Synchronicity In Marriage - Fidelity, Love, Respect, Sharing Until The Clocks Are Set Back

Brent Fielding hated changing the clocks every Spring and Fall.  The new thermostat required a password and two-step security, the stove he had bought for the kitchen remodeling required almost as much, and the wall clock which never kept good time in the first place, required a step ladder to reach.  Resetting the clock on his new car was cloaked in mystery, hidden in a maze, and the missing piece of a thousand-piece puzzle. 

 

Yet it was at these two times of year that he reassessed his marriage - the resetting, the strange changes in light and shadow, the disassociated feeling, all were signifiers, indicators.  

Brent and his wife Barbery had been married for forty years. Their marriage had survived infidelities, family disputes, and the usual gamut of slights, willfulness, and indifference. They loved each other or at least knew that they would be adrift if one of them died. They had settled into a comfortable routine like most older married couples, but their relationship was a very active one within it.  They never tired of each other, and when one of them had gone out to a class or a meeting, the other felt an emptiness in the house.

As Brent grew older, more and more he began to notice patterns and outlines where before he saw substance.  He noticed how perfectly he and his wife could anticipate their movements so that they never got in each other’s way.  

Not in the small kitchen, nor in the narrow hallway, nor in and out the doors.  He could trace their flows and if he had drawn them, there would have been no straight lines; and if he could have animated them, they would have more resembled a choreographed pas de deux than polite leeway.  

He knew from his wife’s first footfall that she was descending the stairs so he waited until she came down before he went up to his office. He understood her morning routine of coffee, yoghurt, New York Times so well, that never once did it ever interfere with his tea, texts, or chopping the  celery for soup.  They moved through the kitchen with practiced movements, but not not without grace.

The substance of things seemed to matter less than their outlines and their forms.  He noticed how pictures were framed, how the rooms of the house were arranged and built.  He noticed angles and shadows, the lines of phone and light cords, the silhouettes of trees and the shape of phones and sinks.

Brent found that once he started to be aware of his obsession with shape, form, and outline, he could not stop himself from seeing only the thumb hole in the scissors, the composition of the Giotto fresco, the repeating circles of clock, trivet, and ashtray; the disappearing lines of phone cords; the delineation of dried berry stems.  His office was no longer one of color, memories, and texture; but only outlines.

At the same time he came to appreciate his life with his wife more than he ever had. This focus on intersecting patterns or balletic approach gave it new meaning.  If he could emotionally prosper in a routine without substance but only outline, then the relationship was indeed an important one without which he could not survive.

Marriage had always been a matter of synchronicity, a balletic dance, an intimacy born of appreciation of the subtlety of paired movement that only matures after many years of dancing.  Now that elision had become routine - there were no new patterns, unusual pirouettes or steps, and if there had been, he would have been concerned.  

In his younger years such disruptions in synchronicity might have meant a lover, a tryst, a new emotional algorithm which he did not understand.  Now interruptions in the perfect choreography might mean the onset of dementia, or a final release of age-old, well-hidden frustrations. 

Now it wasn't so much changing patterns, but adjustments to time, and the resetting of the clocks which heralded them.  Neither one had talked about the disappearance of patterns, the eventual solitary life that one of them would have to lead, a life without Swan Lake, and worse, a life leading to the end of time itself. 

'We all die alone', Tolstoy wrote in his novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and like Ivan few of us are prepared for the solitude, the fear, the uncertainty, and the final disassociation with everything around us.  No grieving relatives, no solemn prayers of priest or rabbi, no familiar music can allay this terror of the end, the unexperienced future. 

Time is relative said Einstein in his famous disquisitions on matter and energy; but even outside the world of physics we know this.  Old people feel time is rushing by, suddenly it's Sunday again, didn't I just water the plants...While young people feel time moving painfully slowly - dragging hours of anticipation, excitement.  

Which was why the resetting of the clocks made Brent anxious.  He was manipulating time - didn't we get an extra hour of life every Fall?

Of course not, and even if we did, wouldn't that upset God's plan? 

Einstein said that if a spaceship travelled at close to the speed of light time would slow, and that compared to those left behind on earth, passengers would remain young.  Returning to base they would find everyone they knew dead, gone, and buried.  Slowing time meant accelerating it, neither one a good idea. 

A few years ago there was a partial solar eclipse in Washington, and Brent went down to the Georgetown waterfront where there was a clear, unobstructed view of the sky over the Potomac.  When the eclipse was at its zenith - again the sun was only partially obscured - the ambient light changed, the birds stopped singing, the picnickers on the park lawn spoke more quietly, more softly.  The world was at a strange, unaccustomed moment.  Life was always a matter of sunup, sundown at regular, predictable times and this threw that all off.  It was unsettling. 

The eclipse stayed with him for days, and he remembered it especially at the resetting of the clocks.  Both were small, unusual interruptions in familiar patterns and as such could not be ignored. 

At both events, his life of physical patterns - the pas de deux, the intersecting lines, the shadows that we make that come and go - and his timely routine were upset.  He could only think of place without both.  No patterns, no time. 

'I love you', he said to his wife, very unusual for him a very undemonstrative person, but fitting somehow at this particular moment. 

So far, so good. Mens sana in corpore sano but for how much longer?  Suddenly that didn't matter now that he had put fractals, shadows, lines and clocks away. 

Playing The Cards You're Dealt - Unforgiving Nature, The Tale Of Parents Whose Children Are Not Up To Snuff

Maeve Bradley had prepared the baby's room months before the due date.  There were stuffed animals, mobiles, soft lighting, a pastel color scheme, fanciful throw-rug, and a teddy bear.  She and her husband chose not to know the sex of the baby - that was God's doing - but like all parents hoped that he or she would be happy and healthy. 

To begin with at least, for Maeve believed that with the genes in the family, their child would be one of a kind, blessed from birth with the one-in-a-million genetic package that would be the foundation for greatness. 

Presumption, of course, unless you knew Maeve Bradley, an obsessive woman whose genealogical investigations were as thorough as that of a Harvard academic.  She studied the original texts of Mendel, studied his family trees, learned stochastics and the probabilities of outcome - when to predict blue eyes when brown were dominant, what were the genetic determinants of height, pigmentation, and agility. 

Her father had been at Yale when the infamous body-type research project had taken place.  A German geneticist had convinced the dean of the psychology department to allow him access to the nude photos of all incoming freshmen taken to determine aberrations in posture - scoliosis and other spinal irregularities. Why Yale thought this was important is beside the point. It was Werner Smoltz' contention that body type - mesomorph, ectomorph, and endomorph - was a predictor of intellectual ability. 

The mesomorphs, closest to our simian ancestors, were expected to do poorly, while the ectomorphs were considered the ideal for high-level performance. Smoltz was influenced by the Belgian colonists in Rwanda who had unscientifically determined that the tall, well-muscled, physically attractive Tutsis should be favored over the monkey-like Hutus and given positions of responsibility. 

Smoltz's research was dismissed by Yale in the wave early wokeness - body-type analysis was racist and socially irresponsible - but there were a number of academics who quietly pursued Smoltz' idea. These mesomorphic apes milling about in student lounges couldn't possibly be bright enough to tie their shoes. 

In her intent to build a genetic profile for her soon-to-be-born child, Maeve overlooked nothing, even the discredited theories of Smoltz.  She even dabbled in phrenology - the Nineteenth Century theory that head size and shape determined intelligence. 

After much assiduous investigation, Maeve built the expected genetic profile of her future child, and was convinced that he would inherit the high intelligence of two remote great uncles, one on each side of the family, who had excelled in theoretical mathematics and physics. This direct genetic link was freshened by two female ancestors who, although not as famous as Madame Curie, were well-known in the scientific community as geniuses.

 

As soon as the baby was born Maeve looked for signs of high intelligence.  MIT Press had a complete series of academic works on child development, genetic trait predictors, and signs of precocity, and Maeve matched them with her baby's smiles, looks, and movements. 

She first noticed something awry in the young toddler's playgroup.  While the other children played engagingly with the pots, pans, spoons, and cups - filling them with water, emptying them, stirring them, etc.- Maeve's boy Roland just sat there, a bit wobbly, goofy looking and disengaged. 

Disengagement is often a sign of early perceptive cognition, the MIT tomes suggested; but there was something too disconnected about the boy to ignore.

So she bought a range of toys meant to challenge the growing intellect of toddlers, facilitating their development into reasoning, analytical adults; but Roland just sucked and fiddled with them, and left them in a pile on the floor. 

Something must be wrong, Maeve reasoned - not with the boy but with the MIT algorithms.  The researchers in Boston must have missed something, or a sample size too small or other inconsistencies.  It simply couldn't be Roland. 

By the time the boy was two there was no doubt that the genetic hand he had been dealt was a bad one, but even then, skilled poker players with bluff, threat, and confidence can at least come out even.  The point was, do all you can to make do with what you've got.  In Roland's case, to squeeze every bit of whatever intelligence he had out in the open.  He might not be at the top of the food chain as she had expected, but given every advantage, he would have a respectable position. 

In all this, Maeve suspended disbelief.  Despite what she saw, she simply could not accept the fact that her son was poorly endowed.  He was as smart as any of his classmates, and she would prove it.  So she wheedled places for him in the accelerated math and reading sections at school.  'Wait and see', she told skeptical teachers who were reluctant to put a slow-thinking boy in with whizzes.  'Consider his self-esteem', they said. 

The boy of course could not keep up, looked dimly at the simplest addition and subtraction problems, and doodled on his worksheet while the other children worked.  

Reading was no different.  He was not dyslexic or learning-disabled, just, well... dumb.  In her mother's generation there was no political correctness and the dumb kids (there was no varnishing reality in those days) were put in special sections.  No one took offense, and these children were as accepted on the playground as any.  There was a bell curve for everything, these children instinctively knew, and because of it, there was no reason to feel superior or arrogant. 

Not so today when advancement, success, and superiority matter.  It was a question of honor that Roland make up distance lost and join the peloton. Which he couldn't do, and which left Maeve feeling frustrated and hopeless. 

Private school would be just the thing, and once again Maeve wangled a slot for him at one of Washington's premier institutions.  The Admissions Office was at first reluctant to take him, but a more than generous donation to the building fund did the trick. 

Not surprisingly, Roland was simply not up to snuff.  Not only that, because the students admitted to the school were Washington's best and brightest, he fell far behind. 

Affirmative action was just beginning in those days, and the school felt obliged to admit under-represented minority students - not just the sons and daughters of the black middle class and children of African diplomats, but children from the worst inner city neighborhoods. These children were basically given a free ride.  Just being in the school and exposing white children to diversity was enough. 

Roland was not even up to the meagre performance of these students, and he was teased, intimidated, and harassed simply for being white.  The school had no choice but to tell Maeve that her son was not the right fit for their academic program. 

Somehow the boy got through public high school - Washington high schools were used to having low-performing students, and he was quite comfortable there.  Little was asked of him, and he was praised for whatever he was able to produce. 

But his mother, after all these years still convinced that some spark of real intelligence if not genius resided in the boy, looked at colleges for him. By now Maeve knew that Harvard and Yale were not in the cards, but any number of competitive state schools would do the trick and Roland was enrolled in a well-known public university. 

To make a long story short, he failed there and at two others.  To his credit, he kept soldiering on when such failure would have taken the sap out of most young people.  

Finally, Maeve gave up. She let him do what he wanted to do, and that was to fix appliances which he took apart and put back together with ease, locating the problem (worn gasket, bent rotor blade), finding the right part, and fixing the thing. 

 

As much as at first it galled her to see her son finagling with blenders and toasters, she had to keep her disappointment under wraps - for the boy's sake; but Roland thrived, got a job at an Ace Hardware store that offered a repair service for small motors - blowers, lawn mowers, etc. - and was considered a whiz.  He could get old rusted motors clogged with grease chugging away after only an hour. 

The repair shop was good for Maeve.  Not that she went about boasting to her friends about Roland and his genius with Toro mowers, but that she became less obsessive about everything.  It had taken Roland and twenty-five years of frustrated expectations, but she could finally sit in a chaise lounge in the back yard and relax. 

Roland, finally released from his mother's clutches did well, made a good living, married the right girl, moved to a split-level in Gaithersburg, and lived happily ever after. 

'I wonder what nasty bits I got from Uncle Harry?', said Maeve. 

The Outrageous, Hilarious, Irrepressible Donald Trump - 'Nice Ass', Nikki Minaj, And Real American Populism

It's all over the media now, President Trump on live television, addressing a crowd of Republican supporters, saying what a fine ass rapper and Trump supporter Nikki Minaj has.  'And I have seen some nice asses in my time', he said, then asking her to stand up and shake her booty. 

Outrageous, hilarious, over the top - the best yet from a man who says what everyone is thinking but afraid to say.  Nikki Minaj does indeed have a fine ass, a big ass, a fine, black booty that had every man looking her way as she climbed the stairs to the podium to give the big man a hug and lead the crowd in chanting, cheering, 'Donald Trump...Donald Trump...Donald Trump' in the best howling hoopla of American campaigning.  

This was Donald Trump at is very best, and Nikki Minaj at hers - the two of them in synch in this hilariously excerpt from the American playbook. 

Black booty? Are you kidding.  The last ten Superbowl halftime shows have featured black women rap stars shaking it, waving it, grabbing crotch and titties, playing to the crowd, giving them everything. The Trump-Minaj show was just another in a series of American populism. 

 

Who ever claimed that America was a sophisticated, high-toned country?  The Superbowl halftime, perhaps the most watched forty-five minutes on television, is America low-brow at its best.  An unashamed, unrepentant sexual gallivanting unparalleled anywhere else in the world. This is populism, appealing to the lowest common denominator. This has nothing to do with the Sun King and his Garden of Versailles, wigs and powder, formal balls, and chamber music. 

It has nothing to do with English reserve or German propriety.  It is far from the Grand Canal, Florentine cathedrals, or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.  It is crass, cracker, and backwoods, toothless, moonshine-drunk carousing. 

It is us, the gunrack-and-bass boat masses whom Alexander Hamilton mistrusted, the majority that Jefferson championed even though he knew that the country's electorate would always be made up of rubes.  'My country right or wrong', said Barry Goldwater, arch-conservative who ran against Lyndon Johnson on a platform of military defense and rock-ribbed patriotism. 

Jefferson knew what was coming but never let on, agreed to create an upper chamber of government, the Senate, to act as a filter through which populism would have to pass, and still the American ethos - a cultureless, vast wasteland of raw opportunity - prevailed. 

All of which is to say that no one tuning in to the Superbowl halftime show should be surprised.  Beyonce, Nikki Minaj, and every sexual trouper from Las Vegas runways to Mardi Gras to Miami Beach nightclubs represent America, not the National Symphony at the Kennedy Center. 

The American Left, expectedly and predictably cried foul when the clips of the Trump-Minaj affair hit the airwaves. This was the last straw.  This defiantly anti-democratic, racist, punishingly autocratic interloper had finally crossed a line, humiliating, demeaning a black woman in public.  The Commander In Chief as a plantation overlord, his racism and misogyny never more evident.  Poor Nikki obeyed the Massa and got up and showed off her booty before being sent back to the cotton fields. 

And all a week before the midterm elections.  The American people would finally see what the Republican party was all about - a bottom-feeding, hateful, cabal of racist misogyny.  

Of course as usual the Left simply doesn't get it.  Nikki Minaj wasn't used or abused.  She was Trump's dance partner, Ginger Rogers to his Fred Astaire. She was reveling in the vaudeville moment, on stage with the President of the fucking United States, cheering him on for all his outrageous populism. Finally a real American, the first authentic American president. 

The howling is louder than it's ever been.  Not even ICE has upset the Left this much, driven them to such frenzy and apoplectic hate; and it is because they can do nothing that the hysteria becomes even more fevered and wild.  

And what is it that has thrown them into such apoplexy? Only the outrageous, unconscionably bourgeois taste of the man.  First it was the new White House ballroom, garish, Rococo, all glitter and gilt, mirrors, and marble, chandeliers and sconces...an abomination, a travesty.  How could he have?  How could he have destroyed the very fabric of American culture and turned the White House into some whore house?

'A travesty...a nightmare...a garish, trashy redo...an architectural bouffant hairdo...a tarted up, faux glam, cheap, flimsy fantasy...' were some of the gentler comments heard on the street.  This was the last straw, the final expression of the total crass unsuitability of the man in the Oval Office, a bounder, a charlatan with not a gracious, charming, sensitive bone in his body.  The last straw until Nikki Minaj. 

The Left hates Trump's America for all its lowbrow instincts. They hate every sequin, every strand of tinsel, every waft of cheap perfume, every high-bosomed line dancer, ever bit of glitter.  They do not hate Trump because of his alleged and presumed crimes and misdemeanors, but because of who he is.  

Trump is an American president whose populism reaches out to the pig farmers, cowherders, and housewives of America who want what they can't have - a bourgeois, cotton candy St. Tropez crowd who could care less about January 6th, secret documents, or payoffs to call girls. 

How to deal with such a betrayal?  No more Camelot, Kennebunkport, or Hyde Park; no more Renaissance Weekends, summers on the Vineyard or even vacations in Maui; but a full-blown, tinsel-bedecked, Rockettes, over-the-top Hollywood extravaganza.  Impossible to have envisaged by the coastal elites, a true American has acceded to the White House.

The furor of the Left is badass, mirage elitism.  How can a man with such foul, horrendously crass taste be in the White House?  Even worse, Pennsylvania Avenue is crowded with beautiful, blonde, blue-eyed, white women coming and going from 1700.  Not a person of color, or of alternative sexuality.  Not one physically challenged aspirant, not a single true representative of diverse America - an Administration of white privilege, pure segregationist temperament, which flaunts its brazen racism. 

The Nikki Miraj thing is just the latest display of his foulness, taking advantage of a woman of color, berating her, reducing a musical talent to a gross sexual distortion.

'Hey', said Pharoah Jones, King of Anacostia, 'Trump, he be the first black president.  Obama say he is, but that nig-a ain't nothin' but a high-toned Uncle Tom.  Trump, he love black booty just like the brothers, sho' nuff'; and that was the irony the Left could not understand.  He was supposed to be a white trash racist, and here he was hero-izing Nikki Minaj.  What was up with that.  The man can't have it both ways. 

Of course he can and does. He is a true populist - he has not one bone of prejudice in his body.  He will take anyone, anytime, 'the great American cauldron'.  He chases women and women love it.  Nikki was a black charmer of a whiter than white President of the United States.  That was Trump, and that was America. 

Trump is a man of Hollywood, Las Vegas, the mean streets of New York and the hollers of Appalachia, runways and overalls, glitz, sequins, and glitter and diesel fuel and bass boats.

The greatest part of Donald Trump, his supporters say is not this empathy, this cultural honesty, but his flaunting of it, the in-your-face, take that attitude designed to enrage the Left and in so doing to expose their humorless, vindictive, folly. 

He has two years left in his presidency and you ain't seen nothing yet.  The man is just beginning to shed the last traces of Washington faux propriety and become fully his own man and more importantly, the people's hero.