Decatur Book Festival 2018!

Another Labor Day Weekend, another DBF for Calvin.

After examining this year’s festival schedule, I headed into the fray without being excited by any particular event on offer this year, other than the opportunity to see and hear one of my living literary (and political) heroes, Armistead Maupin.

Fortunately, I was delighted by every single one of the talks I decided to attend. Without exception, the authors and their interviewers were intelligent, informed, witty, and engaging – a lot to expect of any speaker!

Only one of the presentations (and one of the most unexpectedly enthralling) was not connected to a new or newish book: “Volumes: An Artist in the Stacks” featured, along with archivist Tamara Livingston, photographer Sara Hobbs, who described her project of examining (of all things) the marginal notes in some of the many items in the rare book collection at Kennesaw State University’s library.

Each of the other presentations featured interviews with the authors of various recently-published books. The panels I chose to attend were about books about as different from each other as one could imagine:

One of the panels, “Clever Resistance,” featured the authors of two different books on a related subject:

   

 

As much as I enjoyed all the sessions I attended, the interview with Armistead Maupin was the highlight of this year’s festival. It was conducted to a huge and enthusiastic audience that filled the sanctuary of the First Baptist Church of Decatur. The kindheartedness, perspicacity, humility, sense of humor, and generosity of this endearing man were so wonderful to be reminded of. The book festival also featured a showing of the 2017 documentary about Maupin, The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin (which Randy and I had recently seen at home via Netflix), but the interview the following day focused on Maupin’s recently-published memoir:

I can’t find the words to describe how stimulating (and hilarious) each of these presenters was – and how heartening it was to mingle with so many thousands of other book lovers – and  I came away Sunday afternoon completely convinced that I should continue to make time each year to attend the Decatur Book Festival.

Meanwhile, I can set aside more time in my life to reading books (and to posting mini-reviews of those books to “The Constant Reader” sidebar section of this blog), and to posting more frequently to my other blog, devoted to the celebration of all things bookish.

 

 

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Cirque du Soleil!

Last night Randy and I and our friend Pat, plunked down some big bucks ($67 each) and drove all the way to Duluth, Georgia to see the latest incarnation of Cirque du Soleil.

Totally worth the expense and the journey!

Having seen two previous Cirque shows (each of which friends had treated me to), I had high expectations of what I would behold, and this version proved to be just as enthralling as the earlier shows.

The imagination that spawns these Cirque spectacles is beyond impressive, and the atmospherics (including the excellent-as-always music) did not disappoint.

Here are a few photos (from the Internet) of a few of the marvels on offer in the production entitled Corteo (Italian for cortege):

         

Perry Treadwell, 1932-2018

Perry Treadwell was an extraordinary man who I met in the late 1970s as part of a men’s consciousness-raising group he had founded. Perry was a member of the local Quaker congregation whose weekly silent meditations I attend. He died his home in Decatur on June 25th.

Perry was one of several local Quakers who I considered a local hero for the social change projects he devoted his life to. In recent years, Perry’s wife Judith Greenburg had volunteered many hours at the Meetinghouse library, whose operation I have coordinated for several decades.

At Perry’s memorial service last month, those of us who had gathered at the Meetinghouse to share our memories of Perry heard two poems that Perry had written.

Here’s an excerpt of one of them:

Friendship takes energy,

And the courage to reach out.

If your life is too busy to reach out,

Simplify.

Remember that, in the end,

The only things to hold onto

And will hold onto you

Are friends.

Here’s the entirety of the second poem of Perry’s that we heard:

Center down to the depths of unthinking.

Find your inner calm.

See how the world moves

in its rhythms.

 

Feel the rhythm of the universe

To which all things belong

And to which they return.

 

If you don’t feel the rhythm

You remain confused in darkness.

Coming from and returning to the light,

You accept, trust.

Distance brings closeness.

Calm brings laughter.

Open your heart.

Be a Friend.

Being a Friend to your Self,

You can float through the

Ups and downs of life,

And prepare for death.

I will miss this thoughtful, sometimes cantankerous, and always generous man.

Road Trip to Virginia

Randy and I made recently returned from our third out-of-state road trip this year,

Randy wanted to show me his dad’s ancestral haunts near Hot Springs, Virginia, where Randy spent several summers as a child. In addition to visiting a cousin there, Randy also wanted to donate some stuff to the town’s historical society. I wanted Randy to tour Monticello, and to visit my Mercer-era friend Reed Banks who lives nearby, in Charlottesville.

Our visits to Hot Springs included a visit to the Homestead Hotel:

/; we stayed overnight nearby, at the Warm Springs Inn. We spent our two nights in Charlottesville at Reed’s house.

The landscapes of the valleys along our route between Hot Springs and Charlottesville are some of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen . . .

The reunion with my friend Reed in Charlotteville was fantastic. We had memorable conversations on a wide variety of topics as Reed squired us around the university town where Reed and his wife Renita raised their two children (now grown up and living far from Charlottesville).

In addition to spending a morning taking two of the remarkably informative tours being conducted these days at Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello, just outside Charlottesville, the three of us spent a lovely afternoon inspecting the gorgeous buildings and numerous gardens at the Charleston campus of the University of Virginia, designed by Jefferson:

An Unexpected Garden Treat

On our way to Hot Springs and Charlottesville, we visited numerous antique shops and malls, stopping for our first night in a town in southwest Virginia called Wytheville (pronounced with-vill).

We spent the night in a suitably funky-but-comfortable 1950s-era motel there . . .

. . . and ate dinner at a fancy restaurant across the street:

The restaurant is housed in a ramshackle series of restored log cabins with tons o’ atmosphere and excellent food.

But the most startling thing about the restaurant is its large cottage garden, chock full of wonderful plants and garden sculptures and other whimsical structures. Since we managed to get only a late-evening glimpse of the garden while waiting for our dinner (ditto quick inspections of the restaurant’s two amazingly interesting gift shops!), we decided to come back the following morning to take some photos. Here are some of them (about half of them taken by me, the others by Randy):

Our road trip to Virginia, like our previous trips this year to Florida (in May) and to Kentucky (at the end of June), was full of delightful surprises along the way, including some great conversations in the car and plenty of pit-stops at local antique malls. And I’m delighted that our trips to various destinations around the southeast U.S. have been as thoroughly enjoyable as our trip with some friends around Italy last September, when Randy and I got re-acquainted after having first met so many decades ago.

Next up for us before our next overseas trip (this time to Spain): a road trip to Asheville, which may or may not – because of the hefty $60 admission fee – include a visit to the Chihuly exhibit at Biltmore House.

 

 

 

OK, Then: 70!

“If I had known when I was twenty-one, that I should be as happy as I am now, I should have been sincerely shocked.”

– Christopher Isherwood (Letter to Edward Upward, August 1974)

This year on July 4th, I turned 70.

Someone who’s lived that long should be able to be more articulate about what turning 70 feels like than I seem to be able to manage.

Like most of my recent birthdays, deciding to acknowledge another trip around the sun with a formal ritual involving other people seemed somewhat . . . optional. In terms, I mean, of trying to experience my birthday as personally significant, and this year’s in particular as some sort of watershed moment.

The main thing I can report about what it felt like to turn 70 is that it felt a lot like turning 60, or, for that matter, 50 or even 40. This is hardly something to complain about, but I still find it surprising, given the hoopla surrounding these decade-marking birthdays.  but I still find it surprising.

In terms of my physical health, which remains astoundingly good for an American my age, I have noticed that at 70 I don’t have the stamina I used to have. Mere two-hour stints of gardening (vs. the all-day marathons of yesteryear) now seem ideal, as do fewer consecutive hours of, say, shopping in the most fascinating of antique malls. And the prospect of any dawn-to-dusk traipsing around even the quaintest neighborhoods of overseas capital cities is decidedly a thing of the distant past.

The main way I cope with this slight diminishment in stamina is by taking daily naps – a luxury that even after five years of being retired I still enjoy.  Like my daily doses of hot tea every morning, my naps seem to help a lot with keeping me content and operating contentedly within the limits of my current energy level. I realize that this is mainly because I am not yet coping with any chronic illnesses or with the result of any debilitating accidents that beset many a retiree my age – and, for that matter, many Americans younger than me.

Still, I suppose I assumed, when I was younger (especially much younger) that I would feel at least wiser at 70 than I felt at 50 or 60. But no, that’s not the case, unless you count being especially vigilant about guarding the limits of my stamina counts as wisdom. I do feel that I’ve learned to take myself a little less seriously the older I’ve gotten, and have taught myself to be at least occasionally more flexible and a bit less judgmental than in previous decades.

One of the reasons for this noticeable if somewhat incremental and belated transformation has been educating myself over the past two years (along with another ten friends of mine) about the Enneagram. I’m still a novice at understanding the Enneagram’s implications and potential for me personally, but the little I have gleaned about that particular typology of personality styles has been helpful in guiding me to occasionally break the pattern of certain ingrained habits that for too long dictated some of my mental habits and reflexes.

Another powerful influence that’s been helpful in a few habits of thinking and behaving has been a more recent one: my almost ten-month-old significant relationship with Randy Taylor that began during the middle of a trip last year with several friends to Italy. Randy’s way of doing things (and of thinking about things) is often noticeably – and helpfully – different than mine. The fact that Randy and I have been spending so much time together in the runup to the 70th birthday, and the fact that I’ve been learning so much from him while I enjoying our time together, will likely make my 7th decade feel quite a bit different from my previous decades.

In any case, whatever subtle and/or gradual transformations may be happening with the way I habitually move through the world and try to frame – or re-frame – what happens in my world and what my options are for all manner of things – habits, relationships, hobbies, projects, householdery routines, travel-related plans – I haven’t turned 70 feeling significantly diminished in either my general well-being or in my level of curiosity and enthusiasm about whatever my post-70 years will bring me, or what I hope to bring to them.

Be that as it may, I did want to conjure up a way to celebrate this 70th birthday a bit differently than I’d celebrated most of the previous ones. Ever since I co-purchased with some friends a cabin in the north Georgia mountains almost 20 years ago, I’d spent most of my birthdays there. This year, I decided to invite several friends to join me here in Atlanta for a potluck picnic and the obligatory fireworks-watching. . As it happens, Randy and some of his friends had been celebrating July 4th at the pond in Avondale Estates, and our inviting some of our respective friends to meet each other there on my birthday seemed like a sufficiently convenient and low-key way to celebrate my 70th.

Except for the blazing heat (we had to get there before sundown to nab a sufficiently spacious spot with a decent view), the humidity – and the ants –  the pond-side picnic in Avondale Estates was perfect.

In retrospect, I suspect that next year I will probably designate an air-conditioned environment for celebrating my birthday. I also need to refine my preference for people bringing only edible presents to asking that they bring only non-sweet edible presents! The wonderful cake, pie, and fudge that friends or siblings made for the 4th I am still serving all these weeks later! (Thank goodness I was born in an era after refrigeration was invented!) I certainly gained some extra poundage from that picnic and its aftermath that I wasn’t burdened with on July 3rd, and am planning to hoping to take care of that by eventually resuming more frequent and longer walks in the appealingly walkable neighborhood I am lucky enough to be living in.

During which walks I should have plenty of time to contemplate how my 70s resemble – and differ from – my 60s, not to mention frequent thoughts on how the astonishing fact that I’m alive still, and that, among other delights, I have such interesting and loyal friends, some of whom were able to join me in marking my 70th birthday, some of whom could not for various reasons, including the melancholy fact that some of my dear ones are no longer alive themselves.

I have a lot to be thankful for, having known all these people, and I continue to learn from all of them – the ones still living and the ones not living – about how to make my remaining years – as few or as many as they will be – as rich and interesting as we can make them.

St. George Island 2018

Every year for the past five, I’ve spent a week in May with eleven other gay guys who rent a house for a week on Florida’s St. George Island.

This year, Randy Taylor (my partner since a trip to Italy with several friends last October) went with me to the beach – his first time there, although he knows most of the people who joined us there, all of whom, like Randy and myself, are veterans of Gay Spirit Visions conferences.

The other newcomer to the beach this year is also named Randy; he traveled all the way from Fort Wayne, Indiana. The rest of us (with the exception of Greg, who moved about a year ago from Atlanta to St. Petersburg, Florida) live in Atlanta or North Carolina.

Before arriving this year, the Atlanta Randy and I spent two days traveling elsewhere in Florida, driving down to Naples to see some property my mom and dad had purchased there decades ago. We spent the night on the way down with a friend of Randy’s (an antique dealer who lives in one of the most unusual houses I’ve ever been in) who lives near Tampa.

This pre-St. George leg of our trip featured a car breakdown incident in the remote and tiny town of Salem, Florida, midway between Naples (near the edge of the Everglades) and our backroads-using route northward to St. George.

Fortunately, our tow-truck driver got us to a motel for the night, and after a temporary repair in Perry, Florida, we managed to get the car as far as St. George so the friends who had joined us there could help us drop off the car at a mechanic’s shop on the mainland, and retrieve it later in the week. (My car repair shop here in Atlanta reimbursed me for the cost of the car repair, as I’d taken in the car for servicing shortly before our trip.)

While we all enjoyed a carefree week surrounded by the various luxuries and conveniences of Abijem, our spacious rental house:

Of course, some of us felt compelled to make a few temporary modifications in the house’s decor. For example, the living room mantel and mirror were quickly festooned with strings of lights, and we decided to festoon the gigantic flatscreen television set with a little festive drapery:

Also, one of the ornamental animal sculptures dotted about the house apparently needed a bit of tweaking:

This year’s beach trip featured all of the activities I had so enjoyed during previous trips to Abijem. We meditated together every morning, took trips into the nearby fishing towns of Apalachicola and Carrabelle for restaurant lunches and/or shopping, did a bit of reading, took some delicious naps, and engaged in plenty of catching-up conversations, general lollygagging, teasing, and frequent laughter.

We again prepared a week’s worth of memorable dinners for each other:

Greg’s tablescape for the dining room – slightly modified for each of the dinners we took turns preparing for each other throughout the week.

The group strolls along the beach took place mostly in the evening:

Although I didn’t get around to joining in on any of the bike rides or the two group massage sessions, I did manage a glorious foray into the waves with Randy one afternoon (ditto the hot tub), and, as in previous years, participated in a series of fiercely competitive rounds of Wizard. Sarong-wearing was popular again this year. Several of us visited (or re-visited) the small but excellent nature center on the mainland near the entrance to the St. George bridge. And Randy and I worked in a short visit with our friends Royce and Martha Hodge, who live on St. George.

The most distinctive difference between this year’s trip and previous ones was the unusual weather we had. Except for the first couple days, it rained at least once a day, although by late afternoon most days, the sun broke through the clouds and you’d never have guessed the island had been besieged by torrents of rainfall.

Some of the cloudscapes Randy took photos of:

Now for a few photos (most, though not all, taken by me) of my co-conspirators this year:

Chase (Silva, NC), who’s organized these group trips to St. George for the past 17 (!) years.

Bradford (Raleigh, NC)

Craig (Atlanta, GA)

Greg (St. Petersburg, FL)

John (Asheville, NC)

Ralph (Atlanta, GA)

Randy M. (Ft. Wayne, IN)

Randy T. (Atlanta, GA)

Roger (Asheville, NC)

Ted (Atlanta, GA)

Tom (Atlanta, GA)

Randy and I prepared teas for the group on three of our afternoons together:

The English Tea.

The Asian Tea.

The Herbal Tea.

My last photo is of the sunset on our final evening at St. George:

Photos from previous trips to Abijem are here, here, here, and here.

Retirement: A Snapshot of What It Feels Like, Five Years In

Yesterday was the five-year anniversary of my retiring from my full-time job.

Shortly before retiring, I decided to periodically reflect on if and how my reactions to being retired felt. I wanted to do this because my memory is so poor that I figured I would otherwise soon forget how the retirement process unfolded for me – especially psychologically – and I wanted to remember that process in detail.

I did write lengthy blogposts on how retirement felt

• after the first day
• after the first week
• after week #2
• at the three-month mark
• at the six-month mark
• at the end of year one
• at the end of year two
• at the end of year three

But when my fourth retirement anniversary rolled around in 2017, I decided that so little had changed since my previous annual report that there was no point in writing about Year Four. Now that the Year Five mark has arrived, I remain convinced that perhaps the most radical changes – psychological changes, anyway – of transitioning from the status of fully-employed to fully-retired must’ve occurred in the earliest months.

The most definite thing I can report at the five-year mark is that my recollections of my working days – those 31 years of working in public libraries and the 9 years before that working in the mental health treatment field – are infrequent, vague, and feel alarmingly remote from my current circumstances. I really cannot summon up in any vivid way the feeling of what it was like to have my daily activities and whereabouts constrained by a schedule dictated by someone else, and/or the need to generate an income sufficient to maintain my economic independence and the comfortable mod cons that go with that status. Only rarely do I have flashbacks to – or even have dreams involving – workplace scenes, even happy or pleasant ones. (And, lest I forget, there were a lot of happy times during my work life. Not only am I fortunate as a retiree, but I am one of the lucky, lucky Americans who enjoyed – most of the time – having the jobs I had, and, with certain notable exceptions, who enjoyed working for the supervisors and colleagues I worked for or with.)

Although, for a while now, I’ve taken for granted my newish circumstances as “the new normal,” I am – at least sporadically – aware of, and feel gratitude for, my good fortune. What few challenges have come my way since retirement fall firmly in the sphere of “First World Problems.”

For example, I’m still not thrilled with the way I’ve managed – or failed to manage – a satisfying balance, post-retirement, between voluntary activities that are solitary and voluntary activities that are more social. Like my other “First World Problems,” this one pales before the great good fortune of my current circumstances.

I am certainly not juggling with what the great majority of my fellow Americans. including many people I know, are coping with:

• Holding down a part-time job to make ends meet. So far, I’ve managed to live my first five years of retirement within my (savings-generated) income.
• Parenting children – and All That That Entails, attention- and energy- and anxiety- and cost-wise.
• Sharing my house with two aging parents, or even one aging parent (as my sister Lori did for an entire year before my mom moved to an independent living facility).
• Living with any constraints or complaints resulting from serious or chronic health problems of my own.
• Being confronted (thus far, anyway) with some huge remodeling or repair expense that owners of old houses (like mine) must inevitably deal with.
• Foregoing – for financial reasons or for one or more of the reasons I’ve just listed – all non-necessary pleasures, such as eating meals in restaurants or traveling. On the contrary: I still treat myself to meals that I don’t cook myself and I’ve been able (financially and otherwise) to travel overseas twice since my most recent retirement blogpost (most recently a three-week jaunt through Italy last fall).

So I know I am lucky in almost every respect one can imagine: I’m still healthy, solvent, and, relatively speaking, free to pursue my own interests and to indulge a lot of my passing whims. I am also increasingly conscious of how ridiculously lucky I am to live in a society that – at least for a privileged subset of a particular generation of citizens that I happen to belong to – allows for a person to live at least a few decades of his life without the drudgery of wage slavery. (Not to mention the good fortune of not living in a country whose residents are being bombed, plundered, or enslaved. And even with Trump and his enablers temporarily fumbling around with the levers of government, I’m in no danger of being deported or otherwise separated from my loved ones. And while I hardly live what I would call a charmed life, I am not, as many of my fellow Americans are, coping with polluted water, a blighted or dangerous neighborhood, or month-long power shortages.

I can think of only a few as-yet-unreported factors that have affected my retirement routines within the past two years:

• My 90+-year-old mom’s move to an independent living facility almost an hour south of Atlanta; my taking on responsibility for managing her finances; and, most recently, helping my siblings with my mom’s recovery from a hospitalization for pneumonia. These events have resulted in considerably more time (vs. the first three years of my retirement) helping to attend to my mom’s needs as well as my own. At the moment, it is unclear whether or not my mom will be able to safely continue living in her own apartment; the inevitable (if impossible to predict) changes in my mom’s living circumstances will doubtless affect my own activities in some as-yet-unknown manner.
• I am still sorely feeling the lack of a weekly calligraphy class in my schedule that resulted from my former instructor’s deciding last spring to stop teaching calligraphy at the senior center where I had been taking classes for several – and very rewarding – years.
• Last October I embarked on an intimate relationship with someone. This ongoing adventure has wrought all sorts of changes in my general outlook, in my daily routine, and in my former plans. These changes are wonderful, but they are still relatively new, so I am still adjusting to them as Randy and I continue to share more time with each other.
• I’m either not quite finished with a certain volunteer project I’d hoped to have concluded by now, and am about to plunge into a newer one. So there’s the mild frustration of wishing I could more quickly conclude one activity and more quickly begin the other one. I’m also between trans-Atlantic trips: my long-anticipated trip to Italy now receding with great speed into the distant-seeming past, I haven’t quite gelled my plans for, later this year, a much-postponed return trip to Spain (re-imagined now to include Randy).
• I experimented for several (pre-Italy trip) months with incorporating an hour’s walk into most (good-weather) days, and look forward to (vs. dreading) resuming that feature of my daily round as soon as warmer weather returns.

Otherwise, I am still a contented retiree:

• Still reading (though not reading as much as I thought I would: I tend to fall asleep after a mere hour or so!), and still documenting my reading with mini-reviews in the sidebar of this blog.
• Still gardening or fantasizing about what I plan to do next in my tiny plot of ground.  (I’ve recently learned, however, that I need to remember to interrupt my what can easily become rather obsessive gardening or garden-related activities with more breaks in general and with more naps in particular!)
• Still taking tai chi classes once a week (and still practicing the form at home most days).
• Still enjoying doing most of my chores and errands, weather permitting: after my twelve-year-old scooter finally gave up the ghost last December, I promptly bought myself a new one.
• Still enjoying living in the incredibly congenial neighborhood I was fortunate enough to buy a home in, way back there in 1993.

As a final note, I hope to remember something the aforementioned calligraphy teacher – and all-around Wise Person – Sharon Ann Smith, told me recently. She thinks the term retirement is misleading because it inaccurately describes what most people she knows – including yours truly – are doing with their post-fulltime-employment years. “We aren’t retiring from anything. On the contrary:  We are re-inventing ourselves!”

In many respects, it does feel that way. May it be so!