A year comes to an end.

2016 was an eventful year for me.  I was forced to retire prematurely and precipitously.  I had stomach surgery.   Out of an abundance of precautionary foresight, I worked hard for the Hillary campaign in the fall yet a carnival barker beat her (with 3 million fewer votes) with the telling assistance of the Russians and the FBI.  Most of my friends either moved or have dropped away.  My running dropped off a cliff after my surgery, and then again this month when a painful calf injury felled me.

But the biggest event of the year for me was finding out this year that my youngest son got married last year.  Congratulations, Danny, and welcome to the family, Laura.

Tomorrow I'll be at my usual lunch spot.  Perhaps I'll see one or more of you all there, eh JJD&L?  

Waiting for Godot

Where was I on the penultimate day of February during this leap year?  At my favorite pizzeria having lunch, as usual on any of my sons' birthdays.

No one showed of course.  It's a little ritual I have, because maybe one of them will show up someday.

This one, Danny, as I found out this month, is now married.  Good to know.

He coulda brought his wife, or his brothers, or any combination.  Welcome to the family, Laura.

The Age of Innocence

I'm reading The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton about decadent highbrow New York society in the 1870s.  It won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature.  It's  a great book.

I knew from the start that the book wouldn't end well for its protagonist, Newland Archer, a young man who resists the hypocrisy and self-absorbed nature of upper-crust haughty society even as he is caught up in it.  He is enmeshed in a chaste but cloying love triangle which he hastily thinks he solves by marrying his fiancee, May Welland, quickly at its onset, when the exciting but very bohemian Countess Olenska shows up from Europe to tempt him, from whence she has fled her husband.

Newland thinks he's ahead of his time by wishing for and ascribing to women independence, hence his attraction to May's cousin, Ellen Olenska, the countess who has the audacity to leave her husband and live independently, frequenting gathering places of writers and actors, the lessor people of society who have to toil for their daily bread.  But Newland has proposed to May, whom he considers to be a blank slate to be filled up with knowledge he imparts to her from his vast, eclectic reading.

Newland, an attorney, is assigned to Ellen's case as she seeks to file for divorce.  Following his firm's orders and against his better judgment, he advises her not to pursue the matter since proper people don't divorce and she is a part of the highfalutin society even though she is different.  There is mutual attraction between them, the married lady and the engaged man, and here is the author's description of their first chaste moment of almost irresistible physical desire.  Ellen, "dressed as if for a ball," is inspecting herself in a mirror by the mantelpiece in the drawing room when Newland re-enters, having seen Ellen's aunt off to her waiting carriage, which will soon return for the countess.

"Madame Olenska did not move when he came up behind her, and for a second their eyes met in the mirror; then she turned, threw herself into her sofa-corner and sighed out: 'There's time for a cigarette.'

"He handed her the box and lit a spill for her; and as the flame flashed up into her face she glanced at him with laughing eyes and said: 'What do you think of me in a temper?'

"Archer paused a moment; then he answered her with sudden resolution: 'It makes me understand what your Aunt has been saying about you.'

"'I knew she'd been talking about me.  Well?'

  ""She said you were used to all kinds of things--splendours and amusements and excitements--that we could never hope to give you here.'

"Madame Olenska smiled faintly into the circle of smoke about her lips.

"'Medora is incorrigibly romantic.  It has made up to her for so many things!'

"Archer hesitated again, and again took his risk.  'Is your aunt's romanticism always consistent with accuracy?'

"'You mean: Does she always speak the truth?'  Her niece considered.  'Well, I'll tell you: in almost everything she says, there's something true and something untrue.  But why do you ask?  What has she been telling you?'

"He looked into the fire, and then back at her shining presence.  His heart tightened with the thought that this was their last evening by that fireside, and that in a moment the carriage would come to carry her away."

So short, so suggestive, that magic moment in the mirror when their eyes locked.  This weekend I cheated and watched the Martin Scorsese movie, filmed in 1993, even though I'm 100 pages from the end of the book.  The film was mostly faithful to the book, and was filled with actual quotes from the book.  Now I know how the story ends, with its devastating consequences for Newland.  In the movie, Scorsese has the two clench and kiss in this scene, which as you can see, didn't happen in the book at this moment, but perhaps that was to have a scene that enlivens up an otherwise dreary and dull movie up to that point.  The movie picked up steam from this point onwards.

Great Expectations--Monetary or Personal?

 I finally finished Great Expectations--Pip's great expectations have vanished, leaving him in debt but also forcing him to undergo redemption and turn from a fop into a man.  Perhaps the point of the book is that great expectations aren't monetary, as it's ruinous to expect to be made happy by money, but rather great expectations are personal, as associations are ultimately rewarding. 

In as great an incredible piece of literary license as you'll ever find in literature, Pip and the cold and heartless but beautiful Estella, her features and her implacable inhumanity softened and altered by time, sadness and hardship, meet on the grounds of the ruined Satis House more than a decade after the passing of its owner, the reclusive jilted-bride Miss Havisham, who raised Estella to be what she became.  This chance encounter occurs when each is on a lonely moonlight stroll, scheduled to depart forever on the morrow after a brief nostalgic sojourn to the place of their childhood.

"'Estella!'  'I am greatly changed.  I wonder you know me.'  The freshness of her beauty was indeed gone, but its indescribable majesty and its indescribable charm remained.  Those attractions in it I had seen before; what I had never seen before was the saddened, softened light of the once proud eyes; what I had never felt before was the friendly touch of the once insensible hand. 

"We sat down on a bench that was near, and I said, 'After so many years, it is strange that we should thus meet again, Estella, here where our first meeting was!  Do you often come back?'  'I have never been here since.'  'Nor I.'"

Great Expectations

I'm reading Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. It sure is slow going but it sure is good reading. Some paragraphs are a page long! 

I can't believe I read it in seventh grade because I don't remember any of it; or rather, perhaps I read the Classics Illustrated comic book back then instead of the novel. I can't believe they assign this dense and complex, but rich and exquisitely well developed, book to seventh graders, who surely could never follow all the goings on in it. Perhaps they don't assign it anymore, assigning instead, what, a Harry Potter book? 

I have reached what I think is the moral of the book, when Miss Havisham, with her heart of stone, begs Pip to forgive her someday for having so cruelly misled him for so long about his true benefactor but even more importantly, for having turned her adopted daughter, the beautiful child Estella, Pip's longstanding unobtainable love, into a cold and heartless adult incapable of love. Pip replies, "Oh Miss Havisham, I can do it now. There have been sore mistakes; and my life has been a blind and thankless one; and I want forgiveness and direction far too much to be bitter with you."  

This reduces the stern old spinster, who never left her bridal party room when jilted at the altar decades earlier, into a weeping and prostrate supplicant whom Pip comforts.  The evolution of a boy-turned-fop into a freestanding, freethinking young man who--what?  I'll find out in the coming days and weeks as I crawl through the last eighty pages or so.

Portlandia

My friends tell me there's a cable offering that mocks the over-the-top green attitudes of Portlanders (the Left Coast variety) that's screamingly funny.  Undoubtedly.  (Abe is there.)

I traveled to Portland over the Fourth of July weekend to attend the wedding of my twenty-something niece, who lives around there with her significant other.  Now that they're married, are they still Significant Others, or are they husband and wife?  (The mother of the bride and one of my other four sisters conversing before the ceremony.)

Everything good is "sustainable" out there, whatever that means.  The wedding photographer summed it up on his website by saying that he appreciated being asked to shoot the wedding of the couple because their union is "sustainable" (I suppose so if they don't get divorced like half the couples who get married do) and the three of them started out the happy day by going to a state park to get some shots of the two there because the park offered "cool locations" and it was "sustainable" (was it suspected of going somewhere?).  (In Portland, you can run over the many bridges spanning the river, which is cool.  Here is a sign on the Steel Bridge which establishes the pecking order in terms of right-of-way on the bridge, being pedestrians before bicyclists, and in fine print Prohibits you from hurling yourself from the bridge.)

I was only there for two nights and one day (two mornings) but I got two runs through the city in.  It's a great city.  (In Portland, the water faucets are always On, spouting water needlessly and endlessly.)

Information please

A few years back when I was in the throes of divorce litigation, whenever a child of mine reached majority, the divorce lawyers would negotiate a new child support order at a cost of many thousands of dollars. Each new order that got entered into the public record carried my full name, address, date of birth and social security number. When I balked at signing such a privacy-wrecking document, I was told that unless the order contained this information, the desk clerk wouldn't accept it for filing. Then I wouldn't "benefit" from having my child support payments reduced by about a hundred dollars per month. (It's not smart to spend thousands to save hundreds. That's part of the estate-wrecking "game" of divorce that dispirits men.)

In Virginia that has changed and now social security numbers are contained in another court document which is filed under seal. But there are states that are more backwards than Virginia.

I know a person who recently ordered a copy of a marriage certificate from another state, a public record readily available to anyone. It was an outrageous treasure trove of personal information.

It listed the full name of the man and woman, along with each one's date and place of birth, social security number, current address, status (divorced or not and what month and year), and full mother's and father's names and status (dead or alive). It listed the full name and address of each witness.

Unbelievable.