David's Blog We Must

Tuesday, January 9, 2024

Monday, January 8, 2024

About Me and Classical Music

My experience of classical music is rooted in my childhood years (fidgeting through performances at Symphony Hall in the itchy black wool pants my parents made me wear for the occasion, the BSO being Church), and in influences as recent as NPR’s Facebook post “The Top 10 Classical Albums of The Year,” which demonstrates if nothing else that composers and performers of music for the concert hall have been busy, making up new things for us to listen to. It’s not all Mozart and Beethoven anymore. Actually, it hasn’t been for a while.

Yet the following scene is still typical:

The winter concert hall is warm and well-lit, and buzzing with small-talk among the concertgoers taking their seats, or searching for their seats, or already sitting in their seats, or in someone else’s seats, having disposed of their coats and scarves as well as they can, and peering now at the fine print in the program while the members of the orchestra assemble themselves onstage. The percussionists are trying out their timpani, the violas are practicing their peskiest parts, the trumpets are galloping up and down their scales, the bassoonist is doing a last-minute run-through of an especially tricky solo, sounding like a dove cooing to itself.

The concertmaster stands and plays the concert A, and the rest of the orchestra falls into line with an upwelling of coordinated sound, literally setting the stage for what’s to come. Now the conductor strides forward from the wings, smiling broadly. She or he steps smartly to the podium, bows to the orchestra, turns and bows to the audience, right, center, and left, as the audience applauds, although no one has done anything at this point to deserve it. Facing the orchestra again, the conductor now raises the baton, waits (sometimes for many moments) for silence to descend in the theater, and now the baton falls.

It seems a timeless ritual, like a religious service. If a male, the conductor is likely dressed in a customary outfit known as white tie, or some similar attire slightly more 21st-century. The orchestra members are wearing formal clothing too, with black, gray, and slices of white predominating. Why is this? Sometimes there are classical performances in which the orchestra is dressed in casual clothing, with no adverse effect on the quality of the music, except that musicians dressed informally seem to be enjoying themselves more. Certainly the days are past where the audience would also show up in stiff traditional attire, to take “their” seats. At one time, this code of dress may have been a sign of respect towards the esteemed maestro and musicians, and to the well-known pillars of the Western symphonic canon, most of them white male Europeans. Or perhaps it was a way of signaling that whatever changes might occur in the world outside the hall, the old standards of privilege, and the privileged, would be maintained within it.

In a way, we in the audience are part of the performance too. Our job is to sit and listen, to applaud when the time is right, to enter and exit on cue, and in general to pay up, keep quiet, and behave ourselves: no talking or eating or self-grooming while the program is underway, no standing up, no shouting, no throwing things, no taking pictures, no dancing around or rushing the stage, please please please won’t you kindly refrain from Just About Everything.

The whole classical/concert experience is full of signaling. When my father was inducted into the Army in 1943, they at first wanted to put him in the signal corps; they thought that he, as a violin player, would already comprehend how abstract symbols could convey explicit instructions. (For better or worse his pre-architecture training won out, and he was placed among the combat engineers instead.)

What else can we say about classical music? For one thing, when you experience it in person, it is unamplified. No microphones for the performers, no loudspeakers stacked on the stage, no mixing board. Traditionally, it is an acoustic music, relying on instruments played by hand, and not dependent on electronics. Everything is live. Pre-recorded music and sound effects are seldom utilized. Sometimes pipe organs or electric keyboards figure into performances, and they are dependent on an electric current and some form of mechanical assistance. Mostly, though, power is only required for lighting, heating, and ventilation.

Classical music is old school. Much of the repertoire has been around for over a century, and it is not going the way of the dodo anytime soon. Your Google news feed is not apt to tempt you with something like “Hot New Trends That’ll Change Your Mind About Symphonies.” Tradition here is strong. Hip and chic are not.

Classical music sounds expansive. It is meant to make an impression on you. It is meant to be a statement on the part of the composer and on the part of the performers. Classical music is often monumental, heroic-sounding, thrilling, thought-provoking, intelligent, demanding, requiring a commitment from you.

Classical music, in person, is a visual experience. You are watching music being made, by an ensemble of fairly ordinary-looking people, using devices that are constructed wholly or in part out of natural or handcrafted materials. The brasses glitter, the double basses shine, the bows of the violins rise and fall in rhythmic waves, the percussionist’s hovering, marshmallow-tipped mallets strike with precision, as they have for centuries. The conductor makes a choreography of the music, striking the time, gesticulating, stabbing, chopping, dragging the sound forth, in a strange, fixed-foot interpretive dance.

Classical music is planned music. With the exception of the soloists’ cadenzas, improvisation is not a factor in a performance. The composer’s score serves as the reliable map to guide the musicians through the maze. (I am always impressed with people who can pick up some sheet music, look at it, and begin to hum the melody or the harmony in the right tempo and the right key. Never could figure out how they did that. I am a slow reader in the English language to begin with, and a musical score is another language entirely, in which Latin letterforms are pushed to the margins. A typical score is a dizzying sight, and sometimes resembles dead carpenter ants flattened on the page.)

Classical music, if performed competently, is delivered to you complete and highly polished, with your 100% satisfaction in mind. Mostly, you only need to sit still and listen, though that can be more challenging than it sounds.

Classical music is virtually limitless and can lead you anywhere. In time, you could find yourself listening to something like the Ramayana monkey chant (www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6EFGuXEowk).

Over the years, I learned to call the kind of classical music I enjoyed “programmatic.” You’re probably aware that this type of composition is intended evoke mental images of languid summer afternoons, or battles, or birdsong, or fauns, or the ocean, or thunderstorms. The kind of classical music that tended to put me to sleep is called “abstract.” Here, musical ideas are to be explored (and then explored some more, and then explored at even greater length), but you’ll only be reminded of birdsong by accident.

You can ignore classical music. Even if you like it, you can turn your back on it and walk away from it for a while, maybe a long while. If you don’t like it, if you consider it to be dull and square and stuffy and elitist, you can easily avoid it, and never have to experience it.

Classical music is serious. People take a scholarly approach to it. So, then, you have to know what you’re talking about if you undertake to discuss any aspect of it with someone. And you have to know not mispronounce the names of the performers, the compositions, or the composers and the cities they hail from. You have to expect to sit through music that you might find boring: lengthy works for solo piano, pieces for duos or trios or quartets or quintets or sextets or septets or octets or nonets that strike you as tedious, music without strong or memorable or hummable themes. Works from the 20th and 21st centuries that seem bizarre.

Then there is the ponderous music of Bruckner, Mahler, Strauss, Rachmaninoff, that you may find, after sampling it, learning a bit more about it, and finally sitting through some of it, to be exhausting, impenetrable, beyond your reach, a waste of your time.

So, here’s a suburban middle-of-the-road fella’s conception of classical music: give me Respighi, Sibelius, Copland, Mussorgsky, Vaughan Williams, Stravinsky (even the chamber suite “L’Histoire du Soldat”; Stravinsky makes you listen.) And not so much your Mozart, your Haydn, Schubert, Schumann; they make me nod off at concerts. Give me Alan Hovhaness. Yes, him. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeXEP7VzQqo). And Arvo Pärt too, why not. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sp2oxWdRMuk)

At my college station, about a third of the programming over the course of any week was classical. During orgy period (the four weeks during winter and spring exams) the normal schedule would be suspended and the station would switch to all-day, all-night operation. Extended “orgies” of recorded music would be broadcast, and were intended to keep undergrads company as they stayed up very late and woke up very early to cram for exams and finish up those overdue term papers. There were rock and jazz and folk music orgies, but the memorable ones were the classical orgies. For example, there was, during my time, a 40-hour Mozart orgy (or was it 60?), during which no single work was played more than once. The DJ, or “orgiast,” attempted to one-man (that is, to do both the announcing and the engineering from the control room, where the recordings were put on the air; normally, a classical program would be staffed with one announcer and one engineer, who would do their work from two separate rooms, but this was exam time and staffing was thin); however, this staffer became incoherent after about 35 on-air hours straight, and subs had to be called in to finish the orgy. There was a 56-hour Tchaikovsky orgy, 48 hours of Bach, 50 hours of Beethoven.

I did several such orgies, starting with a four-hour Sibelius orgy. (Growing up in the home I did, you knew about Jean Sibelius. My parents had a turntable-amplifier system and a collection of maybe 75 LPs. My father would drop the tone arm on Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony and conduct the final movement, waving his arms around the living room with his eyes shut, and with special attention to the six separate emphatic chords that conclude the piece. I think Sibelius’ Fifth spoke to him of how an individual’s dauntless striving can help him overcome life’s impediments. Or something.) In the station library I had found a boxed set of all seven Sibelius symphonies recorded by the Japan Philharmonic under Akeo Watanabe. Several of them happened to be the shortest performances available, and I, thinking how this would enable me to squeeze more Sibelius into the time allowed, was going to play all seven by the Japan Phil, in order, interspersed with other works. It was a tidy plan but a silly one. Whatever the Japan Phil’s strengths, it was doubtful that theirs would be the best performances of every one of the symphonies. Before air time, the station program director suggested that instead I ought to play the best performance of each symphony, rather than the shortest, since ultimately that would be a better listening experience for the radio audience. I attempted to do as he asked, but I could only guess at whose Second Symphony was better, whose Fifth. I sure didn’t know. I’m certain that there were phone calls to the station from Cambridge-area audiophiles who were affronted by the choices I made.

Another time, I was one-manning a program and, between announcing breaks, a more senior station member turned up on some errand or other. He stopped in to listen to a few measures of the music coming out of the monitors, a Beethoven piano sonata. Turning towards me briefly he asked, “The Arrau?”, meaning pianist Claudio Arrau. It wasn’t really a question. He knew just by listening for a few moments whose performance it was, and he wanted me to know that he knew. More signaling.

I realized later how much affectation went along with just about everything, in my college days. I studied, but I was not really a student. My radio voice was authoritative, but I was not really an authority on classical music, or any other kind of music. And though it later provided me with employment for a time, I chose not to commit to the disembodied life of a radio personality.

And now, back to the concert hall. After the final finale, unless the concert has been a complete disaster, and sometimes even then, the audience explodes with applause, and then rises (in a now-ritualized practice some disdain as ovation inflation) and claps with increased gusto, and now the conductor, having departed, comes back onstage, beaming, and brings the soloists too, and the conductor has key members of the orchestra stand, one by one, and the audience claps even louder, remembering that clarinet solo, and that place where the second violins did something special, though they can’t recall exactly what. Then the conductor and soloists leave again and the applause ebbs away a bit, then they come back once more and the applause rises again. This may go on for some time. But everyone tries to avoid what might be called the applause vacuum, where the applause peters out before the conductor and soloists have quit the stage for good, forcing them to make their way through the back rows of the orchestra in an uncomfortable silence.

Now the trance-state is broken. It’s OK to yawn, to cough, to clear your throat. You rummage for your coat and hat; you have to leave now, you may not stay. The theater doors swing open, and cold air rushes in as the concertgoers make their way outside. There is some chatter about that piece, or how well the orchestra scaled that particular summit, but mostly the talk seems to be about where are we going for dinner, and who are we meeting up with where and when, or how bracing it feels to be suddenly outdoors. Our own small-talk isn’t up to the task of deconstructing the concert we’ve just heard.

MORE LOOSE ENDS

There was classical music in my parents’ collection that I liked (that is, as a child I liked listening to certain recordings of certain pieces, over and over). I remember “Pictures at an Exhibition” (Bernstein, New York Philharmonic), and Ferde Grofe’s “Grand Canyon Suite,” which I was not allowed to play at my college station because it was considered too “pops,” too low-brow. I remember “Bolero” (Munch, Boston Symphony, the only recording of it I’m aware of where the trombones at the end don’t sound ridiculous). I was not allowed to play that at my college station either; too well-worn, a “warhorse.” And a little red translucent 45rpm disk containing Tchaikovsky’s stirring “Marche Slave,” which I played and played and played until it wore out. (Same deal at my college station: nix on that too, a warhorse.)

Was this a proper early grounding in the classics? No. There was no music from the Renaissance or Baroque periods, no opera, little chamber music, nothing more “modern” than the Ravel. Essentially, our home library of LPs was my father’s homage to his own mother and her father, for whom the Boston Symphony, Serge Koussevitsky, Symphony Hall, and the canon of 19th-century European big-symphony music (plus whatever “modern” music Koussevitsky championed... if it was OK with him, it was OK with them) were considered to be sacred... the be-all and end-all, the highest quality music imaginable. And, not knowing any better, I fell into line with that view.

I did get better at it. But sometimes I think, what I know about classical music plus $5 would get me a coffee and a cruller at Dunkin’s. Classical music: it’s this thing where you’re sitting around listening to it and then you can’t wait to turn it off. Bartok? Scriabin? Stockhausen? Forget it! Turn it off! Turn that crap off!

You can see it right here; my requirements and therefore my knowledge were simple, and they remain stubbornly so. I like these composers (but not everything they ever wrote, not by any means), and my preferences are almost solely guided by ear, not affected by what each composer was attempting to achieve, or how this or that piece fit in with their larger portfolio of work.

I did not understand how music was composed or performed, and played no instrument myself. I did sing in a large chorus in my freshman year at college, and was privileged to be part of a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth at a packed house in Sanders Theater, but mostly fell away from the hard work of singing serious music in public after that. I never grew to liking opera, was never bitten by the Ring Cycle bug. Some of my fellow announcers at school were fanatics about Wagner; it seemed to be something that went hand-in-hand with being an educated person, so I made an effort to learn the names of the operas and their proper order in the cycle. It seemed better to fit in, or at least to appear to fit in.

It’s amazing to me now how little I know, and how small my world still is. How did other people become who they were supposed to become? Where did they find the time?

Blues: an exercise in writing about fruit

Fat, dark-skinned blueberries, some nearly the diameter of a dime, have become a common year-round sight at my supermarket. They are fine, just fine, and like all blueberries they are good to eat as is or cooked. They freeze well, and you can also grow them in your garden if you want, although you’ll need to take good care of them, and you’ll need to put up netting to protect them from birds, rabbits, chipmunks, and all the rest. Your homegrown berries will be luscious though, the store-bought ones a little less so, I think, but all in all they’re very nice.

But they’re not the blueberries I remember. The little blueberries I remember grew out on the windswept “moors” of Nantucket.

In New England, blueberries come in two main varieties, highbush and lowbush. Lowbush blueberries tend to be small, each about the size of a pea. (They won’t be winning any contests for berry size, but that’s not the point of them anyway.) According to the University of Maine, where they know about these things, lowbush plants are not themselves planted, but “inhabit” areas of thin soil on uplands and glacial outwash plains that are unsuitable for other crops. That is, not only do they predate you and me, but you have to take them where you find them and nowhere else. The berries are the right color, not the deep blue typical of the supermarket sort but a strong, appealing medium-blue, a blue with some violet in it, really a blue like no other. The skin is dry, not shiny. Scattered lowbush berries grow in the shady woods behind my house, but the animals usually get the few fruits that ripen.

Highbush blueberries are shrubs that lend themselves more readily to cultivation. The berries have a lengthy shelf life; they show up at the market in all seasons, a long way from where they were grown. But then: a berry plantation called Gundy’s, about two miles from my house, offers highbush berries in late July and early August that, confusingly, are not dark-skinned but the color of lowbush berries instead. At the check-in table you say hello to the Gundys, Ernie and Trudy, who have run this farm for many years and perhaps are growing tired of it. At least, Trudy seems to be. When asked what their adult children are up to, Trudy mentions a daughter who’s settled in Vermont. “It is nice,” Trudy declares. “I’d be up there too,” she continues, waving a hand towards her fields, “if it wasn’t for the berries.”

When I’m at Gundy’s I am not on Nantucket but in my own community, seeing folks that I might know (“Hey, how ya doin’? How’s the picking?”). I feel a sense of dislocation. I’m standing, not stooping, to pick the berries. The air doesn’t smell of salt, and no gulls cry overhead, and the sea is very far away. And I’m not 7 anymore, so there’s that as well.

Let’s touch on this one point and then move along: the Nantucket of my childhood is gone and never coming back. Even while the island has become a popular and pricey vacation spot, and continues to experience a building boom, the land itself is slipping into the sea, while the essence of the place, as I see it, has been crowded out. How do I feel about that? I feel lucky that I knew it when not so many people went there. I feel sad that it has changed so much. I am sorry that people are loving it to death. I am sorry that the seas are rising. I’ll miss it when it goes. Which is a way of saying something else, too, without coming right out and saying it.

We were not summer residents. Our family of five went there for a week or two for about ten summers, starting in 1956 or whenever it was that Ned graduated from diapers. One summer, my folks decided to live large and rented a cottage for a whole three weeks. That turned out to be too long for our family, even if it hadn’t rained for most of our stay, which it did. And there were flying ants aplenty in the cottage, who were enjoying their holiday and wanted to share their good times with us.

Doggedly we went to the beach anyway, because that’s what we did. Around noon, it would be Surfside, down on the southern shore, where the breakers rolled in from the wild Atlantic hour after hour. We would bob among the tall waves, take foolish chances with them, and, when it was time to come in, run like crazy up the beach with the white water and the undertow tugging at our feet. Later in the afternoon we would shift to the Jetties, on the north side near town, with calmer waters we could actually swim in without the risk of getting pummeled by the waves or dragged out by the riptides.

Paved roads connected the two, but my dad liked to take the longer route from Surfside, a narrow dirt byway that went eastward along the shoreline before turning north towards the airport, where the pavement resumed. The road functioned as a shortcut through the moors between the beach and the airport, though not too many used it, and it wasn’t on the map. My dad bounced us along the rutted track, tossing up clouds of dust, looking for his special place. While the road had no name we knew of, for us, here, the moors did: Blueberry Heaven. As we left the shore behind and swung in closer to the main runway, we could see small single-engine planes come buzzing in from over the beach and touch down a few hundred feet away. Once in a while the four-engine DC-6’s of Northeast Airlines would come lumbering in from the big cities. “Tourists,” we sniffed, we who came to the island by sea and knew where the number-one blueberry-picking place was.

My father would pull off the road and we would tumble out with pails, buckets, and old milk cartons, spread out among the low, brushy plants that covered the moors in every direction, and start picking. We would stay until we’d collected enough, then we’d move over to the swimming beach, sometimes stopping for a while at the airport terminal to watch the planes up close.

These were strictly lowbush blueberries, clustered together or scattered among the bayberry, bearberry, grasses, and wildflowers. They came up only to our ankles. You had to bend over pretty far to pick them, or squat, or alternate between the two. As we each found places to pick where we wouldn’t bump into each another, we felt a kind of gentle simplicity (or simple-mindedness) settle over us. We felt the stickiness of the salt on our skin. If it was sunny, we felt the glare and the heat. The salt wind passed among us, arising off the water, and we could just hear the big waves in the distance, booming ashore. There was nobody else around.

Sweet berries and salty air. For a little while, that’s all there was to it. For a little while, it was all there needed to be.

I felt at peace out there in the berry patch. I think we all did. No one had put these bushes here, they just grew there on their own, had been growing there, for a very long time. Somebody owned all of this, but they were far away, probably, and anyhow they weren’t doing anything with it (yet). There were no fences, no “No Trespassing” signs, no one charging admission. Because it was always summer when we were there, my memories are mostly warm and blissful, a child’s mostly flawless daydream. There were no rules, except for please don’t drop any (but of course we were going to drop a few), and please don’t squish them (but of course we were going to squish a few), and please be sure to wash them off before you eat them (which of course we did, except when we didn’t). We were allowed to take all that we could carry. I guess we must have felt that this part of the moors belonged to us, in a way.

One afternoon at Blueberry Heaven, I took a picture of my father with my Kodak Brownie. In the photo he is standing facing me and holding his bucket tilted towards the camera, proudly showing off how many berries he’s already gathered. The moors are behind him, and above everything is the pale blue of the sky descending towards the sharp blue line of the horizon. He is wearing a boatneck long-sleeved beach shirt, and he is grinning from ear to ear.

My dad has been gone more than ten years, so I can’t ask him, but I believe these visits to the berry patch in the fifties and sixties were not his first visits. I think that he spent some time here in 1936, to be exact, a 14-year-old delightedly picking berries and watching planes and going swimming and enjoying the summer. That year, he and his mother and his older brother had come out to Nantucket for an extended break from their life in New Hampshire. Over the years, in his remembering it and selectively recounting it, this experience turned into a wholly pleasant memory of the island in summer, and became the reason our own family went there for our vacations, instead of, say, the Rhode Island shore or the Vineyard or the Cape. We kids didn’t ask him about it back then; something about it told us not to. But there were faint clues here and there.

I believe that they came out to the island, my grandmother and her two boys, after her marriage went to pieces in a not-very-private way, and she packed up and got the hell out of Peterborough, partly just to get away and partly because the gossiping in that insular town had become unbearable to her. Nantucket was truly a far-away place back then, nobody knew them there, and summer lodgings in the thirties were not very expensive.

These lowbush blueberries on the back road to the airport, they required some care in picking. You seized each one gently between your thumb and forefinger, comprehending well the advantage of having an opposable thumb. Each berry was tethered to its tiny branch just enough so as not to blow away in the wind or wash down in the rain. You had to be careful to grip it lightly and give it just enough of a tug. Each berry was a near-perfect orb, almost weightless. The first ones you dropped into your pail went “plonk” when they hit bottom.

Soon you had a small mound of blue in there, a blond boy’s just-right color. Blue like my eyes, kind of, blue like the clothing I looked best in, blue like the ultramarine paint I still splash across canvas and paper, the color that stands out for me in a multicolored world.

So my dad was re-creating a happy part of his childhood, in taking us out there. A happy part, with a shadowy side to it. In some circles this is known as a frozen need, a deep longing from the past that can never be assuaged here in the present, though people do try. I can’t complain. It’s a pleasure to forage for berries in the wild. The activity and the berries themselves cost us almost nothing, just a little effort, out there in the seemingly limitless moors, the breezy moors, the sometimes chilly and foggy moors, where gray mists occasionally closed in around us without warning.

My dad was also hoping to foster happy childhood memories for us, too. But the troubling reasons his mother had run away to sea with her boys remained buried and untalked-about. Happy and Unhappy worked their way across the moors side by side, bent over at the waist and edging forward through the berry fields, swaying slightly with skinny arms extended, like children pretending to be elephants. When you stood up straight to stretch your back, you could just see the Atlantic off to the south, and the endless horizon where there were few boats to be seen, ever. The lonely sea. The cold, vast, impossibly deep and lonely blue sea.

Dancing: an essay from 2020

“So they called at the inn
for a room to dance
and who but they danced merrily —
and the very best dancer among them all
was Old John Webb who was just set free.”

“The Escape of Old John Webb” was on the Kingston Trio’s 1960 album “String Along,” which I listened to countless times. It is one of approximately 98 million songs that mention dancing, and, like dancing, it is clever and lively and a bit obscure. When it came out, it sparked controversy (of course it did), because the Trio (as I understand it) had a habit of taking old ballads from England or wherever, changing a few things around, and claiming credit for the resulting “new” songs. Some people didn’t like that.

At least when your feet dance the cha-cha, you don’t have to pay royalties to anyone (though if you want some music to dance to, you do).

Dancing back in the days of Old John Webb did sound like fun, in a way. Yet it seems odd that when Old John manages to regain his freedom, he celebrates, not by shooting off fireworks or something, but by moving across the floor in a series of formal, socially-acceptable patterns. Pretty tame, there, Old John! Is that really the best you can do?

My own history with dancing is characterized by experiences ranging from elated abandon to acute embarrassment. I’m going to sketch in just a few of them here. (I should add that I’m talking about dancing in which I was a participant. Dancing in which I was not, that would include Alwin Nikolais, Pilobolus, Alvin Ailey ((but no ballet, no, no)), plus numerous step dancers, morris dancers, swing dancers, and practitioners of Appalachian clogging. That’s for another day.)

•   Let’s begin with Mrs. Ferguson’s after-school dance class. In my town, parents who wanted to expose their eighth-graders to the social graces signed them up for “Fergie’s.” When you heard that your folks were sending you to her dance class, you knew that there was no getting out of it. Mrs. Ferguson was an institution. For years she had been running beginners’ classes for large groups of maturing schoolchildren in the spacious and high-ceilinged grand ballroom of the Maugus Club. The Maugus was usually open only to members-and-their-guests, so this was one of the few ways to see it from the inside. Mrs. Ferguson, it was said, hailed from a tony neighborhood in an old-money part of Boston. On the dance floor, she stood with extreme good posture, tall and broadshouldered on tiny feet, resembling a plumb bob. She was a solitary and commanding presence, the center of our uneasy attention, imparting instruction in dance, with dollops of deportment, while we, fidgeting in our churchy clothes, sat as quietly as we could on hard chairs around the perimeter of the room. We stared at her, trying hard to listen. Because maybe something about this would turn out to be really important, who could tell? In that respect, it was very much like church. Mrs. Ferguson did not solicit questions from her pupils. There was simply the teaching, the rituals, and, on your part, the accepting, the doing-or-dying. That was dance, then: a beautiful potential, which could become the wondrous creation it deserved to be, only if everyone kept their mouths shut and strictly followed the rules, of which there were many.

We had to learn and never forget how to do many proper things: invite a young lady to be our dancing partner (a girl you might have thrown a snowball at the previous winter), how to hold our partner in standard ballroom dance position (“facing partner, slightly offset to the left, lower bodies together, upper bodies apart, both looking left; the man’s right hand is just below her left shoulder blade and her left hand is on his upper right arm”). We boys stood close enough to our partners to sense that girls, too, perspired. For many of us, learning to dance was a tough climb, partly because the boys were expected to lead. First we had to summon the energy and presence of mind, then we had to hold that energy in check. Some of the boys suffered bouts of bashfulness; I saw one of Fergie’s assistants grab one of these boys and shake him hard by the shoulder. “Now, do it!” How could they be expected to turn him into a little gentleman if they didn’t first cleanse him of his bashfulness?

The dances we learned were basic and few: the waltz, beginning with one session devoted entirely to mastering the box step; the foxtrot; the cha-cha; and the lindy. There was a ray of hope in the lindy, because it was clear you could dance it to rock ‘n’ roll, as Fergie’s assistants demonstrated for us. The lindy was fun, and I would try to get better at it, many years later.

•    Multiple ballroom-dance tune-ups in my 20’s and 30’s, to get me ready for this or that wedding reception. Or at least make it so that I wouldn’t be watching my own feet most of the time. When the rubber hit the road, though, I usually forgot everything I’d learned.

I was to be an usher at my older brother’s wedding in 1970, and it was explained to me that I would be paired up with one of the bridesmaids, and would be expected to dance with her at the reception, alone and in full view of the hundreds of assembled guests. To wow them with my style and aplomb, you see. This demanded a private lesson, at a small studio down by the railroad tracks, a setting not at all like the Maugus ballroom. I had no girlfriend at the time, so they supplied a practice-partner for me, a pretty teenager in a black leotard and leggings and a short skirt in a bright red plaid. As soon as we went into dance position, I suddenly felt very warm and my mind went blank. I don’t know what I learned, but I forgot it as soon as I learned it, maybe before.

Then there was Madame Rosa. Before Annie and I got married in 1984, we felt that another tune-up was needed. (The need to dance in ballroom style kept cropping up! Like crabgrass!) We chose Madame Rosa’s out of the phone book because we could walk there from our apartment. Her studio, with walls covered in red flocked velour, was in the turret of an immense Victorian. Within it stood the great mound of Rosa herself, once a lithe dancer of note, many years before, now covered in a long gown that matched her walls. Annie and I stood in dance position, but so far apart (the better to see our feet) that Rosa was moved to exclaim, “My goodness! Have you two just met?” She did teach us one thing that stuck: in the waltz, when your weight went onto your left foot, say, you had the option of turning your head slightly to the left and glancing away to the far corners of the room. Then doing it with your right. It extended the form of the dance, making the two of you appear more graceful, and really, we needed all the help we could get.

•   The loose and sometimes drunken boogeying of my college years, and the decades that followed. This was emancipation: to think that there could be dancing where you didn’t need to know any steps, didn’t need to lead, could change partners freely or dance by yourself or sit down to rest at any time. When they put a Grateful Dead jam on the stereo and cranked up the volume, or the Stones’ “Some Girls,” or Toots and the Maytals, you were going to jump out on whatever dance floor there was, and do what came naturally. Naturally!

Later, the rising popularity of disco put pressure on us free-form dancers to, once again, take a partner in dance position and execute rehearsed and exact steps out on the floor. I took a pass.

•    Contras and squares. When you marry a fan of folk dancing, sooner or later you’re going to find yourself at a contradance or square dance. The music sure is sweet but you’re not allowed to sit off to the side and listen to it. You’re there to dance, so, up on your feet everybody! Nor are you allowed to rely on your more experienced partner; in the course of the evening, the caller will invite you, not to say pressure you, to “now thank this partner and go find another one.” Yikes! They said this was supposed to be fun!

In a contradance, all the available dancers pair up, with the individuals in each pair facing each another, forming two long straight lines down the length of the hall. The music starts, the caller calls, and the convolutions ensue. The patterns of the choreography repeat, and are fashioned so that a couple will end up traveling the length of the set to its bottom, where the two dancers trade places and get ready to enjoy the dance anew, now from the point of view of traveling up the set. Got it? The caller stops giving detailed directions after a few minutes, and the dance goes off on its own like a living thing. Beautiful! But: in the event of a misstep, contradances are difficult to stop and reset. If you, the easily-flustered beginning contradancer, turn left, say, instead of right, or forget to cross over, or happen to sneeze and lose a beat or two, not only are you lost, but so is the whole set you’re in, and the lines crumble. Embarrassing!

That’s why I will always prefer a square over a contra. In a square dance, the four couples that make up each square, though they may go through all kinds of steps of varying complexity, will always wind up back where they started. So if anyone gets lost, the square can regroup and start over within a few measures of music. Safety dance!

Need I add that no adventures in dancing such as these will be happening this week, or this month, or possibly at all, this pandemic year. Aside from taking lessons online, or practicing at home with or without family members, or watching performances on TV or other devices, dancing has ceased. This is remarkable.

The Whole World in His Hands: an exercise in writing about two unrelated things

His powers of perception were open for business.
He smelled wood smoke and sawdust, vinegar and leather and felt
the cold outside trying to get in. He heard a horse snort in his neighbor’s barn.

He was in the kitchen, about to pare an apple, six of them actually, a mix of varieties.
This one was a Granny Smith.
He had to pare them, because his apple-peeler-corer gizmo was broken.
“Pare,” now there’s a word. An old word. People began paring things hundreds of years ago.
To chop and to slice, they used to use sharpened stones, until somebody
thought to borrow some small blades from the keepers of the weaponry.
So now he was back in the seventeenth century or something with a steel blade and some dough,
an oven getting warm, and an assortment of apples to peel, for a pie.

It was going well so far. He held the apple in his left hand,
cradling it with his fingertips and the sides of his fingers.
His right hand, now, it had several jobs to do.
In the curl of his four right-hand fingers he held the wooden handle of the knife,
its blade pointed towards him.
His right thumb extended away from his hand as if it didn’t want to have anything to do
with those fingers, or like a “thumbs-up” gesture but pointing out to the left instead of up.
Both his right thumb and the four curled fingers also helped to hold the apple,
and kept it from jumping up and falling to the floor.
But mainly his hands worked together to advance the blade against the skin of the apple, just so.
With slight but firm pressure his hands rotated the apple so that the blade,
guided with care, bit through the skin, just enough, not too much, and his right fingers,
clutching, drew the blade on and under the skin, further and further,
while his right thumb braced against the as-yet-unpeeled part of the apple.
A lot going on! Pressure this way and pressure that way, all for the desired outcome.
In this way he separated the peel from the apple, but took care not to cut away
too much of the white “meat” of the apple. That white part was the grail.

Again and again the blade approached his thumb, almost touched it, sometimes did
touch it, just a tart little kiss, the sharp blade against the soft thumb pad.
He had learned how to do this from someone long ago, not his father. Probably his mother.
He would have been a balky pupil then. He had really wanted to know how to do it right
and not cut himself in the process, he just didn’t want to be taught.

And his mother knew how to peel an apple, she sure did. And fast!
She had peeled a lot of apples, a lot of potatoes, in her time. On many occasions
he had watched her work the paring knife, a knife he knew to be almost as sharp as a razor,
watched her draw that blade up to her right thumb over and over, and not get cut, ever.
How the heck did she manage that?

Someone had to show you how to do it. You wouldn’t get it by reading directions in some book.

It was going quite well. And now, like the peel separating from the apple,
his mind began to separate from his task, and his task began to go on along without him.
He had started with the first apple up about where the top of Greenland would be.
Because, you know, the apple resembled the planet.

The green apple was spherical like the blue planet, and had two poles on it like the planet
and had a tough outer skin like the planet. And when you rotated it in order to peel it,
it rotated in the same direction as the planet, the western parts traveling right around
to where the eastern parts used to be.

Under his gentle, steady surgery the apple completely became the planet, the one he lived on.
His hands kept working, but by themselves. His mind had gone adrift,
and he was up there in space now, looking down at the apple, his planet.
He could see the oceans, the great deserts, the thick and sudsy formations of clouds.
The blade cut across the globe, a formidable storm edge shearing away the surface of the planet.

Now the blade became a sharp winter gale, the brunt of it a thousand miles wide.
He watched it cut down mountain ranges as it passed through them,
slice off the crests of the mightiest waves far out at sea.
He inclined his head slightly, and the blade became a great ship with a sharp prow,
circumnavigating the globe, rolling and surging, and now it was an enormous silver bird,
wings spread wide, fierce with hooked beak and talons, a shadow of woe.
He looked closer. The blade was now coursing south of the equator,
heading down towards the pole. He could see – what were these? – the high peaks of Chile,
the Galapagos Islands, the vast South Pacific, the parched and forbidding interior of Australia.
He saw these things drawing nearer, and he could hear them and smell them too.
He was no longer in his kitchen but adventuring around the planet, a fearless adventurer,
going off to where the beach sands were black, where volcanoes shot fire skyward,
where the wind knocked his hat off, tore at his coat, pushed him down into the wet heather.

All of the places he could go!

Then he had reached the end of the single long piece of peel. He stood the apple up
on the cutting board and deftly split it. Chop!

My Totally Favorite Month

LEON

My favorite month? Well now, let me see. I’ve always kind of liked October? The trees show off their fall colors, and there’s football, and the football pool at the office, and the air feels fresher than it did all summer. I like apples, and even though the supermarket has fresh apples any time of the year, supposedly “fresh,” well, October is the time to get them from the local orchards, and they just taste better, and it’s good for our local farmers, and it’s also time for six-packs of cider doughnuts to show up at the farm stands next to the apples. Pumpkins! Love ’em. Orange. Fat. Happy. Did I mention football? Oh yeah and Halloween is fun for the little kids, and people put up those inflatable displays in their front yards, and there’s candy corn everywhere and people just seem to get into the spirit of the whole thing. McSweeney’s always runs their “decorative gourd season motherf----ers” post in October, I just love that, it makes me chuckle every time. Yeah. October.

QUINCE

I like February. Poor old February. To me, “February” sounds like you’ve just had a blowout and are still trying to drive on the flat, febru - febru - febru. Almost everybody likes May and June, but February needs a friend, a support group of sorts, no doubt about it. See, it’s a pretty good month, really; the days of winter are lengthening, and you can shovel snow up until 7:00 or so, and sometimes you have to. You can start your maple sugaring about the 25th; there’s a thought both hot and sweet. You get these tremendously heavy snow storms that make an ice palace of your neighborhood. Just clearing the front walk can make you feel like a hero. You feel vital! Useful! How often does that happen? You find your axe in the shed. You shovel a path to the wood pile, clean off the chopping block, and split a stack of wood for the wood stove. Suddenly you’re super-strong, you’re the Provider, you’re The One Who Brings Heat into the House.

DENISE

I’d like to stitch together my favorite 30 or 31 days from the year, and make up a full month that way. That would be my favorite month. I’d be sure to have one or two of those dazzling sunny days in January after a big storm, that warm day in spring when all of the daffodils have come out in bloom, that superb day in July when you’re up at the lake or just rolling your lawnmower out of the shed, and you look around and say to yourself, wow, I should remember this. Today is one of those days. You don’t get many days like this.

A month of those days, and I’d be good.

ARTHUR

My favorite month is January. That’s a little unusual, I guess. I don’t mind being miserable, you see. When you’re already prepared to be miserable, you’ll never feel let down. You’ll never be disappointed. It’s the same as, if there’s nowhere you have to go, you’ll never be late. February is a close second, but it doesn’t make the cut because it’s short. Not enough misery.

CLARE

My favorite month isn’t one of the twelve months. I feel like that nomenclature is oppressive and outdated. And did you ever see a picture of the Roman God Janus? I mean, really.

So I can’t just single out one of the regular months and call it my “favorite.” With me it’s more like, I really like the four-week period from about the 21st of May to the 21st of June, you know, the final weeks of spring. It needs its own name. Why not Flora? Why can’t we have something like that?

DANIELLE

I’m in favor of renaming our months. I’m not happy with them the way they are. So I’m not about to declare a preference for “June.” Moon, swoon, cartoon, balloon, spittoon. Or “December.” It sounds like something with sharp teeth and a short fuse. And it ends in “brrrr.” We get it already, December is cold.

Instead, I’d like to imagine the month of Bliss. Or the month of Pancakes. The month of Sweet Dreams. The Alpha, and the Omega. The Yin, and the Yang. Or the month of Danielle, named after me, Danielle. Or, the month of Sailboats, or the month of Honeybees. “I was born on Honeybees 30th.” It doesn’t have to be those, just something different from what we’ve had for so long without ever asking why.

Speaking of why, I understand why you need to have twelve individual months, because of the (roughly) twelve cycles of the moon balloon spittoon. I’m not dumb. I know you can’t have a total of five months, or twenty-five. At least, not until those lunar mining industries of the future manage to knock the Moon out of its orbit and into outer space. After that, the Earth will wobble on its axis quite a bit, and you won’t have the tides or the weather or the seasons that are familiar to us now. But you could have as many months as you wanted.

LINDA

I like November because it’s Thanksgiving and afterwards we put away the leftovers and the dishes and the furniture, and also the menfolk who ate too much and drank too much and nodded off in front of the TV, and then me and Nora and Deena and Joycie get all bundled up and head out to a late-night Dunks for some triple-sugar hot cappucinos, XXXL, and then we hit the stores at midnight, wherever and whenever the big sales are happening. That’s what we’re there for, to get Christmas done early and save us some big bucks, yow-yow! It’s work, sure it’s work, but we like it, we make it fun.

You get my meaning? The women have to do it. The men are no good at it. The men all wait until December 24th and then come home with something half-assed and want you to wrap it. It’s not their favorite thing, Christmas. Or Thanksgiving either, now that I think about it. I don’t know what their favorite thing is, really. With Frank, it might be Bud Light.

BUDDY

Betcha can’t guess what my favorite month is! Well I’ll tell you, it’s all about a jolly old fat guy with a red suit and a red hat and black boots and a bushy white beard, and colorful lights, and snow all around. And our dear Savior, born in a stable in Bethlehem, yes. Twelve days, three kings, eight tiny reindeer, the elves, the evergreen tree, a choir singing carols, the whole shootin’ match. You got it, it’s December!

Of course, it’s a little different up where we are, in the cell block. You need a good memory and a good imagination, and Management won’t be helping you in that respect, or any other. You need to keep your wits about you too, understand? You need to sleep with one eye open, like I used to do when I was a little kid on Christmas Eve: “I saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus, underneath the mistletoe last night …”

NAN

I don’t have a favorite month. There’s something wrong with every one of them. I get very depressed. Time hangs heavy. Food tastes like cardboard. People at work whisper behind my back, sssis-ssswis. I notice my reflection in a store window and I’m disgusted at what I see.

ROB

My favorite month is September. It means summer’s over, and it’s back to the grind for another long winter. And the song lyrics come to mind in a flood of melancholy:

Oh, it’s a long, long while from May to December
But the days grow short
When you reach September

Nobody on the road, nobody on the beach
I feel it in the air, the summer’s out of reach

Try to remember the kind of September, when you were a tender and callow fellow

Now the days are short, I’m in the autumn of my years
And I think of my life as vintage wine, from fine old kegs
From the brim to the dregs … it was a very good year

Oooooo! So poignant, you could just hug yourself.

CATHY

I like March. Henry Beetle Hough said it: March is Marchy!

KEVIN

May is my favorite. Up in New England, it’s birds singing, flowers blooming, backyard vegetables growing. A month full of promises made and promises fulfilled. Often chilly and rainy for the first two weeks, May ends up rewarding you with ever-lengthening and ever-warming days.

So I’ll take May, but with this proviso. Statistics show that if the Red Sox are out of it in late May, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to claw their way back to the top by September. Technically it’s possible, but it almost never happens, not for them, not for any team. So you can take stock of your Sox in May, and decide whether you, like me, might just want to let them go again, for another year.

CHARLOTTE

I like August. Hot, humid, steamy, not often rainy, great for days at the beach, one right after another. Like anything else, the sweetest part of a beach day is in the anticipation. Pack the cooler, pack the suits, pack the blanket and the towels, drive down to where the sky begins to look all mother-of-pearl where it meets the ocean at the horizon. Beautiful! We’re here! Hi, everybody! Last one in is a rotten egg!

That’s why I put up one of those rustic-looking “To the Beach” signs in my kitchen, pointed towards the garage, and I have to tell you, the ocean is at least a three-hour drive from here. Call me a landlocked lady who loves the saltwater life. I love digging in the sand, the seabirds crying, fried clams and burgers and onion rings at the clam shack, a lighthouse and boats off in the distance, hydrangeas blooming electric blue, surf and dunes and sandpipers and kites.

Actually, I don’t get to the beach much anymore. My doctor advises against it. Skin cancer. There’s no shade at the beach of course, unless you bring an umbrella. That’s the whole idea of the beach, you’re supposed to be out in the sun, soaking it up.

Also, the water is too cold, even in August, it always takes me forever to get in. Yeah, the “rotten egg.” And I don’t like the way I look now, in a swimsuit. My bad, but it makes me feel self-conscious. Price of gas too, there’s that. So what I anticipate, in August, on the morning of Beach Day, when we have it, is something that used to happen a lot when I was younger but now only happens sporadically. You’ll see me up on the bluff, with my dog, who isn’t even allowed on the beach, and we’ll be apart from everyone, looking out over the sand and the beachgoing beachgoers and the restless waves extending to the sharp line of the horizon, and making do with our bland sightseeing, and me having my old memories.

TAMI

My favorite month? Is that supposed to be a real question? Who are you, anyway? Are you working for the Feds? I know what you clowns are up to in your off-hours down at that pizza place, don’t tell me I don’t. I know what I know and I know my rights too, and I have a right not to be pestered with personal questions of a demeaning nature that you have no right to ask, none whatsoever!!

Trouble With Pants: an exercise in writing about maladjustment

Not long ago, at the end of an evening of movie-watching at home, Annie and I clicked off and then tried to get up from our easy chairs where we’d (at first) sat and then (gradually) slumped since about the second half of whatever we’d been watching. “Oof!” “Ow!” “This gets harder every week!” Annie got about halfway up and then wavered and had to lunge for an armrest to keep from falling all the way back down. “Are you OK over there?” “Yeah,” she said, “I'm just having . . . trouble with my pants.”

Trouble with my pants! I laughed loud and long, knowing that I’d stumbled on my theme for this essay.

Pants? I’ve been having trouble with ’em, sure I have. (Not your pants, my pants. Your pants are your problem and you’re welcome to them.) I’ve been having trouble with my pants for a long time now, years in fact.

“Pants” is a funny word. A dog pants, but a dog doesn’t wear pants. Is a one-legged pants a “pant”? Isn’t “trousers” another funny word? Another plural term for a singular item. It sounds like a name for a pet, a pet dog, you can see it on the side of Trousers’ food bowl: TROUSERS. It would seem to be a noun for something that trouses. I don’t like the sound of that! Keep your trousing hands off of me!

OK, so. What’s the problem with your pants, Dave?

Well, I’m glad you asked. They don’t fit. Or, perhaps, I can’t get them to fit. (So is that my job then, is that what you’re saying?) NOTHING EVER FITS! I mean, my clothing hangs on me just well enough that I can pass through the world without acute embarassment, which isn’t nothing, I guess. For casual wear, and I dislike any other, my go-to pants are Levi’s 505’s in 36x34, in a “dark rinse” finish, I think it’s called. I run them into the ground, is what I do. I also have some khaki slacks left over from my office days, and wheat-colored hiking pants for when even “good” jeans would be too downscale, and a suit to wear when people die. Nothing in wool. No way. It itches. I’ve got maybe two extra pairs of jeans, the ones that used to be “good,” so torn and stained and grungy I only wear them for yard work.

505’s are the heart and soul of the “dad jeans” look, almost aggressively unfashionable. They’re slimmish but not tight. With wear, they fade, sometimes appealingly, sometimes appallingly, and they get poochy at the knees and at the butt, of course. Let’s skip over that part, OK? I'm aware of what it looks like back there. As the day goes by, I can feel my waistband slipping and the extra fabric gathering in unwanted folds, a real baggy-butt look. It doesn’t bother me except when I see photos of myself.

I inherited my mother’s large rear end (bet you weren’t ready for that), so for a time I kept it partially covered with the tail of my shirt (see below). But you can’t wear that look everywhere. Maybe, you can’t wear that look anywhere. So then you’ve got to take into consideration the belt.

My belt is a thick strip of brown leather meant to hold my pants up day after day for as many years as possible while looking just the teensiest bit manly. But what happens is the belt itself migrates south, owing to gravity. It’s 1.375" wide but the space afforded by the belt loops is 1.875". So the belt settles to the lowest possible position, while the topmost part of the waistband rolls out and over the top of the belt, like toothpaste blurping out of the tube you forgot to cap up last night. Is it a good look, the look you were looking for? No, it isn't.

My mother (my mother!) bought me my first pair of bell-bottoms. Basically they were white with many vertical candy-stripes of all hues, extra wide at the bottom, and more like a velour fabric instead of denim, very soft. Very Carnaby Street, very Incense & Peppermints. Where and when was I going to wear them? While hanging out with my buddies behind the Friendly’s downtown, smoking? But I didn’t do that! Where else, then? Not to church, not to school, not while biking, not while fishing down at the pond. (Or was I getting too old for that now?) I strove to like them, more as a reward for Ruth for at least trying, but I only wore them twice.

How about shirts? These days I own a handful of shirts that I would wear when I’m out in public. Couple of button-down collar shirts from the office days, couple of flannel shirts for cold weather, and maybe four decent t-shirts, all L.L.Bean, all solids, no stripes, no logos, no illustrations, no funny sayings, no nothing. In addition I’ve got some clapped-out t-shirts that I wear only while sleeping, usually because the collar is pulled out of shape or something, but there’s wear left in them. (That’s a strange concept to some folks: that you can look at a beat-up garment and ascertain that “there's another six months of wear left in that.”) My size is 16-and-a-half 34-35, or Tall Large, depending; it took me years (and lots of cash) to figure out what to settle on, what were to be my standards.

NONE OF THEM FIT! My shirts slide around on me. To get a shirt that’s long enough I have to buy one that the shoulder seams wind up somewhere halfway down my upper arm. My narrow shoulders are up near my ears all the time anyway, from excessive shrugging. What about tucking-in? Do we wear these shirts tucked in, or untucked? Look at yourself in a full-length mirror. Your belt-line is at the equator. How’re you looking? Do you want to have a sharply-defined, solid bar at your equator, marking the border between North and South? Or are you a bit self-conscious about packing part of your mother’s anatomy back there, and so maybe you want to fudge that equatorial line a bit, leave that shirttail out, let the North seep into the South a little? Don't ask me — haven’t figured it out!

Reminds me of my own little-kid imagining of the actual “Equator,” on first hearing the word. Right away, I pictured a gigantic silent machine up there in the bright blue sky, obscured just a little by gauzy clouds, an enormous weightless contraption with many flaps and gears and swooping cowlings, a cross between an engine and a fishing reel, but huge, huger than huge, way bigger than the Hindenburg, but silent. A mysterious purpose it had, to “equate” everything on the planet so it would all even out. Did the equator, then, have something to do with daylight savings time, or the shortness of our winter days? Was it part of God?

Let’s stop and think this through. Most of us humans have two legs on the bottom and two arms, a head on top, and a trunk in between. How are you going to clothe all of this territory efficiently, effectively, functionally, attractively, affordably? It’s a set of thoughts that must have kept clothing designers, makers of textiles, and tailors up late at night for many centuries. Speaking as a guy: you’ve got to pull on pants from the bottom and up to your waist. You’ve got to pop two shoes onto your feet, most of the time. (I find it hard to work, even to paint or write, unless I am wearing shoes, although I’m taking a walk on the wild side by writing this in my sock feet.) You’ve got to yank a pullover over your head and down to your waist where it meets your pants, or doesn’t as the case may be. Up and down, that's the quickest way to get yourself dressed enough to answer the doorbell. Maybe you hate pullovers: they mash your hair. So, you grab a shirt with buttons. This garment goes on from the back, not the top. Pay attention: you stick one arm in one sleeve and contort yourself trying to locate the opening to the other sleeve so you can stick your other arm in it. There’s the doorbell again — “Coming!” Then you bring the left side and the right side together in front of you and you button: button, button, button all the way down. How are your fingertips today? Kind of numb and fumbly? Oops! You’ve mismatched the buttons and button-holes and your collar looks ridiculous; you’ll have to start over again!

Where was I going with this? Oh. Shopping. It won’t surprise you that I hate shopping, especially in person. The COVID-related rise in online shopping for every little thing has been right up my alley in this respect. I don’t have to drive to the store, I don’t have to make my way across a hot or icy parking lot, and I don’t have to locate the shelf where my jeans are supposed to be, and then turn around and leave unhappy because they never have them in my size. As long as somebody still makes them, the internet is never out of stock.

Whether online or in-person, I will do almost anything to avoid shopping for clothes, because I don’t like to think about it, and I hate having to spend money that way. It feels futile in any case; I never like how I look. I wonder which came first, the hating shopping or the hating the result in the mirror. Maybe they feed off each other.

I “shop” for utility, and of course for value. In my late teens, the local Army/Navy store was a godsend. Surplus clothing was cheap, durable, permanently out of fashion and therefore squarely in fashion. Jeans themselves were the prime example; part of the uniform of ranch hands, sailors, and blue-collar workers everywhere, they were adopted by students in the sixties as a way of saving money and looking cool, while helping you live down your privileged circumstances, without you having to give up your privileged circumstances. When I entered college in 1968, the small menswear stores that had been outfitting undergraduates for decades with pricey suits, slacks, ties, oxford shirts, and gentlemanly accessories took out their traditional ads in the student paper: “Welcome to Cambridge! Do drop by, won’t you? We probably dressed your father and your grandfather, and now we’d like to get to know you, too.” Instead, you and your friends took the subway down to gritty Central Square or Park Square for some decidedly downscale duds.

So let’s review. I have trouble with my pants, and my shirts. Also with my shoes. Lots of trouble with my shoes. My shoes look dumb. So do my socks. My socks won’t stay up, or they go out at the heel too soon: too thin, too thick, wrong color, too dark, too light, too long, too short. As with shoes and socks, so also with coats, and hats, and gloves. Nothing fits, except approximately, like a dog wearing trousers. Mr. Approximately-Clothed.

I don’t buy dress gloves anymore, haven’t for years. “Dress gloves,” sheesh. Are they gloves or are they a dress? Gimme a break. What am I, going to step out to the symphony or the opera in the winter, wearing Italian leather gloves and a muffler? No I am not. All I require of gloves is that they keep my hands from freezing when I take the dog out for a walk. Is that too much to ask? Evidently it is. The cold seeps in, starting with my little fingers, the outer defenses. I have to thwack my hands against my leg to bring back the circulation, like the protagonist in Jack London's “To Build a Fire.”

Also, my hair! I have trouble with it! When we had to wear our hair short (grade school, high school), I looked like a twerp, frankly. When we could grow our hair out (college), I could pass for cool with my very Hair-like hair. When it was time to get work, I had to cut it short again. But, you know, that was all right, because I was older now and it was beginning to mat down on top, losing its waviness and curliness. Not an attractive white-blond anymore, it was becoming more like a stack of straw up there. What was happening to me? Now of course it’s thinning and losing what life it’s had. I can see that I’m going to be one of those guys with a fussy clump over each ear and a band across the back but nothing on top except a few long, wispy strands, old friends of mine who remember how it used to be and can’t seem to move on.

Also, my skin! I have trouble with it! It doesn’t fit me either. It’s as if there’s someone (me) inside who can’t get out because the skin of whoever this is, this other guy, is holding me in. It itches here and it itches there, and it bunches up where it ought to be smooth and it gets blotchy where it ought to be clear. And it’s pink! Not only am I a white guy — bor-r-r-r-ring! — but I’m a pink guy. “Fair,” they call it. Fair to middling. Look at my fingertips! Look at my toes! Or don’t. I'll save you the trouble. They’re pink, a very deep pink!!! I’m not supposed to walk out into the sunlight at midday without a hat and sunblock, maybe not even then. If I do, I’ll be back in the clinic with skin cancer again and this time it’ll be all my fault. I wrote a poem once, a sort-of haiku, to accompany a piece of art, still unfinished:

Skin scorches and cries
For sunblock or shade but
Life wants light hot light

Also, my mind! My mind doesn’t fit me! The fabric and the styling are all wrong, the color is not what I wanted. It belongs to somebody else! The stitching is too tight over here, too loose over there, it’s totally irritating. Can’t I return it for a refund? The garment of my mind both sends and receives the wrong signals. People will laugh when they see me.

I want to be left alone: I don’t want to be left alone: one reason why I write.