A blog from my editor....

Three Score Years and Ten

Little Indian Sioux or Crow

Little frosty Eskimo

Little Turk or Japonee,

Don’t you wish that you were me?

R.L. Stevenson

We were the generation that did not expect to grow up, our consciousness formed in the slough between the revelation of Hiroshima and the farcical maneuvering of the maniacal John Kennedy. We thought that Eliot was wrong about how the world ends, and we expected to hear the bang. We didn’t plan even for a thirtieth birthday, let alone a seventieth; yet here we are: as another poet, A.E. Housman must have said in his last decade

Of my three score years and ten,

Sev’nty will not come again.

I am not a great believer in what the gerontologists call life review: you should have gone ahead and done it at the time instead of regretting it afterwards; and if you didn’t, who’s to blame? It’s not that I have nothing to regret: perhaps most of all the time when the opportunity to train as a clinical psychologist presented itself and I was too lazy to pursue it. To those who may be surprised by this idea, I can only say that I believe that there are actually a lot of people in the world who are crazier than I am. And I am happy to report that there is no major thing which I did and which I wish I hadn’t: my mother is in charge of that department.

No, I dwell rather on the things which I did not get the chance to do, and on the things which I have done and now will do no more. I never had the chance to play Iago or Leontes (though I came close on the latter). I have seen the Grand Canyon twice, and have driven the wonderful, the magnificent Baja Peninsula in each direction (and do not wish to do it again even if I get the chance): both of these are things which I believe everyone should wish to experience at least once.

On the other hand, I am third-time-lucky in marriage, to a young woman (whom I love dearly two minutes out of every three) who keeps me on my toes – by means of strings attached to my hair – and insists on making me go to exotic places even if I have been there before. I have a son who has only ever listed two things I did wrong in raising him, and who once, in a rash moment in the middle of a lake, announced that he had been brung up right (which rash moment he has probably regretted, based on the number of times I have reminded him of it). Thanks to him, I have an adorable daughter-in-law and two beautiful granddaughters who may yet grow up to do amazing things, such as prove that string theory is correct (if they inherit my scientific bent, manifested in my well-documented scholastic record in chemistry and biology!), or dance at the Bolshoi, or play Lady MacBeth at the Royal Shakespeare. And thanks to my wife, I also have a complex and vivacious stepdaughter who will correct all the evils of society and who, as far as I can tell, not only appreciates my presence in her world, but may even wish I had entered it earlier, not least because of my stabilizing influence on her eccentric mother. All of that is a matter of luck, and might never have happened. Very few ever knew (and most of those who did are either dead or will have forgotten, and of those who remember, none will care) that I was a miracle baby, though I have not performed any miracles since. I could not have been born a year earlier and survived; and when I look at the larger picture of the world, I think I would not wish to have been born much later. I can only hope it works out for my children and my children’s children.

But what of that larger picture: what did we as a generation accomplish? And will we be missed? “Not much” is, I fear the answer to both questions. We were the product of a vertical culture, shaped by 55BC, 1066, and 1689, and I think that we, or others not much younger, were its end product. To use a hackneyed phrase, there seems to have been a paradigm shift, and it is now more important to be part of a horizontal culture, which I make no effort to do. I’m not even multicultural, refusing to believe that rap and hip-hop should be exalted to the status of Beethoven, Moliere, and Michelangelo. I still care more about who wrote the Shakespeare plays than about who won American Idol.

In short, I have begun the downward glide into curmudgeonhood (some would say I already have a master’s degree in the discipline), a self-confessed Luddite who does not text or twit and is not even on Facebook. I can’t even listen fast, as I have to remind my son every time we meet – but he’s smart, and he does get it. Most of the young people in one’s brief daily encounters don’t, so I tune them out: they’re probably not saying anything of major import anyway. I am now a follower of Santayana, who said that there is no cure for birth and death but to enjoy the interval. Having escaped death three times and quadriplegia twice, I will enjoy the interval, the remaining interval, and vicariously enjoy the trials and triumphs of my family and of those young friends who are still in the process of discovery. Then, dinosaur that I am, I will melt into extinction, like that little Indian sewer crow.

The branches on a family tree....

My daughter, Alexis, leaves for a two-week trip to Israel tonight. She is going with a group of grad school students and professors from Hunter College in Manhattan to study some of the Israelis' social programs. Israel has been much in the news of late: Palestinian protests on the West Bank and Prime Minister Netanyahu's visit with the President at the White House and meetings with congress. I selfishly am hoping the Muslim Spring waits to hit Israel until after she returns. Also in the news, my niece, Andrea, graduated with honors last week from the U of M. She has been accepted to grad school in audiology at the U of M.

Both Alexis and Andrea worked long and hard to get through college, not just taking classes but working demanding part-time jobs all their way through school. It took both young women longer than four years to get their degrees and both have decided to continue for another degree before heading out into the world of professional careers. Nowadays people debate the value of a college education. Kids with expensive 4-year college degrees are finding it hard to find good paying jobs so they can pay back their huge college loans. Many young people choose to go to grad school while waiting for the economy to change or to make themselves more marketable.

Alexis is preparing for a career in community organizing and is hoping for an internship at the New York Immigration Coalition next year, her final year of grad school. Andi hopes to continue working for a professor of audiology at the U of M who is doing research on second-language acquisition in children. Alexis received a stipend this year for her work at Baruch College and Andi hopes she can have some of her U of M tuition paid as she works on her master's degree.

This week I began to reflect on the respective family trees to which these young women may owe some of their characteristic persistence. I thought about the individuals swinging in those trees who definitely found life a struggle too. Some of these relatives found the struggles to be too much to bear and turned to alcohol to ease their pain and thus spread it around for others to share. Some of the family tree members were colorfully eccentric, others met with tragedy.

The girls share Scottish great-grandparents on their mothers' side. Julia came from Stirling to the US in her early 20s. I have written about her before. She was the eldest of five children and came to the US to get a job so she could send money home to her struggling family in Scotland. She got a job as a nanny for one of the members of the wealthy Pillsbury family here in Minneapolis and sent home so much money that her mother accused her of being a prostitute.

Julia married a fellow Scot, George, whom she met here in Minneapolis, and became a mother of three. She worked as a grinder at Hitchcock Foundries for several decades. I remember that the first thing she did every night when she came home was to take a bath to get the grit off her body. She brought her parents over from Scotland and supported them as well. She had been top of her class in school back in Scotland and I think she had a fairly high IQ. She loved to read and could recite scores of Robert Burns' poems from memory. She was widowed at age 50, moved in with us and became an alcoholic.

Shortly after Grandma Julia became a widow and before she moved in with us, my mother would have my sister Cate and me spend Friday nights with her. We were about 4 and 5, and I remember her putting us in the old claw-foot bath tub on the second floor of her old house. She then would go downstairs and drink "highballs" with a woman who lived with her, named Betty. She and Betty would drink and watch Perry Mason on television and forget that my sister and I were in the tub. The water would get cold, and I remember feeling rather terrified. She told us not to get out of the tub until she came to get us out, so we would sit there for what seemed like hours. My youngest sister remembers walking each day to the neighborhood corner market with Grandma Nanny, as we called her, after she moved in with us. Nanny would buy a six-pack of Grain Belt beer and down it within 30 minutes time.

The cousins' great-grandfather, George, fought in the trenches of France in WWI. He was gassed, and his lungs never recovered. He came to the US from Glasgow after the war and spent his life delivering coal to homes in South Minneapolis. He had a beautiful singing voice, especially when he was drunk, and a beautiful head of red hair. He died suddenly at 52, from a cerebral hemorrhage. The other great-grandfather the girls shared was of English descent. Guy was the eldest child in a large farm family in Western Minnesota. He came home from school one day to find his father had hanged himself from a rope in their barn. He cut his father down and spent the rest of his childhood and teenage years as a farm laborer moving from farm to farm supporting his mother and siblings. With a 4th-grade education, he rose to the position of plant foreman at Electric Machinery in NE Minneapolis. His wife, the girls' great-grandma, Ardis, lost a kidney to rheumatic fever in 1912 at age eight and spent her adult life as a mother and part-time hypochondriac who was always busy creating things covered in sequins for her home. My mother used to joke that her mother-in-law was dying from the moment she met her, but she lived to be 84.

Andrea's Colombian grandparents on her father's side were poor farmers in Colombia who worked hard all their lives to support a family of 16 children. Andi's grandfather bought a small bar after retiring from farming and a bunch of thugs brutally murdered him in that bar. He was in his fifties. Many of the children went on to become well-educated, successful adults.

Alexis had a Canadian great-grandfather on her father's side who was a doctor in Jamaica. When he was 5o or so, he married a young German woman, who was to learn he had fathered scores of bi-racial children on the island. Or so the story goes.

The girls' grandfather, Ralph, was a musical child prodigy who, when he was about 12, was asked by Tommy Dorsey to tour with his big band across the US. Ralph could play the trumpet, sing and dance. Ralph's mother, Ardis, said he could not go, and he proceeded to have a nervous breakdown. He was a talented, tormented and extremely bright man who went on to marry young and immediately had to support a family. (I was born six months later.) He went to night school, part-time, for years at the U of M to get a degree in engineering while he worked full time. He became an alcoholic in his thirties and chose never to recover from his illness. Neither did his wife or daughters. All four of his daughters were estranged from him at the time of his death because of his abusive parenting, and we have no idea where he is buried; nor do we really care.

Both girls have fond memories of their Grandma Lily, who dreamed of becoming a nurse; but no-one in her family encouraged her, nor did they have the money to help her do so. She became a young mother of four girls and worked at her own business as a cleaning lady while she ran the household. Her four daughters all graduated from college and all earned advanced degrees. She didn't have money to help them to go to college, but she encouraged their every step to become educated so they would have the choices she never had. Lily's daughters all hoped her husband Ralph would die first so she could find a life beyond that of a co-dependent caretaker. She died first, at age 70. Lily's daughters also wished she had protected them from their father's abuse, but she didn't.

It's good to know about the characters on your family tree -- the good, the bad, and the ugly -- so you can at least try to make some new mistakes in your own life. Andrea and Alexis seem to demonstrate the trait of persistence that one can find running in the family. Good luck to them. Nowadays, as always, a little persistence is a good thing.

Phoebe re-visits her King Charles's Head

We had our hunches about Arnold and his tendency to grope women other than his wife. We thought there was probably more to the story and of course now there is. The list of famous men we women love to hate gets longer every day. The media is having a heyday with all the dirty laundry Maria and Arnold were not able to get into the washing machine fast enough. The psychologists weigh in once again with their theory that power, money, and fame are the dangerous cocktail mix that makes such men as the Terminator feel entitled. Most men, even those who lack money or fame, aren't shocked by revelations of celebrity infidelity. (What is shocking, says our European Correspondent and Editor, is that Americans consider fidelity a qualification for political leadership.) Women on the other hand, have a tendency to express shock and righteous indignation when this sort of scandal hits.

It would be nice if there were some sort of over-the-counter test kit one could buy at the drugstore that could predict accurately the likelihood of a person's tendency toward infidelity. They could call it "CheatorNot." You and your partner could both buy the kit and share your results before you tied the knot. Sort of like the pregnancy test kits everyone uses now, or the blood-sugar monitors you can buy at Walgreen's. One would pee or spit into a cup or prick one's finger to determine whether one is or is not infidelity prone. Science does magical things nowadays. There are genetic marker tests that predict all sorts of things, why not a genetic marker test for infidelity that can be bought at CVS?

Actually the social scientists have developed a reliable personality profile of those who are most likely to cheat, but most people don't bother reading such research or even know that it exists at all. A quick, easy and accurate drug-store test that can identify those of us likely to cheat could save a lot time and a lot of heartache. Then, when you learn of your partners' indiscretions later on in your relationship, you would only have yourself to blame. "Damn!" you would say to yourself, "I knew I shouldn't have married him/her after I saw the test results!" Or, "I knew I should have told him I wouldn't live with him unless he took that test."

Yes, all's fair in love and war, of course, but infidelity often comes as a terrible blow to the unsuspecting. A bonus shock, of course for the wronged partner, is to learn of a child being involved, like the 10-year-old child in this week's revelation. Ninety percent of married couples say they disapprove of infidelity, although 60% of men and 40% of women cheat at some point in their marriages. Figure that one out!

Betrayed spouses (spice?) can easily be kept in the dark, either because they are prone to denial or because the cheater is a master of deception, or both. Infidelity can feel like being ambushed and then being left to lick your wounds all alone. It is naive to be shocked when human beings are capable of betraying another human being, even their spouse. Affairs and infidelity have, after all, been going on from the get-go. If and when it happens to you, it is natural to feel foolish, humiliated, angry and yes, shocked. You may look back and see the signs you chose to ignore.

In recent tales of celebrity infidelity, we have watched some woman who has been wronged demonstrate real grace and character, while the cheating significant others come out looking like real scumbags totally devoid of grace and totally lacking in character. My favorite fictional scorned woman is played by Julianne Margolis on the television show The Good Wife. She suffers her humiliation with true grit and style. As did Sandra Bullock. Sandy cried, no sobbed when Jesse told her about the call girl, but then the story goes she stopped crying, put on her sunglasses and walked out the door never to see her outlaw husband again. Elin Woods kept a low profile all the way to her multi-million dollar settlement with Tiger. Although, the low profile came after she hit him with one of his golf clubs. Some cheaters do redeem themselves, some even get their own shows on CNN.

Some ask how these high profile women could be so stupid. I say, get off your high horse. We all know Hilary Clinton is not stupid. We human beings, high profile or not, can be naive (OK, stupid) when it comes to love and marriage because we do put on our rose-colored glasses or our blinders when it comes to those we love. Let's quit pretending we are shocked by infidelity and let's also admit how much we all love a good sex scandal.

Women will always be attracted to men who are and rich and/or powerful. Such men, back in our cave days, were the men who had the best cave and the best clubs. In other words, good fathers and providers when we had to stay home with the kids around the fire. Men are biologically hard-wired to spread their love around more than women. Women get pregnant, and in this state, sex is not their first priority. Sex is always a man's first priority. We are only a few thousand years away from the behaviors which kept our species thriving on the planet. Evolution is a long process and though we may all say we want fidelity in marriage, we are fighting a biology that goes back thousands and thousands of years.

If there were an infidelity test at the drug store, how many of us would use it and share its results with the one we love? I think most people would prefer to live with the blinders pulled down over their eyes and take the risk of being betrayed. Remember, love is blind after all. Ask Helena whether all's well that ends well.

All's Well.......but

I was surprised and disappointed last night that the Classical Actors' Ensemble production of All's Well That Ends Well did not draw a bigger crowd, especially with the excellent reviews it received in several Twin Cities newspapers last week. Just because something's good doesn't mean people show up. Sometimes people show up in droves for bad things. Take our baseball team, for example. The Twins are bad this year, very bad, and people show up in mass even through hail storms and tornado sightings. The beautiful new stadium is of course mainly responsible for the record-setting crowds, but the open-air venue in such a climate as ours, coupled with a losing team, may not keep the fans rolling in for long.

The Twin Cities are well stocked with theater venues, and this theater company is only in it's second year, so large audiences are probably not to be expected. The company may not last in the lovely 1912 building it inhabits, but the Classical Actors' Ensemble is a classy and creative new addition to the theater scene here in the Twin Cities.

Last night I saw the play again, and my friend Pat and I ran the concession stand together. After the play was over, the actors came back on stage and took questions from the audience. Some of the comments and questions were excellent. All's Well That Ends Well is categorized as one of Shakespeare's "problem plays" because it is a mix of comedy and drama. Some in the audience admitted that though they liked the production, they found it's description as a problem understandable as to why it is not one of Shakespeare's frequently performed plays. The audience too was amazed that not only could the actors act, many of them could sing and play instruments in polished musical interludes between scenes. Harry chose to gently dance around the audience last night as he neither sings nor plays an instrument but can do a nice fox-trot.

I was also cheered to learn in this after-play dialogue that the actors' first two weeks of rehearsal involved sitting around a large table dissecting the lines in the play, figuring out the language, and understanding the vocabulary, all of which showed in their execution of their lines. I say cheered because as I have stated before, Shakespeare to me is like a foreign language: it sounds beautiful, but more often than not, I don't understand what is being said. Someone in the cast said exactly the same thing. She said it takes time and effort to appreciate the language and the poetry. Whew! I guess I am not so stupid after all, just uneducated.

Shakespeare creates characters who are not only complex, but embarrassingly human. We now have psychological names for the characters he created: sociopath, narcissist, compulsive liar, character disordered, etc. He was somehow able to understand the complexity of human nature 400 years ago without the benefit of the DSM-IV. Who has not met a woman like Helena who for whatever reason, falls for the wrong man? My friends Merrie Jean and Pat, who attended the play last night, found Helena to be a very aggravating heroine. I, of course, well known for my romantic love-life disasters, found Helena to be endearing. A strong, intelligent woman, but when it came to men, really stupid. I told my friends not to be so critical, even the women of Jane Austen, a few centuries after Shakespeare, continued to have few roles beyond wife and mother. Jane, of course, chose neither role, perhaps so she could be free to write great novels.

Who has not known a Bertram, the man of Helena's dreams? The people who, finding they have been coerced into a bad situation, proceed to show the world their complete lack of decency and sensitivity? Who among us has been lucky enough to have a mother-in-law who sides with her daughter-in-law when her son behaves like a real jerk? Now that is an unusual woman you don't run into everyday. Then we have the king nursed back to health by the savvy and intelligent Helena, only to use his good fortune to boss people around and make them fearful and miserable. And Parolles, the amusing chameleon-type human being, who somehow manages through lack of character to get himself out of life's predicaments with a sort of grace all because he is fashion forward. I've known a few of these types in my time.

Life often presents situations that do not always end well, and most of us know this; but we try desperately to find happy endings anyway. As Thoreau said, most people live lives of quiet desperation. The genius of Shakespeare is perhaps his ability to understood human nature better than anyone and then put these characters on stage for us to laugh at, to criticize, to feel pity for and to be confounded by. Shakespearean characters turn up all the time in our lives: at work, at the mall, and in our own families. Maybe the problem plays make us uncomfortable because life really is one problem after another, with comedy and tragedy all mixed up together, sometimes all in one day.

One's personal pursuit of happily-ever-after can bring out the worst in in each of us, especially when our pursuit butts up against someone else's pursuit. The Americans went so far as to write the pursuit of happiness into their constitution, characterizing it as an inalienable right. Shakespeare would have recognized it as a chimera which can make a real mess of things.

Prince William and Kate

I took the day off to watch the Royal Wedding, resisting the dozens of desperate calls from St. Louis Park, where apparently half the teaching force wished to do the same thing and must have called in at the last minute with a nosebleed. It truly did not disappoint. Some people laughed at me -- actually several people laughed at me, but I didn't care. (I at least had the sense to record it - twice - and watch it later, all twelve hours!) Thirty years ago I remember sitting on my couch at 4:30 am with my baby daughter in my lap, watching Charles and Diana get married. I was naive enough to think they would live happily ever after. I sat on the same couch with that same daughter, aged 16, watching Diana's funeral. Our own family was breaking apart and we cried for Diana, but we also cried for ourselves. Happily ever after just doesn't work out sometimes.

I am not a Royalist by any stretch, but I do enjoy all the pomp and circumstance that the Brits do better than anyone in the world. I even thought the Bible reading which Kate and Will chose and the prayer they wrote together for the ceremony were rather telling. These two have obviously learned something from the past and have given thought to their future roles, which some argue are archaic and meaningless.

As neurotic and immature as Princess Diana was, she did manage to bring the monarchy kicking and screaming into the future (or into the more recent past, as my editor might say). Watching as Diana was forced to face the reality of her sham marriage was very painful for me, because my marriage at that time was also a sham and I didn't want to face reality either. Watching her fumble and bumble as she did in so many ways was understandable to me as I too fumbled and bumbled my way out of a bad marriage.

One thing Diana did get right was being a Mom to her sons, William and Harry. Amid all the craziness of her short life, she did have a vision as to what she felt was important for her sons to learn and experience outside their royal realm. Some of the antics of William and Harry have not been all that admirable, but other times they have shown a deep sense of what is really important in our world and how their notoriety can make a difference. Wedding guests were told to make charitable gifts from a long list of charities rather than buy gifts. Harry did not flinch from putting himself in harm's way in Afghanistan and he was truly upset and angry when he was told he had to come home. Both young men have traveled the world supporting a variety of worthy human rights causes.

The most fun and interesting aspect of this royal romance to me is the fact that Kate's great grandfather was a coal miner from the north of England and her grandmother dreamed of being the "top brick in the chimney." Kate's mom was a flight attendant and her dad an airline dispatcher before they became very successful internet business tycoons. Not exactly rags to riches but they did make themselves top bricks in the chimney. Who knows, this time there may be a happily ever after.