Senior Living - Better An Epitaph And A Plot Of Grass Than A Sad Repository Of Old Memories

Melrose Potter never thought of herself as old, but as she looked in the mirror, she was shocked at what she saw.  Had she always looked in the mirror every morning brushing her teeth or before work combing her hair, she might not have been so shocked and surprised; but because she hesitated - well, refused - to look at what she knew was an older image, the sight of the gray, the lines, the hollows, and the sags was horrific. 

She had seen her friends and colleagues age ungracefully.  Nips and tucks, cosmetics, and makeovers were not part of her solidly patrician ethos, and so one by one the daughters of New England deteriorated before her eyes. 

 

Not her, she convinced herself.  Aging would not be so unkind to a woman who went daily to the gym, did Pilates and hot yoga, walked to and from the Metro on her way to work every morning, ate the healthiest offerings of organic farmers' markets, got routine checkups and went to bed at a reasonable hour.  

Of course aging could be unkind, and as that one revelatory, incidental look in the mirror showed, it did so with a vengeance. St. Laurent and Armani, thousand-dollar hair stylings, hours of massages and holistic spa treatments, Cartier jewelry, and the finest French cosmetics were only cover stories for what was the steady march to the grave. 

 

'Don't be so melodramatic', she said to herself as she prepared for the day ahead. 'I've got many good years ahead of me', but her words were unconvincing.  Just yesterday her closest friend, Sylvia, moved to Ingleside, the high-end senior living complex on Military Road to join Marfa Potter, Ileana Fox, and Muffy Deloitte. 

All these ladies had lived alone since their husbands died and decided that the facilities and community at Ingleside would be far more preferable than Doordash take out and lone walks on the C&O Canal. 

Melrose - Mellie to her friends - was not in this exact situation.  Yes, she was resorting more to Doordash and Wagshal's deli; and yes, she found herself staring at some indifferent painting in the West Wing of the National Gallery, but she never had a husband. She had remained determinedly single all her life, enjoyed serial lovers, had turned Sapphic once or twice, and never looked back...until now. 

The old face in the mirror and the personality behind it were solitary entities.  She had no memories of a husband and no children or grandchildren to add substance to her increasingly weary life.  She didn't exactly regret her past decisions, but was forced to reconsider them by the face in the mirror. 

Melrose Potter was a privileged child, having grown up in a world of wealth and status - the Park Avenue, Biarritz patrician kind, not the arriviste bourgeoisie of so many.  Summers were spent on Nantucket, winters on the slopes of Gstaad, high school at Miss Porter's and college at Wellesley; but that elite upbringing was not enough to condition - or rather tamp down - her sexual and social recklessness. 

 

She was a whirling dervish of sexual affairs, political protest, unencumbered engagements, and travel adventures to the unexplored regions of the world.  She was tornadic, a devilishly powerful, almost frighteningly aggressive woman out to pick every rose and climb every mountain. 

The tales of her escapades at La Coupole where she joined the Paris underground in their sexual bacchanals after midnight were legion as were  those of her Eyes Wide Shut black mass sexual exorcisms.  She was known from Paris to Monte Carlo, from Tangier to Pretoria.  She was a free spirit, a woman of limitless ambition and agency, a party-goer, and intellectual, a carouser. 

And then before she knew it she found herself childless, alone, and facing the prospect of early interment at Ingleside.  Yes, it was all it was touted to be, its advantages limned in the attractive, glossy brochure sent out to wealthy zip code 20016 and its aging residents. 

Ingleside is a community of progressive, wealthy neighbors who have chosen to spend their golden years with likeminded people; a communal, respectful, congenial place to share, to stimulate, to excite, and to be happy

Yet despite its chat rooms, seminars on the influences of Babylonian mysticism on the Pentateuch, and classes in chess mastery, and despite its glowing publicity, Ingleside was a repository of old memories, an ill-lit place of regrets.

A recent Yale class reunion, thinned out because of 'early retirement' as the class chronicler wrote in his elegy to the Class of 19___was still vital, and the docket was full of important political inquiry.  The class, liberal to a man it seemed, could not get enough parsing of the state of the world and their influential place within it. 

'Leaving something behind' was the unwritten theme of the Reunion, a paean to university which counted a number of Presidents, Senators, financiers, and men of rectitude and high purpose.  These alumni might be in the last decade of their lives, but they were still working hard for a better world.  Although they might not be at the barricades of their youth, they could still fight the good fight from the podium. 

 

There were a number of these Yale men at Ingleside when Melrose's friends had moved there; but age had taken its toll and banked the political fire.  The more one stayed, lived, survived at Ingleside, the more one regressed. It was no longer 'back in ought four', but reminiscences far more treacly and airy. Even men of power and influence babbled when it came to Ingleside. 

Melrose resisted the pull of Ingleside Senior Living.  There was something fitting about a woman whose best years were young ones and whose achievements and accomplishments were merely addenda to the experiences of her youth.  Given that, the last thing in the world she wanted was to blabber about it, share it with total strangers, give in to the cloying demands of senior living. 

'Aging in place' was the euphemism for dying in place and holding on for dear life before it happened.  Melrose never thought of her insistence on staying at 4903 Burlington Road as anything more than an eventuality she chose and was not chosen for her.  

Vladimir Nabokov in his memoir Speak, Memory wrote of himself as a memorist, someone for whom the past was not just an assemblage of random memories, but an existential point de repere. The present was a matter of micro-seconds, the future only a possibility; but the past was as real as the memories of it retained. 

 

There was something in Nabokov's perspective that appealed to Melrose.  It was her past and no one else's and better to die in her traces caretaking those memories than quacking on about them to indifferent strangers. 

True to her principles, she died in her favorite armchair, found there by the fire department who had been alerted by accumulated mail and leaves on the walk.  A fitting end.  What in fact could be more fitting than the solitary death of a truly independent, defiantly unique woman?

Municipal Politics - Kickbacks, Walkin' Around Money, And No-Show Jobs, American Democracy At Work

Washington, DC is the Nation's Capital, seat of federal government, its bureaucracy, and the Supreme Court, but it's also a city with a municipal government. It once was simply a federal district run by Congress until Home Rule came into effect. 

Home Rule in principle gave voice to the people of Washington, and with their vote a Mayor and City Council were elected. Funding would be through taxpayer financing with a small portion of the budget from federal resources to help keep up the federal buildings, landscaping, and national parks. 

As soon as this devolution of authority returned a certain degree of political and fiscal autonomy to the District of Columbia, the fire sale started.  Typical of all urban municipalities, DC turned populist, and in majority black DC, the populism was distinctly racial.  The white wards of the city were to be the cash cows, contributing the lion's share of tax revenue, and the all black wards across the Anacostia River, dysfunctional, crime-ridden, drug addled, and socially delinquent were to be the beneficiaries of this white largesse. 

City Hall wasted no time in reparations.  Now that a black local government was to finally govern black Washington its constituents were finally to get their due. 

The money 'invested' in the inner city neighborhoods of the city started modestly until the election of Mayor For Life, Marion Barry who raised the ante.  A virtual flood of public monies flowed officially into black neighborhoods, and a steady stream of unofficial 'walkin' around money' followed.  These extra funds were to reward residents for their fidelity to Barry and his cohorts, to assure their support in coming elections, and to give them the satisfaction of taking whitey to task. 

When things got out of hand and when Barry was convicted of all kinds of crimes, his arrest was ignored.  The black population had always known of his fondness for drugs and hookers, but since this was part of their culture, they were nonplussed. 

Barry was one of them, and his off-program escapades with crack, hookers, kickbacks, and no-show jobs simply mirrored their own extra-judicial enterprises. 'One of us, one of us', went the refrain of the movie Freaks and became the meme of the day. 

At this point the federal government stepped in and appointed an overseer, an unelected representative of Congress, a financial hardliner, and an honest politician to right the ship.  He did his job, and the white wards of the city at least, thought that perhaps the days of the drug-running murder capital of the country were over. 

They were wrong, of course, and once Anthony Williams left  his appointed position and a term as Mayor, things went back to the way they were.  Crime returned to its nationally high levels, drug crewes fought it out in street battles, and inner city neighborhoods became no-fly zones for the police. 

Now, a new Democratic Socialist Mayor is about to assume office, and from the other side of Washington - municipal politics - the flagrant expenditure of non-accountable monies on non-performing, historically disproven, venal, and self-interested programs - is soon to begin in earnest.  

Residents of the white wards of the city have up till now taken municipal disregard and disrespect for granted, but now are ready to move out.  The older residents are heading for Florida and Arizona, and the younger generation is moving across the river to Virginia and the high-tech enclaves relatively immune from punitive taxation and municipal corruption. 

If the thought of Zohran Mamdani, Democratic Socialist Mayor of New York causes night sweats, the thought of DC's Janeese Lewis George is nightmarish.  Taxes, already among the highest in the nation will be raised, the inner city neighborhoods across the river will be afforded a financial banquet of unseen proportions, the police will be transformed into social working acolytes of the ghetto, and minority-friendly hack contractors awash in new monies will tear up perfectly good sidewalks, dig and build where they will, and buy Cadillacs with the profits. 

'The black people of Washington have suffered enough', said the Mayor-Elect's spokesperson, 'under the yoke of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, discrimination, and racism at the hands of their white oppressors.  The time has come for action'. 

The new Mayor's policy papers have been a socialist's dream - free daycare, free healthcare, free transport, free lodging, free food.  Janeese has shown the world that she is no Mamdani clone, but a woman of agency and influence in her own right and will not simply adjust the machinery of government, she will transform DC into a People's Republic. 

Janeese is not alone at the center of municipal anarchy - the mayors of Chicago, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and Portland are no different.  They have run on overtly racially manipulative campaigns, have salivated over the thought of untold millions in taxpayer resources at their disposal, and have acquired a sense of invincibility thanks to the persistent chant of Diversity Equity Inclusion and the black identity politics, an integral part of it. 

The depths of municipal intellectual, financial, social, and economic corruption would not be possible without white liberal complicity.  While demographics have altered the municipal electoral landscape, with significantly large black voter roles enabling the election of demagogues like Janeese and Chicago's Brandon Johnson, white liberals, convinced that the most important item on their political agenda was the fostering of the prominence of the black man, facilitated it. 

From major metropolitan areas, to cities and small towns, municipal politics have been transformed resulting in incompetence, sinkholes of poverty and violence, and the rise of blatant corruption. 

The situation is not unlike what is happening in France.  The country, convinced on the political imperative of open borders, reparations for the sins of colonialism and the systemic racism that resulted, welcomed millions of undocumented, Muslim Africans, and is now suffering the consequences.  France is no longer the proud Eldest Daughter of the Catholic Church, cultural leader and icon of Western civilization. It has become an ungovernable chaos with radical Islam and anti-white and anti-European sentiments at the core. 

The American Left, having lionized so-called oppressed minorities, having given free rein to 'political expression of racial frustration'. supported corrupt organizations like Black Lives Matter, made heroes out of criminals like George Floyd and demonized the police while so doing are seeing exactly what they have done.  Municipal governance is out of control. 

Bob Muzelle, a longtime DC resident and lifelong progressive remarked about the new mayor, 'Let's give her a chance' and in so doing voiced the intellectual vanity of 'democratic socialism'. With the election of Janeese, Bob could finally come right out and say what he had believed all along - socialism was the world's saving grace, a philosophy of generosity, compassion, and social justice.  Yes, it has had its ups and downs but it has never lost its currency, agency, or moral imperative. 

For decades political activists like Bob could never actually say they were socialists - communists in the lexicon of Joseph McCarthy, terms that branded the believer as a traitor - but now the philosophy was finally out in the open in America and its hope for a Utopian future soon to be realized.  

This heady cabal - white liberals and black demagogues - spells doom for the future of municipal government, but it seems unstoppable.  The idea of finally casting off the chains of capitalism and creating a fair, just, and equal society not only excited the likes of Bob Muzelle, but energized the credulous idealism of youth. 

Bob was delighted when Janeese won the DC Democrat primary, a virtual guarantee of election in the November election, and he hosted a dinner for his colleagues, friends, and supporters. While always careful to never betray the poor and the marginalized, he kept his dinners simple; but at this celebratory dinner, he allowed himself a show of the icon of victory, a bottle of Moet-Chandon Reserve. 

Soon enough his property taxes will go through the roof, his income taxes will become even more punitive, and a variety of 'luxury' taxes will penalize him at every turn; and then, maybe then the old adage, 'Given enough time a liberal will always become conservative' will apply to him. 

Cross-Cultural Marriage - Abuse, Money, And Good-Byes, But Moral Duty Done, An African Tale

Marfa Chapin was nearing thirty, not so old in today's youthful culture, but old enough to begin to wonder about the possibilities of marriage and family. Marfa had never pursued men.  She was content to be pursued just like her mother had been. 

'Oh, your father made a beeline for me', her mother said, 'and never stopped until I said yes'.  The marriage had been wholesome - and that was saying something in an age of dissatisfaction and divorce.  Mrs. Chapin had no cause to complain.  Yes, her husband was desultory in bed, an unenthusiastic partner, but he was a good provider, faithful, and an engaged father.  More than most women could hope for. 

Growing up in such a household, Marfa never had dreams of marrying a prince; but assumed that the right man would come along at the right time.  Most women she knew were either married or in a relationship so her time would come; but it didn't.  Whether she was looking in the wrong places or the eligible men were taken, or because there had always been something tellingly unapproachable about her, she always came up empty. 

She shifted gears, became the pursuer instead of the pursued, but that had not traction either.  She was not adept at that kind of thing and came across as a bumbler.  She accosted men at the National Gallery, on the Red Line train, at the Old Ebbitt Grill, and in Lafayette Park to no avail. 

At the same time and perhaps because of her failure at love she joined the progressive movement and vented her frustration and used energies on the canon - climate, diversity, inclusion, and the redistribution of wealth. She was not particularly passionate about any of these issues - her family was Republican - but they sufficed to take her mind off marriage and give her at least some purpose as the months wore on. 

Now, Marfa was a very credulous, even naive woman; and within the progressive movement to restore the black man to dignity and his proper place atop the human period, was embedded a longstanding myth that the black man as a super-stud, an inexhaustible lover of immodest proportions, and the very epitome of virility.  Black men loved women and could not do without them.  While such extreme sexuality carried with it some 'irregularities', it was still a potent, desirable, objective. 

There was a curious purity in Marfa, a kind of narrowly focused vision and one which sought the original, the real thing, the source.  American black men were too compromised, too ghetto, too pimped out and grilled for her.  She wanted the motherlode, the being of the forest, a man of sentience, forest wisdom, preternatural intelligence, and native sexuality, the African. 

Where she picked up these ideas was a mystery. Her progressive sisters were partly responsible for the elegy - after all civil rights had been their main course for years - but their idolatry ended in asexual protests on the Mall.  

Marfa's interest certainly couldn't be Mungo Park and Rene du Chaillu who wrote of African tribal savagery, slavery, and Paleolithic backwardness; or even Sir Richard Burton, intrepid African explorer, ethnologist, and adventurer who with Speke set out to discover the source of the Nile or Graham Greene who wrote of his travels in The White Man's Grave. 

So where did this fantasy come from? Sociologists, Africanists, and development experts had all recorded the peculiar sexuality of the African.  Sex was for him not just a marital affair or a conclusion of a love interest, but a compelling, daily ritual.  A day was not complete without sexual release.  The Baby Momma syndrome in the American inner city was a living legacy of this sexuality.  

While women like Marfa were quick to point out the irresponsibility of such sexuality, they secretly wanted to be a part of it.  White men, especially after No Means No, had been so intimidated by feminist demands, that they were timorous and hesitant in bed.  Ugh.  What woman wanted that?

And so it was that Marfa went to Africa as part of a locally sponsored effort to provide education and counselling to young mothers about the importance of breastfeeding and proper weaning.  This would be her chance to discover Africa, to breathe its air, feel its vibes, and perhaps find a mate. 

To her credit most white women are so racist to not even consider the prospect; but the fact that one prejudice always tops another is common. Marfa was open to blackness per se, but held to this fantastical premise that all black men were insatiably potent lovers. 

Victor Ngoma worked in the Department of Health in the province where Marfa had been assigned. He was a youngish man with some French education, a modest salary, who was well-groomed and well-spoken and paid particular attention to this American woman come to Africa to help the poor. 

He, like most simple Africans with only slight, desultory acquaintance with America, assumed that Marfa was wealthy. Of course by African standards she was - as rich as a Gao princess - and a worthy prize.  As culturally naive as he might be, he knew that many white women came to Africa for sexual tourism.  The myth - actually the reality - of African male sexuality drew thousands of women to the continent every year.  

Most women came and went, sexually gratified by paid gigolos, but there were some who, coming out of a peculiar American political ethos,wanted more.  Their sense of justice and morality led them to intimacy, not just quick satisfaction, and Victor sensed that Marfa was one of them. 

So he wooed her, courted her, treated her royally, and finally seduced her in her suite at the Hotel Independence, the five star hotel built by the country's President-for-Life for foreign dignitaries and development workers. 

Marfa did everything in her power to convince her sponsoring agency to send her back to Africa to complete her mission, and before long she was thinking seriously of marrying Victor, bringing him to America and leading a model multi-cultural life. 

Had she done her research, she would have found a trail of disappointed, unhappy women who had trod the same path.  Getting on in years, unhappy in love, progressive in their bones, they had gone to Africa, met, fell in love with, and married an African only to be left on the curb, abandoned, bank account emptied, and despairing. 

Yet she didn't.  She had heard such stories, but believed they were one-off misfortunes.  With Victor she was in an entirely different place with a loving, respectful, honorable man. 

Of course he was nothing of the kind.  He was as deliberate, cautious, and canny as a Nigerian scammer, and took every precaution to promote and safeguard his interests until it was time to go.  By the time he was finished, he would have money in the bank, an American green card, and an unlimited future.  He would repay those in Africa who had sponsored him, and he would continue to be a man of Africa while leading the good life in the United States. 

Burned but not twice shy, Marfa never lost her attentiveness to the black cause and blamed herself for her innocent mistake.  Victor wasn't such a bad man.  He was simply a man concerned about his family and their welfare, and did what he could to provide for them.  She was collateral damage, but not much harm was done.  She had done the right thing and would do it again if the opportunity arose. 

Fortunately it did not. She got over her fanciful ideas, retained a modicum of interest in progressivism, married a prosperous tax attorney, and made a good home for him and her family.  The old adage, 'Given enough time a liberal will always become conservative' was as true as the rising sun in Marfa's case.  Not that she gave up entirely on the black man, she just gave him more room.