Coming Out--a poem

 With the assistance of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Ana Castillo, William Carlos Williams, Gary Soto, Andrew Marvell, and Langston Hughes

I celebrate myself, and sing myself.

I wish! Actually, I don’t though I know every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I think instead, I’m nobody, without the comforting how dreary – to be – somebody.

In short, I was afraid. I have always been scared of you and have convinced myself

These are not thoughts great books have withstood time for.

But how should I begin to spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways that so much depends on?

Do I dare disturb the universe and declare desire?

I want to jog into the next century on the power of a great, silly grin, roll all my strength and all my sweetness up into one ball, and believe they’ll see how beautiful I am and be ashamed –

Because there is that in me – I do not know what it is – but I know it is in me,

Something inherent that resists the insistence that I don’t exist.

Dinosaurs

2  Dinosaurs

For the last few years, I have been having trouble with the fact and idea of dinosaurs.  I have not always doubted these reptilian creatures.  When I was young, I was convinced of their  authenticity.   I had, after all, during my family’s numerous visits to the Agassiz museum at Harvard University,  beheld many a skeleton of vertebrae, bones, and plaster wired together to create massive models that dominated the museum’s grand, musty rooms.  These colossuses were indeed thrilling.  I have no doubt, too, that they would have been even if they had not been viewed in contrast to the museum’s outer galleries’ dimly lit glass cases of delicate, finely wrought glass flowers which my mother insisted my brothers and I admire, or at least look at, before we were permitted to enter the hall of the creatures of the Cretaceous.   I really believed that these skeletons, despite the plaster prosthetics, were genuine.  Who wouldn’t?  I was a child with my parents.  It was science and it was Harvard.  

Notwithstanding the weight and authority of lessons learned in childhood and the cultural cache of all things museum and Ivy, over time my doubts about dinosaurs have grown.  What brought my simmering disbelief to a crisis, besides the Saturday afternoon staple of Godzilla movies and dinosaur toys in my fifties’ childhood, was the breathless announcement sometime in the 1990s of fossil evidence that these not so fleet footed creatures had feathers.  Feathers!  I mean, really.   Even with their small heads and rumors of mini bird like brains, the avian appendages of feathers fails to fly for me, seriously violating my beliefs about the behemoths.  Even though evidently some suspected such accoutrement earlier, certainly no one had suggested plumage when I was a child.  And if there were previous hints of such fluff, why had we followers of the fate of the species not been alerted to the possibility?   Why was this image altering information just thrust upon us with no warning?  Was there some kind of conspiracy here? 

Whatever it was, this feather dust up only brought into focus doubts that had been simmering in me repressed and left unspoken for many years.  We are supposed to believe that after “roaming the earth” for many a year, these extraordinary behemoths just disappeared.  Like that.  Was it the small brains and vegetarian diet, a logical possibility some may say?  Perhaps even some Icarus-like issue with those feathers, the dinos daring too much.  No!   The master narrative of my pre global warming warning youth ascribed the destruction to a historically histrionic meteor or comet or the like.  (My Google search on this matter, by the way, revealed a lack of consensus on which type of celestial body deserves the brunt of the blame.  The destruction of the dinos is ascribed variously to a comet, meteor, and asteroid.  And just so you know that I am thorough, I did investigate the distinctions between these various types of denizens of the heavens.  Alas, my source, the website, “Science Kids:   Fun Science and Technology for Kids,” which I chose for what I suspect are obvious reasons ( I often fail to know more than a fourth grader),  did not provide much clarity—all were described variously as heavenly bodies with tails.)  More recent theories propounded for the mass extinction sixty-six million years ago of the creatures large and small read like climate change prequels, with an obviously non human aided and therefore somewhat inexplicable earlier ice age, or a particularly ferocious  volcano a la 1991 Mt. Pinatubo, wreaking dinosaur havoc by throwing up debris that blocked the life giving sun. 

Whichever it is, this destruction of the dinos scenario creates what I call the evolution problem.  Don’t get me wrong.  I am a big fan of evolution.  But I just can’t keep in my head that these dinosaurs and humans are part of the same evolutionary strain.  Is it because these reptiles, notwithstanding the bones I have seen, are in truth more imaginary to me than real?   Has cinema and popular culture trumped science?   The ridiculous feathers, with their implications of dinosaurs as birds, certainly didn’t aid in verisimilitude.   Besides, if the once decisively dominant dinosaurs were subjected to some force deadly enough to devastate their habitat and thus lead to their demise, why didn’t all the plants and verdant glens and dales, from whose slime we humanoids allegedly rose, go with them?   Was there, if that were the case, a two step evolution (much like the two step creation of the bible with Lilith, Adam’s first wife, (woven from the same cloth, incidentally) conveniently replaced by the rib-sourced Eve) in which the planet of the apes and humans was preceded by a whole other, discrete, dinosaur and the like evolutionary animal strain?  Could that be?  Does that make sense?

 And here is the thing, really:  if something so dominating and enduring—having existed for 136 million years—can perish in the cold or dust,  what chance do we sixty-five million year old featherless mammals, who require so many goods and services, have?     What chance do I, a sixty-five year old product of evolution, have?

Retirement

1  Retirement

I am free.  I have retired.  After almost thirty years, I have voluntarily left my teaching toil in the vineyards of higher education.  I am not planning to carry on in that employ or a similar employ, or any other employ, for that matter, again.  Well, maybe on some occasion I will teach writing or literature on a part-time, temporary, just for fun basis.   I actually do fantasize about short contract teaching in some as yet unnamed exotic but comfortable and safe clime, an experience I have been fortunate to have enjoyed a few times in the past.  You should know, by the way, if you are contemplating retirement, that peregrination is evidently expected and almost obligatory for retirees.  In fact, one of the first questions folks asked when I announced my pending retirement was if I was going to travel.  I cringed a bit at such inquiries as I enjoy touring but very much hoped to avoid that and the other stereotypical retirement tropes which, alas, in their myriad forms, loom seductively.  I have, for instance, taken up sculpting.  And my also retired partner and I have joined the local senior center to take Tai Chi.  Can you imagine!  When I tell my non-retired friends this, often their first response, unmediated by sensitivity or conscience, is to laugh.  I take no offense.  I understand.  I understand. But even if I do indulge in a variation of travel disguised as employment, I have no plans to derive a sense of utility or comprehensive identity from these or other endeavors.   I tell myself that I have weaned myself from the tyranny of a need to be productive, of service, or fame.  I have registered for Medicare and have just started collecting a pension.   I can now relax.

Or can I?  That is what I thought until I read an article in the New Yorker by Patricia Marx on the “Golden Years” (New Yorker, October 8, 2012).   (I have always thought it ironic that a person named Marx writes the shopping advice column for the New Yorker.)    I read Marx in spite of my best anti-consumerist intentions.  And just so you know, I am no slouch in the Marx department. For a year or so in my late twenties, I lived in a socialist, co-ed, non-sexist, semi-vegetarian political collective whose do goodery was supplemented by study groups on Marx and others of his ilk.  And while I currently live as thoroughly a bourgeois life as I can afford, I have not abandoned myself to the worship of the material.  Still, I find myself fascinated by this guru of affluent consumerism’s considerations of the ins and outs of individuals and establishments that purvey prestige products and services.  I am attracted and repelled by discussions of the proper messenger and handbags, watches, linen, shoes and advice about gourmet take out, private schools, beauty spas, yoga institutes, and the like.  I know that Marx is not writing to the likes of me.  And yet . . . and yet, I am haunted by her presentation of the various options for modern retirement and wondering if I am doing it right. 

First, there is the problem of nomenclature, which in itself reveals the tendency of the times for many baby boomers: “Encore Career, Recareer, Rewirement, Anti-Retirement, Regenopause [clearly for women only]” are only a few of the phrases Marx presents as current descriptors. OMG, I thought, I am supposed to be having a second career!  Retirement is not an entrance into freedom and leisure as one leaves their job/career, a time for reflection, hobbies, and fun, as I thought it was, but a retooling for another commitment of time and energy to finally fulfilling and enriching myself.   We still want to “do” something.  What happened to all that talk about “being”? (I note, by the way, that family and friendship seem to play little part in filling the apparently yawning gap in personal satisfaction and meaning expressed by many of the retiring boomers. The much quoted sentiment that the only things that matter in the end are love and relationships is often cited but little observed.  Personally, I have long thought that, yes, people are perhaps all that matter at the end, but not necessarily in the meantime. )   

The implication of these terms for retirement is wearying enough, but also disturbing is that apparently, the new retirement requires expert assistance in the form of retirement coaches, which Marx goes on to describe.  Now I know that this coaches thing is not new for the baby boomer generation weaned on weed, psychotherapy and mood altering and/or controlling pharmaceuticals.  While we might have spent our youth acclaiming freedom of expression and individuality, we have been joiners.  We may bowl alone and not join Masonic and other lodges, but many of us did flock to therapists, Esalen, EST, encounter groups, and other workshops that promised fulfillment and self-actualization.  We may have not trusted our parents and elders, but we have depended much on the paid kindness of strangers.

So what’s a good time girl like me who craves to do the right thing to do? Why, after a lifetime of laboring for wage and/or profit, can’t I simply relax and be lauded and applauded for it?  The life of the mind and the swimming pool beckons. Isn't that enough?