Surrealism and Sandcastles: Reflections from Seven Mile Beach

 

Talk about surreal—and serendipity. First, the latter: we never imagined taking a beach-resort Caribbean vacation until we learned that friends of ours, about our age, take one every year in Aruba. After being denied our Jazz Cruise because Ann broke her shoulder three days before departure—and loving the water (though not so much the sun)—we did some investigating and decided to go away for six days to a resort on Seven Mile Beach, Grand Cayman Island. Our choice was based on previous visits on cruise ships and the rave reviews of that beach, plus the Caymans are close by air, only an hour plus from Miami.  Also, serendipity again: a distant relative lives there. On our last visit, we met Melanie—but not her preteen son, Jackson, or her husband, JR, as we did this time around. I described the connection in this entry: Family Time: A Precious Gift.

We carefully planned to spend most of the days in those clear Caribbean waters, outfitting ourselves with neck-to-foot sun-blocking attire. Ann dutifully wore hers. I wore most of mine—but not all. I paid the price with sunburns in the few places I missed with sunscreen.

 

Here’s where the surreal part begins. We were also there to celebrate Ann’s 84th birthday. Together, we still feel like a couple of kids at times, but at a beach resort mostly catering to families and young couples, it felt like going to a costume party dressed as the couple in Grant Wood's “American Gothic,” only to find everyone else didn’t get the costume party message, all about forty years younger.

 

A frequent beach visitor

Yet people were respectful of our encroaching decrepitude, often handing out “Oh, I don’t believe it!” when Ann challenged them to guess her age. That forced careful underestimations: 59? 65?, even one daring a 73. The lesson here: if you really want to feel ancient in your 80s, go to a Caribbean beach resort where nearly everyone could be your child—or even your grandchild.

One such couple—beautiful and young—took an interest in us “oldsters” during one of our extended intervals of splashing and floating in those clean, clear waters. They were genuinely incredulous that we were in our eighties and stunned when we told them we’d been married 55 years. They’d only met three months earlier in Jacksonville. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were also taking a pre-honeymoon trip, as we did in Puerto Rico in 1970 before we were married. They were captivated by the stories we shared: of that trip, of what keeps us together—love and mutual respect. Naturally, Ann told them we were celebrating her 84th birthday.

They were sitting not far from us under the shade of a chaise lounge (as were we). Ann had left the beach; I told her I’d follow soon. Imagine my surprise when, a little while later, a hotel waitress approached carrying two frozen piña coladas, looking for a birthday “girl”—not thinking she meant the other half of me. Our benefactors were gone. Ann was gone. So I asked the waitress to find someone else deserving on the beach, while I took one and drank a toast to them—and to my wife. We saw the young couple the next morning before they left, and we thanked them. Ah, to be young again, taking one last swim only a couple of hours before their flight home.

Jax, Me, Melanie, Ann

 

Speaking of age—if we were indeed much younger and looking for a life of sun, sand, and water—the Caymans would be a very attractive place to find employment and live. That’s what my second cousin once removed, Melanie, and husband did, now becoming citizens of the Caymans.  She, and her son, “Jax,” gave us tour of most of the island. For Jax, the highlight was the baseball field, where he’s developed into an all-star for his age. Baseball takes a back seat to soccer and cricket in this British Overseas Territory, but Jax has made international traveling teams. In fact, he’ll be in Tampa soon for a tournament, and in October we’ll see him in the World Comes to the Palm Beaches, to be held at the spring training facilities of the Nationals and the Astros.

Jax wins a HR bat

While we were there, he won the Cayman Islands Home Run Derby for his age group. Remarkably, this happened shortly after our island tour (not a single traffic light—only roundabouts!). We asked if he wanted to rest up for the challenging evening, but he said, not necessary, he was confident he’d win. The power of positive thinking: win he did—with 15 dingers!

As mentioned, the UK holds responsibility for the islands’ defense and foreign relations. I suppose it has no strategic value to our rapacious president—beyond yet another prosaic Trump faux-fancy hotel. So rest easy, Caymanians: unless uranium or gold are discovered on your island, you’re probably safe from delusional manifest destiny.

 

My guide for descending further into surrealism during our beach vacation was the book I brought with me: The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, a writer I highly admire. This trilogy of novellas—“City of Glass,” “Ghosts,” and “The Locked Room”—is unlike his more traditional novels I read before, The Brooklyn Follies and Baumgartner.

It’s hard to pin down the genre of The Trilogy, perhaps a cross between the detective novel and literature of the absurd.  It reminded me a little of Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem, but far more abstract, with the voice of an unreliable narrator reminiscent of James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime.

 

 

Ironically, I had found a good used UK paperback edition published by Faber and Faber, which adopted British spelling conventions: appropriate, given that I was reading it in a UK Territory. Still, it's a distinctly American work—memoir-like, and dreamlike. Its themes slip through the fingers of your mind, like the fine sand of Seven Mile Beach. It served my goal perfectly: reading something immersive enough to escape our unreal day-to-day political nightmare by entering an alternative imaginary world devoid of anything political.

I was partly drawn to it for its New York City setting and Auster’s sensibility, which often aligns with mine. There’s a comfort in such familiarity. Indeed, I was immediately smitten by the opening pages, as the unnamed narrator describes Quinn, a mystery writer using the pseudonym William Wilson, and his love of aimless city walks. I described one of my own (albeit, purposeful) NYC five-mile walks in this 2022 entry. 

 

Quinn, however, walks randomly—letting the city guide him. If ever there was an example of internal narrative, this is it. I quote Auster, as this captures the essence of all three stories and the spirit of the city:  “New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked no matter how well he came to know its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Lost not only in the city, but within himself as well. Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within. The world was outside of him, around him, before him, and the speed with which it kept changing made it impossible for him to dwell on one thing for very long. Motion was of the essence, the act of putting one front foot in front of the other, and allowing himself to follow the drift of his own body. By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal, and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself, and he realized that he had no intention of ever leaving it again.”

Reading that, I thought of Thomas Wolfe’s short story “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn.” Auster gives clear attribution to many great American writers—particularly Poe, whose story “William Wilson” also features a narrator haunted by an alter ego.  Auster lived for a while on the Upper West Side (his novel Baumgartner was set on 85th Street – the same street I lived on long ago -- between Columbus and Amsterdam).  West 84th Street, between Riverside Drive and Broadway, was renamed "Edgar Allan Poe Street” to commemorate Poe's connection to the area. As Poe had lived at 206 West 84th Street I speculate that Auster felt a close connection to Poe, in spirit as well as geographically.

He expands on the concept of the unreliable narrator across all three novellas, with characters shifting identities, even including one named Paul Auster. The Trilogy is a prime example of metafiction. He brings in the process of writing itself, referencing greats like Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Thoreau—his story “Ghosts” identifying them as such.

Auster blurs the lines between fiction and reality—much like the times we now live in, where news can read like parody. Characters search for truth, only to find themselves swallowed by existential questions. This culminates in “The Locked Room,” where the unnamed narrator’s missing childhood friend, presumed dead, Fanshawe—the “real” novelist in The Trilogy—reappears. Fanshawe’s wife is now married to the narrator, who’s been hired to be Fanshawe’s Boswell. How’s that for circular thinking?

The narrator has writer’s block writing the biography: “I had been struggling to imagine him, to see him as he might have been – but my mind had always conjured a blank. At best, there was one improvised image: the door of a locked room. That was the extent of it: Fanshawe alone in that room, condemned to a mythical solitude – living perhaps breathing perhaps, dreaming God knows what. This room, I now discovered, was located in my skull.“

Earlier in the same story, Auster casts a dispiriting light on memoir writing—something I’m personally grappling with: “Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so-and-so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle with that bridge – none of that tells us very much. We all want to be told stories, and we listen to them in the same way we did when we were young. We imagine the real story inside the words, and to do this, we substitute ourselves for the person in the story, pretending that we can understand him because we understand ourselves. This is a deception. We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end, we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another -- for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.” 

I can argue that it was through his fiction that Auster gained “access to himself.”  The line between memoir and fiction is faint, one gaining access to the essence of one’s life in characters of one’s creation in fiction.  The memoir I am writing includes some of my short stories for precisely that reason.

My beat-up paperback, heavily marked, looks at me now as a challenge to keep writing—to keep reflecting on The Trilogy. To what end? Only that it’s good (for me) to leave a record of my reactions to this important work.  I’ll say no more about it now, other than that reading it during this trip left an indelible impression—just like the Caymans. The rest of my scribbled observations will remain between those pages, maybe for me to revisit, maybe for my progeny to muse about.

The turquoise waters of the Caribbean proved to be more than just a beautiful backdrop; they were a balm for the soul. This eclectic trip culminated in a celebration dinner to mark Ann’s birthday, fresh fish caught near the island and a little piece of birthday cake.

 

80B

 

“80B” was the imaginative salutation of a homemade card from our friends, Art and Sydelle, to mark my 80^th birthday, an alphanumeric version of the short version of my name.  The card was rendered with an original water color drawn by Art.  Beautiful. 

 

I normally don’t obsess over milestone birthdays.  There was always a future in my mind.  When I was much younger, future and infinity seemed to be in a one-to-one correlation. 

 

Beginning an octogenarian decade comes with the knowledge that unlike other decades, there is a different feeling about the future as the body goes beyond its expiration date.  So, the point is to make each day count.  Writing has always been important to me and I’m now turning to something I hope to finish.  You might call it Volume Three of my “explaining” series, this one “Explaining It to Me.”  It will be a personal memoir of a not very extraordinary person.  Now, there’s a blurb for the book!  Nonetheless, as I said in my first volume, getting thoughts down, working, focusing, is an end in itself.  Satisfying.  I’ll even incorporate the short stories I’ve written, ones I always feel are unfinished as every time I open those, I make revisions.  In print I’ll have to call them finished.

 

Time, time, time is now the main issue.  A race to a finish line.  Perhaps that may mean my writing in this space will be more limited, and if a review of a play or a book, more truncated. 

 

Speaking of which, is it coincidental that over my birthday I happened to pick up a book I’ve had in my-to-be -read pile for some time, Louis Begley’s last novel, The New Life of Hugo Gardner?  I wrote extensively about Begley, the author of the Schmidt trilogy, in my November 2012entry, “Schmidtie.” 

Among other details, I pointed out that Begley was at a stage in life when he wrote those novels that was a little ahead of my own stage, and The New Life of Hugo Gardner seems to capture that again for me.  It is about the protagonist’s sense of a life well lived now in summation, a looking back, the outcomes of actions he either knowingly or by chance took in his life. He, as do I, is trying to retain a sense of control, living his remaining years on his terms.

 

Is this Begley’s final fictional statement?  Time will tell.  A brief summation without even naming characters explains why I ask that question.  Hugo Gardner concluded a career as a highly successful and influential journalist, assigned to the Paris office, happily married, two children.  Here he is in his 80s and is told he has prostate cancer and finds his wife has left him for a younger man.

 

His doctor wants to aggressively treat the condition.  Gardner instead prefers to watch and wait and if the waiting does not turn out well, take care of the business in Switzerland.  Like Schmitie, Gardner moves in wealthy, well connected society.  Ultimately we all have these existential dilemmas in common.

 

He is estranged from his daughter and uses his son as a go between in trying to understand his daughter, but they are not close as well.  He also has an ex-lover in Paris, and they get together again, Gardner thinking that there is a possibility of a long term relationship.  But the lover is caring for her invalid husband and wants Gardner simply nearby as a companion and occasional lover.  That has its starts and stops until the boom is lowered by her that she has reconciled with another, younger love, leaving Gardner in a state of limbo, mostly alienated from his family, and having to contend alone with his prostate decision.

 

He explains his big decision to refuse radiation to his long-time Doctor.  As Begley is prone to do, his dialogue does not carry quotation marks.  It works well in his narrative.  And his writing is precise, befitting Begley’s former profession as an attorney:

 

You have explained it all very clearly, I said, and I’m very grateful, but I really don’t want to do the radiation. Your cure may turn out to be a prelude to other illnesses and new dilemmas. Let’s roll the dice. We both know how it will end whatever we do – in exactly the same place.

 

Excuse me, Hugo, but this is nihilistic crap. Why don’t you say straight out that you were tired of life and want to commit suicide?

 

I could have shaken my head thank him and gone home but I felt the need to explain myself. I really didn’t want him to think I was nuts and lacking in respect.

 

Because that’s simply not true, I replied. Please don’t feel concerned. I’m not tired of life. I love life even though I’m lonely and often unhappy. But I want to live on my own terms. That means being capable of making my own decisions, of moving around without a walker or wheelchair. I’m accustomed to chronic pain in my lower back and the aches and pains in this and other joints that come and go but I wouldn’t want to live with great pain. Doesn’t that make sense to you?

 

He didn’t bother to answer.

 

Knowing I might have a similar discussion in my future makes this novel especially poignant.  So does the fact that I share many of the writer’s feelings.  Gardner not only has a NYC apartment, but a home close to Sag Harbor, another of my favorite places from my past, and after seeing his Doctor, he calls his housekeeper there and says get ready, I’m returning.  As fate would have it a younger (female) cousin lives nearby, now a widow, also remote from her children, and they’ve always had a fond relationship and I’ll leave it at that without revealing the denouement. 

 

If this is indeed Begley’s final fictional statement (he turns 90 later this year), it is a fine, thoughtful, perhaps cathartic work, and certainly, for me, relevant and moving.

 

Ringing in the New Year with the Past

Five years ago we celebrated my 70th birthday on a ship. Needless to say, seems like yesterday.  I was not even thinking that we could do it again.  But the past became the future. Although, looking at the pictures, I see the change, in us, in our “kids.” 

So, for my 75^th birthday we managed to enjoy another Caribbean cruise, this time on the Celebrity Silhouette (now considered a mid-sized ship, but, still, about the largest we’d go on – meticulously maintained though, and the meals were surprisingly good with excellent service). This was a destination onto itself, the ports, Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, and St. Kitts being ones we visited before and, now, the first two still bearing the devastation of Hurricane Maria.  But the point was to be together, our little family, which very happily now includes our daughter-in-law to be, Tracie.

It was an opportunity to get to know her.  Jonathan is a lucky man to be marrying such a lovely woman, intelligent and loving.  She is a pediatric gastroenterologist, with harrowing stories about kids doing what kids will do, like swallowing nails.  Thankfully, there are caring specialized physicians such as Tracie to cope with those events.  I’ve always regretted not having a daughter in addition to our two sons.  It is a dream soon to be realized.

My actual birthday itself was celebrated a couple of days before we left with friends pictured left to right, Harry, Susan, my wife Ann, Lois, John, and the birthday “boy” himself now working on his last quarter century, grateful for whatever of that time the fates allow.

Unfortunately, when we left for the cruise I had a sinus infection which morphed into a chest cold, loading up on a Z pack while on the ship and all the over the counter medications necessary to control my cough.  Never had a fever though so didn’t consider myself contagious and washed my hands scrupulously to spare fellow passengers.  Not exactly the way I envisioned an active cruise.  So it became a relaxed one, leaving the ship only once in St. Kitts.    But as I said, the point was for our family to be together.  Their work schedules had to be arranged almost a year in advance, so we were lucky to coordinate a birthday celebration redux.

We didn’t “do” shows or games or other activities on the ship but instead hung out at the spa where there are not teeming crowds. They served light lunches there, and it was a place where Ann, Jon, and Tracie could play Scrabble (in addition to playing on our Verandah).  Chris and I read mostly. 

Ann and I retired after dinner to our stateroom to read.  Or to view a late sunset.

My main read turned out to be my own “book” a PDF retrospective of my Dramaworks blog commentary over the years, which I published with a preface in my prior entry

But I also managed to fit in several one act plays by the late Sam Shepard, one of our most important and enigmatic playwrights and engaging actors.  I had bought this collection for my iPad for the trip only months before his recent death.  Many of these plays were written in his early years, some appearing first at Café La Mama where I occasionally went in the 1960s.  It’s possible I could have seen some of them there.  Who remembers?  Theatre of the Absurd was on the rise and the European influence on Shepard is clear.  But he was one of a kind, bringing in his Western sensibilities too.

The first play in the collection, though, is one of his more recent ones, “Ages of the Moon.”  It is about two old “friends” who at long last see each other on the porch of one of their homes in some unnamed countryside, two displaced characters who have the past to chew on and to view the eclipse of the moon.  Dark and funny, it captures the passage of time, the regrets, the hurts, and what time really means: decline.  Best of all is the cadence of Shepard’s dialogue. 

I’m not finished with the collection, about half way through, but that gives you an idea of what one might find in Fifteen One-Act Plays by Sam Shepard (2012)

The first stop on the cruise was the Port of San Juan and approaching the Port, one passes the massive Castillo San Cristóbal and from this prospective one would hardly be aware of Maria’s devastation.  This brief video may not play on all devices.

Chris took a bike tour of part of the island and said that the destruction was much evident, trash and remnants of homes, utility lines still down.  Heartbreaking.

The last stop on the cruise was St. Kitts, the island most spared by Hurricane Maria. While Ann enjoyed a hot stone massage at the ship’s Canyon Range Spa, Chris and I took a walk, past the touristy shops and then into Basseterre, the capital of Saint Kitts and Nevis, a place I’ve been before, and always an opportunity for some idiosyncratic photos.  Their Independence Square has a beautiful Italian-inspired fountain.

Unfortunately, two cruise ships in port put a damper on things, depriving us of the opportunity to really mingle with the Island’s people.  They were outnumbered. 

Finally, back to Ft. Lauderdale and the sunrise.

So, 2018 begins, after blowing out the candles of 2017.  Tempus Fugit.  A Happy and Healthy New Year to All.