Gray Matters By Elliott Joseph

The Cutlass Supreme

2011-11-14T14:41:00.000-08:00

By Elliott Joseph

December 2011

"Sell it? Great Car! Cutlass! What year? '69? '72?"

I hear the cry every day. It's actually a '71 and I am the original owner. I'll never sell it. "I'm saving it for my grandson," I say. I do not have a grandson, but it's a comfortable way to avoid a confrontation, and then I drive off on my errands.

I bought the Cutlass, a convertible, on July 17, 1971 at was then Van Ness Olds in San Francisco. It cost $4,500. I had looked at a very nice brown Mercedes, but it was $12,000 and did not have an automatic top. Since I now have over 300,000 miles with the original engine I think I made the right decision.

Yes, there have been repairs, and sometimes it is difficult to find parts, but I have a wonderful repair service, Union Garage, and they understand old cars.

The Cutlass is filled with stories. One day I was parked in the Marina. A man, accompanied by a man and a woman, approached me. Here we go again, I thought, but he surprised me by taking out a three-ring binder with pictures of his '71 Cutlass that he had at home in Switzerland. It is identical to mine in excellent condition. He showed a picture of his engine under the hood, immaculate and I think it was chromed. He asked to see under my hood, and I was embarrassed because it didn't look like anything like his.

I use my Cutlass every day. It's just my regular car and I don't exhibit it or take it to a classic car event. Yes I keep it in good shape and still have the original interior with the old but working AM radio. I'm on my third top, three paint jobs and three transmissions along with several renewed starters and brakes.

The thing about the color of the paint job is the quality of the blue. The original color is matched by computer and is simply gorgeous. It reminds me of the French expression, l'heure bleu, that time of day after the sun sets and before night falls. People respond to the blue almost more than to the car itself. Cars today are so much alike the Cutlass really stands out.

One day the Russian fleet was in, and they started taking pictures of the Cutlass. They wanted to have their picture taken sitting in the car with the top down. I think the Cutlass must be all over Russia by now.

The car drives beautifully and with its eight cylinders has a lot of power. It has no electrical systems except of course for the lights, and you have to roll up the windows by hand, which I like.

For about 38 years my wife and I were never in an accident. Then for the past two years we have been in two, one when a car went through a red light, taking out the front end, and another time when a man backed out of his garage and hit the passenger side. Both times my wife was driving and fortunately was not injured. Hayes Auto Repair did a magnificent job both times and the car looks like new, getting a lot of thumbs up. I am so cautious now when I drive, not wanting another accident. I'm very careful coming out of my garage. It's tight and the Cutlass when I bough it was called mid-size, but today, compared to most cars, it is big.

I know many people fall in love with their car, and with the Cutlass Supreme I am one of them.

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The Manhattanization of San Francisco

2011-10-20T09:41:00.000-07:00

By Elliott Joseph

November 2011

Reprinted from California Living,

The Magazine of The San Francisco Sunday

Examiner and Chronicle

To the amazement of an incredulous world the island of Manhattan has actually begun to move itself to San Francisco. While many claim to have heard the rumblings of New York ideas in the fair city of the hills and bay, it is safe to say that no one ever dreamed that brick by brick, girder by girder, street by street, twenty-two whole square miles of concrete, give or take a few miserable acres of parks, would really pick up and physically transport itself 2470 miles across the country.

Considered the largest move in the history of the world, logistically outdistances such huge undertakings as The Great Wall of China, underground Atlanta, the Astrodome and Walt Disney World, it is matched in its daring only by the decision to complete the move by mid decade. Perhaps there was secret hope that it all could really happen. Perhaps New Yorkers thought San Francisco would balk at the move.

The popular 102 story Empire State Building, long the world's tallest structure, is being painstakingly transplanted to the Embarcadero where it will replace the pitifully inadequate Ferry Building.

Sixty-nine additional skyscrapers over thirty stories in height, led by the Chrysler Building, the seventy story Rockefeller Center and sixty story Chase Manhattan Bank, are being moved to the immediate vicinity. They will house the offices of the 104 major corporations making the move, along with the host of advertising agencies, printers, accountants, insurance agents and myriad others who service them.

The United Nations, destined for Russian Hill as a concession to a soft foreign policy, is coming back to The City where it all began. The buildings will be operated by The De Young Memorial Museum.

The famed New York theater district , the Great White Way, complete with its first run motion picture houses, peep shows, side street strollers and concomitant entertainments, is destined for Broadway and Columbus Avenues, elevating the area to that of the "Crossroad of the World." Elevation of a more literal kind is also in the making, since the new density will require North Beach topless and bottomless to move into the Transamerica Building. Word has it that the move would not be unwelcomed by the renting agent.

The need for vastly increased housing is anticipated for those of Manhattan's two million inhabitants who will choose to make the move with the city, as well as the countless others who will be drawn to the new San Hattan, Fran Hattan, San Franhattan, Manfrancisco, or whatever The City may be renamed once its transformation to the new position of the new National Center is complete.

Some feel there will be a huge need for jobs for all these people. But others have pointed out that there will be enough employment handling the move itself. This latter group calls over-cautious those who see the need for new jobs after Manhattan has been transplanted, emphasizing the endless cycle destruction-construction as sufficient in and of itself as a means of generating employment. The wrecking trades alone. the group claims, will account for fifty percent of the new labor force.

An army of bulldozers is in the assembly stage for the assault on the Redwood Highway as part of the plan to link all of Northern California with the new San Francisco. Oregon is building a 40-foot wall stretching to Klamath Falls to protect itself from "the hand at our throat."

One can only wonder how it happened. Some say it started a bit at a time. Some say Manhattan grew bolder as it perceived a change in the values of San Francisco, feeling the time was right. One view even held that San Franciscans were tired of losing. They wanted to win for a change. And here was their chance to play big league ball, make a place in history for themselves.

Some thought that San Francisco had been naive, unaware of what it had, without the courage to realize it had been where others really wanted to be San Francisco, they felt, a gifted city, a pearl.

And what of New York? Suddenly finding itself free, plans are now in the making for Grand Central Park, stretching the length and width of the island. Across the Hudson, in New Jersey, things are growing again, as roads and refineries are being plowed under.

It's quieter. At times, a certain stillness, caressed with soft, child-like laughter, fills one's ears. The other day someone came up with a new idea. It took hold at once, and a hundred and fifty men, women, boys and girls marched to Brooklyn, each with a little brush, to paint the Verrazano Bridge red.

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The Search for Meaning

2011-09-07T21:01:00.000-07:00

By Elliott Joseph

October 2011

When I was teaching at The College of Marin in Northern California I gave a course called, "The Search for Meaning." While the other courses I gave were popular, I was surprised that over 60 people registered and showed up for this one, making it necessary to book an especially large room to accommodate the participants.

I should also tell you that the course was part of an adult education program at the college.

I had a good relationship with the participants (it's hard to call these adults students, considering their age and education). And so I didn't mind opening the session by saying, "It's remarkable that in only two or three hours we are going to learn the meaning of life." This got a bit of a laugh, as you might expect.

The reference I used for the course was an anthology from a series called Discovery Through the Humanities, sponsored by The National Council on the Aging, Inc., with the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The cover of the anthology was "The Thinker" by August Rodin.

The course engendered a great deal of discussion of the essays, articles, stories, poetry and photographs in the anthology, copies of which I was able to distribute to the class for use during the session.

So how does one find meaning? Actually, according to the compilers of the anthology, there are some interesting ways.

Foremost is Personal Relationships. And then there is being part of The Social Whole, being One With Nature, being aware of Truth in the Unseen, Accepting the Inevitable, and for some the concept of Life After Death. And finally, Creating Meaning through Art and Science, and Creating Meaning through Sacrifice and Service.

Some of the texts used to illustrate the authors' points were: "A Death in the Family" by James Agee, "I Have a Dream" by Martin Luther King, Jr., "Renoir, My Father" by Jean Renoir, "The Republic" by Plato, "Courage" by Anne Sexton, "Death Be Not Proud" by John Donne, "The Autobiography of Charles Darwin and Selected Letters" Francis Darwin, editor, and "Out of My Life and Thought" by Albert Schweitzer.

Magnificent writing to help us think about ways we might find in our lives for our own search for meaning.

For me, my search for meaning has primarily been Personal Relationships. I have had many friends and a rather large family with many cousins, aunts and uncles, a brother and a sister, and of course my parents. My parents divorced and my mother's new marriage was very successful with a man who adored her.

It was easy making friends growing up. Where I lived there were many boys and girls close to my age. We played many games indoors and outdoors and were very athletic. As I grew older more intellectual matters added to my development under the influence of my teachers and more mature friends.

I had several girl friends through the years, a couple more serious though I think it was my sexuality that was a driving force.

As my education proceeded, there were many other subjects of meaning, such as I have described previously in The Search for Meaning course I gave at The College of Marin.

Some of my friendships were very close and have lasted for many years from my neighborhood, my schools and college and my experience during World War II.

Meeting the woman at The City College of New York whom I married has been a profound source of meaning and happiness for me, a relationship of now 63 years.

Creating meaning has helped me as a writer and the appreciation of the mysteries of existence, through reading in science, religion and philosophy. I have also been influenced by Martin Buber's I-Thou concept, the antithesis of the I-It where one recognizes people are not things to be used. A relationship is not a separation but a meeting of the other, a give and take dynamic matter with rewards, surprises and perplexities. Physical intimacy, too, contributes deeply profound human feelings and meaningful understanding. Who can doubt this?

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Being the Oldest in the Room

2011-08-15T11:23:00.000-07:00

By Elliott Joseph

September 2011

I'd like to get a little personal today.

Age is a tired idea, but I must say I suddenly realized I am often the oldest one in the room. By that I mean at the movies or theater or restaurant or certainly at a social gathering.

At 87 I am not the oldest in the world and surely there are a lot of gray heads except in the restaurants, where the clientele is so young. When I was young I couldn't afford these restaurants.

At 87 I sometimes think it won't be long that I'll be 90, if I last. That's a number. Time goes so quickly.

Fortunately, while I have some health issues I am basically OK. I haven't played golf for over two years and tennis is long gone. Getting out of a chair is a chore and exercise is always on the horizon, but though I realize walking is the easiest and the best thing for an old guy, I don't walk enough.

What else do I feel at 87? The news is so disappointing, all those unemployed, people losing their homes, the endless stupid wars, the killings on the street.

What helps is having a neutral corner. I remember a play, I can't recall the name, where this husband kept getting his wife pregnant until she declared a neutral corner. It was a comedy with a message.

What more does an 87 year old person think about? Cassandra. Remember her? Because of her beauty Apollo granted her the gift of prophecy. But when she did not return Apollo's love he cursed her that no one would ever believe her predictions. She told the truth, but because of the curse she would never be believed. It's a legend, but so true. The bright aware woman who recognized a financial crisis would occur. She was not believed and her name wasn't even Cassandra. Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, but the inspectors were not believed. Cassandra at work again. You can't win in Afghanistan. Nope, can't be believed what common sense can see. Cassandra. Apollo's curse.

Oh well, what's an 87 year old supposed to do in the face of such tragedy? As I've said before, can you live with it? Just don't call me Cassandra. Anyway, I'm not that beautiful.

# # #

Im Silber Gemacht

2011-07-19T10:47:00.000-07:00

By Elliott Joseph

August 2011

I was 19 in 1943 and in the ROTC, Reserved Officers Training Corps, at City College of New York. Together with other members of my class in the ROTC I was enlisted in the army in June. Since December 7th, 1941, we were at war with Japan and Germany, when the Japanese abruptly bombed Pearl Harbor.

At Fort Dix in New Jersey, where I was inducted, a sergeant in charge who had a heavy foreign accent, told us recruits, " You think you soldier-- you shit." Not too good an introduction to serving our country.

Basic training in the heat of a summer in Georgia soon followed. We were a bunch of college New Yorkers, new to the South and its racial prejudices. We mixed, however, and learned what we ultimately were in for as infantry officers.

After 17 weeks of weapons and varied arduous training, we were returned to the college for a short period of education in a program called ASTP. This was followed by transfer to Officer Canidate School in another part of Georgia.

It was rigorous, difficult, but not without some humor because my close buddy, who was a few weeks ahead of me in the program, tipped me off to what to expect, making me a star. The result was I was commissioned in July of 1944.

So there I was, a Second Lieutenant, not the best job to look forward to in the infantry as an officer in combat.

Luckily, I was transferred out of the 106th Division, which was practically annihilated in the Ardennes Forest when their lines were broken by a furious assault by the Germans in what became known as the Bulge. I would have been captured or killed as some of my fellow soldiers and officers were.

As a replacement officer I arrived in Holland, following being shipped across the Atlantic Ocean with 15,000 officers and soldiers on the Queen Mary, in January of 1945, and was transferred to the 75th Infantry Division.

And then another piece of luck. Because I spoke German, thanks to courses at De Wit Clinton High School and City College of New York, I was made the staff Intelligence Officer of my battalion. There was patrolling and combat, but mercifully not nearly as much danger as other officers and the men experienced.

A memorable situation was when I was flown in a Piper Cub to reconnoiter the other side of the Rhine River, which was occupied by the Germans, in anticipation of the crossing of our Ninth Army and the British into the heart of Germany. A patrol I organized investigated the far shore at night with heavily armed men in two boats and returned safely with information that was used by our forces in the crossing.

The war in Germany was ended in May of 1945. And in Japan, fortunately for me, although not for the Japanese, the terrible Atomic Bomb, dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed so many people, ended the war in Japan in August of 1945.

There followed a year when I was stationed in Rheims, France, in charge of processing German prisoners of war and returning them to their homes. I have to admit it was a pleasant, educational interlude where I learned about French culture.

In my function processing the prisoners I dealt with their officers, and happened to have been promoted to First Lieutenant and given silver bars. When I showed up at a subseqent meeting with the officers, they noticed the bars and suddenly shouted, "Im Silber Gemacht," recognizing that silver bars were the sign of promotion, evidently a matter of pride that "their" commander had been recognized.

I was returned home and discharged in July of 1946. With the support of the GI Bill I completed my education, receiving a Bachelor Degree in English from the City College of New York and a Masters Degree in the Teaching of English from Teachers College, Columbia University with the hopes of becoming a writer. With my wife, Roz, I then travelled to Paris and enrolled in the Sorbonne, where she and I enjoyed a memorable year.

I have been able to get some things published and have enjoyed teaching at the College of Marin in the Bay Area where I recently retired. And now I have my blog, Gray Matters By Elliott Joseph, which I hope to have its three year collection of pieces produced in a book.

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Bronx Boy

2011-05-25T16:01:00.016-07:00

By Elliott Joseph

June 2011

I loved growing up in The Bronx. I had so many friends my age. We played in the streets, which were safe, hardly any traffic. The years were the thirties, another time. Somehow my parents were able to feed and clothe me in those difficult economic days. Corduroy knickers and colorful sweaters, soft shoes from the Army Navy store where I could also buy a pocket knife to play mumblety-peg in the gardens.

You never said you lived in Bronx. It was The Bronx, unlike the names of the other boroughs, Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island. It was, and still is, The Bronx.

The Bronx is a county with its own courthouse and executive. There are two stories of how it got its name. One is that it was named for a Swedish sea captain, James Bronck who settled there in 1639 and established a farm. The other story named for the Bronck family farm. As Google reports, "Many of the wealthy of Manhattan would come to visit their friends who owned the farm, and would simply say they were going to the Bronck's ." The name stuck.

The Bronx became the home to Irish, Italian, German and Jewish immigrants, of which my family was one from England, Poland and Russia, our neighborhood on the Grand Concourse being principally Jewish. For Italian flavor we visited Arthur Avenue where we got great pizza and Italian pastries and listened to Italian spoken joyfully. It was in Creston Junior High School and De Witt Clinton High School that I met non-Jewish students. P.S. 64, my elementary school, was almost all Jewish, which closed for the Jewish holidays, an extra vacation from our studies for us kids.

After school we played all the New York street games until dark and our mothers called for us to come upstairs. We played Ring-o-Leavio, Johnny-Ride-The Pony, Stick Ball, Salugi. Touch Football, Immies Hits and Spans, Catch, Slug Ball, Boxball, Skelly, Potsy, cards and lots of games.

We roller skated, played street hockey, threw what we called a pink Spaldeen rubber ball that had a high bounce. We talked and talked about what we'd do when we grew up. We roasted mickeys on a fire in the lot. We never fought except if a bully made his way into our group. He'd get the Bronx cheer, which would deflate him. When it snowed I'd sleigh down our hill belly-whopping on my Flexible Flyer while one of our gang watched for the occasional car or horse and wagon delivering milk or ice.

When I was fifteen my father and mother divorced and my beautiful mother subsequently married a very nice man who adored her. With my little brother and my big sister we moved in with them. My stepfather, whom I called "uncle," bought me a bicycle in Macy's and I pedaled safely on the expansive Grand Concourse, which was modeled after the Champs Elysees, to my old neighborhood and my friends. By then there were girls in our gang and new adventures trying to get a "feel."

There was a swimming pool and huge parks and the famous Bronx Zoo and exciting neighborhoods to explore. We rode the elevated train to high school and the subway to City College on Convent Avenue.

We listened to the radio for the baseball scores and stole our way onto a roof that gave us a view of the Yankee Stadium's games. We listened to the heavyweight championship fight where Joe Lewis knocked out the German boxer Max Schmeling in the first round, to much of the consternation of Adolf Hitler. We hung on every word of FDR's Fireside Chats after his stunning victory in the 1932 election over Herbert Hoover. We lost five dollars when our local savings bank failed after the start of the Depression.

What a time it was, so much an important part of a young boy's Bronx life, and the friends I made, which has stayed with me all this time.

# # #

Good Old Fashion

2011-04-24T11:07:00.000-07:00

By Elliott Joseph

July 2009

My friend Phil has loosened fashion's grip on me.

And not a moment too soon as I consider the frightening prospect of having to replace any part of my wardrobe.

He walked in the other day, looking like a million. He was wearing a smart, single breasted gray glen plaid suit, white cotton dress shirt with spread collar, deep red silk tie with tiny black dots and a pair of shining, wingtip black oxfords.

"New outfit?" I asked.

"Not on your life!" he said, smiling. "I got these clothes right out of my closet. The suit is Jacques Roy, Paris. Bought it at Barney's New York in 1986. The shirt is nine years old. The tie ten. And the shoes sixteen. That's years, man, years."

"Some of my trousers are tapered below the knee," I said. " Some are flared."

"And some. I'll bet, are straight," he said, laughing mischievously.

It was an exhilarating moment as I thought I might be able to wear those great clothes that I've cherished over the years. But it all weighed heavily on my mind. Could I stop believing that the day of my old clothing had passed?

Phil must have understood my dilemma.

"I say to those who feel they have to dress down. 'Go ahead if you feel you must dress to conform and forget who you really are.' Guys like you and me should dress for ourselves. You wear your Marty Sullivan. And I'll wear my Jacques Roy. We'll stay trim so we can fit into them, and we'll knock each other dead in the process.

"The alternative," he went on as he made for the door, "is to go out today and pay eight hundred and seventy-five dollars for an off-the-rack two-piece wool and synthetic blend suit, sixty-four dollars and fifty cents for a shirt that doesn't even have your exact sleeve length, forty-five for a tie and ninety-five dollars for a pair of shoes! Or worse, drop your self respect and get a pair of jeans and a tee shirt. Uhg!"

Flushed with excitement after Phil left, I wondered what it will be like when I come out with my old but in great shape Marty Sullivan suit , my old still crisp Ascot Chang custom shirt, the foulard I got years ago in Los Angeles and my brown English loafers, class of eighty-nine.

Will my age be showing?

So be it!

# # #

My Year At The Sorbonne

2011-04-18T14:43:00.000-07:00

By Elliott Joseph

May 2011

Actually, my year at the Sorbonne was a year in Paris without the Sorbonne. You see, although I was registered for a Doctorat d'Universite I never attended any classes for the simple reason

they were all in French!

The year was 1951. In order to qualify for my G.I. Bill monthly check of one hundred and five dollars as a married man, I had to establish a subject for my thesis. I met with my advisor, who fortunately agreed to conduct the interview in English.

"Blake," I said.

"You Americans," he said. "All you know is Blake. Why don't you do Washington Irving in Spain. He's American, a wonderful writer. You could go to Spain and do your research there."

Although I had been an English major in New York, and had a Master's degree, I was woefully ignorant of Irving's experience in Spain. I vaguely knew he was the author of Tales of the Alhambra and later learned he was the American Minister to Spain. At another time, when I eventually got to the Alhambra, I was sorry I had not done any work on that thesis idea.

Never mind all that. I liked all his other work, which included The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, A History of New York, Rip Van Winkle and a host of other writings collected in The Sketch Book.

My wife Roz and I were overjoyed to devote the year to experiencing the food, wine and culture of Paris. Hotel living was far from pleasant, however. But fortunately the student services of the Sorbonne got us a small apartment in the fourteenth arondissement near Montparnesse where we thrived as happy residents despite the lack of hot water. The public baths and heating up enough water on our two burner stove for a bath kept us fit.

We did not have a refrigerator, but I loved shopping every day in the neighborhood food and wine stores and learned enough French to get by. One day in a butcher shop it occurred to me to ask the patron, "How long would it take to eat a cow?" I don't know what came over me to ask such a question.

"What did he say?" asked one of the local customers who was there that day. When he relayed my question to them an intense discussion on the fringe of an argument ensued until one asked, "How many in the family?" I don't recall the final result, but most of the group was satisfied with the response.

The cafe night life with the gang that we got to know was ideal, just hanging out, having drinks and engaging in hours of discussion on just about every thing. We were living the free life of expatriates soaking up all that Paris had to offer us in our twenties. The parks, the neighborhoods, the sites. You cannot describe how beautiful it all was. Late nights and sleeping in the next morning was a fragrant routine, listening to the French radio with some tantalizing comprehension. Reading so many books. Trying to write.

How we managed to find a beat up VW Beetle we could afford in a newspaper ad was a miracle of sorts, which gave us runs through France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Belgium and Holland, often breaking down but finding people who could keep it going for very little. Each trip a story, documented in four notebooks we kept religiously. So many memories. Always wishing, wishing the dream would never end until we ran out of money enough to supplement our G.I. checks and had to return home to the U.S. to find work and our changed lives.

To this day, so many years later, we have applied the rich lessons we learned during those glorious days in the City of Light. Paris, we will never forget you.

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Exercise

2011-03-24T16:03:00.000-07:00

By Elliott Joseph

April 2011

I have several ways to exercise.

It's a serious endeavor, because everything I read about exercise says it is good for you. I do not like to exercise, no matter how healthy it's supposed to be.

I may be an exception in that there are a lot of people on the streets running, whether it is hot, cold, raining, or probably somewhere snowing.

There are also stores that have exercise machines in the window with people, mostly young sweating, who are the farthest thing you can imagine from needing to exercise.

Be it as it may, I try.

The first thing I do in the morning is go to the bathroom. Not to exercise, but to urinate or whatever. Then I have my orange juice, after brushing my teeth. There is some exercise there but not very much.

Before breakfast, because I don't want to upset my stomach, I stretch my legs then my shoulders. I have seen Asian people in the park throwing their arms around, so I try that a couple of times. That hurts my shoulders and my elbows, so I stop that pretty quickly.

Getting out of a chair is kind of tough these days, so I do that two or three times. It seems rather silly, but getting out of a chair can be important.

Don't misunderstand me, I know this is vital. I have a couch, and getting out of it is not that easy, but I don't want to become a potato.

Walking is the key to health, so I don't take the car to go a few blocks. We have a lot of hills in San Francisco, so walking isn't a piece of cake. I do not eat cake.

Diet is not exercise.

You think I'm kidding, but I know this is serious.

I used to play tennis. I enjoyed this even when I lost, which was more often than most. I switched to golf, which is as you may know, a game where one good shot brings you back for another try.

Drinking is not exercise, but it is far more enjoyable and not too bad for you if you don't do it to excess. Exercise in excess can be dangerous for your body. Joggers can overdo it to the point of losing their breath. That doesn't seem too bright. Swimming requires showering and risking athlete's foot in the locker room.

There surely is a point to exercise, and far be it for me to deny it, but how do you measure moderation? There must be a way to exercise without dread.

I am looking for that way.

# # #

What Are People Actually Thinking?

2011-02-22T17:17:00.000-08:00

By Elliott Joseph

March 2011

I've always wondered what people are actually thinking. It boggles the mind when you see what they do, what they say. Are they thinking? I took a course in psychology, way back when, to try to understand it. What I learned was when the environment of lab rats was put into turmoil, the rats went crazy. Is that our world today? Are people simply reacting to our nutty environment, the terror, the aggressiveness, the pace, the economy? Which came first, behavior or thinking?

You know what you are thinking. In the interest of trying to figure out what you or others are thinking, I thought I'd tell you what I am thinking.

I don't think you can surmise what goes on in a person's mind, one can't read their actual thoughts by simply noting their behavior. You can't overhear what they are thinking, as though they are doing a Shakespearean soliloquy.

I have to admit that in recent years I have started to think aloud, talk to myself. I am often alone for great periods, and suddenly realize that I haven't said anything for hours. My cell phone is just sitting there. Though I am married and have friends and family, I don't think aloud where others can hear me. So up to now no one knows what I am thinking, unless I tell them. When I write they may have some idea but writing is different.

A great many of my thoughts, I am sure, are not unique. I am a member of society and the human race, which is comforting, though I like to think I am me and no one else is me. My thoughts, as yours are too, were different when we were young, growing up, getting an education and at different stages of life.

So what are some of the things I have been thinking lately?

I have done a lot of reading in my time of philosophy and psychology and the classics. They are a part of me, but I don't think of them actively that much now, with some exceptions.

When I look in the mirror in the morning I sometimes talk to my image. Who are you I wonder? What do people think about you? They see my profile and the back of my head, which has to give them a different view of me physically, in addition to the frontal view that is familiar to me.

When someone calls out my name I am somewhat surprised, though of course I shouldn't be. I use their names, why shouldn't they use mine? My parents named me and for the rest of my life I have come to realize that is me. If I had changed my name, which I had thought of doing, would that also be who I am?

And what does it mean to be a senior, to have lived a portion of what others call history? I was "it" a while ago in a game of "Trivial Pursuits." I had to select a category. I was not up on sports or contemporary music, or so many other things. I knew something about history, so I chose it. Every question was about something that had happened in my lifetime. History!

To have lived through the Great Depression, World War II, The Korean War, Vietnam, all those presidents. Other people's history.

Have you ever thought about all the numbers in your life? Social Security, your land telephone number, cell phone number, your address, the phone numbers and addresses of the people you know, if you work, all those numbers, how much money you have, how much you have lost, your library card, your credit cards, pin numbers, checking account, passwords, license plate, driving permit, passport number, date of birth, wife's or partner's numbers, your combination lock, your safe deposit box, the temperature, the distance of the moon and the planets, how many days in November, your weight. You get the picture. Be grateful you are not on Roman numerals. How do you remember all those numbers?

I think a lot about my wife, of course, and my friends and family, and I'm sure they think about me, though one can't know exactly what they are thinking. Fiction describes people, some times going into their heads, added to the observations of behavior. Can that be utilized to understanding the way people actually think?

Psychologists, philosophers, do they know? The closest I can come to guessing what you are thinking has to do with the news, politics, family life, relationships, sports, the movies, television, the economy, healthcare, things to buy. We think about what we see and hear on the media, to paraphrase Will Rogers, who ironically said he only knows what he reads in the newspapers.

Kids, teenagers, adults, tomorrow's seniors, heads full of thoughts, some wise, some banal. Sex, children, survival, jobs, money, pleasure, health, joy, fear -- all those thoughts, the good and the bad. We may not know them, but as the Bard reminds us, "Thinking makes it so."

One of the little things I think about is what I should have for a drink before dinner. Or whether I should have a drink. I have heard that having a drink, as long as it is not in excess, say two or three, isn't harmful. In fact, a glass or two of wine with dinner is actually beneficial. And enjoyable. Eating, in excess, isn't good for you. Nor is sex these days.

What else do I think?

There is, of course, the world, our country, the suffering and joys, what it all means, if that were possible.

Sometimes I am not thinking at all, just reacting, living the day. But when I am not day dreaming, there are more things I think about.

Bob Herbert, The New York Times columnist, makes me think about the rich getting richer while the poor get poorer and the middle class losing that position in society that they have had since World War II. Are we losing our democracy, while Egypt and perhaps parts of the Middle East, may be gaining theirs?

Why do some people order Coke when they go out to dinner? Why do they order a hamburger at a good restaurant? Why do they dress down instead of up? Why do they shout and laugh so much in restaurants? Why is the music, if that's what it's called, so loud in restaurants? The French don't allow it. So much better for your enjoyment of a good meal.

Why do some people drive so fast, even in the rain? And so aggressively, without common courtesy?

Am I being too critical? I wonder about that sometimes. But not enough.

What do I like about some people? That they're nice, funny, interesting, look good whether they are good looking or not. Why don't I like Best Sellers, popular movies? Am I an elitist? What's so bad about being an elitist? Wasn't that once upon a time a distinction like a good education?

I think about my skin a lot. It's so vulnerable. Is that the word for sensitive? It cracks and sheds, gets so dry. It has lost its integrity, some one once told me.

I used to think about what people thought of me. No longer, though I want to think I still care, in a way. What are some of the other things I think about?

Security, relationships, what I should have said that time, the moon, the stars, the universe, evolution, faith, books I'm reading and have read, my education, money, death, my travels, my health, my garden, my 71 Olds Cutlass Supreme convertible, what's going on, where it's going, so many questions.

Enough about me. What are you thinking, right now?

# # #

You're Only Dead Once

2011-02-03T15:28:00.000-08:00

By Elliott Joseph

February 2011

To life!

Hey, wait a minute. This blog is supposed to be entertaining. What am I doing writing about death? Well maybe what has an absolute end can help provide meaning to what comes before.

Ernst Becker opens his Pulitzer Prize winning book, "The Denial of Death," with a quote from Samuel Johnson, "The prospect of death wonderfully concentrates the mind." As the realization came to me of its eventuality, whenever that may occur, I began to prepare information for those who will have the responsibility of taking care of matters after I am gone.

What started this for me? Besides my own natural thoughts, I was faced with all those tragedies and disasters in the news, floods, tornados, storms, shootings, war, disease, the ever presence of obituaries.

But what sealed it for me was deleting the names in my address book of those friends and family members who have passed away. What a terribly sad and painful thing to do! Everyone dies, but how to accept it? If I could retain the names of the dead, perhaps their ghosts would comfort me.

There is so much being written about death these days. The media, the literature, the films, the theater. It's hard to escape it.

Live forever? Jonathan Swift cautions us about that, as you may recall from that part of Gulliver's Travels about the Struldbrugs.

"Happy notion where every child hath at least a chance for being immortal...their minds free and disengaged from the continual apprehension of death." What advantages I would acquire if I lived forever, I thought.

"The question," Swift writes, "was not whether a man would choose to be always in the prime of youth, attended with prosperity and health, but how he would have a perpetual life under all the usual disadvantages which old age brings along with it.

"Loss of teeth and hair, no distinctions of taste, eating and drinking without relish or appetite. The diseases they were subject to still continue. In talking they forget the common appalation of things, and the names of persons, even of those who are their nearest friends and relations."

And so Emerson writes, "As the bird trims how to the gale, I trim myself to the storm of time, I man the rudder, reef the sail, obey the voice of eve obeyed at prime; 'Lowly faithful, banishing fear, right onward drive unharmed; port, well worth the cruise, is near, and every wave is charmed.'"

And John Donne. "Death be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so."

For some, I guess, like Donne, "One short sleep past, we wake eternally, and death shall be no more, death, thou shall die."

Every creature, from the beasts of the jungle to the tiniest insect, does everything it can to avoid death, and yet there are men and women and boys and girls who come to welcome it, though in truth, others embrace it tranquilly, if not eagerly.

Death?

To life!

# # #

You're Only Dead Once

2011-02-03T15:27:00.000-08:00

Ten Thousand Words?

2010-12-25T16:17:00.000-08:00

By Elliott Joseph

January 2011

On Christmas Day The New York Times published The Year in Pictures 2010. To say they were remarkable, eloquent and breathtaking would not be an exaggeration. On the same day the San Francisco Chronicle published an article reporting that Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kansas, the last lab in the world processing Kodachrome color film, will discontinue its service at the end of the year.

Also reported was "The Last Kodachrome Photograph Show." The photographer Pat Willard, who will have four Kodachrome photographs in the show, refuses to use Ektachrome film and will revert to black and white.

My wife Roz Joseph, also a professional photographer, has refused to go digital and has given up taking pictures, leaving some thousands of color slides and prints in her collection.

With page after page of color photographs in the paper, especially in the Sunday Magazine, it is shocking that the Times has announced it is dramatically reducing (believe it?) the publishing of photographs starting the first of 2011, in an effort to bring back some of the ten thousand words that even one picture represents.

Words will continue to appear in the paper for those intrepid readers who wish to go beyond the captivating images brought to bear by a host of talented shutterbugs.

So what's going on? It is the development of the digital camera that may be behind the return of the printed word. Rapid technological advance of the camera from the days of the old Graphlex encumbered by its outlandish flash, has transformed photography to today's convenient digital devices which not only do away with film, but which, with alarming alacrity, backed by the extraordinary manipulations afforded by Photo Shop, produce frightfully gorgeous results, such as raising a model's awkward eyebrow and putting a sports car on the top of Mount Everest.

I am a victim as well as a beneficiary of this ease of producing good color renditions heretofore requiring the most careful attention to format and subject, and without the need of utilizing painstaking studio work aided by brilliantly creative lighting.

In a recent three week trip to Portugal, one of the world's most photogenic countries, I shot, without any particularly professional ability, over 700 not bad photographs with a pocket sized digital camera I bought for less than two hundred and fifty dollars. Gone were the heavy, expensive Nikons and their array of lenses with there countless boxes of transparency film, to shoot dozens of guesswork slides that I could show to no one without a projector and a dinosaur of a screen, while they dozed off in boredom. Furthermore, each of those friends and relatives, with their digital cameras could now produce rather excellent pictures, making my own unnecessary.

I must say I have taken some pretty good pictures myself in the past, have gotten some awards, and have been the subject of photographs by some excellent pros, such as the one shown here by the renowned travel photographer Carl Purcell, who had led the safari trip to Kenya that my wife and I took twenty-five years ago. Because of his talented eye he was able to make a snapshot look thought out, and it proved good enough to be published in newspapers across the United States and abroad, demonstrating that you don't need a digital camera to do a great job.

In my early career in advertising I learned to respect the agency's art directors and photographers whose now ancient equipment could produce outstanding work. Who read my words of copy that I labored over?

So it's actually the quality of the photography these days that is behind The New York Times possible thoughts about questioning the proverbial statement that a picture is worth ten thousand words. And the word may be spreading. Amazon is back to selling books. With Kindle, your average consumer is reading more, and turning from the thrall of the image.

Sports, travel, advertising, arts and leisure, Sunday styles, even The Week in Review, have been dependent on the photograph to grab the attention that only a glaring headline used to produce.

If the Times ever does cut back its photography, will you miss the ease of all those amazing pictures to tell you their story? Will it try to make you want to know more with the word?

"Taking photographs," writes Susan Sontag in On Photography, "has set up a chronic voyeuristic reaction to the world which levels the meaning of all events."

Will I lose my former love of the photograph? Is it too seductive, too easy to relate to? Has it become too time consuming to think? Too difficult to ignore? Will I miss the words?

# # #

Alameda Sand Sculpture

2010-11-04T13:04:00.000-07:00

By Elliott Joseph

Photography By Roz Joseph

December 2010

I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read."

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that marked them and the heart that fed,

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing besides remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

Who can explain the compelling anti-Ozymandias passion to create beautiful sculptures and castles of sand, only to see them washed away within hours by a relentlessly approaching tide? This curious and highly vulnerable art form can be seen on countless bathing beaches around the world each summer, yet nowhere is it more poignantly and expertly practiced than at the Robert Crown Memorial State Beach in Alameda, California where each June several hundred serious men, women and children compete in the Annual Sand Sculpture and Castle Contest.

They come well prepared to this broad expanse, with its handsome view of the San Francisco skyline. They bring home-made tools, shovels, containers for carrying and spraying water, a sketch of their planned sculpture, warm clothes for protection against the wind, and enough food and drink to sustain them during the feverish work session to meet the deadline and beat the water before it erases their painstakingly constructed achievements from the memory of mankind.

The sculpture must be made of sand, with trimming of wood, rocks and shells found that day on the beach. That's the only rule before they go to work, singly or in groups, on the small plot of beach assigned to them at the low tide morning registration hour. By mid-day their sculpture will have to be completed so that the judging, and the all-important picture-taking, can take place before the inevitable.

# # #

Fading Fast

2010-10-17T16:52:00.000-07:00

Painted Wall Signs Are Disappearing

But Is Restoration The Answer?

By Elliott Joseph

Photographs By Roz Joseph

Reprinted From Online Preservation

November 2010

In the heart of Chinatown in Oakland, California, there is an old advertising sign that looks just like new. In fact, it is. The "MJB Coffee Why?"sign, prominently displayed on the side of a century-old building was first painted in 1906, but was redone 15 years ago.

The owners of the building were able to get a grant from the MJB Coffee Company, through the Oakland Museum, to repaint the sign in its original colors. The sign was one of dozens that had been painted on walls throughout California for the company, which wanted to pique people's curiosity about their java.

Across the bay in San Francisco, on a building that housed the Victoria Theater, another old advertising wall sign was revitalized 25 years ago. The 1920 "Albers Flapjack Flour" sign had deteriorated so much that painters had to find photographs of the original wall from the Carnation Company, which owned Albers. Although the black-and-white photographs showed the miner's facial expression and other details on the ad, painters had to guess the mural's colors.

These renewed signs are among the exceptions, however. Thousands of others in cities, towns, and rural areas across America are not as fortunate. They are doomed, either by destruction of the buildings that are their canvasses, a covering coat of paint, or weather and time.

For instance, San Francisco's "Get Kist for a Nickel" sign, whose provocative message promoted the soft drink for more than 40 years, is gone. In the otherwise beautifully preserved town of Nevada City, California, the landmark "Rose Fashion Shoppe" wall sign can barely be read. Exposed to the elements for almost a century, it is simply fading away.

Created for commercial purposes on brick, concrete and other canvasses, old painted wall signs may have lost their power of persuasion, but they have taken on a value of their own as American artifacts.

One of the companies that painted walls was the California firm of Foster and Kleiser. Before it was purchased by another company in 1953, when the service was discontinued, the company had painted walls in hundreds of cities in the Western states. The service was called the "Special Paint" department, says Joseph Blackstock, director of research at the Patrick Media Group, Inc., the company's current owners.

"The term 'Special Paint' was probably more accurate in the years following World War II," Blackstock says, "because we painted on other surfaces as well as on regular walls. We might paint designs on water towers or reservoirs or indeed do murals in commercial establishments."

Almost all outdoor advertising companies offered a wall-painting service in the early years. The paint was usually brightly colored, and signs were painted once a year, sometimes twice or more. Affectionately known as "wall dogs," the painters had to work with many kinds of surfaces.

"Some of the surfaces were so bad," Blackstock says, "they would wear out good brushes in a day or two. Another factor was the weather. In Seattle and Portland, much of the painting had to be done in the rain. In Tucson and Phoenix, it was often in temperatures of over 100 degrees."

The cost of painted advertisements was surprisingly low. In 1929, they ranged from $15 to $50 per month for a three year contract in heavily trafficked areas, with exceptionally busy locations going for $100 per month. Ten years later, the company sold advertisements for as little as $9 per month and as much as $250. More than a few new products got their start on wall ads: Coca-Cola, Signal Oil, and Canada Dry were prime examples.

In addition to using walls in cities, enterprising tobacco companies sent their representatives to rural areas to convince farmers to allow the sides of their barns to become advertisements. One of the most successful companies to do this was Mail Pouch Tobacco: "Treat Yourself to the Best" started to appear on barns everywhere.

"In the early days, the farmer was offered his choice of being paid subscriptions, says Mary Ruth Whorton of the Helme Tobacco Company, which now owns the Mail Pouch brand. Whorton tells the story of a British celebrity arriving in New York who was asked what he thought America was most famous for. Without a moment's hesitation, he replied, "Good looking women and Mail Pouch Tobacco signs."

At first, local sign painters were given the rural jobs. Later, by the 1930s, the firm of William and Ed Burner were handling all the contracts -- as many as 17,000 barns, walls and billboards. The 1965 Highway Beautification Act forced Mail Pouch to paint over many of its ads, since signs within 660 feet of interstate and federally aided highways are now prohibited. In former days, it took about three years to cover all the territories.

Currently, Helme employs one part-time person to paint signs in Ohio, West Virginia, Western Pennsylvania and Western Maryland. They are repainted every five to six years, and new locations are rarely added.

Painting walls is a tradition as old as Pompeii. In old wall signs a time is conveyed that can never return, when milk was delivered at the door, when flappers danced the Charleston and a penny bought a salted pretzel or a jaw-challenging gumball. Is restoring them an option? Some say that those who attempt to restore these ads change them in the process. They look too new, too crisp, too fresh, and too out of place, as if we expected to take their original message seriously. There is something to be said for keeping those that remain in a state of arrested decay.

"I loved those old wall signs," Blackstock says, "and was greatly disappointed when our company discontinued them."

# # #

Six Days in The City

2010-09-26T16:29:00.000-07:00

By Elliott Joseph

Reprinted from California Living

San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle

From a diary found under a bench in Washington Square

MONDAY

11:10 a.m.

Up after nine and a half hours. Feeling good. Better wash T-shirt. Hair coming along.

Noon

Breakfast at Jim and Dora's. Saw Kim and Charles. Fog burning off.

1:00 p.m.

Almost succeeded in controlling left nostril after twenty-five minutes of concentration in Washington Square.

2:00 p.m.

Observed some suits. Wasted lives.

3:00 p.m.

Read "Walden." Really dig Thoreau. Wind coming up.

5:00 p.m.

Hunza's for a shake.

7:00 p.m.

Gold Spike for dinner. No wine.

9:00 p.m.

Cold tonight. Double espresso at Trieste. Rapped about war and photography.

Midnight.

Felt stiff neck coming on. Practiced concentrating on the left nostril again. To bed at two.

TUESDAY

11:25 a.m.

Up after nine and a half. Neck OK.

Noon

Bumped into Maggie at Jim and Dora's. Said she's going to buy some belts and set up a blanket at Embarcadero Plaza. Asked me if I want to go into partnersip. Baba says, "All life is an effort to attain freedom from self-created entanglement."

1:00 p.m.

Held breath for three minutes in Washington Square.

2:00 p.m.

Hitched to Golden Gate Park. Got a ride all the way in a new Ford pick-up. Golden Gate Park was designed by one man. Why does man foul the nest?

5:00 p.m.

Took three hitches to get to North Beach. Bumped into Red Ed. Said he was going to Oregon. "I love a broad margin to my life." Sky bluer than blue. Bought some groceries.

7:00 p.m.

Beef stew at the U.S. Saw this groovy chick. Great teeth. Libra. Would you believe, a lawyer!

9:00 p.m.

Walked. Glad I didn't sell my black turtle neck sweater.

Midnight

Smoked. Resolved never to shave the beard for anyone. Thought I was getting a headache, but it passed.

WEDNESDAY

Noon

Ten hours. At this rate, I'll live to be a hundred.

12:30 p.m.

Breakfast at Jim and Dora's. Should take coffee black.

1:15 p.m.

Tried the right nostril at Washington Square Got a dog's mess on my left leg. Surprised I didn't get mad.

2:30 p.m.

Walked to Bank of America building. All bombing is insane. Peace has to start with each of us. Sorry I sold my camera.

4:30 p.m.

Watched the commuters running. To eat their meals? Play tennis? Make love?

6:00 p.m.

Napped.

7:00 p.m.

Liver and onions at Little Joe's. The way he sweats!

9:00 p.m.

Peeked into three pornos. Do our bodies think?

10:00 p.m

Picked up this girl. Sally. Works for an advertising agency as a secretary. Has an M.A. in English, but didn't tell them so she could get the job. Inglorious man.

Midnight.

Three times.

THURSDAY

9:30 a.m.

Phil, Mark and a guy named Bob crashed pad. Hitching all night. Mark going back to get his degree. Went back to sleep.

Noon

Called Sally. Crab meat salad at Mama's. Sally paid. Wondered whatever happened to Ruth Moore.

1:30 p.m.

Left nostril exercise at Washington Square.

2:00 p.m.

Wondered what I'll be like at thirty. Not all that far to go. Felt the warm sun under my skin. Bob made me laugh this morning. Said he'd come to San Francisco to make it.

3:30 p.m.

Walked to Cala Foods. No opening yet. Checker cum laude. The dears don't know what they're missing.

6:00 p.m.

Letter from mom. Herb got a raise. Her hints used to be more subtle.

7:00 p.m.

Everybody to the U.S. Had to wait twenty minutes for a table. Maggie there. Said she's got the belts. Told her I'm not cut out for business. Now how would I know that?

9:30 p.m.

Browsed through Tower Records. Shot pool at the Sport.

Midnight.

Alone again.

FRIDAY

11:00 a.m.

Registered at Opportunity Personnel. Why is filling out an application so degrading? Should be called a supplication.

1:00 p.m.

Changed back into jeans.

2:00 p.m.

Dim Sum at Hang Ah. Wondered who is going to rent all that office space going up.

3:00 p.m.

Cable cars filling up. Must be the weekend again.

4:00 p.m.

Fell asleep on a bench at Washington Square. Hit by a frisbee.

6:00 p.m.

Walked to Henry Africa's. Didn't go in.

7:30 p.m.

Ham steak at the U.S. Mixed with the tourists on Grant. Called Sally. Out.

9:00 p.m.

Saw Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood. Couldn't believe it!

Midnight.

Irish at Buena Vista. Not one face made me happy. To bed at 1:30.

SATURDAY

Hitched to Tam. Thick white fog bank off the coast. City absolutely the most beautiful sight. Raced a dog. Hitched to Stinson Beach. Alive at last. Should go back to Mendocino one of these days.

# # #

The Russians of California

2010-08-18T14:42:00.000-07:00

By Elliott Joseph

Reprinted from The Voice of America

September 2010

The other night I had smoked fish, pelmeni and shashlik for dinner. My wife recently made borsch, piroshki and beef Stroganoff. A few weeks ago we spent the day at Russian Gulch State Park. Last week we toured the Russian River. One of our favorite magazines has published a new recipe for Kulebiaka. I sometimes go to Irinka for a glass of tea, or browse in the Ananie bookstore. On the bus I saw a man reading a newspaper called The Russian Daily Life. I live on Russian Hill.

Where am I? Moscow? Kiev? Saint Petersburg?

Not at all. I am in San Francisco, California, and it seems that a day can hardly go by that I don't see or hear or touch or taste something Russian. Russians are all over the world, of course. Through the many years of their great history they have traveled, they have traded, they have hunted, they have planted and settled. Some have remained, some have returned to their motherland. Some have settled in other countries and then moved on to other lands.

But a certain number of Russians have come to California. Here, too, some stayed and some left. And the process still goes on as Russians continue to come and go from all over the world. It was natural, even inevitable for the first Russians to have come to California. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the west coast of what is now America was the next step for Russians who had made the trip to the Aleutian Islands and Alaska. At that time the Spanish and Mexican governments in control of California felt threatened by what they regarded as Russian expansion. To prevent this, the Spanish increased their own colonization of California, and enacted restrictive legislation against the Russians, who were engaged in fur and whale oil trade, agriculture, shipbuilding, cattle raising, fishing and forestry.

The Russians formed a colony at the Russian River, north of San Francisco, called Slavensk, now known as Fort Ross. Meanwhile, the Spanish established missions up and down California to provide a sort of barrier against the Russians. The northernmost of these was the Mission San Francisco Solano, founded in 1823 at Sonoma, butting up against the Russian settlement.

Not all of the Spanish were hostile to the Russians, and there are many stories of friendship and mutual assistance. There is even a famous, if unfortunately tragic, love story. Nicolas Petrovich Rezanoff, a Russian government attache, and a celebrated sixteen year old beauty, Conception Arrilaga, daughter of the Spanish governor of the territory, managed to secure official approval of their betrothal. But Rezanoff, journeying across Siberia, to make a report to his government before the wedding, developed a fever and died. It was 35 years before Conception learned her Russian lover had not abandoned her of his own free will. In the meantime, she had taken church vows, and was to remain faithful to Rezanoff all her life.

Because their people were beset with physical and economic hardships and the mounting hostility of the Spanish, the Russian authorities ordered withdrawal of the Russian colony from California, selling all Russian properties in Decembeer 1841 to Johann August Sutter, a Swiss then living on the Sacramento River.

Today, there are about 50,000 Russians in California, most of whom live in the San Francisco Bay Area. They arrived in periodic waves starting around 1900, except for 50 families who came as early as 1869. Some were Molokani or "milk drinkers," pacifists who drank no alcohol. Others were "Spirit Wrestlers," sometimes called Doukhobours. Some were Subotniks. Many came by way of Turkey, Iran and Siberia. Many came after the revolution of 1917-1919. In the 1930s many came from Manchuria. The last big group to come to California were displaced persons from parts of Eastern Europe, just after World War II.

And what about today's Russians of California? What are they like? How do they differ from other Americans? Seeing how strongly their influence is felt, I became fascinated with the subject. I had to learn more, because in doing so I would learn more about California, San Francisco and myself.. And as I did, I felt I wanted to tell you about it.

# # #

The Widow of Nob Hill

2010-07-16T16:16:00.000-07:00

By Elliott Joseph

Reprinted from California Living

San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle

August 2010

San Francisco has changed. It's so sad. Of course we've managed to save a few things. It was a lovely performance tonight, wasn't it? Verdi, Verdi, where would we be without you, Verdi? So passionate.

I'm fourth generation San Francisco, you know. But I've told you that, haven't I? Strange. Very odd being part of the hills, so to speak. I certainly am as old as the hills. Oh yes, I am. You'd rather walk a young beauty, wouldn't you? Oh yes, you would.

You are a perfectly charming young man. A perfect dear for taking me to dinner tonight. And the opera. How should I ever have gotten out of the house without you, Jeff? Jeff, that's a lovely name. So masculine and assertive.

My husband's name was Arthur. Now that's a substantial name. Arthur. Oh he had a good life. He did so much for The City. A really splendid man, Arthur. It's a good thing he's not here to see what those Vulgars are doing. Vulgars -- that's my descriptive for people who have no taste. Taste, cultivation, they're frightfully old-fashioned and unhip ideas, aren't they? Everyone in blue jeans and work shirts and trying so desperately hard to look hard up. It's such a bore.

I have always worn what I thought was beautiful, whether or not it was in style. I wish some of those little dears would have the courage to dress individually, instead of in that pseudo-individual look, which is getting positively sickening in its repetition.

Ah, but San Francisco's elegance is a thing of the past. We're relics, my dear Jeff. Anachronisms, living in a city that could be first-rate if it would only take itself in hand.

Now, I have never for a moment believed that a beautiful woman couldn't be interesting. Why should one expect less from a city? Here we are, the major cities of the world abdicating their responsibility for greatness, our civilization virtually peeling and crumbling, and San Francisco is primping and dolling itself up as though beauty were more than skin deep.

But I'm raving, simply raving, my dear sweet Jeff. You're probably thinking how awful it is to have to think about how awful things are. Your whole life is ahead of you. Ah, I should have been born a man. I envy you. I'd show the world what San Francisco could do. I'd do battle for my fair lady.

As a woman, a widow, I do what I can. But it's nothing. Nothing. I am not the grande dame of San Francisco. All I can do is my bit for the opera and the ballet and the symphony. Yes, and the museums, and my charities. At least, I tell myself, I can help keep our institutions alive. I meet with my friends. We talk. We decide. We do.

I think, if I were younger I'd rebel. I'd do what the young women are doing today. Run for congress, fly a plane, start a business, become a surgeon. My daughter and her friends, they're active, every one of them. Busy doing real things. My grandchildren will do even more.

I was a rebel in my time, you know. I wore short hair. I drove a car, I was violently against Prohibition. I fought intolerance wherever I encountered it. People knew where I stood.

What is a tired old woman with an annuity supposed to do -- backpack with the twenty year-olds? I'd look even more ridiculous than I do now. Yes, it's true. I am ridiculous. But what are we doing standing at the door. Come in, Jeff. Come in. Let me fix you a cup of coffee, or a drink.

There, that's better. You like the view? It's even more beautiful during the day. Views help us see outside of ourselves, don't you think? That can be a disadvantage, too. It's so good to come home. I am comfortable among my old things. An antique with her antiques. I like them because they are the only things I know that are older than I am.

Sit down. Sit down. We are deliciously alone. My housekeeper doesn't sleep in any more. She's wonderful to me, comes in every morning. She keeps this place so organized. It's much easier to take care of than the house on Jackson Street, but still there's much to do. She is a very good cook. Not as good as Felice was, I'm afraid. But then who could be?

Felice was marvelous. She could prepare Filets de Soles Orientale, Langue de Boeuf Choucroute, Ris de Veau Bonne Maman and mince pie as good as Escoffier himself.

Oh, but it's obscene these days to think of food like that, isn't it, with the prices so astronomical. I don't know how people do it. I have been so lucky. Daddy and Arthur took care of me. I have tried to be worthy of the pains they took to see I'd be comfortable.

Those are my grandchildren. In those little gold frames on the piano. They're much bigger now. Those pictures were taken two years ago. Good children. Not a bit spoiled like I was. Irreparably spoiled.

What shall it be? Coffee, tea -- or brandy? You're a dear. It's right over there. Just seven little drops for me. It's unbecoming for a relic to get drowsy, and that's what too much brandy does to me. It used to make me sexy. How sad to think of those bygone days!

Sometimes, to keep myself from falling asleep right in front of my guests, I play the piano or sing. Don't look so frightened. I'm not going to torture you with that.

I had a little training. Some talent, I suppose. But not enough to pursue. Just enough to appreciate what an artist must do to develop her art. Have you heard the new opera finalists? The winner is a genuine talent. So effortless. Such depth of understanding.

It's clear tonight. My, how the lights sparkle. The skyline has changed so, I can't tell you what it does to me. No, I'm not for preserving a glorious past. The past was not always that glorious. But it's frightening to think how quickly things move today, how much power can be brought to bear on this fragile city. It can be transformed in no time to something altogether different.

Life was so much easier for my great grandfather and my grandfather. All they had to do was pit themselves against the elements, test their strength and wits against the land and against other men. It was like a sort of club in those days. Everybody out for the same thing. There was no question that it was right. It was only a matter of how to accomplish your goal.

But today everything is so much more complicated. The whole world is a tightly related little village. You can't ignore the consequences of what you do. People must work. People must live. You can't dictate what should be done, what can't be done. You have to work it out.

Do you think it will work out, Jeff? You're so young and handsome and strong. You've got hope and faith and confidence, don't you, Jeff? You don't believe that we should cultivate our garden, do you?

Are we in a spiritual depression? It isn't all pleasure and self-indulgence, is it? Life can't be simply a matter of easing pain and having fun, can it? Everyone wants to go sailing or walk the beach. That's all very well, but we need a clashing together of ideas in San Francisco, don't you think? There's such a desperate longing for tranquility. Except, of course, for those who are angry. But anger isn't very inspiring, is it?

It's all so difficult to comprehend. Oh dear, I am getting far too philosophical. Look at the time! And you have been sitting there so patiently, listening to this monologue of mine. I'm so glad we were introduced, Jeff. I'm so glad we've had this opportunity to get acquainted. We're going to have other opportunities. Of course I have my box for the season. Next week I will be going with my little group, though. But soon the symphony will open. Then the ballet. Then, of course, the Spring Opera and Stern Grove concerts.

Tomorrow I'm going to my Mozart group. Then in the evening to hear the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra. I just keep running, running, as long as my strength holds out.

Perhaps, if you're free, we can arrange to spend another lovely evening. Meanwhile, I must plan my trip abroad. There is so much to do you wouldn't believe it. I really should have a secretary.

The brandy is getting to me now. It's such a bore getting tired. I'll be up at the crack of dawn tomorrow. There's the flower show, if I can squeeze it in. I suppose I shouldn't be greedy and try to do too much.

Once again, dear Jeff, thank you so much for a lovely evening.

# # #

Portrait of Tracy

2010-06-15T14:20:00.000-07:00

By Elliott Joseph

Reprinted from California Living

San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle

Photo By Roz Joseph

July 2010

Sometimes I wish I never wanted to paint. What about photography? Ansel Adams. Imogen Cuningham. You could be the world's greatest woman photographer, age 21. Hold up the camera, and click! A work of art. If only there weren't so many photographers. Everybody, I mean everybody, has a camera. Click! Click!

Who cares about painting today? I like that little part. What else was she wearing on her right wrist? This will work. You're a genius. Forget photography. You don't know which end of the camera to look into anyway. Just keep on painting. You're the new Picasso. Age 21.

There's Jerry. "Hi, Jerry." He's so crazy. Cute, but crazy. He paints circles. Soft circles. He says they're not circles. Canvas after canvas of circles that are not circles. I can't believe it.

Do you have to be crazy to be an artist? I hope not. I am so hopelessly sane. So deliciously lucid. I think so clearly it's positively frightening! Loony bin, next stop. Paint, paint. Never give up. If we give up, art will die. Die, die, die. Dead, dead, dead.

Paint, paint, paint, you super gorgeous genius, and save the world, the Bay, the Mission District, and let's hear it for Yerba Buena!

There's Gordon. I can't stand that man. "You can go into advertising," he said. A fine thing for an instructor in Fine Arts to tell a fine, Fine Arts student. The pimple! Do I have to develop a heavy set of arrogance to defend myself from people like that? I am easily bruised, you inferior superiors. Oh, look at that blue. It's so wrong. It's so wrong! Maybe Gordon is right. Maybe I should go down to Batten, Barton, Honig, Harrington and Thompson. After all, some of my best friends are in advertising.

Is that all we are, illustrators, bartering our ideas for food? Is that what I am going to be, an illustrator? Is that why I came to the Institute? Is that why I paint until I think I am going blind?

Oh, oh, here comes Esposito. That man frightens me. Oh my God, he's looking at my painting. If he says anything, I'll die. I'll just die. I am not going to look at him. I am not going to acknowledge his presence. There he goes. The monster, he didn't even say a word!

I NEED ENCOURAGEMENT!

Thank you. Thank you. Oh, thank you. Yes, my instructors lavish praise on me. You are so kind. Oh, it really isn't that good. It is? You're just saying that. You really mean it's the best thing you have ever seen in your entire life? Thank you, Mr Frankenstein, thank you Mr. Fried, you really are outstanding critics.

I am such a phony, such a sick, sick phony. I searched for a garret, and found a two bedroom flat in Pacific Heights. I force myself to suffer. Send me no money, father. I shall steal the little clothing I need. If I am hungry I will shoplift. Don't worry, I can take care of myself.

I hate my job. I hate making Cafe Borgia and cappuccino. I will never drink coffee again as long as I live.

Tiny, tiny stroke. Once over very, very, very, very lightly. Careful, dammit. That's all right. Painted with an eyelash. What am I saying. What am I not saying? Don't think. For God's sake, don't think.

I could always go back to selling waterbeds on Broadway. At least that was fun. That freak and all those people from Nebraska. Why do they come to Broadway anyway? A waterbed in Nome? No, that's Alaska. The time that guy tried to get me on that waterbed. "I just want to see if it's possible," he said.

Why couldn't I sculpt? Because it's a silly little word, sculpt, that's why. And besides, I'll be able to go to Los Angeles or New York, and sell this canvas to a forger for a very small fortune, who can then auction it to the People's Republic of China, so that Avery Brundage can be so impressed that he will switch to collecting young, beautiful painters from the San Francisco Art Institute, and the world of art will say, "Lo and behold, Tracy What's-Her-Name, she'd be all right if her painting wasn't out of date ten minutes before the canvas dried."

Actors are the only people in San Francisco who are worse off than painters. I am going to do something about your eye, changing lady of my portrait. I have looked at your two eyes, your one sad and your one happy, your one mad and your one glad, your one lost and your one won, your one tossed and your one fun, and I am going to do something right this minute.

What are they looking for, those galleries? Why do they tempt us with success?

That eye. That eye.

Lady of my painting, can I feel your body through your blouse? Are you warm? Are you breathing a little more heavily than usual?

Bessie walked to Vista Point. Twenty-two shades of gray in the silver sunset. She wouldn't have done it unless - but who knows why they do it? You're dead now, Bessie. Dead. What does that mean, anyhow? Some want to live. I want to live.

You've got to have luck. Maybe it's all a matter of luck. Ben painted Aunt Lara twenty years ago as Mother Earth, a nineteen-year-old girl. And now Lara has become Mother Earth. That's genius.

If they don't buy it, it's not important as not letting me paint. You don't have to buy it! Do you hear me out there? No offense. If you don't want it on Union or Geary or Sutter, I'll simply take it to 57th Street and have John Canaday insist that I get a Guggenheim.

That boy was kind of nice. I told him I was going one block. He got out of the car, took a long, disbelieving look at me and said I should be ashamed of myself. Then he took me by the hand and walked me up the hill. Will he call me?

Everybody at Perry's says they never go there, and they never dress like that. What was that story? "A Clean, Well Lighted Place." Why are we so afraid to be alone? We are the topless generation. No head. It's weird. Four out of five people I meet are from the East.

What if I made both eyes happy-sad-happy?

The library upstairs is so clean. Books are so clean. Ideas are so crisp when they're written down. Look at this place. Nothing crisp about Studio 116. "Do not remove!" "Paint for Jesus!" You could put a frame around this floor and get a fortune for it. Oh look, somebody's painted the bulletin! "College of the San Francisco Art Institute. Offering the Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees in filmmaking, painting, photography, print-making, and sculpture/ceramics." Ah, the fun life of art. "Abandon all hope, ye that enter."

There's Ted. He's really good. He doesn't look like an artist. The enemy of art is the artist who looks the part. Do I? Am I too happy? Sometimes not knowing why or how I am alive tears me apart with fear. So why am I so happy? Wait, there's plenty of time. You won't always forget so conveniently.

Wipe the extra paint on your sleeve. Mix and match, not so precisely, not so exactly. You used to get less paint under your nails, when you bit them.

"Hi, Ted. What? Do you think so? Thanks. I like the thing you're working on now. Really good. True, we are all geniuses. How can a genius not get a passing grade? Even from Esposito. Keep struggling."

I'll bet Ted would be a great teacher. Another year to get my degree. Is there life after graduation? There's something about getting a degree in painting that's silly. Where would I have gone if I didn't come to San Francisco? They say this is the best part of your life. So why not end it at twenty-one? Technique, technique, technique. The message, the message, the message. Whatever happened to the happening? Art. What is art? That's for the critics and the teachers to decide. That particular changing moment of that particular life is for you to decide. They decide if you decided right. They judge. You are the judged. Will I play an imaginary zither to my paintings, like that old woman I saw on Beach Street? Let's sing to the canvas and the glory of art.

Where would I take my dear little brother if he came here? What would I show him? Pretty little Union Street? Ghirardelli Square? Things all nicely decorated to sell? Is that the only answer to filth and poverty? Am I getting all this in that eye? No, that's what a background, an environment - you should excuse the expression - is for. The socio-psychological-cultural milieu. When you put it that way, you don't put it. So just paint your mistresspiece and then go to your friend's concert on Maiden Lane and stare at the hat on the sidewalk so it will fill all the way up with money. One person, one single person listening is enough. Play your heart out. Keep your beat. Count if you have to, but keep on playing. Never, never open that valve to nothingness, the way they did at that party. That can't be the way. That's what beer used to be for, and now the new way is faster and different, but not so different.

If Jack would only put some paper in the printer when he writes that novel. But there will always be Wendy who can play so that you wonder how it all can happen, and be grateful that your egg was swimming at the right time. On Maiden Lane and at the Faire she plays in her sandals and flowing robe. On the stage at San Francisco State, pardon me, Cal State San Francisco, she's neat and formal and her hair is civilized. And she's part of a bigger sound that speaks to many people one at a time. And her eyes dart up at the conductor and back at the music.

I can't get up in the auditorium and tell everyone how she helped me, when I kicked the bed and cut my hair, telling me not to say anything when Tim said he was leaving. He was going to stop working for praise, and was going to Los Angeles to get on a TV series about a successful young beautiful actor in San Francisco. Then he finally said that he didn't study Chekhov and Shakespeare to do that.

Why does a man need victories, so many victories?

What did I study? Where did I look? Music and Art High School. Visual Arts. The Brooklyn Museum. The Whitney. Modern Art. The Metropolitan. The Louvre. The Rijksmuseum. The National Gallery. The Prado. Venice. Florence. Rome. The fields of Arles. The faces of my mother and father. This woman, this lady of my painting. This changing woman. The olive trees of Toledo. The stones. The woods. The inaccessible light. The walls. The blues, rich, trumpeting, blinding. Soften them. Soften them. Just beyond control. A wildness that isn't wild. Confusion that isn't confused. We are both witness and victim.

"Light, more light," said Goethe. Just enough on the canvas. Not one bit more. It travels fast enough itself. You are not being painted to be hung, my lady of the painting, but to remain on the easel. You are never quite finished. Your blood is on my arms. You comfort me. You satisfy me, when I don't understand. You feed and house me. I don't need to worship or escape into the noise or oblivion of shock and tastelessness. You are my medicine, my law, my social service, my Ph.D. You free me, and I am grateful. Lady of my painting, soon I won't know you as I think I know you now. I won't know what it is that we want from each other. You are different every time I look at you.

Here comes Esposito! Who is that with him? They're coming this way. The four of them. They're coming here. They're all going to look at you, my lady of the painting. They want to see you, my candidate for the museums of San Francisco. Are you ready?

# # #

The Other Pebble Beach

2010-05-20T12:39:00.000-07:00

By Elliott Joseph

Reprinted from California Living

San Francisco Sunday Examiner

& Chronicle

Photos By Roz Joseph

June 2010

Forty-five miles south of San Francisco, on Route 1, there is a small cove known as Pebble Beach. This fragile natural gem is not to be confused with the glamorous broad white sandy beach at Carmel further south, or the much publicized Pebble Beach Golf Course near it, along the beautiful 17-Mile Drive on Monterey Peninsula. Most people do think of the manicured greens and rolling fairways of the championship golf course when they hear the name Pebble Beach. That Pebble Beach is where celebrities and some others play, a better organized and more highly developed world.

There are no celebrities, however, on my little Pebble Beach. What local fame it has is due to the unique beauty of the hundreds of thousands of little pebbles that the sea cuts out of the accommodating rock, as it crashes and swirls and surges in the headstrong way of the waters of northern California.

The colors of these lovely stones, which the relentless surf polishes to virtual jewels, are altogether bewitching. I never fail to drop to my knees or sit among my pebbles when I'm there, and hold them in my hands, letting them fall between my fingers, enjoying the richness and sensual pleasure of their touch.

As the surf recedes over their glistening perfection it seems to say, "Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!" as though it does not want the rest of the world to know of its treasure. To me the pebbles are part of an organism, and the beach seems to cry out in pain when the pebbles are taken away in the pockets or the plastic bags, or as I recently witnessed, in the pails of their misguided or unthinking admirers.

The number of stones had been dwindling over the years as so many visitors failed to resist temptation. There used to be a sign at the entrance to the beach asking that you do not take any pebbles away with you. But for a while, mysteriously, the sign was missing from its post. Until it was replaced, the silent rape went on without admonishment.

Ironically, the pebbles distract the plunderers from the exceptional tidepools that border the beach at its southern end. Situated amidst a geological fantasy of color and shape -- a moonscape in miniature, a simulated aerial view of the canyons, valleys, buttes and mountain ranges of the great American southwest -- the tidepooles contain rich worlds of tiny sea life.

When the tide is out this variegated universe is stunningly revealed in the canals and caves of the slippery rock. As the sea churns and swells at a safe distance, the temporarily still waters of the tidepools can be seen teeming with little creatures.

In their zeal to take the pebbles, the plunderers are less moved to bother the strange tidepool animals, which go on living their curious lives, oblivious to the threat of their existence.

Perhaps it is a sacrificial function that the pebbles of Pebble Beach perform, protecting the innocent snails and sea urchins from an untimely death. But how long will their own number, like the heroic citizen-soldiers of a bygone civilization, be sufficient to stand guard?

# # #

Do you have a special beach?

The Chinese Laundry Torture

2010-04-27T13:46:00.000-07:00

By Elliott Joseph

Reprinted from Saturday Review

May 2010

Some time back I took the usual weekly bundle to my local Chinese laundry, only to make the disquieting discovery that an enigmatic, dark-haired, ageless stranger by the name of Sam Wip had bought out my old friend, Ben Chen.

Since it had taken me, when I first moved into the neighborhood, a number of painful months to acquaint Ben with the manner in which I preferred my shirts, something I have always been most particular about, I did not look with favor on the new proprietor, whose presence foreshadowed another tortuous path of tight-lipped training, disappointment, and frustration toward the seemingly impossible.

Imagine my pleasant surprise when with the most profound understanding he informed me that he was well aware of my problem and would do everything in his power to help.

The following week I found my cuffs and collars that perfect meeting of soft comfort and crisp body that I had learned to love. As I adjusted my tie around the collar of my white, 2x2, Imported Pima, which I had purchased at Saks, I noticed a small black spot just under the pocket.

"Well," I told myself, "accidents can happen to anyone. We'll give this fellow a chance."

I wore my gray striped broadcloth instead, and decided to drop off the Pima on my way to the office.

Sam greeted me with a wide smile, which he maintained throughout our short conversation.

"You wear vest?" he asked.

At this I began to grow a bit disenchanted with my new friend, but I said nothing and left the shirt hopefully.

It came back with the spot a few shades lighter. It would, I told myself this time, be all right under my vest. As I fastened my right cuff, however, I discovered a shapeless, muddy stain there. It was late and I didn't take the time to change. Besides, I thought, I would cuff up my sleeves a couple of times once I got to the office.

"They eat candy at laundry," said Sam the next day, still smiling. "And forget to wash hands." He'd see what he could do.

This time the stain was traded for a neatly sewn, small diagonal rip at the second buttonhole. To Sam's next question I admitted I never wore bow ties.

"Then everything OK," he grinned. "Nobody see."

"I'll see," I said.

He shook his inscrutable head and went on smiling.

When the shirt came back blue I drew the line.

`"Do you know how much this shirt cost?" I asked sardonically. "One hundred dollars! " I added, answering myself.

"You buy on sale?" Sam asked.

"What's that got to do with it?" I replied.

"Blue very nice," he said.

"I want my white shirt!" I shouted.

"Expensive shirt make you unhappy," he said.

"You're the one making me unhappy."

"Shirt you can afford never make you unhappy."

"I can afford the hundred dollars," I lied.

"Then why you get mad?"

"Your job is to do the shirts right!" I said. "Not give me advice."

"Shirt too expensive. Make laundry man nervous. You buy cheap shirt. Get good job."

So I went out and bought four shirts, and paid less than a hundred dollars for the lot. And you know, he hasn't gotten a mark on them!

# # #

Too Much Impulse Appeal

2010-03-23T22:22:00.000-07:00

By Elliott Joseph

Reprinted from PUNCH

April 2010

Thanks to those motivational research experts I've gone and fallen in love with a package, the kind you find in supermarkets. It wouldn't be so bad if it were a matter of admiration, or affection. But I'm in love with it.

So much goes into package design these days, I'm told. It seems packages have to sell themselves, now that sales personnel are practically a thing of the past. Well, they've gone too far this time.

I was in the supermarket picking up a few things for myself, and there it was, on a shelf, just below eye level, about on a line with my shoulders. You wouldn't say it was beautiful exactly, but there was definitely something compelling about it.

It was a simple, slender box, principally white, but with daring dashes of red and gold tastefully worked in with crisp, clean lines of typography. A subtle, almost sensuous design outlined the promise of a shapely bottle teasingly contained inside. The whole thing had a freshness, a vitality, an aura of youth and gaiety, yet a mysterious, profoundly mature quality that seemed to understand me. I had an overwhelming desire to reach out and clutch it.

But I was ashamed of what I felt, for I didn't really need it. I turned to continue along the aisle, but I couldn't, and in a wild moment of ecstasy I plucked a package from its resting place and thrust it into my shopping cart. A hot, inexplicable feeling of satisfaction burned its way through me. Exhilarated, I completed my chores, impatient to get home.

Alone in the privacy of my own surroundings, I fell to admiring the slim little package that had suddenly come into my life.

It stood there before me, so pert, so cute, wearing a strange little smile. I actually began to talk to it. I told it personal things, things I've never been able to tell anyone. I got so lost in talking about myself, I didn't even think of noting its name.

And then a queer feeling came over me. I put my hands on the glistening box. Barely realizing what I was doing, I allowed my fingers to search for the lid. Gently, ever so gently, I opened it and reached tenderly inside for its precious contents. In a moment my hands held the treasure itself, delicately swathed in a gossamer gown of pale tissue.

In a state that was bordering on the delirious, I slowly undid the dainty wrapping until the soft, supple plastic bottle lay there naked, its rich curves nestling comfortably in my impassioned grip. I bent over to unscrew the cap and take my fill of the heady fragrance that stole from the graceful neck, my eyes closing in a delicious reverie.

It was pretty silly, of course, and the next day found me irritable and distracted. That evening, however, rationalizing my need for butter and eggs for breakfast, compulsively drawn to the supermarket, which was open late, I found myself standing ignominiously before the self-same shelf. Once again I was gripped by desire for the little package, and in an uncontrollable gesture I scooped up the entire contents of the shelf.

I paid the open-mouthed clerk and passed quickly out the door. In the apartment, I discovered I had neglected to buy the breakfast things, but I didn't care.

In the weeks that followed I found it convenient to set up a separate closet for the little packages. I had them neatly arranged, but every time I opened one up I felt I had to replace it with two the next day. I bought so many I adopted various disguises to avoid the curious stares of the clerks. In spite of the immediate satisfaction the packages gave me I grew increasingly depressed as the emptiness of my guilt-ridden compulsion wore on me. What's more, I developed an annoying tic in my left eye.

One day, desperately resolving to break myself of the habit, I walked into the store. I would prove I could muster enough self discipline to resist buying the package. No hidden persuader was going to get the best of me.

But blinded by my addiction, with shaking hand I placed one on the counter. "Just one, sir?" asked the clerk with a sneer.

You can see the low state to which I had sunk.

Somehow, after a heroic struggle, I left it there, and walked slowly, painfully, triumphantly, to the exit, both eyes tic-ing away. Stoically, I entered the bus and sat stiffly while it carried me to my stop. I managed to get upstairs, where I broke completely and opened one package after another in the wildest, most bitter orgy of my experience. It left me more dead than alive. After that Pyrrhic victory only a miracle could save me.

The next day I put on one of my best disguises, a red crewcut, and painted a thin mustache on my trembling lip, donned an elevator operator's uniform and affecting a low left shoulder and sweeping limp, careered into the supermarket, intent on replenishing my empty closet.

I arrived at the customary spot midway down the fourth aisle to find the shelf filled with detergent. Abandoning my limp, I made up and down the aisles like a lunatic, only to come upon a sight that filled me with horror.

There, staring me right in the face, in a big basket at the head of one of the aisles, were dozens of the little packages, jumbled crazily on one another. A huge garish sign nailed to a piece of wood, protruded from the mass of little boxes. "SALE!' it screamed. And the boxes -- what had happened to them? Printed boldly across each one were the words, "One dollar OFF!"

People were crowding about the display, pushing against one another, grabbing. Two, three, four at a time they took. "Say, are you buying or aren't you?" said a man trying to reach past me into the basket.

Dumbstruck, I let him brush by, and stood there transfixed as his hands opened and closed around one package after another. I was furious as I pictured them lined up in his closet.

But it had done the trick. I was free of the compulsion at last. My tic disappeared and I no longer wanted the package. It was ugly now, sullied , fortunately, by its maker's sordid sojourn into the depths of commercialism.

And then, just this evening, I was shocked to see it in its old spot again, brighter, whiter, more beautiful than ever. Flashing brilliantly across the box were the words, "NEW! IMPROVED!" With a monumental effort I managed to fight my way by, but the little package cried out to be bought, bought, bought!

And now -- I think the tic is returning.

# # #

A Gift For The Language

2010-02-23T13:06:00.000-08:00

By Elliott Joseph

Reprinted from McCall's

March 2010

I have always been interested in the problem of communication. Keeping oneself from being misunderstood in one's home, by someone who speaks one's own tongue, is difficult enough. So it may not seem surprising that when faced with the prospect of a European trip, I started boning up on my languages.

My wife, who regards preparation of any kind as a pitiful waste of time, viewed my long hours of study with the tolerance of a psychoanalyst.

"You'll never learn a language by studying details," she said. " Infinitive, present indicative, imperative -- that's all nonsense. The only way to get to know a language is by grasping its mystique."

"And what," I asked, "is that?"

"Oh, that is le je ne sais quoi of Spanish or Italian."

"That's French," I said.

"Language is something you feel -- like the dance," she said, ignoring me and waving her delicate arms.

"We'll see," I said. We did.

Our first problem occurred on board the plane. We were seated next to a left-handed Spaniard. He was at the window seat on my right. I foresaw difficulty rubbing elbows at dinner in those close economy class quarters, and dove into my phrase book for help.

"Dispénseme," I began, "habla usted inglé s?"

In return he smiled pleasantly. He was an elegantly dressed man, about my age, I guessed. His proud, brooding eyes seemed typically Spanish.

"Oh, good," I said. "Say would you mind switching seats with me? It's so tight here, and..."

His smile faded instantly into the cloudy reaches of incomprehension.

My wife leaned forward and smiled. The Spaniard smiled. I smiled. After a moment of awkward silence, my wife smiled again, and moved her finger back and forth a few times, and pointed to my seat. We both stood up. He looked at me, and I smiled. I took a step toward his seat. He got into mine.

"Well, that wasn't so difficult," said my wife.

"I suppose that's what you mean by mystique," I said, calling to her past the Spaniard. "What are you going to do with Lefty now?"

She didn't seem to mind him on her right, so we left him in the middle seat. The man remained puzzled by the whole thing, and we switched back before dozing off after dinner and the movie. In Madrid he tipped his hat and strode out of our lives.

At the hotel we were taken to a dark room overlooking a narrow courtyard. I was prepared for this and said to the bellboy, a shy, handsome Spanish lad of no more than eighteen, "No tiene buena vista."

"No speak English," he said, dropping his eyes. Undaunted, I opened the phrase book and pointed right to the line. The boy looked and shrugged his shoulders. Then my wife said it.

"No tiene buena vista." Suddenly, the boy lit up.

"Ahhh," he exclaimed, "no tiene buena vista! Momento, por favor." He picked up the telephone and minutes later we were in a beautiful room overlooking the broad avenida. I gave him too generous a tip, of course, and he bowed out of the room, nodding gratefully, first at me and then at my wife.

"Tone, inflection," she said. "It's how you say it that counts."

"Sure, after I showed him the phrase book."

"Perhaps," she said, patting her hair as she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror.

Whatever the explanation, the same thing happened again and again. For some reason she was able to understand waiters when they explained the menu, taxi drivers when they described the history of some interesting site and policemen when they gave us directions.

This was as true in Italy as it was in Spain, which I was thankful for, since we would be taking a car in Rome and driving through the countryside, where the language barrier might prove formidable.

We avoided the autostrada, sticking to the smaller roads so that we could see more of the towns and the people. The sun was glorious and I was glad we had chosen a convertible for the trip. The wind rushed by crisply, and my wife leaned her, now tanned, arm over the door and faced into the breeze, letting her hair blow as we drove through the morning.

This idyllic state ended abruptly at the gate of a quiet hillside village with the dull thumping of a flat tire. I set to work changing it at once, only to discover that the spare was also flat. A tall, dark-haired man of about thirty stood watching me.

"Che peccato," he said.

"He said it's a shame," said my wife.

"Ask him if there's a garage nearby."

"Is there a garage nearby?" she asked.

"Quasi dieci minuti."

"About half a mile from here."

"Well, I guess I'll start hiking," I said.

"Ma è chiuso a l'ora di pranzo," he said.

"He said it's closed for lunch," said my wife.

"Il ristorante è vicino," he said, pointing. "Voi andare a mangiare insieme?"

"He says we might as well join him for lunch," she said. "Come on. It might be fun."

It was fun, all right. For her. She and this fellow, a doctor, it turned out, had a wonderful time. They laughed. They talked. She in English, and he in Italian. They spoke about America and Italy, and art and literature and the theater and wine and food. They spoke about wine and food interminably. I had never known she was that interested. I tried to speak to him in English once or twice, but he looked at me quizzically. Of course I couldn't understand a word he said. Well, we sat there for about two and a half hours, eating and drinking and the two of them gabbing away and slapping the table. It wasn't until about four o'clock that I got the tires fixed and we were on our way.

"I've really got to hand it to you," I said to my wife. "You have a remarkable aptitude for romance languages."

"It's what I told you," she said. "Get your nose out of tense and case and possessives. Concentrate on the spirit of what you want to say. Get into the lyricism of the language. Don't listen to the words. Listen to the music."

I'll have to admit she had me believing her. I all but threw away my books, and then looked forward to Paris to watch her slice through the subtleties of French gender with that theory of hers. There was just one thing I had overlooked. "In French," my book had said, "all things are either masculine or feminine." It set me thinking.

On our first day in Paris I observed that my wife got nowhere with our hotel's patronne, and nowhere with our chambermaid, and nowhere with our waitress. And I was about to commit her great theory to the snide wastebasket of a rational man's skepticism, when to my profound surprise I found myself applying the theory on my own, with inspiring success.

It was to me that the girl in the parfumerie addressed her remarks. It was at me that the pert receptionist at Christian Dior smiled. It was to me that the chic woman at the Café Select on the Champs Elysées talked of France and America, and art and music and wine and food.

And you know -- as I was telling my startled wife that evening -- I had never realized it before, but there is really nothing in this world as interesting, as civilized and as mysterious, too, as the wine and the food of La Belle France.

# # #

Can You Live With It?

2010-01-17T15:44:00.000-08:00

By Elliott Joseph

February 2010

It started with the car, now a designated classic, my 1971 Oldsmobile Cutlass Convertible, of which I am the original owner. Miraculously, it has 296, 010 miles with the original engine, though it has had two transmissions, several starters, two valve jobs and enough repairs to have helped send my mechanic's two children to private schools, and more recently to college.

For this gorgeous vehicle -- which gets the high sign daily from the drivers of passing cars, pedestrians, policemen and bus drivers -- and children who have never seen anything like it -- and the frequent shouts I hear to "Sell It?" -- finding parts has been difficult and some times impossible.

I think the first time I heard, Can You Live With It? was from my mechanic about the door on the car's passenger side that has a temperamental lock. To repair it, the door would have to be dismantled, there would be no guarantee that the repair would work, and even a risk that the door could no longer be opened or locked. In addition, the cost would be quite high.

"Yes," I said, "I can live with it."

I realize there are actions one can take to repair things, or to try to change the difficult behavior of others, but at the same time that there could be the possibility of unintended consequences. So the nagging question must be faced. Can You Live With It?

For example.

You love your wife, but she snores. Can You Live With It?

Your cat brings you dead mice. Can You Live With It?

Your neighbor, with whom you have an otherwise good relationship, plays the loudest, most god awful music on the weekends. Can You Live With It?

Your loyal dog barks and sheds. Can You Live With It?

You get parking tickets you can't fight. Can You Live With It?

Children scream. Can You Live With It?

Newscasters shout. Can You Live With It?

It seems people are beginning to speak more and more softly, making it difficult to hear what they're saying. Even the actors on stage are no longer projecting enough. Can You Live With It?

War. Can You Live With It?

The economy. Can You Live With It?

Lies. Can You Live With It?

People on cell phones. Can You Live With It?

The way the newspaper makes you sneeze. Can You Live With It?

Your loss of height. Can You Live With It?

The weight you gain. Can You Live With It?

The misspelling everywhere. Can You Live With It?

Other people's taste, or the lack of it. Can You Live With It?

The dripping bathtub faucet that would require breaking through the tiles and the wall to fix. Can You Live With It?

The leaking windows. Can You Live With It?

The smokers. Can You Live With It?

Your mother-in-law's cooking. Can You Live With It?

The nearly maniacal laugh of some people. Can You Live With It?

Those terrible movies. Can You Live With It?

You know what I'm talking about. All those annoying, frustrating, challenging things you can't get fixed or changed. What are yours? Do you let them get to you?

Can You Live With It?

# # #

The Wrong Hat, The Right Hat

2009-12-19T14:04:00.000-08:00

By Elliott Joseph

January 2010

Remember how strawberries used to taste? If you do, you've been around as long as I have, because it's been an age since they've had any real flavor.

And what about tomatoes? The last time I sliced into one of those pulpy monstrosities my knife didn't even get wet.

Just when I was about to give up eating anything that didn't have to be cooked, my friend Phil told me he had figured out what's been causing the problem.

"Those farmers are wearing the wrong hat!" he said.

He pushed me into his jeep and drove us to a local produce fair at the edge of town.

"Follow me," he commanded.

In the course of an hour I was treated to the most delicious strawberries, figs, melons, peaches, apples, tomatoes, peppers, lettuce and other greens I had tasted in years.

"Now," he said triumphantly, "look around. See any plastic caps here?"

Indeed there weren't any.

Not one of the local growers was wearing the familiar, baseball type peaked cap that has become the mark of the big corporate farmer. Not one had that full crown of banded plastic netting on his head, its high, stiffened, cotton fronting, so often emblazoned with some company trademark.

Every one of the local growers was wearing a straw hat.

"Good old fashioned farm hat, the straw hat," said Phil. "There you have it. The big farmers who supply our supermarkets aren't wearing the right hat."

"It can't be the hat," I chuckled. "If anything, it's the logistical demands of distribution, the need to harvest crops before they're ready. It's the pressure of big loan payments. It's the accelerating requirements for efficiency and increased production," I went on. "That's what has turned our farmers away from growing foods that have taste to foods that are big, heavy and look good. It's the tragedy of our times."

"It's the hat," he repeated, "pure and simple. Chefs, police officers, the clergy. We are what our hats say we are. And the same goes for farmers."

"Never mind the hat," I said. "If there's any solution to this problem, it rides with the consumer. What we have to do is encourage people to insist on tree-ripened flavor and quality."

"It's the hat," insisted Phil.

"Excuse me," I said, not without a bit of sarcasm in my voice, "are you implying that all we have to do is get the farmer to change his hat and our troubles will be over?"

"Precisely," he said. "The straw hat will put the lid, so to speak, on the problem. It's big and clumsy. It'll slow the farmer down. Right now, with that handy adjustable strap in the back of the plastic cap, the farmer can go flying off in his high speed tractor, even in a big wind. The straw hat would come right off his head if he tried that.

"Now he can walk into his glass-walled, chromium-lined bank wearing that plastic representation of corporate mentality and even these days get that loan he's got himself hooked into needing.

"Imagine him strolling into a bank wearing a straw hat and trying to get credit for a million and a half. He'd be lucky if they let him open a checking account. The straw hat would keep the farmer small enough to once again think in good old-fashioned terms."

"You're making it sound rather easy," I said, trying a bit of irony.

"It's really not so easy," said Phil. "The farmer likes that home run image he thinks the plastic cap gives him."

We got into the jeep for the ride back.

"Once people make the farmer realize that they won't accept anything less than good tasting produce," I said, "the farmer will find a way to deliver it, whether he's big or small."

"You've got a lot of faith in the farmer," said Phil.

"I do," I said. Then I reflected on the delicious fruit I had tasted at the fair. "Maybe, just in the the meantime, mind you, I'll start buying some produce from the people wearing the 'right' hat."

Phil laughed, satisfied that he had made his point.

# # #

Quotidian

2009-11-20T20:58:00.000-08:00

By Elliott Joseph

December 2009

Actually, I like the daily routine. It frees me up, leaves my mind clear.

I don't wake up too early. I wash my face, brush my teeth, of course. Because deodorant irritates my skin, I shower or simply wipe under my arms with a damp cloth, which keeps me fresh throughout the day and evening. Never a complaint. There's also shaving the cheeks and trimming the beard, whether I'm going out or not.

Breakfast is my responsibility. My wife does dinner and doesn't eat lunch. The night before, I plan the breakfast and my midday meal. I use the pages of a 3x5" pad for this, as well as for my to do list for the day, after checking the calendar. I don't trust my memory any more.

Then there's the day. The morning stretching and exercises. The pills to take, the mail, the computer, the newspaper, shopping for food and supplies, maintenance.

If there are chores, like taking out the garbage, dusting or vacuuming, they get worked in somehow. I'm not rigid about them. After a while they get assertive. Once a week there's the laundry. We have machines in the garage. I make sure I have enough quarters. That's another thing that gets on my list. I get four rolls at a time, so I have a cushion.

There's the doctor and the dentist to schedule.

So you ask, don't I ever do anything important? I do. I do. I am a writer, and there is always a project, projects, I should say. Some writers, some artists, sacrifice their daily life, even their family life, for their art. Perhaps my talent, such as it is, isn't worth the sacrifice. Is that small of me?

Maybe I could have done more. Would that make a difference?

Certainly, if my work brought the world to a better place. Health care for those not covered, help for the homeless, the economy, peace, a light that opens the way for the lives of others. Those might be reasons to let the house and its occupants fall apart -- for the greater good.

What does quotidian mean anyway? "Occurring every day. Commonplace. Ordinary."

I don't do everything every day, but I guess I'm programmed, though a bit of delay now and then doesn't hurt. Do I leave time for serendipity? There's movies, theater, lectures, books, music, museums, gardening, recreation, friends, family, and my work of course.

Get maid service to do the quotidian? That's an option, I suppose, but who'd pay the bills, balance the checkbook, manage the credit card statements, get gas, wash the car? Maybe someday when we can't turn the mattress. It's getting heavy, but so far we can manage. My wife has her photography, and is able to do her quotidian part, more than her part, in fact.

I'll bet there are a lot of people for whom the quotidian isn't so bad. Those folks don't want to let their home life disintegrate. I don't think it's compulsiveness. For me it's just a welcome sense of control that gives me tranquility, some shielding from an otherwise chaotic, alarming world. I do wonder sometimes, though, about those people who just let things go.

# # #

Early Retirement

2009-10-19T16:28:00.000-07:00

By Elliott Joseph

November 2009

My friend Dave is the youngest in our crowd, but he was first to get a job, first to get married, first to have kids, and six months ago the first to retire.

"Early retirement, heh?" I said when he told me the news. "I knew you were making a bundle, you rascal." Now starts a life of debauchery, mindless travel and excess, I envisioned, leading to boredom, anxiety, desperation and premature demise.

Dave insisted he wasn't loaded.

"They've forced you out. Discrimination!" I yelped.

It wasn't anything like that, he said. It was his own decision to retire.

The poor guy, I thought. He must be terminal.

"You can tell me, Dave," I said, putting my arm around his shoulder. "How much time have you got?"

He guessed about thirty-five to forty years. His father had lived to be ninety-two and his mother was in good shape.

"You're going into business! You've invented a substitute for soap!"

He smiled.

"Hated your boss's guts, didn't you?"

No, he said. He had worked very hard all his life. He had seen to his children's education, and at last they were on their way, each in his or her own style. Now he just wanted to do whatever he felt like doing.

I had to save him. He was my friend.

"OK," I said, "go through your drawers and get rid of every pair of socks you haven't worn in two years. Then, after you enjoyed your little respite, take a serious look at your future."

What else can you say when your pal, barely into his fifties, says he's wrapping it up?

The first thing he did was to take a six weeks trip to Spain with Betty to study Spanish. I saw him briefly when they got back, but then they took off for Cleveland to see family and old friends. We talked now and then but not that much. Finally, last weekend, I was able to stop in to see how he was doing I prepared myself for the worst. How much free time would a person who's worked all his life be able to take?

As I entered his house an exquisitely delicious aroma filled my nostrils.

"Betty baking?" I asked.

No she was out. That's a snack loaf he has been experimenting with and it's just about ready.

I regarded him suspiciously until I noticed how well he looked. The crease on the left side of his face was gone. The rims of his eyes were a healthy pink instead of the raw red I had gotten used to seeing over the years. He seemed trimmer and sort of bounced on his tennis shoes as he moved about the room.

"So what have you decided to do?" I asked.

Well, he thought he'd continue with the Spanish. Such a beautiful language.

"O.K., O.K., but what are you going to DO?"

Did I mean tomorrow? He didn't know. Maybe take a walk in the woods. Did I want to play some golf or go to the game with him?

"What are your plans, David?"

He'd been doing some volunteering. He liked that.

"Good, good, but what are your PLANS?" I repeated.

Then he told me about the four men he had seen at a cafe on the island of Kos ten years before. Nearby was the great plane tree, a descendant of the one under which, it was said, Hippocrates had taught medicine to the youth of ancient Greece. The men were sitting on simple wooden chairs at a simple wooden table. He thinks there was a famous painting of a scene like that. Each had a glass in front of him, though it was ignored for the most part. They talked, sometimes earnestly and sometimes perfunctorily, and they laughed and they looked at the people passing by. The next day they were there again.

Dave said he had thought about taking a picture of them, but decided that if he did it would probably wind up in an envelope someplace and he'd forget all about it.

"Are you saying you want to sit around and just do -- nothing?"

"Is that nothing?"

"It's a waste. You'd atrophy. After a while you wouldn't know what time it was."

I looked at my watch. "It's a quarter to two," I said.

He knew.

"It's Saturday."

He knew.

We shook hands.

"If you ever need me," I said, "if ever you need a job. If ever you start chewing off your fingernails, I want you to call me."

He assured me he would.

Well, I thought, it's only a few months. Let's see how he's getting along a year or so from now.

Imagine. Retiring early and doing whatever you want to do. That can't be good for you, can it?

# # #

Only When I Laugh

2009-09-19T15:40:00.000-07:00

By Elliott Joseph

October 2009

As you may know, I have been a writer of humor all my life.

I've laughed, I've giggled, I've laughed so hard I've almost choked. So what was I laughing at?

The loss of jobs? The houses all but gone? The tent cities? The futures shattered? The battles against hopelessness? What was so funny? The rising cost of food? The fraud? The so-called health care debate? The big lies? What passes for music? Afghanistan? Iraq? The shouting of newscasters? The mindless speeding of cars in TV commercials? The lack of common courtesy?

The lack of taste?

Why did I always seem to have such a bellyful of laughs? Was it that I didn't care? Was it that I was ignorant? That I saw how difficult it was to get the right thing done? That I saw today's crazy human behavior as remarkably similar to the experiment I witnessed in a college psychology class -- where the environment of laboratory rats was made to be crazy, resulting in crazy rat behavior?

Or was it simply that I laughed because if I didn't laugh I might go crazy myself?

# # #

What I Don't Know

2009-07-20T15:54:00.000-07:00

By Elliott Joseph

September 2009

They say that when you reach a certain age you realize that wisdom is knowing what you don't know. If so, I am very wise. The trouble is that there are far too many things I don't know. Here's a partial list:

- - How television works.

- - What "a 30% chance of showers" means.

- - What to say when a stranger calls during dinner to sell you something.

- - What my wife is thinking.

- - How to make money.

- - Why we see only one side of the moon.

- - Why there's never enough time.

- - Which witness in a jury trial to believe.

- - How some people get elected.

- - Why someone else wins the lottery.

- - Why after a coin can land heads up twenty times the odds on the next toss are still 50-50.

- - How to sell something.

- - How to negotiate.

- - How long it takes to get sick from something you ate.

- - The difference between hysteria, paranoia and schizophrenia.

- - Why so much music ignores the ear.

- - Why so much poetry can't be understood even by people with a good education.

- - Why laughter is so good for us.

- - Why so many people cheat, steal and lie.

- - Why so many people drive so aggressively and with such lack of courtesy.

- - Why so many people always seem to be on the phone.

- - Why so many people don't return telephone calls.

- - How to harvest alfalfa.

- - Who makes up all those metaphors for politicians.

- - Why some people talk so much.

- - Why some people never listen.

- - Why the stock market goes down when interest rates go up.

- - Why the stock market goes up when interest rates go down.

- - Why the stock market goes up or down altogether.

- - What a vitamin is.

- - What the smallest particle is.

- - Why some people grow old and others remain kids.

- - How to live with injustice.

- - Why logic has a dirty name.

- - Why following directions doesn't work.

- - Why other people don't know how to water your plants.

- - How to be one of the boys.

- - What Infinitesimal Calculus is.

- - How to speak a foreign language.

- - Why there are always at least two sides to every question.

- - Why some people have no sense of shame.

- - Why there are so many species.

- - How Mozart could possibly have composed so much, so magnificently.

- - Why it's fun just taking a walk.

- - How a ship floats.

- - How an airplane stays up.

- - How we can learn to ride a bicycle.

- - Why we like some people but not others.

- - Why some people like us and others don't.

- - When to say yes and when to say no.

- - How to build a house.

- - How to play a musical instrument.

- - How to play bridge.

- - How to fix a noisy radiator.

- - Why so many men don't flush the toilet in the rest room.

- - Why naming something makes us think we know what it is.

- - What it's all about.

If there is anyone out there who can enlighten me about any of these things, please write me without delay. If, on the other hand, you have a number of things that you don't know yourself, shoot me a copy of your list. I don't know what I will be able to do about it, but perhaps a sharing of our ignorance will have a salutary effect.

# # #

Song of The Sexual Revolution

2009-07-18T11:51:00.000-07:00

By Elliott Joseph

August 2009

"Excuse me, but do you think the sexual revolution is over?"

The question came from a mature gentleman sharing the small restaurant table with me. He was looking at me earnestly, his thick gray eyebrows raised in polite expectation.

I was just about through with my lunch and not altogether surprised that a stranger would reveal such an intimate thought. There are many friendly little restaurants in my town, and it is not unusual to talk about personal matters with someone you don't know, protected as we are by the proverbial shield of anonymity.

I replied that I had been married for a good many years, and although I had of course been aware of the sexual revolution I could not speak with authority about it.

"I was thinking of joining it," he said, "but I wonder if it's too late.

"To tell the truth," he went on, "I never got into it because I kind of liked the way things were before it started. With sex not quite being so much in the open there was more of a mystery about it. We had romance in those days. One looked forward with anticipation to a goal that was not too easy to attain. There was more to long for, so to speak. One could buy flowers, dream, fantasize.

"One could be moved by songs like IF THIS ISN'T LOVE, EMBRACEABLE YOU, ALL THE THINGS YOU ARE,

"The droll risque argument that was presented by LET'S ALL DO IT had some validity, some point."

He chuckled a bit nervously.

"Then there was the other side of it," he continued. "Not that we were prudes, but we could get a good laugh out of sex. I mean you could tell light, bright sexual stories and hit someone's funny bone. You could hint at sexual misconduct and actually hear giggles. It was fun.

"I guess the fifties couldn't last forever."

He took a quick sip of his glass of wine.

"On came the sixties, the Flower Children and the revolution. I was tempted to become a foot soldier and march right in. One doesn't want to be left out of what's happening in one's time. But I held off.

"And then came the seventies and the eighties. Talk about ANYTHING GOES!

"The pill, teen-age pregnancy, abortion, the single parent phenomenon, explicitness - - it got confusing. And the language! It was just plain filthy. To get a laugh at a party you had to appeal to a sort of humor that was not really funny.

"In spite of all that, I recently considered going for it. The cure for VD had been found, and the very idea of consenting adults doing whatever they felt like doing with impunity, had some appeal. And then came the disaster - - AIDS. That stopped me cold.

"But now I'm thinking that today, with sexual education at a new high, with the concept of safe sex understood by so many people, I might be able to don the colors and charge ahead - - if it's all still going on, that is."

There was an unmistakable lack of conviction in his tone.

He looked at me, waiting for an answer that unfortunately could not be forthcoming.

Just then a woman about thirty, slender, with curly, chestnut hair and sympathetic blue eyes approached our table. The restaurant was crowded and we had the only free chair. I suggested that he ask her if it was all over. She sat down. He hesitated, but only for a moment.

"Over? The Sexual Revolution?," she replied with a friendly smile. "Why it's only just started. The biological clock is ticking and America is on to something new and exciting. All those years of adolescent self-indulgence and mindless promiscuity are done with. LOVE WALKED IN for me and all I can say is 'S WONDERFUL!"

The old gentleman looked hard at the woman for what seemed a full minute, and then suddenly lit up as though coming from under a cloud.

"You mean people are dancing CHEEK TO CHEEK?"

"Oh yes," she said. "And if they're not, they want to."

He thanked her, and bidding me farewell, strode off whistling a happy tune.

# # #

Good Old Fashion

2009-06-23T17:21:00.000-07:00

By Elliott Joseph

July 2009

My friend Phil has loosened fashion's grip on me. And not a moment too soon as I consider the frightening prospect of having to replace any part of my wardrobe.

He walked in the other day, looking like a million.

He was wearing a smart, single breasted, gray glen plaid suit, white cotton dress shirt with spread collar, deep red silk tie with tiny black dots and a pair of shining, wingtip black oxfords.

"New outfit?" I asked.

"Not on your life!" he said, smiling. "I got these clothes right out of my closet. The suit is Jacques Roy, Paris. Bought it in Barney's New York in 1976. The shirt is eleven years old. The tie, fourteen. And the shoes, twenty. That's years, man, years."

"Is there a message there?"

"I just put on this combination to make my point. I'm not suggesting that you should match the age of your clothing to your birth date. It's the principle of the thing. Take your old clothes out of retirement. That's the way to beat fashion."

An interesting idea, I mused. But can it work?

My mind raced to the half dozen old suits I had waiting unworn on shaped hangers. The piles of shirts I couldn't wear out if I lived three lifetimes. The rows of ancient shoes with hardly a mark on them. And the ties. How in the world had I accumulated so many ties?

The combined age of my clothing would suit Methuselah.

"I've got plenty of old clothes," I said, "but..."

"But what?" he interrupted, opening my closet door. "Look at that suit. Perfect condition."

"That's my Marty Sullivan," I said proudly.

"Tired of it?"

"Actually, I love that suit. I bought it for a song in eighty-one, but have been afraid to wear it. A shame," I admitted. "It's as light as a feather, and can be worn all year 'round."

"Elegant!" he said. "Love the vest."

"Yes, but the jacket has a two and five eighths inch lapel."

"Three and a quarter. Three and seven eighths. Four and a half. Why should we care about the width of a lapel?"

"Some of my trousers are tapered below the knee," I said. "Some are flared."

"And some, I'll bet, are straight," he said, laughing mischievously.

It was an exhilarating moment as I thought I might be able to wear these great clothes that I've cherished over the years. But it all weighed heavily on my mind. Could I stop believing that the day of my old clothing had passed?

Phil must have understood my dilemma.

"I say to those who feel they have to dress down, go ahead if you feel you must dress to conform. Forget who you really are.

"Guys like you and me should dress for ourselves. You wear your Marty Sullivan. And I'll wear my Jacques Roy. We'll stay trim so we can fit into them, and we'll knock each other dead in the process.

"The alternative," he went on, as he made for the door, "is to go out today and pay eight hundred and seventy-five dollars for an off-the-rack, two-piece wool and synthetic blend suit, sixty-four dollars for a shirt that doesn't even have your exact sleeve length, forty-five dollars for a tie and over a hundred for a pair of shoes!

"Or worse, drop your self respect and get a pair of blue jeans and a t-shirt. Ugh!"

Flushed with excitement, after Phil left, I wondered what it will be like when I come out of the closet with my Marty Sullivan suit, my Ascot Chang custom shirt, the foulard I got years ago in Los Angeles and my brown English loafers, class of seventy-nine.

Will my age be showing?

So be it!
# # #

Too Many Money Belts

2009-05-18T12:02:00.000-07:00

As a Traveler in Italy I Find Out That Worrying

About Theft Can Steal From the Fun

June 2009

"You're going to Italy? Watch out for the gypsies -- and those bag snatchers on their scooters!"

It wasn't the first time my wife and I had gotten such hair raising advice. On our way to Ecuador and Peru a few years ago, we were told to avoid crowds in outdoor markets, and not to take trains or go into the Andes. Pretty hard to do if you're going to Otavalo and Machu Picchu. And another time, friends warned us not to be out after dinner in St. Petersburg, White Nights to the contrary.

Mercifully, nothing unpleasant happened in either of those trips, but now, evidently, we were about to travel to a country that had a nasty reputation for trouble.

Preparing to go to Rome, Umbria and Tuscany, I found that even the guidebooks rang the alarm about security. They advised us to be very careful with our cash, traveler's cheques, credit cards and passports, not to carry a camera hanging loosely on a shoulder, and to have back-up photocopies of key documents handy.

My head had already been filled with well advertised pictures of thievery plaguing the unwary traveler in hotel rooms, on the beach and in restaurants. So I thought I'd better look beyond the Botticellis, Bellinis and Michelangelos I was going to see, and think about more than the Chianti Classico, antipasto and pasta I would be enjoying.

Did not the Italians of old fortify their towns with stone walls? Were not yesterday's protective steps taken by Siena, Perugia and Orvieto saying something to the tourist of today? What should my own high ground be in preparation for a pilgrimage to yes, the land of Dante and Verdi, but also -- let it be whispered -- the Mafia? How could I protect my wife and myself and our belongings from the dark side of our beloved Italians?

Giving in to my fears, I set about trying to develop schemes that would outsmart the wrongdoer, from the opportunistic to the most determined.

First, my person. Under my shirt I would wear two money belts, one with the pouch in the small of my back, and the other on my stomach, where I could occasionally rest my hand protectively. I would also wear a hidden pocket, which would hook through my belt and flip inside my pants to rest next to my appendix. This would be my accessible in and out facility. My pants pockets would hold only tissues, comb and less than ten dollars in euros.

I insisted that my wife wear a small money belt around her waist under her blouse, pointing out that the type that hung from the neck would be subject to a harmful wrenching by a heartless thug. I urged her to secure any bag she might carry by keeping its strap across her body, and that the contents be dispensable She resisted, but resigned herself after hearing the argument I presented based on the frightening reports of pickpockets, hordes of children who would surround you, and desperate mothers with starving babies in their arms, who would burn their fingers into your flesh until you surrendered your valuables.

I made lists of serial numbers, flight numbers, and critical telephone numbers to call in case of loss. I took out insurance. And then, to go the guidebooks one better, I made three sets of photocopies of the lists and of our important documents, one to carry in my day pack, one for the luggage and one to leave home for safe keeping. I developed a maze of file folders and envelopes to hold all these papers, and confuse anyone trying to poke through my things.

As the day of our departure approached, I was so on edge I had barely enough wits to pack my clothing and toiletries properly. My wife went about her own preparations with equanimity, something I wished I could afford, though I told myself I was justified doing what I was doing for our mutual safety.

In my last minute preparations I memorized "113," the police emergency telephone number, and reviewed the Italian vocabulary in my phrase book that I would need to help thwart, overcome or otherwise deal with danger. Aiuto! (Help!) Al Ladro! (Stop Thief!) Se ne vada! (Go away!) Mi lasci in pace! (Leave me alone!).

Then, with one foot out the door, I got a brilliant idea. I'd take along the old cane I had hanging in the closet. I recalled once reading about an eighteenth century traveler being very cautious when he noticed a man walking toward him with a stout stick in his hand. I'd carry my cane, and perhaps there would be a similar message in it for some potential trouble maker.

And so I was ready!

And what happened? Niente! Per niente!

Maybe the cane had something to do with it. Some people seemed to feel sorry for me, thinking I was disabled. A few gave me a wide berth, perhaps thinking I could be aggressive. Most ignored me as just another guy with a cane. It had some use helping me walk up steep streets in hill towns and up some steps in Rome. After a while, though, it was simply one more thing to carry, and a nuisance in restaurants.

As for gypsies, I saw a half dozen colorfully dressed smiling young children one day on the Piazza Barberini about thirty yards away. No one was paying any attention to them.

Everywhere there was so much traffic and so few sidewalks that the scooters and motorcycles, which were so loud you could hear them coming two blocks away, had all they could do to avoid hitting pedestrians, or getting swatted themselves by a Fiat or Lancia. I soon got tired shoving my wife protectively against the building walls, especially since it only encouraged her to window shop, and joined the natives walking blithely down the street as vehicles streamed by.

I had been avoiding groups of men congregated on corners and in piazzas until I lost patience wandering without directions, and discovered how open they were to an inquiry, and with what animated delight they waved me toward my destination. How many times I enjoyed hearing their musical Prego to my grateful Grazie.

Whatever city or town I was in, people were gabbing, laughing, shopping, going about their business, eating ice cream or kicking a ball. They had far more on their mind than my pockets.

Maneuvering through the streets and seeing the sights during the warm days, I sweated, drenched in my money belts. When I needed some cash or a credit card I had to go through contortions to get them. I suffered, but I persisted. Then one day, my wife said she had been eating so much she could no longer get into her tan slacks, which I knew she loved, if she had to wear her money belt. I was almost ready to put on hers,, too, but at that point decided that I had had it with money belts, and put them in the sack I was carrying.

I was feeling pretty good about easing up, and even joined my wife shopping. I had to cash some travelers cheques, and went into a bank, passing through its revolving security chamber that slowly lets one person in and out at a time. But at the counter I couldn't find my passport. A catastrophe! Someone had stolen my passport!

"Calm yourself," said my wife. "It's probably misfiled."

I emptied my money belts. Gone! Back at the hotel room, I opened every folder and every envelope. Nothing. The passport was supposed to be in the money belt I had worn in the small of my back. Why oh why had I not kept it on instead of carrying it?

"Maybe it's here in your sports jacket."

"Why would it be there?" I cried. "Would I leave my passport hanging in the closet?"

"I don't know. Look."

And so it was, together with my wife's. I had been wearing the jacket when we checked in several days before, and had put the passports in the breast pocket when the hotel clerk returned them to me after we registered. They had been there in the closet since then, and for all I know could have remained there unbothered.

It turned out I was to have no terrible news to convey about the trip, no frightening reports to add to the warnings I had received, only tales of fun and pleasure.

One of our last stops was Lucca. Surrounding the city, which is set on a fertile plain before a range of soft mountains, are its broad, ancient protective ramparts, now a beautiful elevated park, the Passeggiate delle Mura. On its tree-lined avenue, forbidden to automotive traffic, we found ourselves among joggers, strollers, lovers and cyclists enjoying their city. I twirled my cane playfully, feeling tutto va bene.

# # #

Dad Need Not Apply

2009-04-23T14:19:00.000-07:00

May 2009

Longer Unemployment for Those 45 and Older

When Ben Sims, 57, showed up earlier this year for a job interview at a company in Richardson, Tex., he noticed the hiring manager - several decades his junior - falter upon spotting him in the lobby.

"Her face actually dropped," said Mr. Sims, who was dressed in a conservative business suit, befitting his 25-year career in human resources at I.B.M.

Later, in her office, after several perfunctory questions, the woman told Mr. Sims she did not believe the job would be "suitable" for him. And, barely 10 minutes later she stood to signal the interview was over.

"I knew very much then it was an age situation," said Mr. Sims, who has been looking for work since November 2007, a month before the economic downturn began.

The recession's onslaught has come as Mr. Sims and many others belonging to the post-World War II baby boom generation -- the demographic burst from 1946 to 1964 that reshaped the country -- remain years from retirement. But unemployed boomers, many of whom believed they were still in the prime of their careers, are confronting the grim reality that they face some of the steepest odds of any job seekers in this dismal market.

By MICHAEL LUO

The New York Times

Finding a job these days is hard enough. If you're getting on in years, it can be a nightmare.

Take the case of my old friend Phil, whose bizarre tale of a recent job interview sent a shudder through my creaking bones.

"This young woman," he said, "thought I was her father."

"Do you look like him?" I asked.

"Must be. During the interview she kept interrupting me with the most inappropriate remarks. Asked me how I had met mom. Had it been love at first sight? Said she had always been curious about it.

"I wondered what was going on, of course, but decided to let it pass, and emphasized that I was a team player, loyal to my supervisor. She said she had gotten so used to obeying me through the years she'd feel funny about telling me what to do.

"I showed her the new product introduction plan I had developed that increased the company's market share twenty-seven percent. She responded with a chuckle about the time I had spanked her for speaking sharply to her mother.

"I read her the part of the speech I had written for the CEO that had brought the National Association of Manufacturers audience to its feet. She pulled out a picture taken at camp and her eyes moistened. She said she'd always love me for my understanding about that boy that summer.

"I went through the budgets I had managed, the revenue I had increased, the expenditures I had cut. She said she'd never forget how I had taught her the value of a dollar, though it had been painful when I had put the lid on her allowance."

"Wait a minute," I said. "Why didn't you get up and walk out?"

"I thought she was testing me," said Phil, "to see how I would stand up under intergenerational stress. So I continued.

"I showed her the personnel evaluations I had received, the commendations. I was about to go into the details of one of my award-winning projects when suddenly her attitude started to change. Her face took on a cold, determined look, and she accused me of being disingenuous.

"She said I was up to my old tricks, trying to control her life. She was not going to allow me to dictate to her. She was a grown woman now.

"Well, I couldn't let that go unchallenged.

"I never did any such thing, I said to her. You were brought up to be independent and assertive. Your mother and I stood by you and supported you in whatever you wanted for your future.

"Now she was weeping. What could I do? I put my arm around her. She sobbed, 'Oh dad, dear dad. It's so good having this out at last. I can't tell you how much this meeting has meant to me.'"

"You pretended you were her father?" I exclaimed.

"I was momentarily carried away. She seemed so vulnerable. She dried her eyes and told me I was one of the finalists for the position. She'd be in touch. We shook hands, and I left."

Surely Phil was stretching a point with this fantasy, but it was still very scary.

"So then what?" I asked. "Did you hear from her?"

"I got a letter a week later," said Phil, "thanking me for my time and complimenting me for my background and achievements. The company had found an individual, however, who did not have my depth of experience but could be expected to 'grow with the position.'

"I felt like sending her up to her room without any supper."

"I guess they were looking for someone at an entrance level," I said. "You were overqualified."

"That wasn't it," said Phil philosophically. "People don't mind hiring a brother, or a son. They simply have too hard a time hiring the old man."

"Next time you should try to get interviewed by someone closer to your own age," I said.

"That's an idea," he agreed. "Hell of a thing, though, isn't it?"

# # #

Dusting Time

2009-03-25T14:37:00.000-07:00

April 2009

Last week, after years of happy marriage, my wife, in the spirit of the times, gave me an ultimatum. From now on, she said, she would no longer do both the cooking and the dusting. I was to take on one of them, and I had my choice.

If the truth be told, I have always had trouble seeing dust. Under the circumstances, however, it was clear which responsibility I had to assume. The woman simply cooks too well.

The question was how would I know when it was time to dust.

Almost immediately, it seemed, my wife started wringing her hands and shaking her head. Before I knew what was happening, she had placed a rag before me.

When my wife would dust she would whiz through the house, grabbing things and setting them down as though she were in a race. I'm the kind of person who likes to take the time to do things right.

I took off my rubber-soled shoes and put on a pair of leather-soled shoes to avoid creating static electricity that would make the dust stick to the furniture. Then I put on my glasses, in case there would be something to see. I would not use a feather duster. Sure it would be easy to wave the thing like a wand over a table or a delicate ceramic, but that would simply circulate the dust. You had to wipe things carefully if you wanted to do a proper job.

I picked up the rag and painstakingly began.

Before long I came upon the carved old wooden watchman my wife and I had bought in Oberammergau more than thirty-five years ago. I moved my rag covered finger over his thick gray mustache and into the intricate lantern he carries to light his way on his rounds. It brought me back to the hills of Bavaria and our beat-up little blue Volkswagen on one of the marvelous trips we were able to make during the year I was a student in Paris.

As I wiped the sawbuck table in the living room I was once again bargaining with that big red-headed guy we got it from in New Hope. We had been married about five years and I had my first real job. There was so much ahead of us then.

The Greek chess set didn't take me back to Athens so much as to the time my young nephew checkmated me in three moves. I'm still trying to figure that out.

At the bookshelves my dust rag caressed the old bindings of WAR AND PEACE, ULYSSES and THE UNIVERSE AND DR. EINSTEIN, recalling for me the struggle to understand what Tolstoy, Joyce and Lincoln Barnett were saying.

I put on a recording of Rubinstein playing the Mazurkas of Chopin, to accompany my labors. Then I played a little SOUTH PACIFIC, MY FAIR LADY and THE MOST HAPPY FELLA. They reminded me of those golden Broadway years, buying the tickets to the shows, seeing them with our friends. Old shows now. And old friends, some still here, some gone.

I worked the rag over the frame of the Clavé print and thought of the auction where we bought it, surprising ourselves by refusing to give in when the bidding got tough.

Then there were the snapshots of children, of parents, of grandparents. And my wife's photographs. The three men and three women bathing in the Ganges at sunrise, taken from the small boat we had hired. The old woman, with her dark, creased face, sitting in prayer before the stupa in Boudhanath.

I almost forgot myself, dusting off these memories, when I smelled a wonderful meal being prepared. In a half hour or so I was finished and sitting down with my wife at the dinner table.

"This is delicious," I said. "What is it?"

"Can't be duplicated," she replied.

"You used leftovers, right?"

"Yes," she said. "Thanks for doing the dusting."

"My pleasure. Wasn't as bad as I thought it would be."

# # #

More Secret Thoughts of a Happy Husband

2009-02-23T11:57:00.000-08:00

A man's-eye view of the state of matrimony, with some of the unexpected things that make it work.

Reprinted from McCall's

March 2009

1. Nothing can rival home life.

2. Being yourself is always best, no matter how painful.

3. It is safe to react honestly to returnable merchandise.

4. It is bad luck to go out of the house without your wedding band.

5. Women have to be wakened with extreme care.

6. If you've got to burn anything, make it your bridges.

7. Women are not always thinking when they are silent.

8. Nobody is best at everything.

9. A woman's cross is her head of hair.

10. Living with a woman is a little like working backstage.

11. Curlers are a necessary evil.

12. Money and love are not incompatible.

13. If a man knows what he wants, a woman won't have to tell him.

14, Think twice before asking a question.

15. Keep one closet all to yourself.

16. Never say "No" when you mean, "Wait a minute."

17. A little bit of jealousy goes a long way.

18. Men have muscles; women, patience.

19. Nobody likes an optimist in the morning.

20. Always announce whom you're talking to the moment you lift the phone.

21. Don't count your wife's shoes.

22. Kindness in the morning is repaid at night.

23. Husbands and wives are not brothers and sisters.

24. It's better to get wet than carry a woman's umbrella.

25. Women who have nothing to wear like to throw out men's things.

26. Strength thrives on tenderness.

27. Raise your voice once a month.

28. Never buy a gift out of guilt.

29. A wife is more important than any car.

30. Antiques are not secondhand furniture.

31. The way to a woman's heart is through the door of a good restaurant.

32. Avoid consistency.

33. Women don't expect miracles.

34. Never open each other's mail.

35. Kiss before breakfast.

# # #

Secret Thoughts of a Happy Husband

2009-01-29T12:48:00.000-08:00

Forty random reflections of a man about matrimony, revealing exactly what he thinks about - mostly women.

Reprinted from McCall's

February 2009

1. Marriage makes friends out of lovers and lovers out of strangers.

2. I never met a man who didn't respect a good cook.

3. A working wife is a gift from heaven.

4. No bachelor was ever happier than a happily married man.

5. Sleeping late is not harmful.

6. A shopping woman is a happy woman.

7. It takes only one to make a good marriage.

8. Fresh orange juice is the elixir of love.

9. There is no guilt in admiring a beautiful woman.

10. People who travel are easier to live with at home.

11. Women are night people.

12. Only a fool would tell his wife everything.

13. It is humanly possible to have a good marriage.

14. Women love sales as men love heroics.

15. Don't hold your wife's friends against her.

16. Be first in bed whenever you can.

17. Sarcasm causes baldness.

18. Men should sleep near the telephone.

19. Never keep strict accounts.

20. A woman with taste is always beautiful.

21. Technique isn't everything.

22. Call your wife anything except "Mother."

23. Thank your wife after every meal.

24. Large twin beds are twice as good as any double bed.

25. Beware of the logical woman.

26. Nothing is more tangible to a woman than love.

27. Never talk about your wife.

28. Fat women are more fun.

29. Man will remain uncivilized as long as he has to share a bathroom.

30. Never try to relive your honeymoon.

31. Women regard war as their personal enemy.

32. Learn how to drive a nail into a wall, and a woman will stop at nothing to show her

appreciation.

33. Women don't understand soft-boiled eggs.

34. A gentleman never refuses a lady.

35. Women are usually right for the wrong reasons.

36. Living for today builds memories for tomorrow.

37. Women who wear men's pajamas make good companions.

38. One woman is enough for a real man.

39. If you lose your wife, don't keep looking for her.

40. Never keep a diary.

# # #

Cousins Party

2008-12-10T21:12:00.000-08:00

January 2009

"I'm your second cousin," said my mother's cousin Sophie, "and my daughter Alison is your third cousin. So her son is your fourth cousin."

"That's not right," said Sophie's sister Margaret. "Elliott is our first cousin once removed. So Alison is his first cousin twice removed, and Albert is..."

"Thrice removed? You're both wrong," said their brother Ralph. "Our children are his second cousins. And their children are his second cousins once removed."

"I don't like that expression, 'removed,' " said Sophie.

"It's done for clarity," said Ralph.

The conversation was taking place at our annual cousins party. I had not attended for a number of years and there was some catching up to do.

"So what's William?" asked Sophie.

"William is Elliott's step second cousin once removed," said Ralph.

"William is as much a member of the family as any of the other children," said Margaret.

"Nobody said he wasn't," said Ralph.

"You called him a step cousin."

"Well, he's Carol's son by her first marriage."

"I don't like that expression, 'step,' " said Sophie.

My mother had come from a big family, and there were lots of cousins on her side. Still, it was surprising to see so many people, a great many with children, spilling into the back yard and roaming through cousin Sophie's old house in Santa Barbara, where the party was being held.

Margaret had made her famous chicken, and just about everybody had brought something special, so there were plenty of good things to eat.

Cousin Henry was there, so there was more than enough to drink.

"Louise and Victoria have Robert's blood, right?" asked Ralph.

"Genes," said Margaret.

"OK, genes. Does William have Robert's genes?"

"He has Carol's genes," said Sophie.

"And she's my daughter-in-law," said Margaret.

"I guess we're all cousins," I volunteered.

"I love William just as much as I love any of Robert's children," said Margaret, "whether they're his children with Carol or his children with Helen."

"Whatever happened to Helen?" I asked.

"She married Carol's first husband," said Margaret.

"Jack? She married Jack? How did that happen?"

"When Carol and Robert fell in love, Jack called Helen to commiserate," said Margaret. "They were really better suited to one another than their ex's."

"That's today for you," said Sophie.

"Do they have any children?" I asked.

"What's the difference? They're not cousins," said Ralph.

"They don't have children of their own," said Margaret. "But if they did, they'd be cousins as far as I'm concerned. I always like Helen. And besides, she's Louise's and Victoria's mother, and they're my grandchildren.

"Oh for God's sake!" said Ralph. "That's not the issue. It's the language. We want to use the language properly."

"Just call us all cousins," said Margaret, "like Elliott said."

In past years I had been able to see a series of family resemblances among the cousins. But now that the family had grown so much, it was harder. There had been family voices, too, sounds you could recognize. Now the voices were more varied, more reflective of other worlds.

And yet I still felt at home.

"What if Louise and Steve have children?" asked Sophie.

"What do you mean? asked Margaret.

"They're not married."

"They'll get married," said Ralph.

"A lot of people aren't getting married these days," said Margaret. "That doesn't mean the children aren't cousins."

"Victoria wouldn't do it. She wouldn't be a single parent," said Sophie.

"She wouldn't because she's a lesbian," said Ralph.

"Do you have to use that word?" said Margaret.

"OK, she's gay. Gay people don't have children."

"Says who?" said Margaret. "Anyway, she can adopt. And if she does, that child would be a cousin, too."

Suddenly, Louise and Victoria ran up with some young children I'd not seen before, and drew us into a tight circle. We all hugged and kissed.

"Hooray for the cousins!" shouted Louise.

Everyone stopped what they were doing and shouted, "Cousins! Cousins! Cousins!"

Next year the party will be at Margaret's in Walnut Creek. I'll try to make it.

# # #

Pills Are Us

2008-11-25T20:43:00.000-08:00

December 2008

I hadn't seen the old gang, what was left of them, for quite a while and was surprised how reasonably well they looked. There we were, the four of us, Charles, Bill, Betsy and me.

As we've done, each time we've gotten together, we launched right into the organ recital: our arthritic knees, heart surgery, cataracts, breathlessness, hearing loss and other bodily signs of age.

This time it was also about pills.

"You know," said Betsy, "my favorite TV show is the network news. You get all that information about the new drugs."

"I hate that relentless drug advertising, and the 'Ask your doctor' routine," said Charles. "Are we oldsters the only ones watching the news?"

"There's this new orange pill," said Betsy. "It's for fatigue. I'm always so tired after dinner."

Charles is our skeptic, and has no patience for the classifying of pills by their color or configuration. "What's the generic or trade name? That's what's important."

"Those names are too complicated," said Bill. "Every pill has its own shape, and that's a handy way to tell one from another. I take a diamond one, a little round one, an oblong blue, a half tiny white, a hexagon and a long green one."

"Don't you want to know what you're taking? What their side effects are?"

"I take supplements," said Betsy. "They don't have any side effects."

"They're placebos," said Charles.

Bill agreed. "Ineffectual."

"I hate the way the ads talk about side effects in a tone that sounds like they're good for you," said Charles.

"Do you see any wrinkles in my face?" said Betsy. "Alternative medicine. Herbals."

"Genes," said Charles.

"I take them with apple sauce," said Betsy. "I choke with water. With apple sauce they go right down."

"It's the apple sauce a day that's helping your skin," said Bill.

"I take Levothroid, Furosemide, Metropolol, Hydralazine, Cozaar, Amlodipine, Terazosin and Lovostatin," said Charles, "and have no problem distinguishing one from another."

"I take Vitamin C 500, B-50, Calcium with Vitamin D and Centrum Silver," I said.

"Me too," said Betsy. "And those little forest green pills."

"Forest sulphate," said Bill.

"Ferrous sulphate," corrected Charles.

"That was a joke," said Bill.

"What do you take for headaches?" I asked.

"Tylenol."

"Ibuprofen."

"I can't take Advil or Motrin."

"Ecotrin. It's coated."

"I carry Aspirin, just in case I get a heart attack."

"What about Flomax?"

"I love that ad."

"Do you take sleeping tablets?"

"Never."

"Sometimes."

It was time for cookies and coffee. For a while there was silence.

As we said our goodbyes, I asked, "Are these little pills the things that are keeping us alive?"

"Ask your doctor," we agreed.

# # #

Older Woman, Younger Man

2008-10-23T20:43:00.000-07:00

November 2008

Older woman, younger man relationships

Women have more options than ever - including men!

Braving "robbing the cradle" jokes, almost one third of women between the ages of 40 and 69 are dating men 10 or more years younger. According to a recent AARP poll, one-sixth of women in their 50s, in fact, prefer men in their 40s.

msnbc

- I want to thank you for this opportunity to talk to you about your relationship.

"My pleasure."

- May I ask your age?

"I don't do age."

- OK. Just how young is the man in your life?

"About my son's age."

- That would put him...

"...in his twenties. But they've been in their thirties and forties."

- So you've gone out with younger men before.

"I've tried to go out with men my own age or older since my husband died, but it hasn't worked out."

- They were not in good shape?

"On the contrary. They were very cute."

- It's something else then.

"It's something else."

- Can you give me a hint?

"Older men don't like to do it standing up."

- Sex?

"No, silly. Eating.

- Eating!

"Older men want to do it sitting down. They want their dinner on the table at six o'clock. They want their lunch on the table at noon. They want their breakfast on the table at seven. That's not a relationship. That's slavery."

- Younger men don't like to eat sitting down?

"Not the ones I've known. Too busy. Too much in a hurry. Off to jog, off to work, off to the movies. I haven't cooked in a year."

- And you don't miss it?

"If I want to cook, I can. I've got old friends. I can invite them over for a veal roast, curried chicken, or whatever. I can cook for myself."

- But isn't it romantic to be sitting at an intimate, candlelit table for two together with the man you love?

"That's what restaurants are for."

- I see.

"When I'd complain to an older beau that we never go out for dinner, he'd say, 'What do you mean? We went out just the other month. ' If my young friend has to sit down for a home cooked meal he thinks it's Thanksgiving or Christmas."

- There must be other reasons why you prefer younger men. I suppose they make you feel younger and give you a new lease on life, so to speak.

"They don't require so much mending."

- Mending?

"Sewing. Buttons, split seams, tears in their trousers. They just keep wearing their beat-up clothes until they're sick of them, then toss the things out and buy something new."

- And older men...

"...never throw their old clothes away."

- Is there a down side to going out with a younger man?

"There have been awkward moments. Once we were talking about history and this young friend of mine though the Battle of the Bulge was something that happened to people over forty who didn't believe in aerobics. As for me, I didn't know whether a vegan was something you wore, sat on, or drove."

- Do you ever get jealous?

"How do you mean?"

- Well, the men you've known are quite a bit younger than you are.

"I do have a couple of old girl friends who hang around."

- I mean younger women. Have you been jealous of any of them?

"It's the most natural thing in the world for a young man to want a young woman . How can I be jealous of that?"

- So you've lost some younger men?

"And some have lost me."

- What is it that younger men get from older women?

"I can only speak for myself."

- Of course.

"I know how to dance to slow music. I put my lipstick away and I wipe the sink."

- There are three million women in America married to men ten or more years younger. Do you ever think you'll settle down with a younger man?

"Marriage is something else."

- I take it, then, that you do not wish to remarry.

"I didn't say that."

- Excuse me, but is it that you would prefer someone more a contemporary?

"Well, you share William Holden, Audrey Hepburn, Rock Hudson and Doris Day with a man your own age. There's something indefinably comforting coming out of similar experiences and longings. You know where you've been and where you still have to go."

- But?

"I just wish those old guys would lighten up a bit."

# # #

Working The Kinks Out Of The Afternoon Nap

2008-09-27T12:03:00.000-07:00

Reprinted from Grand Times

October 2008

I was grateful to learn from some recently published studies that my desire for a daily afternoon nap was not a sign of laziness, declining interest in my work or approaching senility. In fact, according to the experts, naps are not only natural, they are beneficial and should be encouraged.

Napping after lunch or some time in the mid afternoon, they say, can improve your productivity and help prevent nasty accidents by keeping you alert the rest of the day. Armed with these findings, I vowed I would hereafter listen to my body when it cried out for a nap, and ignore any societal censure that might crop up.

About an hour after lunch that first enlightened day I noticed the page I was reading beginning to fade. My eyes derived tremendous pleasure from remaining closed for several seconds at a time. Normally panicked by such signals, I now looked forward to the afternoon nap that was about to take place with a veritable torrent of anticipation.

I work at home, so implementation, I thought, would be simple. But some questions arose. Should I take off my shoes? Should I put my feet up on the desk or get into bed? If in bed, should I nap on top of the covers or underneath? If underneath, should I get undressed or just take my shirt off? Or my pants?

In any case, I'd leave my socks on.

But how long should I nap? The way I felt I could sleep until the next morning. Since my accountant would be over at four to check the books, I set the alarm for 3:45. I decided to keep my clothes on, remove my shoes and lie down on the bed on top of the covers.

But I couldn't sleep. Lying there, finally, after all those years, all I could do was think that the whole country was watching me, wondering how I was going to finish all the things that I had to do before the week was out.

And then I was in the Antarctic. The dogs were starving, the sled half covered with snow. I was shivering. I needed a blanket desperately. Suddenly the alarm went off. Should I brush my teeth? And my hair -- how would I get it to lie down? My eyes were bloodshot. Before I could even change my rumpled shirt the doorbell rang. Would I be able to talk? To listen? To think? How long would it take me to wake up?

That weekend, business obligations and household chores safely out of the way, I prepared more properly for my afternoon nap. This time I got completely undressed and got under the covers.

I felt my wife shaking me.

"What are you doing?" she cried.

"I'm taking a short nap."

"It's seven -thirty," she said. "You've been in bed since two and we have a dinner date over at Bill and Beth's at eight. Are you all right?"

All right? I was a tiger, absolutely on fire. In fact, I've never been so witty, so engaging, as I was that night. Beth complimented me on how well I looked. Bill eyed me suspiciously. When the others started to yawn I was ready to go bowling.

Later, at home, my wife climbed into bed and went out like a light. I lay there staring at the ceiling. The nap really had worked, I chuckled to myself, going over my triumphs of the evening. An hour went by. And then another. At three in the morning, still unable to fall asleep, I got up for a glass of warm milk. it was hopeless.

Obviously, napping was too new to my way of life. As a novice, I needed guidelines and training.

It would be easier if more people took to napping, the way they took to two- hour lunches, the happy hour and jogging. We'd have more articles, even books, on the subject. It would become a part of American life.

Meanwhile, those of us who are napping pioneers will have to experiment, one afternoon at a time. I'm willing. Are you?

# # #

BATTLE OF THE AGES

2008-08-27T21:42:00.000-07:00

ADVANTAGE MATURITY? OR YOUTH?

September 2008

Recently, I got to wondering how I’d do, competing against the youth I used to be half a lifetime ago.

Now, thanks to the miracle of virtual reality, I could find out who was the better man, me then or me today. Through state-of-the-art computer programming I would be able to, all but actually, get on the tennis court in a battle with my former self.

Why tennis, you may ask. Why not compare my ability to dance or make love?

Sure, they’re important, too, but they require the subjective judgment of another. I wanted a contest where the score alone would decide.

It would tell me whether the seasoned cleverness and diabolical craftiness of my maturity could overcome the brash confidence and awesome physical capability of the wild kid I used to be.

I set about preparing for the showdown by analyzing the player I had been. From old photographs and a memory that was still sharp enough I was able to visualize before me a tall, lean young man with a ruddy complexion that reflected his love of outdoor combat.

His determined expression, trim waist, powerful forearms and insolently square shoulders presented a picture of barely contained energy just waiting to explode.

I knew him to be one of the world’s fiercest fighters for whom defeat seemed more horrible than death.

Nevertheless, as I saw myself standing opposite him, gray, stooped, tired before we even began, I felt I had an excellent chance of beating him. I was smarter and more experienced. My strokes were softer, but more varied.

True, my body was bent where it was supposed to be straight, and straight where it was supposed to be bent, but it could be maneuvered well enough for the doubles I normally played with my contemporaries.

Perhaps it could be made to work against this impatient tiger who was now bouncing around in his quaint little sneakers as the match was ready to get underway.

I won the toss and elected to serve first. The ball suddenly came back so fast and so deep I never had a chance to lay my racquet on it. He had aced me on my own service! The next thing I knew he had taken the first game.

Then he won his service in four straight points. The score was 0-2. I would have to use my head.

I started to chop and slice, a strategy that had been working very well for me of late. This didn’t trouble him in the least. He simply got to the ball in a few quick steps, and returned it first to my left and then to my right until I found myself running into the ground.

I think I picked the wrong conditions for the match. The sun was high in the sky and I was soon drowning in my own perspiration.

I then tried to keep the ball deep into his backhand, which I knew to be his weakest stroke. At last I took a game, but he soon caught on to what I was doing and started to lob the ball over my head as I foolishly went to the net in a vain attempt to force an error.

His lobs were so high, however. I was able to run back to get them. That, I later realized, was a critical mistake.

The court seemed to get bigger and bigger, and I began panting heavily. Then a chill ran up my arms and the ball got harder to see. The score was now 1-4, and I called for a time-out for a drink and a rest.

While I was desperately trying to recover, he dropped to the ground and started doing push-ups! If he had not been myself, I would have murdered him.

The end came soon afterwards, 1-6.

He was gracious about his win, as I knew he would be, and offered to play another set. Exhausted, I shook my head and shut off the computer.

I’ve considered programming a rematch. But why go through all that? After all, it isn’t as though I lost to someone else. His victory was my victory, too. Wasn’t it?

# # #

HORN TALK

2008-07-31T21:11:00.000-07:00

Fuel injection, power steering, automatic transmission, computerized maintenance programming -- today's automobile is an engineering masterpiece.

Except for the horn.

As articulate beings we can go into detail about our trip to the Grand Tetons.

We can debate a constitutional issue. But with our automobile horn all we can say is, "Hey!" "Look out!" or "Get the hell out of my way!"

Imagine my surprise on the highway the other day when I heard this pleasant, "tap, de-te-tap" behind me.

It was the horn of a small blue sedan that wanted to pass. Its friendliness seemed to talk to me, and I moved over quickly.

The driver, a woman in her fifties with a strong profile, rosy complexion and short, straight gray hair touched her brow in a salute of thanks and drove on.

A little while later I found myself next to her on a local street, waiting for a light to change. I motioned for her to join me for a moment, and we pulled into a couple of parking spots.

I complimented her and asked if she had a special horn installed in her car. She said no, it was simply the way she used it.

"Can you show me what you did on the highway?" I asked.

"You mean, 'Excuse me, I'd like to pass you, but I assure you this is no reflection on your ability to drive, your age, your looks or how much money you make '?"

"Yes," I said, excited. "That was it!"

She hit the horn with a quiet touch of the heel of her palm and some delicate taps of her middle finger.

Fascinated, I asked if she had any other horn calls.

She thought for a moment. "Here's one I've used a number of times on weekends," she said, playing a series of staccato beats. "It's, 'Don't look now, but your dog's nose is caught in your right rear window.'"

Realizing I had found a sympathetic ear, I bewailed the way some drivers lean on their horns for the least little thing.

"Yes," she agreed, "and horn talk is really so easy."

I wanted to hear her entire repertory. She said she had to get on, but would run through a few.

Exhibiting an eloquence I had not thought possible with a standard equipment automobile horn, she played:

-- I know I'm in the wrong lane. I'm trying to get out of your way.

-- I'd like to get into my garage, please.

-- I'm blowing my horn a bit louder than usual only because I know you're hard of hearing. No offense meant.

-- Can you move forward about three inches?

-- Love your car.

-- After you.

-- I'm driving this slow because I have a wedding cake in the back seat.

"I wish I could play the horn the way you do," I said, "but it seems complicated. I bet you could make a fortune writing it all down and getting it programmed."

She smiled. "All you have to do is feel what you want to say to be able to get your horn to say it."

Suddenly we heard a loud, four second horn blast from a pick-up truck that had pulled up alongside us.

"Let me interpret that," I volunteered. "He's saying, 'Hey, are you leaving or are you going to spend the night there!?'"

A young man wearing a purple and white peaked cap backwards rolled down his right hand window.

"Hey," he said, "are you leaving or..."

I cut him off. "No, we're spending the night here."

He sped away, giving us a much longer blast. My new friend and I laughed.

She wished me good luck, said goodbye and left. I got into my car, sorry I had not asked her name.

At that moment a man pulled up in a Porsche. He was about to back into the vacant spot. I tapped my horn twice, then once more.

"Sure," he said. "I'll wait while you get out. It'll be easier for both of us."

I took off, feeling I had found new strength.

# # #