Priyo and Imphal

I returned to India on a visit scheduled to last from Oct 1 through the 17th of March, cleverly designed to avoid not only the holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas, but also much of the worst of the winter.  As before, Priyo was waiting just outside the terminal (as close as the law allows), but unlike last time he had quite a wait while I navigated the dangerous shoals of Immigration and Customs.  Apparently no one from outside India had ever before visited Manipur (Priyo's home state) for nearly six months, except as a missionary or businessman.  There were a couple of tables set up for foreign arrivals, which included, in this case, me and a couple of Japanese or Korean businessmen.  The businessmen were handled relatively quickly by one agent, while I was handled by another agent who was so overwhelmed by the unprecedented wave of visitors dealt him - i.e., one - that he hardly knew how to proceed despite having a cheat sheet right in front of him.  Laboriously, he asked each question, mulled the answer, asked it again a couple more times and then proceeded to write something (almost certainly not my response).  Another man informed me that I would be required to be tested twce a day for the first 30 days for signs of illness - ebola was a big fear there.  As I stood there being interrogated, the luggage came, was picked up by the other passengers who then departed.  Time passed; lights began to be turned off, and on and on droned my intake person.  Finally someone who seemed to be in charge of the terminal came and asked me if I had any luggage.  I said yes.  He then zipped through the same list of questions through which my other interlocutor was wading and said, "Come with me."  As we left, my agent seemed still to be continuing the intake process alone, possibly unaware that I was no longer present.

The luggage carrel was entirely empty, so my rescuer took me to an office where unclaimed luggage was kept.  A half hour or longer process began where it was ultimately discovered that my luggage had been held in New Delhi because it contained what might be a weapon.  This was a cordless drill I had brought as a gift for Priyo - a gift that I would be VERY glad I brought later in the visit.  All the time, dusk was falling outside and I was very concerned that Priyo might assume I had not arrived and had gone home, since the airport was closing and I wasn't sure he had seen me, although I had seen him outside.  I filled out a form listing the contents of my luggage in order to request my luggage be released and sent to Imphal - the capital city of Manipur where I was staying.

Priyo was there when I finally emerged; I have yet to encounter a single situation where he has not been absolutely reliable (other than a tendency to leave me for longish periods trying to socialize with friends of his who speak little or no English).  We bounced over broken streets to Chassad Avenue where Priyo had finally found a place for us.  Absolutely no one advertises rentals in Imphal;  Everything is found by word of mouth.  Almost no tourists ever go there and those who do or who travel there for business usually stay at hotels or have relatives or acquaintances to take them in.  Priyo had found this apartment by walking around and going into each larger building he passed and asking if they had rooms to let.  We were on the bottom floor of a building labelled "Haokip Enterprises" in an interior apartment (one window opening into a dim lobby) with two rooms and a bathroom.  The kitchen was to be along whichever wall we chose.  It soon became apparent that the only electric power, aside from that lighting the ceiling fixture in one of the rooms, was to be provided by a wire Priyo strung from the nearest outlet out through the window and plugged into an outlet in the hall off the lobby.  This outlet had an on/off switch, and from time to time during the length of our stay someone in passing would switch it to "off".  Unlike our bright airy apartment in Panchkula, this place was dark, unheated and pretty grim.  The walls were two shades of lavender and orange.  The floor was painted bright blue.  Woodwork was dark brown.

Imphal was at least a half-century behind Panchkula in every way.  If anyone ever again laments to me about "the good old days" I will listen no further until that someone has spent a couple of months in Imphal.  The terms "old days" and "good" are not so easily joined as one's fond memories may have it.  The roads were largely unpaved, or at best, paved long ago with paving that had broken up and largely disappeared.  As a result the air was filled with thick dust from the constant stirring and powdering of dried mud by the endless noisy traffic.  There were no sidewalks except here and there where building owners had laid large slabs of cement (each with protruding loops of steel rebar that served as handles for lifting.  These slabs were laid atop the open sewers that ran along each side of the street.  Between the treacherous handles and the sudden ending of sidewalk where landlords at the next building declined to lay the cement covers, one had to look mighty slippy to avoid disaster; so much so that the general preference was to walk in the street instead.  This was an experience that involved mud and puddles after a rain, and at all times meant keeping a wary eye on traffic.  Since the road were so rutted, the prudent drivers wended their way along the least potholed part of the street, which had them on the wrong side of the road as often as they were on the right side.  Any walk I took featured me making sudden panicked leaps into the air when a car or motorcycle approached me from behind and suddenly honked.  There were chickens and dogs and, of course, cows here and there in the roadway.

Priyo had built up his medical transcription online business into a busy six-day-a-week affair that earned more than he had made in Panchkula as an employee.  However he worked at home and his days were very long ones.  So much of our days were spent with him in one room typing rapidly and me in the other room reading or watching TV shows on file sharing sites.  Sometimes I'd go out for a stroll and I made some friends of local merchants.  Had the nearby bridge not been closed for repairs, I could have walked downtown in just a few minutes, but as it was, a trip downtown meant hailing an autorickshaw and bouncing up and down on a looping route that took us a kilometer or so to the next bridge - often jammed in a gridlock - and then back up another kilometer or so to the point directly across the Imphal River from where our apartment lay.

So despite Priyo working from home, we had far less together time than we had before and that was in  rather grim surroundings.  Nonetheless, it was wonderful to be together again.  Still, any thought I had of relocating to India permanently was laid to rest.  Most of my life I have thriven in primitive conditions but I found to my dismay that I am no longer that guy.  It doesn't have to be like America and it doesn't have to be super up-to-date, but I want to be in a place where I don't have to spend two days in search of the most common tools or supplies, where toilets work and water runs most of the time.  Were the option to live in Panchkula again, I would still be tempted, but as things turned out, it would have to be Imphal, or some other, smaller Manipuri town.

Things were limping along; Priyo and I made a number of sorties into scenic or historic areas.  After avoiding it for a month, I finally was persuaded to go to Priyo's home village and meet the family.  I made Priyo swear he would not leave me alone for long periods with people who spoke virtually no English.  Within ten minutes he had vanished into the house and wound up taking part in some Hindu ceremony which, he said, he thought would bore me so he left me outside with Dad.  I am not sure, but I don't think Dad entirely approves of me - that is, he has no objections to my continued existence, but he'd prefer that existence to be elsewhere and not influencing his son.  I am pretty sure Dad more or less knows that Priyo is gay or interested in that direction, and that probably is unfortunate in his view but acceptable so long as Priyo gets married.  And that is something Priyo stoutly refuses to do.  Nonetheless, Dad is a courteous man, but one who speaks almost no English.  Our attempts to communicate were pretty awkward, but he did show me around the gardens.  The main reason I resisted visiting the family was that I knew I would be plied with food and so it transpired.  I hate this in myself, but I find eating strange food extremely difficult.  In fact I really hate eating.  Alone, I often don't eat until three or four in the afternoon - it is just such a boring process.  There are foods I really enjoy, if they are already prepared, preferably by someone else, but I would willing give up ever eating again, if I could find a way to survive without it.  Priyo is really a sweetie, and he really managed to deftly intervene to see that I only wound up with food that I was sort of familiar with.

Everyone I met during the entire visit was very polite and friendly and generous.  I encountered no one that seemed to be a hustler, although I was aware that some autorickshaw drivers were charging me a premium.  I really don't mind stuff like that - I have it and they need it and so long as things are reasonably open and I get what I paid for, it is just one of those things, a mere ripple in the pond of my days.

In the end, when I was leaving, Priyo's Mom and Dad made the long journey by public transport to meet me outside the airport entrance, Mom giving me a quantity of fruit which came in very handy during the long flight delays when I got hungry.  At all times they treated me very generously, and made no sign of being less than delighted with my presence.  The visited us a few times and I noted each of them looking a little longer than one might ordinarily do at the only bed in the apartment.

Priyo and I were doing fine - we even bought a used Hyundai for less than $3,000 - and I was about to make a serious push to find nicer lodging when, just before Christmas his Dad called and said the police academy people called and wanted Priyo to report for a physical.   You may recall that Priyo had applied for a position as a subinspector in the Manipuri police (this is sort of akin to a state trooper here in NY) - a well-paying, fairly prestigious job.  His family had paid an enormous bribe to be considered, and then things just came apart and after five years Priyo had given up all thought of actually getting into the academy for training.  Last year, when I left Panchkula, he left a day later to return to Imphal, believing that finally he would be called.  A huge scandal at the corrupt hiring process blew up and he had relinquished all thought of becoming a cop; in fact, he really didn't want to become one any longer.  He concentrated on growing his medial transcript work and was doing quite well.  In fact, because of the demands on his time which kept us from enjoying much time together, he had given up one client and still made enough to live on and we had much more time together after that.

Priyo reported for the physical and was told he must next report to Senapati in early January in order to discover what the next steps were.  Senapati is a somewhat picturesque city up in the mountains sixty kilometers north of Imphal along a gorgeous but poorly maintained difficult road that wound past tribal villages ("This is a Naga village"; "This is a Nepali village"; "These are Kukis," Priyo would inform me as we passed by small settlements.)  To our dismay, we discovered that he was to be taken to the academy in the fairly distant state of Meghalaya within a week.  My return ticket was for March 17 and I couldn't see living alone in Imphal for nearly three more months.  I checked the cost of an early return, and were I to leave before Priyo was to depart, I would have to pay up to $3000 for a one-way ticket.  I discovered that if I stayed in a hotel for 9 days after Priyo left, I could return for only $580.  So this I did.

Priyo is now at the academy and is doing very well.  I sense a happiness and a pride in himself that is very nice to see.  He is undergoing rigorous physical training as well as huge masses of book learning.  He has trained in rock climbing, fire fighting, weapons - he recently had an endurance run of 5 km carrying an assault rifle.  We talk almost every day, but he is so busy, most calls are fairly short.  He believes that he can get a month or more vacation soon after he completes his training in mid-December.  Because he now has good documentable reason to return home after a visit, he probably will have little problem getting a travel visa to the US since I will write a letter vouching for him as I did for my friend Papa who visits once or twice a year.  But it will be so long before we see each other.  I had planned to spend each fall and winter with him in Imphal, but now I am not sure what will happen.  Priyo will be  assigned to Senapati for the first two years after the academy and it is not yet clear if he will be in police housing or not.  If not I can stay with him, but if he is in police housing we will have to work out how to proceed.  I know I want to be his partner for the rest of my life.  And I am confident that he feels the same.

It is bad enough to know we will not see each other before the middle of December, but that at least is a finite period.  The difficulty is not knowing how long after that it will be until one of us can visit the other.  Still, it is enormously buoying to my spirits to know there is someone for me.  Priyo's great dream is to build his own house.  He is saving all that he can to this end.  Land is very expensive and difficult to find; building a house is relatively cheap.  Now that he is going to be a cop, he will almost certainly remain in Manipur for most of his life.  It is I who will be doing most of the travel, and it is well worth it.  Having a house to leave my necessaries in would be ideal to lighten the luggage, and create a sense of home.  Priyo is honest, kind, attentive, generous and loving (and patient and tolerant!).  I just really want to know how soon that travelling can begin!

Sequel; Priyo Part II

Well, Ms JennyD resurfaced after some years of personal torment, which I sincerely hope is at an end for her, and her comment on my last post served to remind me that I hadn’t really said anything about how It All Turned Out.  Giving a nod to the public’s demand for sequels, (although in my case, the public demand has been just a tad on the minuscule side), I shall post a sequel of my own.

I left India on New Year’s day, having in one short trip managed to avoid Thanksgiving, Christmas AND New Year’s Eve - three pluses easily worth the $2000+ that the whole thing cost (a cost I more than recouped by living three months at Indian prices instead of those here at home).  I was looking forward to getting home, partly because I like my place here and partly because I really wanted to have a spate of time alone, just to evaluate my feelings about Priyo and my future.  

For the first month after my return, I had some ambivalent feelings about my home here and living with Priyo over there.  I really like my house for all the reasons I mentioned in my last post.  Priyo and I talked - usually twice a day - which I occasionally felt was just a bit more than I wanted to come to the phone.  It wasn’t that I didn’t care as much as I had before for Priyo nor second thoughts, so much as a kind of desire to be alone with my thoughts - or more exactly, not wanting to set aside blocs of time each morning and evening without fail for telephoning.  But then, after about a month, I became aware more and more of how empty my life here is.  There really isn’t any person or group here upon whom I can rely for chat beyond the mundane.  “How about them Yanks?” is not my idea of a fun conversation.  I do have people I can talk with - and even more so when I include those available by phone - but that certain feeling of coming first with someone, of them really wanting to hear what’s up with me, including trivia and moods is just not there (or here, I should say).  My Mom said, when my Dad died, that she had lost the person she came first with.  more and more I understand exactly what she meant.  It is a special loneliness that crowds cannot take away.

I amused myself by doing some home clean-up and getting rid of accumulations (but, oh, how much is left!)  I bought a new dishwasher which really made me feel good.  I scheduled some care for my spruce trees which are badly infected with a fungal disease and am also having someone restore my gutters which are no longer doing their job.  But I am intensely aware of being here alone and of wasting hours on TV shows and reading things that just barely manage to hold my attention for a short while.  But every day I miss Priyo more.  Incredible as it seems, he centers everything he does around me being in his life.  I am beginning to return the favor.  I can’t wait to see him again, which, alas, will not happen until roughly October as current plans stand.  

As I said before, Priyo was scheduled to enter the police academy in January.  So, within a week of my leaving, he shipped his goods, including his motorcycle, to his home in Trinamapa.  He had had a tailor make most of the clothes he was required to bring to the academy, and had purchased the rest.  He was anxious to begin his training for which he would be receiving a salary much greater than his prior earnings.  Alas, the best laid plans…

I have often thought that the USA was as corrupt as any country, its lawmakers and public officials for sale to the highest bidder and so forth.  While I still think the corruption here is rampant, I now have a new appreciation for what corruption in other lands can be like.  Here corruption touches us indirectly - sweetheart deals enrich some and drive up taxes or costs and so on.  But in India, corruption has an immediate and visible and direct impact on everyone.  One pays for anything one needs to accomplish.  Sometimes one has to bribe police to merely proceed beyond a traffic blockade out in the boonies.  Priyo’s Dad had already paid a couple of hundred thousand to get Priyo to the point of being considered for the police program.  But the greedy politicians had done two things that threw a monkey wrench into the plans to begin this particular academy class.  The first was that several candidates were appointed who did not even bother with the pretense of qualifying physically and mentally.  Blind and handicapped candidates were accepted and allowed to forego interviews and physical tests - these were people who could not in any way fulfill the duties of policemen.  So egregious was this practice that even the Indian media felt it worthy of publishing, resulting in a halt being called to the actual beginning of the class.  Many candidates were married and many had left jobs on the strength of getting their letters detailing what to bring to the academy (as had Priyo) and these were left without means to support themselves and their families.  And, since bribery is illegal, they had no recourse for getting back what they had been forced to pay.  Secondly, even without the corrupt qualifying candidates, the greedy powers that be had over-enrolled the class.  There is a district of India called the Northeast States which consist of eight small states which in some areas, including police training, work together as a single unit.  There is one academy for all the states and this class had enrolled so many Trinamapis that there was insufficient space left for the other states’ candidates.  So even if the unqualified candidates were removed, the rest - all of whom paid big bribes to be enrolled, but who at least met the requirements to be policemen - could not be accommodated by the academy.  

Priyo, being a person who is intensely practical, soon saw that the police job was nothing to bet his future on, and set about finding alternative means to support himself.  He first found a job doing what he had before done in Panchkula - medical transcription.  He is good at this, after six years of doing it, so his former employer kept offering him inducements to return to Panchkula.  Eventually they offered quite a raise and agreed he could work remotely from Trinamapa.  Priyo got a sufficient internet connection and began doing this remote work.  Additionally he found another employer for whom he could work mornings before he received his daily files from the Panchkula.  He is also looking into an opportunity where he can purchase unfinished brooms formed from shrubs found in Trinamapa and resell them to a merchant in another state at 100% profit.  But even without this he now makes more than he did in Panchkula, which is a much higher-paying area for employment.  

I plan to return to India - this time to Trinamapa - in the autumn, and to stay for four to five months.  The six-month wait before me seems to loom before me longer and emptier by the day.  I have come to the realization that the possessions I have accumulated over a lifetime are merely a heap of things unwanted by others, which will be dispersed or discarded when my time comes.  The one thing I can’t give up yet is my house and land which is just as I want it and is where I want it.  Since his police disappointment, Priyo is much more amenable to emigration, but even so, the amount of difficulty in doing so will cause this to be years away even if it can be done at all.  I am ever more aware that life is short.  When I think how close I am to 80, I feel almost panicky.  Should I waste a minute hemming and hawing before I decide to move to where Priyo is?  Apart from my reluctance so far to give up my house, there is one other issue.  Medical care is free to citizens in India, but I would be a non-citizen.  Although medical care is vastly cheaper there, I would be required to pay the full amount for any doctor visit or medicine.  With Medicare, my out-of-pocket annual cost still runs to about $5,000 a year - with my pharmacy costs I gallop through the so-called ‘doughnut hole’ in two months time.  My most expensive medicine (of three), without which I would be headed for Pine Hill in no time, costs about $3000 per month here in the USA.  Even at half, or a quarter of the price, I would be pretty skint if I had to pay the whole cost.  

I am hoping that after my next visit to Priyo, I will feel connected enough to him and loosened enough from my situation here to make it clear what course to pursue.  Meanwhile the calls, which I found in January to be a bit excessive, have become the best parts of my day.  We really can talk about anything.  I badly miss Priyo, who in every way exceeds my hopes for someone to love, and who cares for me more than I can understand.  I always thought a perfect relationship was one where each thinks he or she was the lucky one who got way more than he deserved.  I seem to have this.  Now I just have to grab it.

When I was that young man who was standing by the roadside suddenly deciding to hitchhike to California or even when I was that middle-aged man who saw a notice for a job in Saudi and walked straight to HR and said, “Take me!” there seemed to be so much time to resolve any negative consequences.  But I know if I give up this house, there will never be another, and there is something so satisfying to me about saying, “This is mine; I can do as I please here.”  I don’t want to end up cussing myself for giving it up.  That Priyo and I might not last forms no part of my concern; all relationships of this nature require a trust and a leap of faith which I have already made.  I want one more bit of prodding to give up this house and all that is in it; or I want to be sure that I want to remain here and to work to bring Priyo here, despite the years of effort that might take.  I also have some concern about following my Mom’s path into Alzheimer’s - she is the sixth of her sisters to develop it, so it is clearly in the genes.  It might be nightmarish to be in a land I didn’t recognize with nowhere to return to.  But mostly it is a feeling thing that I can’t quantify in a list of pros and cons.  I want to have an irresistible desire to choose one course which makes me lose all concern for the negatives.  I am almost there, I think.  

What a lucky, lucky choice to have.  I have a genius for complaining about everything, but really this is a dilemma well worth having.

Incidentally, anyone who bothers to check will find there is no such Indian state as Trinamapa.  I have smooshed together letters from the names of several of the Northeast states.  The purpose of doing this is that under no circumstances do I want to put  Priyo's reputation or job at risk by outing him to people in an area where gay relationships are very much despised.

Stranger Than Fiction

If I had read the tale of my last three months in a book, I'd have hurled it at the wall as poorly written, too full of coincidence and generally too good to be true.  And yet, it is true right down to the last jot and tittle.

I have after several years, adjusted to retirement - so much so that work seems as long ago to me as high school.  Another life completely.  I am increasingly content with my life - I love the town I live in, my house, my gardens and woods and lawns and the wildlife therein (except the ones who eat too heartily in said gardens).  I love being the place family and friends stay when they are in town and my family's tendency to have events take place at my house.  I enjoy our weekly Sunday breakfasts with Mom (now 97) who is moving down the slope of dementia much more slowly than many other cases I have seen.  She can no longer put words together and she needs a walker to move and she hasn't a clue who any of us are, but she is smiling and sociable and affectionate (she will sometimes pat or rub my hand and it feels so loving and makes me feel good all day).  She will put anything in her mouth and try to eat it so we have to be alert to her surroundings, just as if she were a toddler.  Anyway, my point is that I am pretty content.

But there is one glaring fly (if flies can be said to glare) in my ointment, and that is that without someone to care for, a partner, there is a hollowness at the core of my life.  Being old and generally disgusting and living in the middle of nowhere, there is almost zero chance to meet someone compatible who wants to be my mate.  Before I even retired, I had begun to check out dating sites but nothing panned out.  These sites may be helpful to those who are young and desirable or to the elderly who want someone to go to bingo with, but for someone elderly who hopes for an active sex life and a soulmate they are slim pickings.  As one ages one gains so much baggage - not so much in the way of unresolved losses and ex-partners and the like, but habits, pleasures, commitments, non-sexual relationships of longstanding and so forth.  Baggage which feels good and comforting, and which one wishes to keep.

If anyone seemed otherwise available, he always lived several thousand miles away - and though that does not bother me, sooner or later I would get the "long distance relationships don't work" line.  Another frequent occurrence was being contacted by scammers both foreign and domestic.  Naturally they assume that anyone old and American is desperate and rich.  Well, we may be the former, but desperate doesn't always mean stupid.  I learned to spot these guys usually by their second letter.  They tend to have a picture that looks like a model's portfolio shot.  Their 'profile' is usually a line or two, highly unrevealing except to note their 'athletic' body, and may include a reference to liking older or 'mature' men.  They tend to 'love' me and promise to spend our life together by the second or third letter - way before I have really turned on my lovability effort.  They always turn any conversation I have about them and their circumstances back to a discussion of me and mine.  They tend to have a fascination with things in my life that indicate my degree of wealth - do I own or rent my home?  What kind of car do I have?  Details of their life tend to change from one letter to the next - one finds oneself thinking, "But didn't he tell me before, that…?".  Once I spot them, I usually keep writing just to see how the request for money will be couched.  Usually there is this one thing that needs to be paid for, then they can come to me, or they can host me if I come to them.  They are considerate - I need not send actual money, I can just give my banking details and they will help me transfer the needful.

Several years ago, when I went to the wedding of my sister's daughter, I took the opportunity to meet with one guy (non-scammer) with whom I had been corresponding, named George, in Oakland, CA.  It was a comedy of errors, culminating in me getting locked in a public garage while George waited 20 minutes for me to emerge and then driving away thinking I had ditched him.  When I got out at last, I thought he had ditched me.  Physically, George was strikingly attractive.  We had, prior to the lock-in, spent several hours tooling around from sight to sight in the East Bay talking and the only negative that emerged was that we are both people who are talkers rather than listeners, and both kind of intent on setting the agenda.  This was a red flag, but not a dealbreaker; being ditched was a dealbreaker for both of us, or so I thought.  That was the last I heard of him - until…

This August, not long before another depressing birthday (it seems so unfair that you have to get older each time one of these rolls around, which they seem to do more and more frequently), I went to see my brother Liam and a friend of his play and sing at a local club.  I got home around midnight, went to bed and was drifting off when the phone rang.  When I answered, it was George after all these years.  Although I feigned recognition, I actually took some time to put together who he was, and once I did we discussed the mutual abandonment at the Oakland garage and a lot of other things - including the fact that we each tended to want to control the flow to some extent.  He said he had thought of me over the years, and was feeling especially lonely that night and thought he'd take a shot and call.  We talked for an hour, and we talked a number of times after that.  I went onto the web next day, rediscovered his dating profile and read up on him.  

Coincidence number one, was that by going back on the site, I changed my 'last visit date' to the present, moving me back to the top of some folks' search criteria.  As a result of this, I received a 'virtual smile' from a lad in India named (I later found) Priyo. I would never have found Priyo in a search of my own because he is below the age I search for - it is a waste of time for someone my age to be talking to 33 year olds (usually).   I thought I had another scammer on my hands and checked out his profile.  The one thing different from most scammers was that this guy had four pictures on his ad (scammers rarely have more than one - never more than two) and every one of Priyo's photos had a serious if not glum facial expression.  They were clearly candid shots, in a mall or some such locale.  So I wrote back asking if he ever smiled.  He responded that he would send me some smiling shots and that I seemed nice.  I said I WAS nice (I can lie with the best of them), and this tickled him so much that we started 'talking' more.  In no time at all we were Skyping, (he looked exactly like his pics) and the smiling pics he sent were so dazzling; when he smiles he goes from just a bit player to the star of stage and screen. 

He didn't look like most Indians I had seen; he looked more Far Eastern.  It turns out that there are a few rural states in India to the east of Bangladesh, pressed up against Burma, where the people are more Burmese in appearance than Indian.  He made me laugh.  I made him laugh.  He told me things that could be considered negative about himself - things I couldn't imagine any scammer telling me.  He answered anything I asked, he said he was employed, and he seemed to have no interest in relocating to America.  He never asked anything that would be remotely revealing about my financial status.  He never hinted at a lack of funds; on the contrary, he often mentioned having bought something or having gone somewhere that would make a plea for financial help pretty unconvincing, although he was clearly not wealthy.  Each thing he told me via phone meshed with everything he had said before.  And I looked him up on Facebook and it was clear he had a 'friend' list that had a lot of much older men.  He had been on FB for years and everything mentioned there dovetailed with things he had told me.  We were soon talking every morning and evening - up to 4 hours a day.  We each made sure the other woke up to find a cheerful e-mail waiting to start his day.  His evening is my morning and vice versa.  

I had promised to meet Papa, my old Indian friend, in Toronto in October for a week or so.  I had medical appointments in November.  December is too hectic and expensive to travel.  And Priyo was entering a police academy in mid-January where he would be living in a dorm for nearly a year.  When would I ever meet this guy? - I was becoming hopelessly hooked on the image I had.  He felt so genuine.  Because of his job, his English was amazing; for six years he has been employed receiving dictations from American and Australian doctors which he then types out, formats and returns as patient case histories.  His medical vocabulary exceeds that of most Americans, I expect, but he is also skilled at vernacular American slang.  I mulled for a day or two how we might manage a meeting.  Then I realized that (as I have said here before; I should listen to myself more often) love is not something you slot into your life around visits and appointments; love is something around which you build your life.  I received Priyo's virtual smile on August 21.  On September 19, I was stepping off a plane at Chandigarh Airport in northern India and spotting a popping and fizzing figure waving frantically at me.  

It has now been just over two months since I arrived.  The day before my arrival, Priyo had moved all his belongings from a cheap shared apartment in Chandigarh to a more costly apartment in Panchkula, a smaller city which abuts Chandigarh.  He paid himself for this much more costly venue as well as for the move itself and some necessary items such as two ceiling fans.  (After the first month I split the rent).  He had even stocked the fridge with Diet Pepsi, which I had mentioned I liked during one conversation.  Priyo was exactly the man he had said he was.  He is generous, honorable, honest, loving, courageous, very smart (speaks 4 languages and understands a fifth) and darn good-looking.  He genuinely has no interest in younger men - a handsome young model or actor is about as attractive to him as a rock.  He loves American culture - music, movies and the like, and he dreams of one day visiting, but he has no interest in living there for good.  He says he had no skills in demand in the US and he'd never, ever be dependent on someone else for his well-being.  He has told me this is the happiest time in his life.  He had never met an American before me.  

Priyo has his quirks - a bit of a fussbudget; he is overprotective when I feel a bit ill (happened twice) and crossing a road with him is a series of 'Come, Come, Come, Wait, Wait, Wait, Come Come Come' commands, despite the fact that I have safely crossed roads for about 70 years, and little things like that, but he is in every way the good man that I found myself falling for via computer and telephone.  There have been no bad surprises.  He puts me first always.  He does the laundry, cooking, cleaning, and everything that needs doing.  It would be embarrassing if I didn't have the thick hide of the Entitled.  Once I was washing a couple of plates and he demanded to know what was I doing.  I said it was not his job to wait on me and he said when he loves someone, he enjoys doing things for them.  Well, I certainly don't want to deprive him of that pleasure!  He remembers any preference I mention.  He caters to my tastes every time he cooks.  I told him before I came that one of my crosses to bear in a life which has seen a lot of travel is that I have real difficulty with unfamiliar foods.  He cooks Indian (which I like) but he runs ingredients past me before he is tries something new.  He thinks it is really funny when I say, "Eeeewwww!"  We laugh a lot, I can make him laugh really hard.  I am crazy about the guy.  It is so amazing to meet someone who is genuinely good right down to his innermost self - and I can hardly believe how lucky he feels to have found me.  We can be together comfortably when we are doing separate things.  Sometimes we lie down reading separate books - Priyo just finished a Lee Child novel (in English).

Priyo told me he was sorry that we had to go everywhere on his motorcycle - he wished he could have a car for me.  I asked why; I kind of enjoyed the motorcycle when I wasn't totally panicked that a bus and a horse-drawn cart were bearing down on us at high speeds (well, not so high speed for the horse).  He said that he knew American Senior Citizens were not accustomed to riding on the backs of motorcycles.  It is the closest I have come to smacking him over the head with a club.  

I have done very little sightseeing here.  I am not a guy for sights in the first place and I came here for Priyo, not castles and beaches.  Chandigarh and Panchkula are planned cities (by Le Corbusier) and are the wealthiest per capita cities in India.  There are a great number of beautifully laid out and well-maintained parks.  Priyo has taken me to a rose garden, a cactus garden, a rock garden (which is not what one thinks of when one says 'rock garden at home - it is a huge maze with waterfalls and full grown trees and narrow paths between 20-foot-high walls, with hundreds of whimsical sculptures of people and animals and small scale replicas of villages).  But mostly we just go to market and stay home (when he is not at work), and that suits me to a 'T'.  

I didn't grasp how cheap it is to live here until I discovered that for two consecutive months, despite buying a handmade carpet and a leather jacket and my my share of the rent and groceries etc, as well as keeping up on my insurance, utilities and other expenses back home, I had nearly a thousand left in my checking account at month end, whereas I usually have very little when I am home, even sometimes having to shift some savings into checking to make it to month end.  But here is a little comparison that might make it clear.  At home I pay more than $90 every two months for Waste Management to come once a week and pick up the trash I have toted out to the roadside.  Here I have a man come daily to my door and take away whatever trash I have accumulated for the princely sum of 80 cents a month (plus a 32 cent tip once a year on the holiday called Diwali).  I got my Doc Martin shoes, which had a tear in the fabric, repaired and polished by a guy sitting under a tree for 64 cents.  I get a shave occasionally by a guy working under a different tree for 32 cents.

In a month, I will return to America.  Being away from home, I have realized how much I like my place in Reedville.  I do not want to give it up.  Since I have a reverse mortgage I will lose it legally if I am living away from it for more than six months in a year.  Although Priyo will see a large increase in salary as a cop, he will still have a really hard time saving enough to come to the US to visit any time soon; moreover, he will have issues about getting enough time off work to do so.  A visa to the US requires the recipient to show savings of $8000 over and above the cost of the visit.  So it appears that ours will be a sporadic relationship.  That's OK.  I told Priyo that I understood he was young, and that if he felt the need, I was perfectly OK with him having the occasional fling.  He said he hoped I would be his only man in that area.  I loved the honesty of the word 'hoped'.  It was so realistic and it was a refusal to make false promises.  He said he felt the same about me, but I can't see anyone banging on my door in the middle of nowhere and demanding to have sex with an old man that only his mother (and Priyo) could love.  

So we shall see how things go from here.  I have always lived by whim and I don't really worry much about what is next when I am happy.  One day of happiness is a win.  How foolish to be miserable because something might not be easy in some future time.  

Meanwhile, I am living the dream!

Keeping the Faith (or Not)

I think most families, especially large ones, have histories that are far more legend than factual.  Kernels of truth - sometimes as little as coincidence of surnames on the old family tree, or some ancestor having lived in the same locale as a celebrated figure - grow into luxurious vines of mythology: "We're related!"  "Great Grandfather knew him!"  Added to this tendency, I think, is the practice of parents or older relatives to sanitize or simplify complex situations into tales fit for young ears.  

It was an object of faith in my family - and still is among some of my cousins on the Warren side (my mother's family), especially the Protestant ones - that "Grandma was kicked out of her strict Catholic Irish family for marrying a Protestant."  This, too, was what I had believed - until in her later years, when I think she sensed she was sinking into the dementia which finally overcame her memory entirely, Mom told me what I assume is a more accurate version of events.  The Catholic/Protestant version of my mother's story paired nicely with a reverse story from my father's side whereby my Uncle Henry's wife was disowned by her strict Lutheran family when she married my Catholic Irish uncle (I wouldn't be surprised if the Irish aspect was worse than the Catholic one) and, when this Aunt Laura died giving birth to her second child, "they didn't even come to her funeral."  This second story seems, also to be less than accurate.  For instance, it turns out that that child and Laura are buried in her (Laura's) family plot.  Incidentally, the child of this birth was named Hedwig and died eleven days after her mother, no doubt having realized what a handicap growing up with the name 'Hedwig' would prove to be.  

The story of my grandmother being disowned was true, and it apparently was also true that her picture was cut from her family's photographs, since we learned the latter detail from cousins who discovered our kinship when a cousin of mine and her employer noticed that they had similar names in their ancestry.  "We always wondered what she had done," they told my mother, when they finally met.  However, as my mother later explained, my grandmother Elsie met my Protestant grandfather Ephraim after she had already left home.  The new story has some suspicious details, which I will point out but, I think, it is substantially accurate.  

Elsie had graduated high school and had taken a job at a local hospital, which she evidently enjoyed very much.  She still lived at home and, I gather, was either the eldest daughter of the family or else she was the oldest girl still living at home when her mother died.  Not too long after she began working, her mother passed away.  Since the family was a strict Catholic Irish family, there was, of course, a passel of kids younger than Elsie who were still in school and in need of a parent substitute devoted to the domestic chores involved in raising children around in the first decade of the 1900's.  My great grandfather, who by all accounts was a son of a bitch, was not about to take over these duties, nor to pay someone else to do it (I gather the family was comfortably off, though not wealthy).  The suspicious details (because they sound a tad melodramatic) of what followed are these:  it was just before Christmas, gifts were already wrapped and the names of the recipients were attached.  Great-grandfather removed Elsie's name from her gifts and readdressed them to her younger sisters.  He then led her to her late mother's closet and told her she was to quit her job and that henceforth these would be her clothes, and that she was to stay home taking over the duties of keeping house for the family and of raising her younger siblings.  

By all accounts, Elsie was a girl who, though an extremely strict parent later to her own daughters, loved a joke and loved a good time.  By this I don't mean to imply she was in any way loose, but just that she was not ready to give up her independence and probable future happiness to become a domestic slave.  She had vacationed the previous summer with a cousin in Geneva, NY and had had a marvelous time there.  Upon being faced with a dreary future at home, she packed her bag and as soon as she got the chance, left home and fled to the cousin, who took her in.  With a single exception, she never saw any of her family again; her siblings were forbidden to mention her name and her face was cut from all the family photos.  The one sister she did see again was Great-Aunt Daisy who, after she grew to adulthood, tracked Elsie down and re-established a relationship with her.  My mother remembers Aunt Daisy's visits as great treats; Daisy always came to visit laden with gifts for the children.  By leaving home and later marrying my grandfather, Elsie Warren left the middle class and became firmly embedded in the working class, in which every one of her daughters remained and among which which they chose their spouses.  

Not too long after she left home, Elsie met Grandpa Ephraim at some social affair - a village dance or festival of some sort - and in short order the two wed.  Grandfather was from an Appalachain mountain family that was spread along the New York Southern Tier and the Pennsylvania Northern Tier and, believe me, even today that is country.  At some point in his youth, Ephraim lived in Elmira, NY and family legend has it that he was "friends with Sam Clemens", who is, of course, better known as Mark Twain.  I doubt they were friends, (there would have been quite an age difference) but he may have known Clemens, in passing, as a fellow Elmiran.  Perhaps more likely, he just knew Clemens by reputation as his city's most famed inhabitant at the time.  Or possibly they weren't even there at exactly the same time, merely about the same time.  However, I do recall that I once mentioned "Mark Twain" and Grandpa (who didn't like me a whole lot anyway), frowned and thundered, "His name is Sam Clemens!"

I suspect the basic truth about Elsie is that she was a rebel from an early age.  She was probably a bit of a 'handful', and I wouldn't be at all surprised if her father disliked her a bit.   These legends of people being cast off for marrying outside the faith may be technically true as to the specific timing of the family decree that they be removed from the family, but my guess is that more often than not, if the religion is not one of those few cults that practice shunning, the marriage is the only last in a long line of small rebellions against the parental strictures.  The child who is thus cast off naturally feels that he or she is on the right side of the equation and is likely to pass on to the following generations a tale told from her point of view.  The parent depicted as overly strict probably would, in turn, describe the child as overly wild or naughty or willful.

I knew Grandpa Ephraim Warren (my only grandparent who had not died before I was born), and as I say, he didn't care for me too much.  As a man who had brought up eight daughters, the younger ones of whom he had to raise without Elsie's help, Grandpa wasn't terribly fond of boys in general.  Elsie died at 49 from complications from epilepsy, just months after Mom's high school graduation; Mom's two youngest sisters either did not recall their mother at all, or had only one or two vague memories.  My mother was raised very strictly, and she herself was not at all a rebel, although a couple of her sisters were somewhat more rebellious against the family norms than she.  Mom and her sisters grew up in a series of small country towns; Grandpa worked in the lumber trade, which required him to move occasionally.  In addition to those requisite moves, Elsie had some variety of wanderlust which caused her to change houses every couple of years even if Grandpa's work did not require a move.  Elsie never returned to the Catholic church, but she made sure her daughters attended whichever Protestant church was nearby.  

My mother so hated moving about that she made owning their own home from the start a condition of marriage to my father, and he and she chose and purchased a house in the city before they married.   Mom always wanted to be a "city girl" and she absolutely hated being a stand-out in any way.  She was the farthest thing from a rebel, yet fate conspired against her.   She became a Catholic, the only one of her sisters to do so, although no less than four of the others married Catholics.  She grew up thinking boys were somehow nasty, and those of her sisters who had children before she did dutifully had only daughters.  Mom broke the family tradition by having me, and then compounded her apostasy by having seven more boys.  And the whole City Girl thing went by the wayside when my Dad's brother Bernard developed a heart condition that rendered him unable to continue working on the family farm which he had inherited.  When I was three, Dad swapped the house in the city, which contained a rental flat upstairs, for the family farm and thus Mom became a farmer's wife as well as mother of eight boys (and of my only sister, Lucy), for neither of which activities she'd had any practical preparation.  "No one will ever know how often I was faking it," she confessed to me a few years ago.   It was strange to hear, since I always remember her as a serene presence, and as calmly expert in any matter that arose.  And you better believe, with nine children and a bipolar, alcoholic husband, plenty of unusual matters did arise.  

I have been thinking about the unreliability of so much of what I "know" lately, as I find out more and more things I was sure were true are actually highly doubtful.  There is so little we actually know about the past; we often find that even the events we witnessed are remembered differently by others who were also present.  Although I really try to be truthful when telling about my past or my family's history, the fact is that much of the nuance, at least, could be better labelled, "my story" than "my history".   It really is true that the older one gets, the less one knows.  Or at least there is so much less about which one can be certain.  It gives me quite a different perspective on history, which, besides being written by the winners, is even more likely written in service of mythologizing and bowdlerizing the past to fit the tellers' prejudices.    

Put another way, there is so little of what actually happened that matters to any individual life.  What one believes is true is the sole determinant of the impact of the past upon one's life.  

Yikes! we are even more rudderless than I thought!

Schoolmarm

At the time that my Father's bipolarity was just beginning to drive him completely off the rails, he started going about helping various townsfolk with yard work and the like.  At the time I thought it was a benign - even laudable - activity, although current interactions with my brother Rob, who is victim of the same dysfunction, has caused me to begin wondering how welcome - and how helpful - Dad's activities actually were.  The downside to this new initiative, as indeed was the downside to every new program which he undertook, was that he nearly always tended to involve his offspring, notably me.  

One of the first of the people Dad undertook to assist in her gardening and so forth was Miss Anna Hargreave, a lovely elderly lady who had been his teacher from first through fourth grade in a cobblestone one-room schoolhouse a couple of miles to the southeast of our farm.  That is, the schoolhouse was a couple of miles southeast; Miss Hargreave's home, which she shared with an unmarried sister named Emma, was across the creek which bounded our farm on the north - a short distance if one were in the mood to swim, but two or three miles by road, since in each direction from the Farm the nearest bridges were at least a mile distant.  

The Misses Hargreave were quite elderly; this was in the 1950's and my father's early schooling with Miss Hargreave, who had also taught several of his older siblings, had begun in 1905.  Anna was a rather beautiful white-haired lady who looked like a Norman Rockwell version of everyone's Grandma.  She was sweet-natured, gentle and generous.  She loved her garden and grounds, though she was too old to do much gardening by herself, and in this case I think my father's assistance was welcome - especially since the entire job rapidly became solely the concern of my brother Gary and me, thence handed on to my sister Lucy, and on down through my catalog of brothers until, long after I was off to college and seeing the world, it became the job of my sibling number six, Liam.  

Despite the fact that I was (as Mom used to tell me with a certain note of asperity in her voice) the Little Prince, a fact that arose solely from my position as the first boy in two generations among my mother and her seven sisters, and the first grandchild  in almost thirty years on my Dad's side where there were no less than five sisters and four other brothers, all of whom had either no children or fully grown children and found much of their time free to dote on me - despite all this positive adult interaction- I remained very wary of adults and never really saw them as completely human in the way I saw myself.  They were too powerful, too all-knowing and their reactions were usually utterly inexplicable to me.  People were far more formal in those days, and I never addressed any adult other than as Mr. or Mrs. or Miss or Aunt or Uncle.  There was no mistaking these folks for my contemporaries or buddies, no matter how warmly they treated me nor how much they played or joked with me.   Adult women dressed soberly and wore hats with veils and white gloves when they ventured forth from their homes for anything other than a quick trip to the grocery - and sometimes even then.  Men wore fedoras any time they set forth from home.  Few women drove; one would see married couples when two such drove about together, almost invariably with the fedora-ed men sitting upright in the front seat of the car, and the gloved and hatted wives seated behind.  

I liked Miss Hargreave, despite the fact that she was an adult and the boss, the latter category being another that, until my day of retirement, I never felt entirely easy with even though I was quite good friends with several of them.  I always felt, with either my elders or my bosses, that I was subject to unfathomable whims, that I was never sure that a humiliating reprimand was not forthcoming, although such reprimands were quite rare in my experience - far rarer than I deserved.  Miss Hargreave would tell me little stories about Dad as a small child.  One I recall was that on his first day of school he showed up with a big red bow tied under his chin.  I was a good deal less fond of Miss Anna's sister Emma.  Emma was thin and boney, and severe in appearance, and although she had a good heart as far as I could see, any conversation with her soon swerved toward the biblical and religious.   She hadn't a clue how to speak to children, and I in turn hadn't a clue how to speak with her comfortably.   Even worse were days when a third sister, a married sister named Almeda, was present.  Miss Almeda - or Mrs. Law, I suppose I should say - was personally pleasant and kind, but age had brought on a speech impediment that rendered her completely impossible to understand.  Her lower jaw did more than tremble - especially when she was speaking - it shook vigorously resulting in speech that was a disjointed series of syllables.  I did not dread her because of any unkindness, but because of my embarrassment that she would speak to me and I hadn't a clue what she'd said.  When I found myself in a position where i was unable to understand an adult I felt a deep shame.   I have always felt I should understand people, a trait I may have gotten from my Mom who went into full panic mode when confronted with even a hint of an accent.  Mom's fear that she wouldn't understand such a person inevitably overwhelmed her to the point that she didn't  understand them, even when she otherwise might have.  

Lucy, genuinely liked Miss Hargreave; I think any kindly haven that got her away from the increasingly chaotic conditions at home would have earned her heartfelt gratitude.  Miss Hargreave, in return, doted on Lucy.  When Lucy was accepted at college and was seeing Miss Hargreave for the last time before she left, Anna gave her the gift of a small leather change purse.  Lucy thought it the odd gift of an out-of-touch elderly lady, until she got home and discovered $100 rolled up inside it.  This was a substantial gift from anyone in 1962, and from a lady in such straitened circumstances as a retired schoolteacher must have been, it was extremely generous.  

Mowing Anna Hargreave's lawn, planting her gladioli each spring, and digging up the spent bulbs each fall and pruning her beauty bush (I am not sure what this bush was actually called, but it was completely pink in spring with thousands of little pink tubular flowers) were more or less Shaughnessy traditions for years.  Miss Hargreave insisted on paying us a couple of dollars each time - which were extremely welcome - but it was almost like a chore at home; that is, something expected, taken for granted and performed with reasonably good grace every summer for years.  

When the task was handed on to Liam, sixth in the sequence of siblings that began with me, he developed a very close relationship with Miss Anna.  Liam has the happy quality of whole-hearted enthusiasms.  He has always loved baseball passionately, he loved cowboy films and the whole 1950's concept of what the West had been - the good guys and bad guys - and he has to this day, tons of friends who return his affection fully, both those newly met and those who are childhood friends because he shows his feelings of affection openly; not with hugs or physical display (we are far too Irish for that) but with unfeigned pleasure displayed when he meets them.  Liam is a singer and a songwriter with the eye of a lover.  (My sister-in-law who has herself been inducted into a Hall of Fame for music in a large city in the West says, "I have written songs, but Liam is a poet."  He has the gift of poking fun in a way that affection shines through.  Chief of all his targets for mockery is himself.  People love to talk to Liam, because he is very funny - not in the sense of knowing a million jokes, but simply in having a gift for coining phrases and descriptions which are both acute and very funny and memorable.  Liam's nicknames for various friends have become family standards when speaking of those friends.

By the time Liam was mowing Miss Hargreave's lawn, Dad had found another protégée just up the road from the Farm - Miss Bessie Hadlock, the last of a family that had more or less been local gentry for generations here in Reedville.  Originally the Hadlocks had lived in a great square house with a cupola on top, which stands on a hill at a point where three roads meet, formerly known as Hadlocks' Corners.  There is today an historic marker in front of "Hadlock House".  However, the generation that produced Bessie, a woman who was as old, or nearly so, as Miss Hargreave, had in some way lost nearly everything.  The Hadlock farm with the great house was lost and at the time everything came apart for them, there appeared to be little hope of saving anything.  However, my dad's oldest brother who was a gifted lawyer and prominent in county politics, undertook to save something from the wreckage for Bessie Hadlock.  Ultimately he managed to save for her a small wedge of land with the small tenant house across the road from the big house.   Nearly every farm in this area - certainly all the older ones - included a tenant house for a family which was hired to help work the farm.   This was usually a rather plain house, much smaller than the big farm house.  Usually the tenant house would be occupied by the same hired man and his family for many years.  In many cases after the nineteen fifties, if farms were sold, the big house was retained by the selling family and the new owners would move themselves or one of their married children into the tenant house.  

At any rate, Liam, with his gifts for throwing himself into whatever he does and for being liked by those he deals with, became as close to Bessie Hadlock as he was with Anna Hargreave.  Both Miss Hargreave and Miss Hadlock would, in any case, have been within our orbit of awareness; Reedville was a very small town and few families moved in or out - everyone had been there forever, it seemed, as had their parents and grandparents.  But because of the lawn-mowing, these ladies became more than just someone one knew of or met occasionally at the store or library.   They were part of that ring of people with whom our entire family had a certain feeling of kinship.

I had long since hitch-hiked to California to become a surfer, and Lucy had completed college by the time Liam inherited the Hargreave lawn and taken on the Hadlock job.  One day he was working in Bessie Hadlock's garden when she came out with a paper in her hand.

"Liam," she said, "we have lost Miss Hargreave."

And she and Liam stood in Miss Hadlock's garden and wept together.     

What a gas!

Never having been a Shi'ite (I'm not even a Baptist!), I had never hitherto enjoyed the experience of being tear-gassed - until last night, that is.  

It seems there are certain social niceties one learns when traveling - the small local customs which make life go smoothly in distant parts.  For instance when one travels to Hawaii, one might be greeted by having a lei placed around one's neck while being welcomed with a hearty "aloha".  The proper response for the tourist is to smile much more brightly than any sane creature would do, raise one's voice that quarter octave so necessary when communicating with toddlers, the elderly, the terminally ill or any native anywhere whose skin is any shade of brown and to babble incoherent phrases amongst which the word 'aloha' should appear no less than three times, while asking the lei donor if he or she will pose for a group photo with said tourist.  It is particularly kind not to force upon the native person any of the many witticisms invoking this being the being the best lei one has ever had which will have crowded one's mind.  

In Nepal, I am told, one may be welcomed with a nice dish of yak tea, a beverage my cousin Warren informs me, although one wonders exactly how he researched this particular datum, which tastes exactly like licking a yak's ass.  The proper response involves the same bright smile and the quarter octave vocal rise, but instead of witticisms about getting lei'd, the preferred thing to suppress is the overwhelming urge to vomit.  

In Bahrain and various other areas in the Middle East, a Shi'ite native may greet one with a firm "Death to America" or ditto to the government or to Obama or, indeed, to any of the many persons or entities which have caught his or her attention during the previous few days.  It is unnecessary to respond in this case at all, since normally the local government forces will make the obligatory response which is to douse the man or woman or the mob which has spoken thus in generous quantities of tear gas.  

It is an unfortunate characteristic of tear gas that it tends not to remain in the locale in which it has been released, nor does it seem to be able to distinguish between local Shi'a and the odd foreigner who might be in the vicinity.  

Khalid and I had enjoyed a leisurely meal last night at a restaurant called Nando's which is a member of a chain which I believe is based in Southern Africa and which features some mighty fine Portuguese-influenced methods of preparing chicken.   Nando's is situated on a very westernized street in a very westernized area which is lined with western chain restaurants.  Khalid tells me this is called Restaurant Street, although I personally incline to calling it "Where are we - a mall in Tampa? Street".   I am influenced here by its very non-unique charm, reminiscent of any place one has ever thrown up one's hands and said, "We might as well eat here."  Khalid, being a Saudi, had eschewed any lit or legal parking spot near this restaurant in favor of parking illegally amongst a series of similar looking concrete buildings on a dimly lit side street that ran perpendicular to Restaurant (or Tampa) Street.  As we were returning to the car, a stray breeze wafted a soupçon of something that seemed, when it hit the eyes to be some kind of smoke.  It felt like that stinging sensation one get when one sits too close to the campfire and the wind shifts in one's direction.  At least that is how it felt at first.  With every step we took, it seemed to grow in force, and at the same time my throat and lungs began to feel suspiciously like someone had poured a tablespoon or so of sulfuric acid into them.  

Apparently the local Shi'ite majority had been in the process of its weekly celebration of the coming of the Muslim version of a Sabbath, by gathering and informing the interested as to what this week's quiet reflection had led them to wish death upon.  In response to this kerfuffle, the government lavished upon them tear gas in quantities greater than one could wish.  It was into billows of this that Khalid and I were venturing.  It is remarkable how difficult it is to find a car one has carelessly parked any old place amongst a clutch of similar-looking buildings on a dark back street when one's eyes are rapidly swelling shut and one has broken into the fastest run one can manage while semi-blind and somewhat touched in the wind.  When we finally got ourselves inside the car, it was the work of but a second for Khalid to light up a Marlboro Red.  This would not have been my first move, but who am I to cavil?

Upon our return to our hotel, we were merrily chaffed by the Syrian desk man and several others who were gathered there, all of whom found much to amuse them in our tear-streaked faces.  This morning, the man on desk duty suggested I stay close to home for the day.  

So I have crossed off another item on my bucket list.  I don't think anyone who was out and about during the Sixties would want to leave this Vale of Tears without having experienced tear gas, although I can  think of one such who is more than willing to forego experiencing it twice.  

And now, on to that yak…

Learning Curve

Oh dear; it has been a long time since I wrote anything and there really is no good reason.  I have had an uncharacteristic burst of energy and optimism since I got back from my trip to India last Fall and I have no idea why.  It seems I have finally gotten adjusted to retirement.  I disliked working so much that I just assumed I'd slide into retirement with a glad cry and a list of great things I wanted to do.  What was I thinking; do I not know myself after all these years?  

I did give the glad cry, but I found I didn't really want to do any of the things on my list.  Or anything else I could think of.  What I hadn't fully considered is that I was cutting off 95% of my human interactions.  There is almost nothing, except reading and writing, that I enjoy doing alone.  I have nearly always liked my co-workers on every job I had, and I even occasionally enjoyed the actual work.  What I hated was the element of "have to": I have to get up at six, I have to get my sleep, I have to turn down opportunities to travel or visit; I have to end vacations before I want to.  It turns out that I am hopeless at making myself do anything; these restrictions were actually what motivated me to do everything I ever did.  Like get up in the morning.  Like get something done before work on Monday, or at all.  

It is funny how we dislike what we need, or what once attracted us.  I expect that any of you who had a failed relationship know that odd circumstance that the very quirks that you found endearing and intriguing are the ones that end up driving you up the wall.  The teachers that had you trembling in September are so often the ones whom you will miss most in June.  "If only I didn't…" we cry, only to find that when it is over, the thing we bemoaned the most was the thing that kept us going.  A life which is all dessert and no main course is neither nourishing nor even sweet.  

I think that somewhere around the second anniversary of my last day of work I finally begin to figure out how to be retired.  I still can't shake the feeling that time is short, that the hard stuff (cleaning, doing taxes, weeding my garden) is "wasting" my time.  But I have found that if I start something with permission to stop when I feel like it - to avoid setting goals for the percentage of a task I will complete today or this week, or this winter, I get quite a bit done and enjoy doing it.  I can't account for it, but I have always done best in the most restricted circumstances - my Catholic college which had curfews at 7:30 p.m. in my Freshman year, Sa'udi Arabia where everyone else felt constrained and frustrated and I felt completely free and safe and life felt full of possibility.  I always have been, by nature, rebellious; what was the surprise is that I need something to rebel against.  Who knew?  

Of course the other thing I have always needed is people to talk to, to do things with, to make anything seem real.  I am totally a "people person", and not in a good way.  I truly don't feel like anything has happened until I talk about it with someone.  So another explanation for my improved state of mind may be the fact that Khalid, the Sa'udi guy I met in Bahrain last October, has been on the telephone or Skype to me almost every day.  He continues to vow that he was hopelessly smitten at first sight of me (ME!  Sad, saggy, wrinkly, pasty me!).  The more we talk, the more this seems to be true.  He says he loves to have someone he can speak with frankly.  He slowly reveals more and more of the type of thing one doesn't tell just anyone.  He has none of the usual flaws: need for money, desire for help with a visa, possessiveness, refusal to accommodate others' wishes, that tend to mar relationships with Sa'udis.  So, to make a long story short, I am off next week to Bahrain where I will be able to better test how a couple of weeks of constant companionship go.  There is nothing like a vacation with someone to reveal all the downsides.  I have a couple of dear friends with whom I never again wish to travel.  One of them is such an oppressive co-traveler that his first two wives each asked for a divorce on vacations - one in Mexico, the other in Holland.  My one long trip with this guy had me wishing there was a divorce for friends.  We are still good friends (it was years ago we traveled together) but I will never travel with him again.  

So that is my immediate future.

We are having the same winter here that has come to most of the nation.  Last Wednesday I took Papa, who was visiting for a few days, to the airport and on the way home I drove with my top down (on the car, not on my body) and wearing a T-shirt.  Next day it snowed.  

During the burst of energy I have been talking about, I completed the four-year project of painting my dining room and went from start to finish on painting my living room and wallpapering the ceiling thereof.  I am pretty chuffed with myself.  

It doesn't yet feel like Spring, despite several warm days.  I must be the only one not feeling it, though - tulips and daffodils are in bud, robins are on the lawn, redwing blackbirds have arrived at my feeder and the lovely wild goose couple that nests each year on my back pond is billing and cooing (or honking) with thoughts of eggs to come.  Spring is a funny thing; each year I will go outside one day - it may be snowing even, but I will feel like Spring has come.  And from that point on, no amount of snow or cold or wind will convince me otherwise.  

Have you noticed that one of the candidates for the GOP nomination is running against John Kennedy?  I would never try to present myself as one who is up to date on all the news, but I am pretty sure Kennedy is dead.  I could be wrong, I suppose.