Planning Retirement

Summer evening in early June. No need yet for the lamps in my friend’s condo. Through the sliding glass door that leads onto his balcony, light comes in across the stretch of a green suburban field.

We are some distance from the city into which my friend travels five days a week. The starched shirt and tie he wears on his twice-daily journeys on the commuter rail have been dropped this evening in favor of polo shirt and walking shorts.

Because of an unseasonable coolness earlier this week, he pads around his unit in white socks. I am not the kind of company he needs to tailor his look for. He expects to be able to spend an hour or two with me this evening and put on no airs.

He rests a foot on the edge of the coffee table. With an easy sigh he puts aside the man who tackles projects head on during the day, sticking his head into colleagues’ offices, delivering the occasional bad news, relying on the weight of decades of employment within the same institution.

It is an employment that he does not yet consider leaving. He is entering his sixties, though, and we talk retirement. Do we either of us know what we expect that to mean? Any idea what we want it to mean? And how soon?

Will it end up a bit like a weekend we leave unplanned? We can wonder sometimes what stories we will get to tell on Sunday night or Monday morning when we have taken no particular pains to create the stuff of stories over the previous forty-eight hours.

Would it be all right to spend the next fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years in a similar mode? Let’s call it “more of the same.”

And then my friend surprises me. There is something in his voice. He does not want to imagine having waited until retirement to do certain things and then find himself facing an illness that extinguishes plans and projects.

He is thinking of his parents and their final years over which he personally watched. In both cases, final years lived too early, concluded too soon.

He wants to learn how to play the organ, he confesses. The right way, not the way he taught himself years ago.

I want to spend more time each day praying. And writing. And reading.

We vow to look for ways in the near future to take long walks together on a regular basis. We want to stay healthy.

Now, Voyager

I like the idea that someone took with him on a weekend away a book that I had lent him. I do not yet know whether he enjoyed it; I barely know if he opened it once the agenda of the group he was joining on the Maine coast took shape. Things he may have pictured having time for might have given way to the long friendly preparations of meals or a side trip to the area’s antique stores.

I suspect that if the soft-cover copy of Now, Voyager made it out of his luggage and landed on a kitchen counter, one of the other men sharing the condo would have picked it up – if only to peruse the Hollywood still of Bette Davis and Paul Henreid on the cover of the novel.

The 1942 black-and-white film based on this work of fiction is something of a classic. One of my earliest gay friends used to be able to recite two hours of key lines before Bette Davis ever opened her mouth. One night in the late 1980s when the movie was scheduled to air, I set up my cassette recorder next to the television. After repeated playings, I became familiar with the pace and tone of the dialogue. I came to know when a pause meant that Paul Henreid was lighting a cigarette – or, rather, two cigarettes.

The name Olive Higgins Prouty appears on the screen whenever Now, Voyager is shown. It is her 1941 novel that brought to life the character of Charlotte Vale and the setting of her elegant Back Bay home where Doctor Jaquith, the compassionate director of a local sanatorium, first meets her at the family’s request. He becomes her lifeline.

It never occurred to me that I might enjoy reading the novel until I saw the 2004 paperback edition in a local bookstore. I have owned my copy for close to ten years without ever probing too deeply into the story of its author. This weekend, though, I gleaned enough online information to realize that Olive Higgins Prouty is buried only fifteen minutes from where I live. I might be able to make the kind of literary pilgrimage that delights bookish types.

While my copy of the novel was up on the Maine coast with my friend, I set about a little sleuthing here at home. It helped that Memorial Day weekend had most cemetery offices open. I got to engage someone official who eventually paused over an index card, typed back in 1974 when the novelist had been buried. He pointed out the general area on a cemetery map where I should begin my search for the Prouty graves.

Before he put away the index card, I glimpsed a nearby address that had been typed under the author’s name. “Is that where she lived?” I asked. Without any hesitation, the cemetery official made a photocopy of the index card for me. I was on my way.

Ten minutes later I was standing over the grave of someone I had never met. It was a far-distant Boston that I got to sense briefly there, quiet and still on a Sunday afternoon. I took pictures with my phone.

I was ready to leave when I saw a locked gate at the end of the roadway along which I had walked in my search for the grave. I recognized something that I did not expect. As a car passed on the other side of the locked gate, I suddenly knew where I was. It dawned on me that here was a stretch of road along which I drive once a week. Seldom able to glimpse over the stone wall surrounding the cemetery, I nevertheless weekly drive within a short walk of Olive Higgins Prouty.

When I pass there, I am on my way to an appointment with my own Dr. Jaquith.

Do I Keep the Book?

What am I saying when I keep a particular book? What am I safeguarding when it is one among hundreds at home and in my office?

Again and again I propose to myself a simplifying of my office book shelves, a thinning, a discarding. This can be preparation, I tell myself, for the day when I will leave what has been my place of employment for over thirty years.

Do I intend taking home all of the books now on my office shelves? By that day – maybe five years away, maybe fewer – when I vacate this beautiful office (and, yes, it is a beautiful office), I will have made some decisions. I will have answered some questions about my life.

And I will possibly have postponed answering others. I will have packed away a book without facing squarely the question it and it alone poses me.

For that is the issue. How definitively am I willing to forgo the pull of the question that a particular book poses? How soon am I willing to forget that that question was once an important one?

What testimony to learning does a 1945 translation of the Georgics bear? How sad if I let myself be no longer reminded of the internment camps in Singapore where former schoolmaster L.A.S. Jermyn translated Vergil a few lines a night! The thin green volume of The Singing Farmer: A Translation of Vergil’s Georgics stays with me.

Hardly irreplaceable, the 1966 paperback The Documents of Vatican II is one of all the books on my shelves that has been longest in my possession. Its red cover identifies it as the early Walter Abbott edition of the documents, more forward-looking and ecumenical in spirit than the 1975 edition by Austin Flannery. What happened to me, to my teachers, to my fellow seminarians in those first years after the Council? That red cover can remind me.

On October 21, 2005, colleagues and I attended a poetry reading at Harvard’s Sackler Museum. The draw was Mary Oliver. The surprise of the evening, though, was a young poet named Kevin Goodan whom Mary Oliver had chosen to read with her. What are the ways that a voice not yet confident breaks your heart when you hear it the first time? I still page through In the Ghost-House Acquainted, listening for Goodan’s voice.

Will a day really come when I no longer want to page through these three books?

Letters I Wrote as a Young Man

The novel I just finished reading last night is what we used to call an epistolary novel. The People in the Photo is a story told not only through letters but through emails and text messages exchanged primarily between two people whose parents appeared in a photograph in a newspaper clipping from 1971.

Last week I received in the mail a different kind of fiction. It was epistolary in the old-fashioned meaning of the term, and the amazing thing is that I had written all of the letters. The earliest dated 1973, the letters were some of them enclosed in the same envelopes in which they had originally been mailed. Most, though, were the simple pages of stationery still folded the way I had readied them for mailing, a triple thickness derived from the paper folded in thirds.

The two main characters in Hélène Gestern’s novel approach with care and curiosity and even reverence the photographs they begin to collect of their parents from various sources. The two of them become archaeologists of sorts, questioning what they find, recognizing that the meaning of the photographs will often rely on ways of thinking that have since grown outmoded. Warnings come from a number of people with whom they speak in 2007 that the truth of the summer of 1971 may not be something they really want to know.

The original recipient of all of the letters in the small Priority Mail box that arrived at my door last Wednesday had been a seminary classmate of mine in the 1970s. Our last visit took place over dinner in Boston in 2009, a cordial and easygoing exchange of information about the partners we had each of us left behind in previous years.

The visit had at first felt like it might prove the motivation for Karl and me to stay more regularly in contact. Our routines, though, mine in New England and his in Florida, would delay the kind of telephone conversation we finally had a little over a week ago. The occasion was his clearing out personal files in preparation for an upcoming move out of the country. He wanted to return to a number of people – seminary classmates and others – the correspondence from them that he had kept safe and secure over the years.

My letters and cards to him were on their way back to me.

So one evening last week I sat with a younger me. I met again the particular tone with which I had been accustomed to write a letter to Karl over those early years of our friendship. It was not a tone I used with anyone else. It was a tone that one man in his twenties used with another man in his twenties as they each camouflaged the kind of affections they wanted kept confidential.

Airy and breezy at times, ironic and sarcastic at others, glib and cerebral at their worst, the letters had been fiction. The moment of relief last Wednesday evening came near the end of the letters when Karl and I had each left seminary. I began to sound like myself finally in what I wrote and how I wrote.

Like the characters in the novel that I finished last night, I approached the reading of my letters last week with care and curiosity and even reverence. I too became an archaeologist of sorts, questioning what I read, recognizing that the meaning of the paragraphs often relied on ways of thinking that have since grown outmoded.

Encounters with Silence

My landlords are downstairs on this second night of Passover. Their grown children’s vehicles are parked in front of the house, one van, one compact.

I can hear a steady reading through the floorboards rather than the telltale exchange of dinner guests. After an afternoon of young footsteps running down a hallway, there are no eruptions of children around a table.

I am ready for gears to shift, I am prepared for familiar voices all raised around the serving of a meal. I do not play any music in my upstairs apartment just yet. I am poised to be respectful.

My landlord has completed a wild winter of snow removal, his snow-blower blessedly noisy on those mornings that I needed my parking space cleared. I was lucky to have someone watching out for me week in and week out as the storms visited New England.

I am sitting with a small book of meditations first published by a German Catholic priest in 1938. Encounters with Silence has long been understood as one of those remarkable compositions by a theologian who knew how to turn his reflection into prayer.

I have owned my paperback copy of the book from my seminary days back in the 1970s. It is one of those books that never disappoint, that never fail to carry me deeper into myself. I always have a sense of the author as an intelligent man, a learned man whose intellectual acuity could have been a protection from facing his need for God – but it never succeeded in doing him that disservice.

On the other hand, his critics have asked how he could never have addressed what was happening in the Germany of his day. I met a man who was his driver in the later years of his life, escorting him to the universities in postwar Europe where he was repeatedly invited to lecture. His reputation worldwide never flagged.

I attended a talk he gave on one visit he made to the United States in the 1970s. His topic was the dialogue possible and even inevitable among world religions.

In one of the meditations in Encounters with Silence, Karl Rahner as a young priest being groomed for university teaching recalled his baptism: “Then my reason with its extravagant cleverness was still silent. Then, without asking me, You made Yourself my poor heart’s destiny.”

I read those words last night in church as I waited for the start of the Good Friday liturgy.

Somehow I find myself a Christian. Somehow I find myself a Catholic. Somehow in 2015 I find myself a churchgoer still. I am grateful for Father Rahner and the way his words address the healing silence before which I get to live.

East Village in Manhattan

I was not born in New York. I am not a New Yorker.

When I read about the East Village, I am responding to an author. I am responding to a narrative by means of which that particular author recreates a section of Manhattan.

I have personal memories of the East Village, but they are few. Those few take on importance, however, and even vividness. No long-term familiarity with the rest of the city has dulled them.

At one point in my late twenties I considered moving to New York and making my living there. I interviewed for jobs and got an offer. By the time the offer came, however, the man whose apartment in the East Village I had visited one eventful evening no longer lured me. What had begun as a chance meeting between strangers in a gift shop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art continued long-distance until a weekend in off-season Provincetown and then it gently faded.

I had my image of that part of Manhattan, however. I had never imagined an apartment so small, its walls and ceiling a patchwork of half-done repairs. An evening from La Bohème touched by an intensity I had not considered possible in my life.

In time I would be visiting New York regularly with a partner whose best friend from high school lived in another apartment in the East Village. A man who would have given anything to be a writer, Michael lived in literary elegance and occasional penury. He owned a second-hand tuxedo for those New York occasions that demanded it. At one such event he had his picture taken with Ian McKellen.

With denim and leather that grew softer over the years, Michael walked New York tirelessly and at all hours. New York was home but a home with which he wrestled, argued, made vehement pleas for a recognition that eluded him. When the epidemic hit, Michael fought but eventually succumbed.

I did not live in New York during those years, and so my impressions remain those of a visitor. When I sit in a restaurant in the city, alone or with friends, I can find myself staring out over the heads of other guests. Through the windows I may glimpse a row of brownstones across the street, and I wonder who would ever exit those doors with the least thought of those of us looking out at them.

Boots and Gloves and Winter Things

I sit on the top step each morning and pull on boots.

Each morning for the past five weeks, I sit looking into the chilly stairwell that leads down to my front door. I tug the laces of the first boot. When I have tied the laces, I place along the baseboard of the landing the slipper I just removed. Taking off the other slipper, I store it next to its partner. I pull up my sock to make it easier to work my foot into the second boot. I tug at those laces and tie them securely.

I am ready to grip a nearby door jamb and stand on the top step where I have just been sitting.

I am not yet ready to gather up the satchel where I keep a pair of dress shoes for my work day. First I need to open the coat closet in the hallway and find my blazer among the other jackets. Then I curve my fingers to hold the sleeve ends of the sport coat as I slide my arms into the thickness of a down parka.

Are my gloves in that satchel with the dress shoes? Most likely. No need to put them on yet because I will need to dig out my apartment keys from the pockets of my topcoat when I get downstairs and out the front door.

On the bottom landing I step around the rubber pails positioned to catch drips from an ice dam above that stairwell. Some mornings I know to pick up a long-handled snow brush to clean the roof of my car. Some mornings I scoop a mug of ice melt to help make the walk to my car a safer one. A scraper is waiting for me on the backseat of my car in case a dusting of snow is hiding a coating of ice on the windshield.

When I get home from work ten hours later, I will need to reverse a lot of the steps I just outlined. I will likely have inched my car between two others in the parking lot, listening to the crunch of ice beneath my tires. I will have looked up at the windows of my second-floor apartment, some of them curtained with icicles.

When the evening begins and the kitchen is steamy with prep for dinner, I will not be wondering what I wonder at other times these past five weeks: Why have I written so little? Why have I read less than usual, making paltry progress in library books that have already been renewed once? Why am I getting to bed well before ten o’clock some weekday evenings?

Mornings come early in an historic winter in historic New England.

Mardi Gras

My brother in New Orleans is moving through the rituals that will carry him to Mardi Gras in four days.

A man in his late sixties, he does not choose to leave such rituals to the younger residents and visitors who each night watch parades roll through the Crescent City. Experience is something that gently guides my brother and his friends through this marathon. On tables in their homes, they have framed photographs of sunny smiles that they wore when they used to mask in troops twenty, thirty, forty years ago.

There is no outrage or scandal that they would hesitate to hint at if someone asked about the people in those photographs.

It is like yesterday to some of them who recall the balls and parties into which they ventured themselves as younger residents and tourists. Long before Stonewall, a hierarchy of New Orleans personalities prescribed the rules by which anyone younger or prettier laid claim to a thrilling sense of belonging and acceptance.

Neither my mother nor my father was a natural at this time of year in New Orleans. My mother sewed costumes for my brothers and me. My father found one of the safer parking spaces blocks from the parade route. Neither my mother nor my father, though, knew about the kind of world into which Mardi Gras could seem an entrance.

Neither would be the mentor that my brother and the other people in those framed photographs sought. Sought and, in circumstances worth a round of drinks to hear, found.

Sharing the January Landscape

There are men whose sadness has lain open before me.

Inexplicably, over the years I have been lured less frequently by hearty, easy laughter and more often by the silent wonder with which some men have watched their own disappointment and loss. I pride myself that I can name it when I see it in others – the landscape their eyes follow, the story they start to tell and then stop.

I become bored by the party atmosphere when it covers over the paths by which individuals got there. I would prefer the spot before the fireplace, the sidewalk leading out into the night. Few imaginings hold me like the snow that might fall upon me and another man cleaning our cars together, our eyes catching the gestures by which we each sweep off the evidence of the hours we spent away from them.

I have driven away into the moods of a January day so many times. I have wanted the strange pleasure of the phone call, the message that comes from another corner where a man finds he regrets his winter a little less for sharing it.

When Christmas Hits

It is not easy to predict when Christmas will hit each year.

Those of us intent on decorating a living space may expect something to strike home when we sit with our tree for the first time. Or for the last time.

Those of us who buy gifts may await some decisive shiver of satisfaction at our final taut tug on a bow or at the look on the face of the person who gets to loosen it.

Those of us who like to sing with others may know the favorite carols without guessing which verse will catch in our throat at that telling point in the season.

But we expect Christmas to hit.

That is why many of us spend time, spend money, spend creative energy in the weeks of December. We do not want to miss it – whatever precisely that something might be this year.

Some promise to ourselves will get kept.

Some vision of our lives will move into greater focus.

Some part of our heart will feel alive in a way that we had not known we needed.

What comes down faster – snowflakes in the light of the street lamp in front of my apartment this evening? Or the words with which I can begin to say thank you?

Oh, the snowflakes, the snowflakes.