Coda

Our “vacation” on our boat in Connecticut wrapped up in a frenzy, meeting friends for dinner, saying our goodbyes, and spending our last night with Jonathan and Anna, first dinner at Westport’s lovely Blue Lemon, and then a night of splendid theatre at the Westport Country Playhouse.  We’ve been going to the WCP for some forty years and the one constant is the quality of their productions.  No wonder the Wall Street Journal named it one of the four leading regional theatres in the United States, along with our other favorite here in Florida, Dramaworks.  You could say we have the best of both worlds, having seasonal access to each.

The current production at WCP is Alan Ayckbourn’s Things We Do for Love, a typical Ayckbourn play exploring relationships with a comedic touch. Perhaps not as well known as his Absurd Person Singular, The Norman Conquests trilogy or Bedroom Farce, all of which we’ve seen over the years, either in London, Westport, or NY,  this play has that distinctive Ayckbourn signature, and as a later play, perhaps a bit more maturity.

The set itself (and the photograph fails to do it justice) is actually on three levels, the living room being the main one, in the home owned by Barbara, a professional woman, dedicated to her job as an executive assistant. The basement flat below is rented to a postman, Gilbert, who also serves as handyman plus having a crush on Barbara (of which she is unaware).  Barbara is 30-40 something, and being visited by her high school friend, Nikki, who is in love and in fact engaged to a Scotsman, Hamish.  Barbara has agreed to sublet the upper flat to them while their house is being renovated, and this level, too, can be seen by the audience.  Barbara and Hamish take an instant dislike to one another. Need I say more?  So the play takes place on multiple levels -- physically and metaphysically -- with interesting and entertaining twists. In the course of the evening, we learn much about the “things we do for love.”

Part of the success of the Westport Country Playhouse’s production is its fine casting; I think a hallmark of both WCP and Dramaworks.  I could single out Michael Mastro who plays Gilbert for special recognition, a difficult role to play.  But all – Geneva Carr as Barbara, Matthew Greer as Hamish, and Sarah Manton as Nikki – are first rate, and make this a memorable production, under the fine direction of John Tillinger.  And kudos to James Noone for his scenic design.

Ayckbourn once said “The joy of the English language is its infinite capacity for being misunderstood.”  Indeed, and how lucky we are to have a playwright of his stature still in our midst.  While viewing his plays, one has the impression one is experiencing a light farce, but his plays linger in one’s mind, a testament to the more substantive themes he weaves with his unique comedic touch.

By the way, I wrote this before a review appeared in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.  Terry Teachout essentially agrees with me!

The following morning we were on the road returning to Florida.  At the last minute we decided to take a detour to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.  We had never seen this UNESCO World Heritage Site and it had been on our so-called bucket list.  We heard that they now conduct smaller tours of the home which, for the first time, includes the upstairs and the dome and decided that was for us. 

It was fascinating to see Jefferson’s use of octagonal forms in his designs such as the dome room and many of the bedrooms.  Unlike most of the home where photography was forbidden, we were able to photograph this part.  His use of a skylight was radical for the time.

We are glad we booked this “Behind the Scenes” tour, arriving early in the morning before the crowds, being able to more leisurely appreciate the genius of the man, a self trained architect as well as author of the Declaration of Independence.  Did he know no earthly bounds?  Surveying his land and buildings, one can say that indeed necessity was the mother of invention.  Jefferson knew how to produce what he needed from the land to transform his entire estate, using his imagination and stunning ingenuity. 

 

I suppose the only blemish on his reputation was his adherence to slavery, something he knew was wrong, but as it was such an ingrained part of the American south at the time, he felt powerless to change it.  Let another generation do it, he thought.  When one thinks that as recently as the 1960s we had segregated facilities in many parts of the US, one can appreciate the enormity of the conundrum.

Besides the grounds and his home (of course the focal point of the visit) we were impressed by The Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s wisdom in setting up the visitor’s center a short shuttle ride from the plantation, with a 20 minute introductory film, museum, a well stocked restaurant, and a beautiful shop.  From there it is but a 5 minute shuttle ride to an experience of a lifetime.  The small carefully timed tours were especially appreciated.

 

It reminded us of visiting The Biltmore in Asheville, and the neighboring Carl Sandburg home in Flatrock, NC.  The Jefferson plantation had the intimacy and livability of the Sandburg home and grounds, and, as a self sustaining home, a little of The Biltmore, but not the grandeur.  However, if one considers accomplishments of the intellect an element of grandeur, Monticello soars

Since we started out early for our tour of Monticello, and we were now continuing on our way to FL, we thought we’d push on setting a target for Florence, SC for the night.  We understood our friends, Harry and Susan, were on their way north and that’s where they normally stay for the night, so wouldn’t it be fun if we met there for dinner?  We knew where they were staying, so we called while on the road and booked a room there. We were driving some 475 miles from the northwest and they some 575 miles from the south.  We both arrived within a minute of each other!  If one had planned to meet that would have been impossible timing.  It makes one believe in serendipity.

It was fun to catch up with each other after being away for nearly two months.  The next morning we left the hotel at 5.30 am.  Great to get some miles under our belt at that time while I95 is nearly empty, except for the trucks of course.  By 3.00 PM we were home, sadly leaving our other life behind at the South Norwalk Boat Club in Connecticut.

But wait ‘till next year!

A Few Summer Photographs

I was going to simply combine this with my last entry but I suppose it should stand on its own as it is not directly related.  In addition to reading some wonderful literature such as the Gilbert’s Ampersand, there are some special moments living on our boat, and I’ve tried to capture a few of them in these photos.

One of the Norwalk Islands you pass while leaving the west side of the harbor is Tavern Island. This has a rich history, including stories of wild parties held by Billie Rose and it is where Lillian Hellman finished her “Little Foxes.”  It can now be yours for merely $10 plus million.

Sheffield Island Light House is a great place to visit. A ferry runs regularly from the Norwalk Seaport Association on Water Street.  Ask whether Capt. Al is running it and say hello! Price of the ferry includes a tour of the lighthouse built around the time of the Civil War.

 

We used to live on the Norwalk River, in this house, although the present version has been renovated and the second floor enlarged.  Norwalk River is a “working river” with barges and fishing and oyster boats regularly departing and arriving, always something interesting going on. This house has a view from the eastern banks while our boat is now docked on the western shore.

How many photographs were taken around the world of the recent Supermoon?  Probably billions.  Here are a couple more, not spectacular but personal, looking east across the Norwalk River from the end of our dock

And of course, an obligatory “underway” photograph, leaving Norwalk Harbor in our boat.

The weather this year seems to be the inverse of last year’s stifling heat wave.  We wondered why we bothered to leave Florida last year, but this summer’s weather in the Northeast has made up for the last, with temperatures mostly in the 80’s and relatively low humidity.  Just beautiful, and as testimony I offer a shot of clouds at sunset over the marina, taken from our bridge.

Lazy Hazy Days

It’s our usual time for what I call the vacation (being on our boat in Connecticut) from the vacation (being retired and living in Florida).  Our life here is very different from that of being in our home, living in a couple hundred of square feet on the water, and in the locale of my working days.  Everything must have its own place and must be secure when we run the boat, which with each passing year is less and less.  When a boat is a home (even for a few months) it becomes more of a challenge to secure for running and to deal with the umbilical cords to the dock, the power lines, the water line, the lines that hold us secure enough so our fixed satellite dish does not stray from its southwest target.  And then what we did as a younger couple on the water takes energy and sometimes daring, wares in precious short supply as we age.  And finally, we’ve been to most ports worthwhile visiting on the Long Island, Block Island, Vineyard, and Nantucket Sounds, and we are happily content at our dock or at our mooring off the Norwalk Islands.

Missing from our boating life here, though has been a small boat, one to take us on a cocktail cruise in (diet coke for me, the Captain), together or with friends, on placid twilight evenings. Recently we were able to buy such a boat – a fairly new one, so it’s likely that we’ll be out on the water more often now.  That is how it should be.  Naturally, we are happy to share it with our son, Jonathan, who has practically grown up on boats.  He’ll help keep it standing tall.

But, aside from our usual routines, the shopping and provisioning, meeting friends for lunch or dinner, my early morning walk in Shorefront Park which adjoins our marina (marveling at the rebuilding going on there and the raising of homes still in the aftermath of super storm, Sandy), there is the endless working on the boat and, for me, some writing (working on some short stories).  I also have my “summer reading” list.  Along with reading short stories by John Updike and Alice Munro, I squeeze in a novel here and there and my most recent read, Solar, by Ian McEwan, certainly classifies as “summer reading,” not literature at the level of what I read before by McEwan,  Saturday, but, still an engrossingly, compulsively readable novel.

I was curious about how the author would handle, in fiction, a subject that has interested me ever since I was exposed to it in high school: solar energy.  At a high school science fair, GE put on a demonstration of solar energy using a small model car on stage, shining spotlights on its roof and miraculously the small car moved across the stage.  I was hooked.  If I had more of a scientific bent, perhaps I would have gone into the field.  Mind you, this was the late 1950s.

So while the technology has been around, we’ve been slow to use it to partially solve our energy needs.  The State of Connecticut sponsored a rebate program in the early 1980s in the wake of the gas crisis, for installing solar powered hot water and we were one of the first houses to line up for it.  It was the most basic of systems, direct heat transfer, a pump circulating a liquid that quickly absorbed heat and then transferred it through a number of coils in a special hot water heater which had an electrical back up heater when the sun didn’t shine.  There was no battery storage of energy.  But it worked!  And by timing our hot water usage we squeezed everything we could out of the sun before reverting to electrical back up.

It’s disheartening we haven’t more rapidly developed this technology to make much more widespread use of solar energy, especially now with battery storage of energy becoming much more efficient.  It’s one of the reasons I admire Elon Musk’s vision, huge garages with solar panels on top, powering his Tesla tethered automobiles.  Even the rooftops of Manhattan could be outfitted, but instead the luxury buildings there have pools and cabanas.  Where are our priorities?

Ian McEwan’s Solar deals with the weighty subject of global warming and the solar solution through one of the most despicable protagonists I have ever encountered, a Noble Prize winner who is a compulsive liar, over eater, sexaholic, and criminal.  One can hardly cheer for his success but McEwan’s novel  makes interesting reading as a satire of everything Michael Beard – our prodigiously plump, reprehensible physicist who can’t save himself but sees himself saving the world -- comes in contact with.  No sense going into the plot in detail as it is readily available on line.  But if you are up to some beach reading, and like McEwan as I do, it’s worth the time.  Some of the novel is very funny, so it is a change of pace for McEwan, as Straight Man was for Richard Russo, although the latter overshadows McEwan’s work for sheer hilarity. 

But Solar is about a serious subject, and one can only wonder why as a nation we haven’t made it a greater priority for solving our energy needs.

Low Tide Shorefront Park

High Tide Shorefront Park

It’s a Wrap

Hard to believe our summer on the boat is drawing to a close.  Next week we’ll be on our way to Budapest to begin a river cruise that will take us on the Danube, the Main, and the Rhine, through five countries and many medieval towns and villages.  I’m particularly looking forward to Cologne, the city from which my great grandparents emigrated.  As a boater, a highlight will be the leisurely navigation of the three rivers, through a total of 47 locks.

Our clearing off and packing up signals the end of our boating season here, leaving old friends, the Boat Club we’re active in, and neighborhoods that are ingrained in our sub-consciousness.  Compounding a sense of sadness was our attendance at two funerals this summer to say farewell to old boating friends, both our age.  We also had a rather sad dinner with a boating friend who had a severe stroke over the winter, a once vigorous man who is now disabled.

I’ve mentioned Shorefront Park before, where I usually do my morning power walk.  I love that little neighborhood here in S. Norwalk, so evocative of the neighborhood I grew up in Queens, but with the added luxury dimension of being on the water.  However, this lovely neighborhood suffered the wrath of Super Storm Sandy, and the devastation can still be seen, homes totally ruined, others in stages of reconstruction, even raising one house a full story to elude possible future flooding.  The storm left its mark on this area.  I usually walk early in the morning and already there is a certain late summer stillness the last few mornings foreshadowing the oncoming fall.  Indeed, time to leave once again.

I did not read as much as I would have liked during our relatively brief stay here.   But in addition to The Orphan Master which I described in the previous entry, I recently read and thoroughly enjoyed Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff.  It reads like a suspense novel and Wolfe makes you feel as if you are right there.  It mostly covers the original Mercury 7 Astronauts’ training and launches, but against the background of the Cold War of the late 50s and 1960s, a period I remember so well, but never fully realizing the extent to which it drove the space program.  The book begins though with Chuck Yeager’s breaking the sound barrier and fittingly ends with Chuck Yeager’s last test flight, the point being that unlike the Mercury 7, Yeager flew a rocket as a pilot. Wolfe’s description of Yeager’s last test flight is unforgettable, and provides a strong incentive for reading the book.

 

Nonetheless, there are several other selections which resonate with me and therefore I include them below.  The first is his description of where the astronauts stayed while at the Cape: Cocoa Beach.  I’ve been there and I can attest that while it has obviously been more developed, Wolfe still captures its essence and the meaning of the place to the Mercury 7:

….Cape Canaveral was not Miami Beach or Palm Beach or even Key West.  Cape Canaveral was Cocoa Beach.  That was the resort town at the Cape.  Cocoa Beach was the resort town for all the Low Rent folk who couldn’t afford the beach towns father south….Even the beach at Cocoa Beach was Low Rent.  It was about three hundred feet wide at high tide and hard as a brick.  It was so hard that the youth of postwar Florida used to go to the stock car races at Daytona Beach, and then, their brains inflamed with dreams of racing glory, they would head for Cocoa Beach and drive their cars right out on that hardtack strand and race their gourds off, while the poor sods who were vacationing there gathered up their children and their Scotch-plaid picnic coolers, and ran for cover.  At night some sort of prehistoric chiggers or fire ants – it was hard to say, since you could never see them – rose up from out of the sand and the palmetto grass and went for the ankles with a bite more vicious than a mink’s  There was no such thing as “first class accommodations” or “red-carpet treatment” in Cocoa Beach.  The red carpet, had anyone ever tried to lay one down, would have been devoured in midair by the No See’um bugs, as they were called, before it ever touched the implacable hardcraker ground.  And that was one reason the boys loved it!

And then onto Wolfe’s definition of the intangible, “the right stuff” as he so poignantly describes it: ….Next to Gagarin’s orbital flight, Shepard’s little mortar lob to Bermuda, with its mere five minutes of weightlessness, was no great accomplishment.  But that didn’t matter.  The flight had unfolded like a drama, the first drama of single combat in American History.  Shepard had been the tiny underdog, sitting on top of an American rocket – and our rockets always blow up – challenging the omnipotent Soviet Integral.  The fact that the entire thing had been televised, starting a good two hours before the lift-off, had generated the most feverish suspense.  And then he had gone through with it.  He let them light the fuse.  He hadn’t resigned.  He hadn’t even panicked.  He handled himself perfectly.  He was as great a daredevil as Lindbergh, and he was purer: he did it all for his country.  Here was a man..…with the right stuff.  No one spoke the phrase – but every man could feel the rays from that righteous aura and that primal force, the power of physical courage and manly honor.

And how did the geopolitical events influence the space program?  Probably there would have been no program, at least not in the 1960s, without those events:  ….Kennedy was convinced that the entire world was judging the United States and his leadership in terms of the space race with the Soviets.  He was muttering, “If somebody can just tell me how to catch up.  Let’s find somebody – anybody…There’s nothing more important”…Catching up became an obsession.  … Finally Dryden told him that it looked hopeless to try to catch up with the mighty Integral in anything that involved flights in earth orbit.  The one possibility was to start a program to put a man on the moon within the next ten years.  It would require a crash effort on the scale of the Manhattan Project of the Second Work War…..Less than a week later…the Bay of Pigs debacle had occurred, and now his “new frontier” looked more like a retreat on all fronts….And the tremendous public response to Shepard as the patriotic daredevil, challenging the Soviets in the heavens, gave Kennedy an inspiration…They were all absolutely startled when Kennedy said: “I want you to start on the moon program. I’m going to ask Congress for the money.  I’m going to tell them you’re going to put a man on the moon by 1970.”

The program and the book culminate with John Glenn’s first orbital flight.  The adoration of the man knew no bounds and his parade with the other Mercury 7 down Broadway brought even the city of steel and concrete to its knees: ….And what was it that had moved them all so deeply?  It was not a subject you could discuss, but the seven of them knew what it was, and so did most of their wives.  Or they knew about part of it.  They knew it had to do with presence, the aura, the radiation of the right stuff, the same vital force of manhood that had made millions vibrate and resonate thirty five years before to Lindbergh – except that in this case it was heightened by Cold War patriotism, the greatest surge of patriotism since the Second World War….But what the multitudes showed John Glenn and the rest of them on that day was something else.  They anointed them with the primordial tears that the right stuff commanded….Somehow, extraordinary as it was, it was…right! The way it should be!  The unutterable aura of the right stuff had been brought onto the terrain where things were happening! Perhaps that was what New York existed for, to celebrate those who had it, whatever it was, and there was nothing like the right stuff, for all responded to it, and all wanted to be near it and to feel the sizzle and to blink in the light…Oh, it was a primitive and profound thing!  Only pilots truly had it, but the entire world responded, and no one knew its name!

 

I also reread Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus (merely 50 years since the last time).  It was a very different experience reading the book as a septuagenarian.  I see Roth as a young colt writing this novella, exploring themes that would develop over the next fifty plus years, with clear signs of the literary thoroughbred he would become.  Certainly the work foreshadows my favorite Roth work, American Pastoral.  Nonetheless, it was somewhat painful reading his youthful work, bringing up issues of my own formative years that were submerged long ago, ones I was hardly conscious of when I first read the book, crazy families’ impact on their children, the first real romantic love, and youth’s obliviousness that old age would one day arrive.  And true to Roth, is a very funny work as well.

The title symbolizes the soon-to-be-lost youth of Brenda's brother, as he is about to be married (like me, at an early age), but still a boy, dreaming of his basketball days at Ohio State, listening to an old radio broadcast of the big game which begins: "The place, the banks of the Oentangy."  My friend Bruce and I spent part of the summer at Ohio State University in Columbus as representatives to the National Student Association from our university.  It was a different world from New York, indeed, but we, like the youth of Roth’s first major work, were ready to be swept along into the stream of life as if it were endless.

The 1984 Paris Review carried a remarkable interview with Roth (hat tip, my son, Jonathan). The interview is a treatise on his process of writing, and I was fascinated by how “fake biography” enters his art, using the analogy of the art of the ventriloquist.  As such, Roth himself is omnipresent in his works: ….Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life. There has to be some pleasure in this job, and that’s it. To go around in disguise. To act a character. To pass oneself off as what one is not. To pretend. The sly and cunning masquerade. Think of the ventriloquist. He speaks so that his voice appears to proceed from someone at a distance from himself. But if he weren’t in your line of vision you’d get no pleasure from his art at all. His art consists of being present and absent; he’s most himself by simultaneously being someone else, neither of whom he “is” once the curtain is down. You don’t necessarily, as a writer, have to abandon your biography completely to engage in an act of impersonation. It may be more intriguing when you don’t. You distort it, caricature it, parody it, you torture and subvert it, you exploit it—all to give the biography that dimension that will excite your verbal life. Millions of people do this all the time, of course, and not with the justification of making literature. They mean it. It’s amazing what lies people can sustain behind the mask of their real faces. Think of the art of the adulterer: under tremendous pressure and against enormous odds, ordinary husbands and wives, who would freeze with self-consciousness up on a stage, yet in the theater of the home, alone before the audience of the betrayed spouse, they act out roles of innocence and fidelity with flawless dramatic skill. Great, great performances, conceived with genius down to the smallest particulars, impeccably meticulous naturalistic acting, and all done by rank amateurs. People beautifully pretending to be “themselves.” Make-believe can take the subtlest forms, you know. Why should a novelist, a pretender by profession, be any less deft or more reliable than a stolid, unimaginative suburban accountant cheating on his wife?

Luckily, before leaving , just this past weekend, all the stars fell into place for us, schedules, weather, etc. and we enjoyed a weekend visit with Jonathan and Chris, yes, both sons!, and Jonathan’s lovely girlfriend, Anna, a really special person, wise beyond her years and with a patient disposition.  We took the boat out to our mooring of some thirty years, between Chimmons and Copps Islands, early in the morning, and had a leisurely breakfast there, Ann, Jonathan, and Anna later playing Scrabble, while Chris and I read.  The day was a “10,” the islands sparkling in the sun and the boat in peak form.  We wish we had had more time with them and better weather in July, but it was not to be.  Nonetheless, we saved the best for last.  And on that note, farewell once again Norwalk, until – hopefully -- next year!