A Treetops Tryst Goes Bad - Better To Have Loved And Lost, Etc., Lessons Of Longevity

Potterton Adams was straying into old age - straying because, unlike his more centered peers, he had no direction. Was he destined to live out the rest of his life in a chaise longue in Florida? Move closer to the grandchildren? Muddle through his elder years waiting for the end? 

This was the awful thought that arrived every morning.  As he dressed - the same shirt, pants, sweater, and shoes as the day before - adjusted his belt, ran his fingers through his hair, and headed for the bathroom, he felt like going back to bed. The whole endless, pointless routine was not worth the effort, better to crawl back under the covers and recover bits of the last dream of the night, walking down a forest path with Nancy Blythe, his childhood sweetheart now grown up, a delectable morsel who had not aged. 

 

'Where is Nancy now?' he rhetorically asked, knowing full well that she had died at an early age, and all his hopes of meeting her gone with the wind.  

He looked at himself in the mirror for signs of hope.  He was old but not that old, past his prime but not his pull-by date, still vigorous and sexually ambitious.  Yet the Black Dog pursued him every morning, coaxing him back to bed, an enervating resignation. 

But one day the veil of tears lifted in the unlikely person of Annette from Accounting, an ordinary working girl from Gaithersburg, clean, forty, and hopelessly single, obvious prey.  

Now, Potterton had always been a faithful husband, dutiful, respectful, and honest. There was nothing wrong with his marriage, no Sturm und Drang, no Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf savagery, just the usual bits of nastiness; so it wasn't frustration or dissatisfaction that drove him to approach the available Annette, but his pull-by date.  If he didn't hurry, he, like Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich, would too soon be consigned to the cold hard ground of the steppes for eternity. 

Coffee at the mid-morning break, martinis and oysters at the Grill Room of the Mayflower, steak and Cabernet at McCormick and Schmick's, and the night at her basement apartment in Adams Morgan. 

A done deal, the Grim Reaper delayed, a magical mystery tour before the coming of the steppes.  He was as happy as could be. A door had been opened, the bedcovers had been thrown aside, and he was a new man. 

'Do not go gentle into that good night', wrote Dylan Thomas, and Potterton was not about to. Come what may, this would be the defining moment of his life - or more correctly the end of his life. The affair was an Einsteinian phenomenon - the slowing of time, giving him a few extra years. 

Of course this was not to be taken literally.  The excitement of sexual abandon did not add years, but made those remaining so alive that they counted for more than fifty dull, predictable, routine ones.  'A new algorithm', he said. 

'Come away with me', she said to him after they had been together for a few months. She was to check the company's books in the Dar-Es-Salaam office, and they could take a long weekend at the Treetops Lodge, a five-star pension in the banyan trees, take a week on Zanzibar, and fly home from there. 

Potterton at first jumped at the proposition.  What could be more romantic than a forest idyll, days and uninterrupted nights together, a tryst turned Arabian Nights.  Yet there would be no five o'clock curfew, that alarm that broke the romance of their Adams Morgan retreat but was also an airlock - a punctuation, an escape. In Africa there would be no such exit.  If things went wrong, they would be hopelessly entangled, tied up, forced company.  

'Why not?', he said and finagled an excuse for the trip - he too needed a trip to check the bank accounts in Dar.  The ease of the deception, the curious coincidence of both lovers actually having business in the same remote place at the same time should have set alarm bells a-ringing. Such omens were common in illicit affairs - guilt is never far away and the troubled mind wanders - but he paid no attention, arranged for his passage, packed, said goodbye, and headed East.  

The first night was delirious - a drunken meal of manioc and boa on the balcony, the sounds of the jungle - mysterious, strange, but exciting - came and went in crescendos, the moon was bright, the stars clear, and their lovemaking was more passionate and unrestrained than ever. 

'What shall we do today?', Annette asked the next morning; but Potterton was not prepared for the question.  Neither did he have any real interest in wild animals, nor had he considered long hours spent by her side.  What was he thinking?  This late burst of sexual energy - a kind of surprising volcanic eruption that comes to most older men - was all that he had considered.  

He had not thought through the rest; and so it was that they banged and jolted their way on safari, spotted a few wildebeests and an elephant, had tiffin under an acacia tree, and returned back to the lodge by dusk. A boring, forgettable day, made worse by Annette's wonder and amazement.  Old age might confer wisdom, but it also produces a been-there anomie that is hard to shake. 

After a few sundowners on the balcony, Potterton felt better and more himself, but the strange African goulash soured him.  He looked at the fourposter, bedding turned down and mosquito net in place, as an adversary.  The long day and Annette's puerile questions of the guide had emptied him of enthusiasm.  Yes, sex was always an anodyne for depression, but not this time. No Exit. 

He soldiered through - that was the least he could do for a girl who had spent most of her savings on the trip, had real affection for him, doted on him in fact, admiring his intelligence, savoir faire, good breeding and above all sexual patience. 

'One and done', he callously thought as they finally boarded the flight home.  Now his sexual resume was complete, bookended, the coda to a youth well spent. It was a good thing he was getting irritated with Annette.  Breaking up would be much easier, tearful certainly, but out the airlock he would go, the last notch in his belt carved, back to home, retirement, and a condo in Tampa. 

The Derailing Of A Yale Man - How A Jewish Socialist Ruined A Patrician Prince

Harrison Potter was a fifth generation Yale man.  His forbear, Isaiah Cabot graduated from the university in 1860, joined the Union Army to fight the Confederacy in the Civil War, went on to amass millions as a shipbuilder, investor, and international trader. His whaling ships plied the South Pacific, and his commercial ships were active in the North Atlantic and the Caribbean in the lucrative Three Corner Trade.

The Potters were a tight family, proud of their English heritage, their aristocratic legacy, and their success, and each successive generation shepherded their wealth, so by the time it was Harrison's turn to head the family, he was heir to a small fortune.

Yale had changed since the days of his father and grandfather - it was no longer the Old Blue bastion it once was, Mory's, Fence Club, Skull & Bones and all the rest - but it still retained its Ivy League cachet despite the inroads made by 'democratization' - the process of opening Yale's doors and turning it from a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant redoubt to something more reflective of larger America. 

The Potter family was never entirely happy with this progression, and by the time Harrison matriculated they were furious that their hallowed institution, a beacon of the Enlightenment, the center for advanced learning, and most important the model for cultivated taste, manners, ethics and morals, had become an inchoate, frenzied, nasty place of viral politics, racial division, and downright hostility. 

The real problem was not systemic but personal.  Harrison came home for the holidays with some rather upsetting ideas and went on about identity, social justice, reparations, and righting historic wrongs.  His barbed asides about Wall Street and capitalism were particularly hurtful. After all, he owed everything to the entrepreneurial genius and financial wizardry of his grandparents, his uncles, and his father. 

It was at Christmas that Harrison came home with Esther Rabinowitz, a fellow student at Yale, a girl from Brooklyn, daughter of the descendants of Samuel Gompers, early Twentieth Century labor organizer, socialist, and progressive leader.  

Her family, like the Potters, had passed on their legacy through the generations, and Esther was a dyed-in-the-wool socialist, as committed to economic and social revolution as the Potters were to preserving America's storied patrimony. 

She was an unattractive girl, sallow complexion, narrowly-set eyes, and a rather beaky appearance overall.  She was smart enough in that intellectual way - staccato speech uttered quickly in passionately contrived metaphors and insistent claims - but there seemed to be no chemistry between her and Harrison.  

It was clear that the boy admired her, listened to her attentively, nodding at all her key points, and tending to her comfort and well-being; but she rattled on in her own world, seemingly indifferent to the family's reaction or response. 

They stayed in the Longworth room, the old Victorian chamber overlooking Beacon Street and the park, but other than some animated discussion, the room was quiet.  If they made love it was either with quiet courtesy for others or desultory routine, for not a passionate peep was heard all night. 

'How did you like her, Dad?', Harrison asked his father on the station platform before boarding the train to New Haven.  Old Potter, never an effusive or particularly affectionate father, sniffed, adjusted his tie, brushed his lapels, shook his son's hand, and wished him bon voyage.

‘Brooklyn?’ he snorted as the train pulled out. ‘Esther Rabinowitz?’

The couple spent less and less time on the Yale campus attending to academic affairs.  Instead they traveled as members of Yale Socialists Of America, an influential campus group which had successfully lobbied for divestment of South African gold bonds (apartheid would never be over until the last white had left the country or had been eliminated), the first openly gay club, and a rush to triple affirmative action admittances.

 

And this was still not the halcyon years to come. Under Esther Rabinowitz's charismatic, defining leadership, the Yale socialists were able to achieve every last one of their goals, setting the stage for the more revolutionary years that were to define the new Yale.

'What on earth are you doing, boy?', said Potter Senior, and followed with a disquisition on American history - their American history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Davenport and the New Haven plantations, the founding of the new republic, the framing of the Constitution, and the legacy of the best of British and Western civilization.  

Harrison listened politely and when his father had finished, said, 'Over and done with, Father'.  He said no more - those summarily dismissive words were enough.  The old man shook his head, relit his cigar looked around the room at portraits of Putnam, Davenport, Trumbull, and Berkeley, shook his head again and said a brief goodbye. 

 

Esther couldn't wait for the post-mortem, for Harrison had promised that he would cut formal ties with his family.  Love, patrimony, filial duty, and family were insignificant at best in the workers' struggle, and obstacles at worst.  Affiliation with such racist, capitalist tools was tantamount to treason. 

'Cut the cunt loose', said his college roommate, but the woman had gotten her hooks into him good, and he came not only to understand her political philosophy, but to adopt it.  More Catholic than the Pope, observed his classmates who had watched him transform from a Nantucket, Gstaad, St. Moritz scion of wealth and privilege to a whiny, single-track leftist polemicist. 

Esther's mother said, 'I don't care what you do or who you marry, that's your problem, but there will be a rabbi at your wedding’, so one officiated.  Mrs. Rabinowitz, the rugalach, and the rabbi were the only Jewish items at the wedding.  

Despite her long history of socialist secularism and fidelity to the Jewish reformers of yesteryear, Esther's mother couldn't shake Judaism no matter how she tried. She asked the rabbi to make it quick, no Biblical homilies or injunctions, a joke or two perhaps and then 'let the young people be young'. 

Harrison's life was a completely committed, responsibly political one.  There wasn't a progressive cause he didn't espouse or hold passionately - gays, transgenders, the climate, the black man, socialism, all were within his attention span. 

It was only a few years later when walking out into a cold Washington rain, he bumped into two Yale classmates on their way down K Street to their law offices. Both, from families as fine as his, wealthy, patrician families of storied history and American legacy, who had married well and had become successful corporate attorneys with homes in McLean, Bar Harbor, and St. Bart's, were happy to see him; but how could this crumpled, disassociated-looking, grizzled person possibly be their peer.  What had happened? 

 

The cold wind across the Potomac had them anxious to get moving, but not before, 'let's have lunch', the usual Washington promises, and an exchange of cards.

'I heard he married that Jewish girl, Esther something, rabbinical stock, leftists, the wrong type' and in that dismissive, offhanded comment hit the nail on the head.  It summed up Harrison's life in a nutshell. He had no shimmering summer days on the Vineyard, no powder at Chamonix, no sailing out of St. Tropez, no cigars and cognac at the Yale club, no Southampton weekends, no Cosmos Club, no Society of the Cincinnati.  He had had nothing but rugalach, sour corned beef, and endless talk of the worker, the black man, and the oppressed. 

A dismal life, no getting around it.  The question this mini-epiphany raised was why - why did he do it?  How did he fall so easily, enticed by the blandishments of a mousy, nervous, girl from the outer suburbs? 

His friends, arch-conservatives, surely were leading the life he had always wanted to live and expected.  They felt no guilt about defending the interests of capitalist enterprises, no shame in making tens of millions in salary and benefits, no second thoughts about giving social reform a pass.  If they slept well at night, then why was he the one to toss and turn next to a savagely unattractive wife? 

'A prince of a man', said one of the two classmates to the other, ‘derailed by a leftist - not a Jewish princess, heir to a Miami Beach fortune, all mink and ermine walking down Collins Avenue, that I could understand, but her?’

 

After that meeting Harrison spent more time at the Yale club, renewing friendships and old college ties.  He fudged his resume, confected something more believable and expected, accepted invitations to the Vineyard, and turned over a new leaf.  

He felt like a snake losing his skin and growing another, sloughing off the old and unnecessary and ready to sun himself high up the canyon.  Of course he had never forgotten his good manners and breeding and was sure to take care of Esther, but on the day the papers were finalized, he felt like the Shah of Iran returning to Persepolis.  

The poor, the marginalized, the deprived?  What of them? Life is personal, Maslow's self-actualization, Ayn Rand's individual spirit emeritus.  It didn't matter what the result of his actions were, only the actions themselves; and in his case they were shelved like so many old essays, insignificant relative to what he had become. 

  

His father welcomed him home at Christmas, reinstated him in the family, anointed him heir and noble son, and forgot - just like Harrison did - the odd twists and turns that took him finally to the place where he belonged. 

As Dumb As A Sack Of Hammers - The Vanity Of Inclusivity And Ignoring What Is As Plain As The Nose On Your Face

 'As dumb as a sack of hammers...a few bricks shy of a load...not playing with a full deck'.  These and other epithets have been used for centuries to describe the 'otherly abled' or in common parlance, dumbbells. 

Senator John Kennedy (LA), referring to Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has added another to the lexicon, 'the reason why instructions are put on shampoo bottles'. Unkind perhaps, but true.  

There is a bell curve for intelligence just as there is for everything else.  Most people fit under the apogee of the curve while a small minority cluster at both ends - geniuses at one asymptote, dumb at the other. 

Facts of life, one would have thought; but in the name of inclusivity - a big top welcoming all without regard to ability - those left on God's curb are considered everyone's equal.  Words like 'stupid' and 'dumb' have been decommissioned, relegated to 19th century novels and minor pre-Freudian psychological journals. 

There is no such thing, insist progressives; and to cover for the obvious, to dress the emperor in a new, more becoming suit of clothes, they have invented ADHD - Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Learning Disability. 

Now, neither of these pathological syndromes existed only a few decades ago when reality posed no particular problems, and when one was brought up to deal with adversity, to try one's best, and to accept the rest. 

Schools, like parents and the community at large, categorized ability.  There were reading sections for fast learners, others for the slow; math sections for abstract thinkers, others for those still struggling with numbers.  

No parents complained, and most students felt well looked after. Those in the top groups were not held back and their ability rewarded; and those at the bottom never felt the frustration of having to stare blankly at the blackboard.

Now, the theory of 'multiple intelligences' allows for those befuddled by 2+2 to color and draw; those who can't make sense of 'See Dick and Jane run' to sing. The fact that the outside world is made up of complex numbers and texts is irrelevant - self-esteem is prime, and encouraging a child to think highly of himself will stand him in good stead after graduation. 

Nonsense, of course. Thousands of students move up through the grades without having learned a thing, and feel quite content about it. They graduate from elementary school with no fundamental skills, no practical sense of educational possibility, and unable to function in society; but on they go to middle school and high school under the same protective mantel of 'self-esteem'. 

Johnnie Dunbar was one of these students who couldn't make heads nor tails of anything, a boy nestled at the far end of the bell curve so stupid that he didn't even know it.  A feature of the modestly intelligent is that they know they will never amount to much and set their sights realistically on hairdressing or supermarket checkout; but those less endowed see the opaque, indistinct, incomprehensible world around them as an indecipherable fluctuating puzzle.  

Now, Johnnie Dunbar was not retarded - that is a psycho-genetic medical category reserved for those dealt a bad hand at birth - too few synapses in the brain to be able to make sense, too little gray matter to figure out and decipher. They are not on the bell curve. They are unfortunate accidents of nature and must be justly and fairly treated well.  No playgroups, educational toys, challenging games are going to help them, stuck as they are in a DNA-determined limbo. 

Johnnie was stupid but not mentally retarded.  He was just one of the clueless, aimless millions born without the necessary equipment to make his way up the ladder. If schools chose to recognize limited ability, call it that, and configure programs to fit this paradigm, Johnnie could have maximized what few brain cells he had. 

Instead, he spent hours coloring bunny rabbits, singing in off-key choruses, and showing off his tumbling skills. 'How wonderful, Johnnie', his teachers would say as he turned in his work, looking less like rabbits than grey smudges, and then pinned on the bulletin board under the bright, red letters of his name. 

The likes of Johnnie Dunbar are not detritus - they can and do have a useful purpose in life, just not that of the majority.  They might not be able to square corners of drywall, but certainly they can heft it up three flights of stairs. Aligning shingles on a roof might be beyond them, but hauling the piles of old, discarded shingles is not.  

Adjustment to reality, facing facts, accepting the natural division of ability, the bell curve. Why is that so difficult?  Ignoring it, pretending that intellectual ability is equal across the board is not a consignment to some dark place, but an assignment to place that fits. 

Mr. and Mrs. Dunbar had swallowed the inclusivity thing hook, line, and sinker and were happy when their son's report card came back all A's, were delighted when told at parent-teacher meetings that their son was a truly remarkable child, and were cheering, devoted parents at every school pageant which showed their son off to the community. 

Johnnie's father, not the sharpest knife in the drawer by any means, was farther up on the bell curve and quite serviceable at his job.  He had always hoped for something better for his son and did his best to encourage him.  They played cards together, father teaching son the strategy of gin rummy, but the boy simply drew and threw down cards with no clue as to why.  They did puzzles together, but the boy simply stared at the pieces on the table, paralyzed by uncertainty.  They all looked the same to him, so how was he to pick?

He enrolled Johnnie in a variety of after-school classes, but the boy was only discouraged by the effort.  He couldn't understand basketball strategy any more than he could long division.  Both father and son were equally disheartened. 

It would be hard for any father to accept the fact that an offspring was incapable of the simplest calculation, dumbfounded at the easiest puzzle, blindsided by the most obvious circumstances; and harder, given the noxious and insidious ethos of inclusivity, to help the boy adjust and fit in where he belonged.  

Mr. Dunbar knew that coloring within the lines wasn't going to get Johnnie anywhere, that his poems were word scrambles at best, and that poring over the two-times tables suggested a problem, but he was alone in his discouragement. Schoolteachers and administrators kept telling him what a superiorly endowed boy he had. 

And so it was that Johnnie Dunbar had to make his own way after 'graduating' from high school, or better, thrown to the wolves. Thinking he was great stuff, he found himself amidst a prepared, ambitious, able cohort group headed off to college or veterinary school, while he stood on the curb squinting and trying to decide how to step off.

The army wouldn't take him, not even in for the lowest slop position. Either you were army material or you weren’t, there were no bathroom-only positions in the service. He was left behind in the grass cutting and leaf blowing jamboree, edged out by ambitious Latinos, but found work breaking rock in a quarry. However, even in his limited consciousness  Johnnie knew that this was the very bottom of the barrel. 

 

He stuck with it, made it up to rock-hauler then to the triage assembly line - he could tell one rock from another and rarely made a mistake in classification - and then decided that the job wasn't so bad at all.  'At the quarry' was the only answer he needed when asked where he worked, a satisfactory, all-purpose reply for employment in a well-known local enterprise. 

Now, had he been judged dumb from the beginning, and if he had been given the education, discipline, and respect required to help him meet his potential regardless of its limitations, he would have done far better than the quarry - not a whole lot better, but at least something commensurate with his ability. 

Commensurateness - that was the operative word within the emerging consensus of reality-based educators. Classes divided by ability, insistence on strict cognitive learning, rejection of 'multiple intelligence' theory and a final dismissal of inclusivity.  Individualism - individual enterprise, ambition, challenge - is the only inclusivity there is.  

Johnnie Dunbar was given short shrift and left to founder because of the ill-conceived notions of inclusivity.  Dumb he certainly was, but deserving of far more than he got.  People are dumb, ugly, uncoordinated, clueless, spacey, gawky, and vacant.  Everyone spots them on sight, and it is just political vanity to pretend that they are all Hollywood-ready starlets, Einsteins in the making, and future captains of industry.  

Thank God this penitential period is ending.  Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity (DEI) is over and done with, tossed aside, political detritus, trash.  There should be no more discarded Johnnie Dunbars, but true belief is harder to scour and remove than nasty stains in a kitchen sink.