassured us: yes, spring does always come 'round at last, even in Maine. I actually wore a skirt and sandals without stockings when I went out to run my errands today.

Now, as to those errands. One of them was to buy salt and pepper shakers. I can't even remember when last I had a salt & pepper set; for literally years I've just bought the little cardboard sets you can get at the supermarket. The problem with that was that the salt would always run out long before the pepper, so I'd be collecting pepper shakers in the cabinet, in order to keep myself in salt. My friend Susan did give me the cutest little salt and pepper mills a couple of Christmases ago, which I do love, but milled salt isn't always what I want; that is, I'm often looking for more finely-grained salt than you can get from a mill (besides which it always seemed to be the case that when I would grab for them they'd be empty, and I'd fume while I fumbled to get them refilled, while the whatever was cooking on the stove).

So anyway, I've been looking for weeks at places like the Goodwill Store, K-Mart, Target, Reny's (the wonderfully old-fashioned department store we have here in Maine) for a not-too-expensive set that wasn't boring. Today, as I was driving to Staples to buy ink cartridges for my printer, I passed the Bed and Bath store and the light bulb went on in my head: hey, they should certainly have salt and pepper sets. And they did, but most of them were, alas, boring; but then I found the last remaining Bear Set! A Maine black bear sitting on its rear end, holding a small shaker in each arm. Kitsch as all get out -- the sort of thing I normally do not go for at all -- but it charmed me, no doubt at least partly because of all the too-big, too-expensive, too bland shaker sets I've looked at lately.

So that was the successful part of my outing. The less successful part was connected to my constant, constant, constant inability to remember things. When I decided I would have to go buy ink cartridges I had the fleeting thought that I should take the used ones I have, to turn them in for reward coupons (although the last reward coupon I received, for $6, I forgot to use before the deadline...) However, in the event, I forgot to take them with me; thought of it as I was pulling out of the parking lot at the local drugstore, where I'd gone first, in hopes that they'd have the ink cartridges I needed, so I wouldn't have to drive all the way to Augusta. I was about five minutes from home, but simply did not feel up to adding to the driving I was about to have to do (I had also done a lot of running around yesterday), by going back for the old cartridges; would just have to turn them in another time.

And here's the big thing: I shouldn't have had to go get ink cartridges at all today, because I went to Staples yesterday, to get something for work (can't now remember what it was!), and I had the thought, oh, I should get ink for my home printer while I'm there. But I realized I wasn't sure what the number of the cartridges was. Pretty sure, but not absolutely sure; I simply could not remember, for sure. And mind you, I've had this printer a good two years, have bought ink cartridges for it innumerable times...but I couldn't remember the number.

I do despair. I know we all joke about our Senior Moments, and Nora Ephron has made lots of money making us laugh as she describes how She Remembers Nothing. I just can't seem to maintain a sense of humor about constantly not being able to remember, having to constantly look for things because I can't remember where I've laid them down (this happens on average about six times a day), constantly discovering I've missed deadlines at work, failed to do this that or the other thing that needs doing, despite the To Do Lists, and all the giant notes all over the place. I REMEMBER NOTHING!! And alas, it really isn't funny.