Speaking Ill of the Dead

I finally finished "Partners Three" the other day. A middling book, I'd say, but mildly entertaining. Most interesting to me was the author's language -- given that it was published in 1928, you can imagine that it was full of lingo we wouldn't dare use these days. There were repeated references to the relative weakness of the female character, for example, and a curious and blatantly racist nickname (which I won't repeat) for tussocks of tundra grass.

I didn't see any of George H. W. Bush's funeral this week. His death made me recall how I felt about him while he was president. In retrospect, he seems capable and dignified, and I suppose he was, compared to what we have now.

But back then, I was not a fan. I had plenty of issues with Ronald Reagan, his social conservatism and trickle-down economics and scare-mongering about "welfare queens" and, above all, his appalling refusal to address the AIDS crisis. I saw Bush -- not wrongly -- as an extension of Reagan. I campaigned for Michael Dukakis when I was in college, in 1988, and was bitterly disappointed when Bush won on the back of Willie Horton. Later, I was opposed to Operation Desert Storm -- the first U.S. incursion into Saddam Hussein's Iraq -- so that didn't endear him to me, either.

When I was a 25-year-old reporter I covered one of Bush's presidential re-election campaign appearances. My journal entry from March 4, 1992:

Today was interesting -- I got to meet George Bush! Well, I didn't really meet him, but he came to the Strawberry Festival in Plant City and I covered it, and I was only standing about 4 feet from him or so. I could have shaken his hand, but I didn't want to since I think his politics are completely reprehensible. Still, it was kind of neat to see him. I got an OK story out of it, though it was all crowd reaction. The prez himself didn't really do anything except smile and shake hands.

I no longer seem to have a clip of the story, so apparently I didn't like it enough to save it. I'm sure I was professionally objective, but it's telling that I saved silly clips about, for example, a baby named after a gas station (true story) but not my one encounter with a sitting president.

A friend who wants to remain nameless took this picture in the early '90s. While Bush was announcing Desert Storm, my friend wrote on the TV screen over Bush's forehead and photographed the result. It may seem kind of mean now that Bush is dead, but I've always loved this picture and I'd say it concisely captured our feelings at the time about the Reagan/Bush era.

(Top photo: Hampstead Heath, last weekend.)

Antlergate

Late last week we finally got around to putting up some holiday decorations in the library. We put up a tree, and wrapped Mr. Mellon, our library's namesake, in a scarf and put some silly antlers on his head.

Then, on Tuesday afternoon, a group of kids were clowning around near the statue. I looked over at them from my desk, at one point, and noted that a girl was wearing Mr. Mellon's antlers. But I didn't say anything. I let them have their fun.

A few hours later, when I was locking up the library at 5 p.m., I noticed the antlers were gone.

Now, this may seem like a minor matter, and I suppose in comparison to Brexit or Trump or climate change or any of our other global disasters, it was. But I vowed that this desecration of our holiday shrine would not stand. I sent out a firmly worded e-mail to the students involved, making plain that I expected the antlers returned or else.

Yesterday morning, when I got to work, the antlers were resting beside Mr. Mellon with the following note:

So all's well that ends well. I shall speak no more of it.

Putting Antlergate aside, we had a busy day in the library yesterday. Some carpenters arrived in the late morning to dismantle our DVD cabinet, with extraordinarily bad timing, given that we were hosting several classes doing research. Everyone coped, but the kids sent eye-rolling glances toward the workers whenever they fired up a drill or even -- once -- an electric saw.

Here's our library Christmas tree:

It's a bit Charlie Brown-ish, leaning to one side, but we like it. We had the middle school kids produce star-shaped decorations bearing recommendations of their favorite books.

Kind of a cool idea, I thought! (I cannot claim credit.) We then put the recommended books on a shelf beside the tree and around its base. Some of the kids recommended typical middle school stuff, like "Diary of a Wimpy Kid," while some went for more sophisticated fare -- Sheryl Sandberg's "Lean In" and Yuval Noah Harari's "Sapiens," for example. Some serious readers, here! Or at least aspirational ones.

Elegy for a Cypress

Our next door neighbor has long had a gigantic leylandii cypress at the back of her property, shielding her garden from the prying eyes of the apartment dwellers on the next street over. I couldn't estimate the height of the tree, because I'm bad at that kind of thing, but when I say huge I mean HUGE. It was definitely an effective screen, not only for her garden, but for ours.

In storms it would creak and groan ominously in the wind, but it never showed any signs of breakage and appeared to be quite strong. It would have been disastrous if it blew down, because it seemed big enough to hit a building no matter which direction it fell. I think it could have even hit our house.

Still, I loved the tree because it was always a hive of wildlife activity. We'd hear squabbles among pigeons and squirrels among the dense green foliage, and I'm pretty sure that's where I heard the owl a few years ago. I said to Dave several times, "I hope she never takes that tree down, because a million critters live in it."

You see where this is going.

Yesterday I walked out to the garden with my cereal, as I often do, and as I was wandering around looking at our winter-stunted plants I glanced up and saw that many of the tree's branches had been stripped off (top photo). This must have occurred while we were at work, because we never heard a thing. Last night, when we got home, the entire tree was gone.

Leyland cypresses apparently grow very fast, and can be a source of neighborhood disputes because they get so big and dense relatively quickly. I've always thought that tree must be very old, but maybe not.

In any case, the critters will miss it. The neighbor did everything right by taking it down now, rather than in nesting season, and I know the apartment people didn't like the tree. One of them came knocking on our door a couple of years ago asking if it was ours, and last summer I overheard the neighbor talking to a visitor on her patio about what a problem it was. I think its roots may have been harming the retaining wall between the neighbor's garden and the apartments, but that's just my suspicion. In any case, I knew its days were numbered, and I don't blame her for having it removed.

But I'm still sorry to see it go.

It will be interesting to watch how this changes the microclimate of our own garden. It ought to be much sunnier now, and maybe windier, too. We'll see!

One of Those Mornings

I am continually fascinated by the top of our coffee press. It's just so shiny and it reflects an interesting perspective on the kitchen, including our "spice parade." I've played this game before.

I am already so late this morning. For one thing, Olga stymied my sleep for about half the night by hogging a pile of blankets and then squeezing herself up against me, leaving me immobilized on the edge of the bed with scraps of covers for myself. That dog morphs into a rhinoceros during the night -- her body expands, her weight increases a thousandfold, her breathing and snoring amplify. I slept fitfully until I finally succeeded in moving her at about 3 a.m., and then I overslept until 7!

Then, this morning, she made things exciting by hopping off the bed, walking into the newly carpeted dining room and vomiting up last night's remarkably undigested kibble. So that sent me into carpet-rescue mode, which seems to have succeeded.

It's just as well, though, because I have nothing else to blog about today. We had our first mission statement committee meeting at school, but that's going to be a slow process and it's not blogworthy. Lucky you!

A Heath Walk and a Bad Movie

I finally had a chance to take Olga back to the Heath yesterday. It felt so good to get out and walk, even though we got lightly rained on and the forest has definitely entered its muddy winter phase.

Remember those beautiful purple asters that Olga was rolling in just a few months ago? They're a sad brown clump now. Overall, the colors of autumn have mostly given way to bare branches and the wet browns and blacks of winter.

None of that mattered to Olga. She was as energetic and crazy as ever.

Here are the day's finds, a couple of interesting (at least to me) pottery shards. When we got home, I added them to my little collection on the dining room windowsill.

Olga went almost immediately to sleep and I watched "Seven Alone," an old Western I remember seeing at the theater as a child. It popped into my mind while I was reading my book about prospectors in Alaska -- even though the movie takes place on the Oregon Trail -- and lo and behold, the whole thing is on YouTube. I remember loving it as a kid, but lord, it's tedious and the acting is about as wooden as possible. Revisiting it was interesting, but I definitely don't recommend it -- unless you're in elementary school.

Ants

Thanks to those of you who commented on my post yesterday. I tried to really put it all out there, and I wrestled with whether it was TMI so I appreciate the warm reception. I was touched by your personal stories and the Fran Lebowitz quote that Sabine left, regarding the generation decimated by AIDS:

"You know who got AIDS first? The brilliant, witty, hot people. The people, quite frankly, who were getting laid a lot. That's the real tragedy of AIDS – it wiped out a generation of those people. If those people could come back now, they wouldn't believe who'd become stars in their stead."

Isn't that the truth.

Anyway, I've been hitting you with some pretty heavy stuff in the last few days, so let's talk about something lighter, shall we?

Yesterday I was walking Olga on the "trash path" along the railroad tracks and we came upon a plywood wall surrounding an unoccupied house under construction. The plywood had a hole in it, and this was the view inside. (I'm pretty sure this is the back garden of the house that collapsed several months ago, which is still under scaffolding on the street side.)

Not very exciting, right? Some rebar and old appliances. But then I looked at that big refrigerator, or whatever it is, and saw a green sticker attached to it:

It seems to be a little hand-painted image -- whimsical ants and a spot of jam, maybe? It was very hard to photograph, because I had to stick my arm through that rebar while trying not to drop my phone, Olga pulling on me all the while. There appears to be a signature at the bottom: www.seraphina. I couldn't find a web site that leads to a likely artist. Seraphina.com leads to a landscape photographer (whose work is amazing, BTW) and Seraphina.co.uk doesn't go anywhere.

So who knows. A mystery!

Yesterday was a bit of a whirlwind here. Errands in the morning, like dog-walking and laundry, and then Dave and I went to meet some friends in a pub in Notting Hill. We had a leisurely lunch and then came home to get ready for last night's staff/faculty holiday party and trustees' reception, which was held in a posh space off Trafalgar Square. I got to wear the jacket!

What That Red Ribbon Means to Me

With today being World AIDS Day, I thought I'd write a bit about my complicated relationship with HIV.

I don't have HIV, and I have been incredibly lucky as a 52-year-old gay man to have not lost any close friends to AIDS (though I do have friends with the virus). By telling my own tale, I don't mean to minimize the experience of people actually living with it. But HIV has transformed my experience as a gay man -- how could it not?

I first remember hearing about AIDS when I was in high school. I regularly watched TV news with my family, and when the reports began to emerge in the early '80s and no one knew what caused it or how it spread, I remember my mom saying, "This is going to be bad."

I wasn't out yet, but I felt a visceral fear, knowing that it affected gay men and that might mean me. By the time I finally did come out as a college student, in 1984-85, the virus had been identified but there were no effective treatments. It was essentially a death sentence. I was involved from the very beginning in our campus AIDS Education Project, which worked with the local public health department to advocate for "safe sex."

To say that it cast a pall over my dating life would be putting it mildly. All the talk of risk made dating or sleeping with anyone seem like walking a knife edge. Very early on, I experimented with another guy in ways that were patently unsafe -- fortunately he wasn't infected. But after that, I was scrupulously careful.

I was so careful, in fact, that I subconsciously walled myself off. I was openly gay, I had gay friends, I went out to nightclubs and participated in gay life. But I rarely made myself personally, emotionally or sexually available.

Some people criticized "safe sex" at the time -- so-called "sex positive" activists -- because you had to be so conscientious about your activities. You could never really let yourself go, get into the animal act. And that's true -- even when I did sleep with someone, I was always thinking about the rules and what would or wouldn't expose me to danger. It was, to put it mildly, a drag, and I had guys laugh at me because I was so super-careful.

Even then, my infrequent encounters led me down dark scary paths. I'd wake up two days later with a sore throat or a swollen lymph node and think I was going to die. I would put myself through weeks and months of fear, even though I'd been careful and done everything "right." Doctors would tell me there was basically no way I could be infected, but I wouldn't believe it -- and I'd get tested multiple times during the ensuing six months until I finally convinced myself I was fine.

And then I'd meet someone else, and the cycle of fear would begin again.

I'm sure a psychologist could have a field day with this behavior, exploring my unresolved internalized homophobia or whatever, but I assure you I am not the only gay man who felt this way. I've heard enough stories to know. Ultimately, while I told myself I wanted romance, I subconsciously put myself in places where I didn't believe it was an option (Peace Corps in a Muslim country) or distracted myself with impossible romantic attachments (a best friend who was the object of a long-term unrequited crush).

Even as effective (but harsh) HIV treatments became available my personal life remained somewhat paralyzed. I did meet and sleep with people, but formed no meaningful romantic attachments through the 1990s, and I can't tell you how much time, money and emotional energy I wasted on fear of HIV during those years.

Finally, after I moved to New York in 2000, as treatments were becoming less arduous, I began to loosen up. I still wasn't a libertine, not by any means. But I met more people, had more stable relationships, became a bit wiser and became more comfortable with the idea that I could have sex responsibly and not be afraid.

I don't mean to make it sound like those were the "bad old days" and it's all over now. As we all know, HIV is still no picnic and contracting it is serious business. As I said, ultimately, I am so lucky -- and not just because I never lost any friends or contracted it myself. I'm just barely too young to be of the generation that got slammed most heavily by AIDS. On the other hand, my youth, when I should have been meeting people and going on dates and having fun, was consumed by it.

I often think how it could have been different. I could have been born a few years earlier and been infected before anyone realized there was a danger. I could have been born several years later, and matured into a world where HIV was more manageable and preventable. Either option might have changed my life, for better or for much, much worse.

(Photo: A pub near London Bridge.)