A Family Quarrel

The older I get, the more of a loss it feels that I don't have a family.  Families seem to be something that most people take for granted; sort of like arms or teeth. Some people like theirs, some don't. But most people seem to have some kind of "next of kin" who will step up to the plate, however begrudgingly, if something is needed.  It might involve a cross-continental move (usually on the part of the needful - I am thinking of a friend dying of cancer who moved in with her sister in the MidWest) but someone is there.

Once my partner became non compos, one day it dawned on me that I am no longer anyone's responsibility or problem.  I have no "in case of emergency please notify".  I can't think of anyone who would consider it their obligation to cancel their plans because I was in the hospital with, say, a concussion.  Yes, I have an attorney, a physician, a psychotherapist, and a pastor.  I have friends but they are all busy (we squeeze each other in once a month for an outing).

All this is a prelude to my writing about my first cousin.  I do have a first cousin, who lives in New York (Brooklyn?), has a wife, and has a son (who is probably at college or beyond now). But he cares less about me than a stranger on the street would, and I would trust him less than I would trust that stranger to make a life or death decision for me.

When I was growing up my family consisted of my parents, my mother's parents, my mother's sister (my aunt), her husband, and their son (the cousin).  At some point my mother and her sister had a falling out.  I can't be sure over what, but it had something to do that even though my aunt and uncle published a communist-leaning magazine and went to all sorts of meetings and conferences, my uncle suddenly had developed a passion for antiques and was buying and selling them, making money hand over fist, which included bilking people by telling them that what they had was worth very little when in fact this was a lie.  All he suddenly wanted to talk about was money.  When he wasn't bragging about his Chippendale chairs, my aunt was on a soapbox exhorting my mother not to vote (I think she was talking about the fact that my mother was going to vote for Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election, so I would have been 30.)

After that it was downhill all the way.  My mother made a decision not to have anything to do with her sister.  Although there was a temporary thaw when my grandparents suddenly needed care (see my opening paragraphs).  My mother handled the appointments and paperwork, her sister handled the money.  The last and final quarrel they had ('Tis the final conflict LOL!) was over the fact that my aunt sold a lot of my grandparents' possessions and offered to divide up the proceeds with my mother without having asked my mother first if she wanted anything as a memento.

So this brings me to the cousin (my "next of kin" whom I will do anything to avoid listing on any form which might spell the difference between life and death for me, like a health care proxy).  Why he decided to continue the quarrel on to the next generation, I have no idea.  I tried to make contact a few times.  When he got a big promotion.  When he and his wife had a baby.  No reply. About a year after this my aunt had a stroke and was put in a nursing home.  My mother actually went to visit her once a week.  She was appalled at how little care the family (uncle, cousin, wife) were trying to obtain for her.  All they talked about was how to get her on Medicaid without losing the house.  I came once and took pictures of my cousin and his family (this was back in the days of old fashioned film cameras).  I sent him the pictures.  I got no reply.  Not shortly thereafter my mother stopped visiting her sister because there had been a two week period when she had not visited because she had been ill.  Uncle never called to ask how she was.

I remember having a talk with my mother about all this (more than one talk, I am sure) about why we couldn't just have a family that hated each other but kept in touch on special occasions, like other people.  She said she thought things might have been different if my cousin's wife had had any social skills, but that she did not.  A friend, recently, also mentioned this.  She said often women will reach out to family and try to patch up quarrels (for example the loathesome LC has stopped speaking to one of her sons but she is still on good terms with his wife). The wife did once or twice reach out to my mother, always tentatively and fearfully, according to my mother, so she might have been afraid of my mother.  But why ignore me? Wasn't she curious?  Any one with a rudimentary knowledge of psychology should know that a 90 year old mother and her 55 year old daughter are not one flesh!

But the family quarrel is not what prompted me to write this blog post.  It's an old story.  What prompted me to write was that last night, just because, I googled the name of my cousin's wife.  I knew she was some sort of academic who wrote about feminism, and that she had co-authored several academic-type articles (I never read any of them).  Well!  It turns out that she has written four or five books (one coming out next year) on fascinating subjects ranging from criminology to the rise and fall of feminism.  My cousin is a criminologist who has bounced back and forth between academia, government, and the world of foundations.  He even got a George Soros grant once.

So this just again emphasizes how tiny a fish I am in a world that seems to be overwhelmingly populated by those who are much larger.

I'm good at this and I'm good at that and I sing and I write and I know about all sorts of things but I am still in the 10% of my social acquaintance, family, and childhood friends and schoolmates who has no flashy academic credentials, bylines, or serious theater or music work in my past.

I was just starting to make some headway learning how to be grateful for my little life, and now this.

What am I lacking?  I have brains and various talents.

As I said not long ago, if I can't do well, I guess I have to settle for doing good.

Plans for the Fall and Plans for the Future

I now have two concerts planned for the Fall.  The first is in late October and will be at the nursing home with the large theater, where I have already sung twice.  So far this has been my favorite place to sing because it is large enough to invite guests and we usually get a large audience.

The second is in early November at a facility on the Upper East Side, near Sotheby's, where I have never sung.  It apparently only has an upright piano but I was told that there would be room to invite guests.  I will go take a look at the room some time in October.

What will be on the program is not definite yet.  My teacher had some minor surgery so I have not wanted to bother him about the dates. I made the November date definite because as I have never sung there, I can do my solo recital, if necessary with piano solos in between the sets. 

If my teacher is available and in good health, we will be singing two operatic duets, the one from Anna Bolena and the one from Samson et Dalila, and then we will each sing an aria and about three lighter pieces (mine would be "Vanilla Ice Cream", "Let Me Call You Sweetheart", and "Home Sweet Home").  If he is not available (or only feels up for singing a few musical theater songs) I will do the solo recital but will swap out "Tanti Affetti" for "Bel Raggio Lusinghier" from Semiramide (it's going well so far) and swap out "Jubal's Lyre", which I've been struggling with, for Prince Orlofsky's welcome aria which is the perfect thing to start with and would make a nice pair with the "Drinking Song".

As for plans for the future, I finally think that I feel things falling into place in a way that makes me feel that my life has meaning and holds together.  I still hate what I do for a living, but it is the most convenient way for me to make an adequate amount of money working the hours I want or need to work any given week.  At the age of 68 I have accepted that I will never be willing (yes, I have to use that word) to put in the superhuman amount of work (and expense) necessary to train for a career that I would love.  I hate academics, for one thing.  This took me over 60 years to realize, but yes.  I am smart, have a high IQ, have always done well on standardized tests (the kind that require that you think fast on your feet), and love to read fiction; I'm well versed in current events and am "cultured" (and not just in my own area of classical music), but I simply don't have the mental fortitude to plow through "academic blather".  I always wondered if I had ADHD, which I very well might.  Coffee calms me down, for example.  In any event, I want to spend my golden years out and about.  I spend enough time cooped up with articles to edit and that's enough.

Harder and sadder than giving up the idea of a "career", is realizing that I will never be able to sing leading roles with any of the "amateur" opera groups around here, not even the most humble (the one where people sing through an opera from books in someone' living room).  Producing something similar involves too much administrative work (and rejection by people who get better offers and do a bunk, not to mention that they never invite me to do anything), so I have settled for solo recitals in nursing homes.  I have already written at length about that, and I have made a decision to love it, not see it as "second best". I love working with the elderly (I think I'm better at that than working with children although I want to continue what I'm doing with children to broaden my life; I don't have any children who might have children or any siblings who might have children and grandchildren.)

And I have decided that when my Angel gets her wings, if I am still mobile and of sound mind, I would like to work with seniors with dementia.  There are all sorts of things I can do with them, including broadening out from doing concerts (which I will still be doing if I am in good voice and good health) to singing their favorite songs with and for them at their bedsides.  This is a long-term plan, and not one I want to delve too deeply into, because right now I have my Angel and can do these things with her, but it is a assurance to me that life will go on.  I don't think I would need academic credentials to do this as a volunteer; I'm sure my life experience with my partner and my musical background would be enough.

So this will be a life.  Not a boastworthy Upper West Side life, but a good one.

Maytime Take 2 and "Aging Artfully"

Last night I watched Maytime again.  My sense of it was quite different from my sense of it four years ago. First, I realized how dated some of it was.  The girl's young fiance makes her choose between going to New York to study voice and try to have a career, and marrying him.  That wouldn't happen today, certainly not among Millennials of a certain socioeconomic class.  The girl would go to New York, launch her career, then "pair off" with someone she might want to marry with the understanding that the marriage would be a partnership in which instance by instance, they negotiated whose career was more important (that year, that month).  Even after children arrived. 

The first time I realized that we were into new territory in that regard was when a friend's daughter (who was born in 1970, so she's more Gen X) decided to go to graduate school in a different city from where her fiance was living, which was where, eventually, they planned to settle.  That would have been unheard of in my day.  If you were lucky enough to "nail" a partner that you were madly in love with, everything else just sort of fell by the wayside if necessary.  I was thinking, for example, of my giving up singing at 30.  I mean there were a myriad factors, most notably that I wasn't really willing to put in the work to take care of my instrument (although by the end I was singing very well from a technical standpoint).  But in addition to needing to earn a living and get a college degree in my off hours (getting a degree in music never occurred to me; my one exposure to music theory bored me to tears) and the fact that "political dykes" didn't "invest themselves in a patriarchal art form like opera", there was the relationship.  My partner would never have countenanced my doing anything that took me away from her for extended periods.  In fact, I remember one of our ugliest quarrels (during the 20 years of our time together that I recall as "happy") took place when, while I was enrolled in college, taking a course called "Women in the Law", I got a chance to go to a conference on Women in the Law (in Detroit of all places) over a weekend.  She kicked and screamed and yelled and we didn't speak to each other for the days leading up to my departure.  I think the thaw broke when I got back but I never did anything similar again unless it was something required by work.

And getting back to Maytime, of course no doubt today, the older teacher/mentor's attraction to his pupil and his request that she marry him (the subject comes up when she tells him how much he has done for her and asks what she can do in return) would be loosely categorized under the heading of "sexual harrassment" (and "marry" probably wouldn't have been the word used, although it might have been; he seemed more interested in "possessing" her than in a roll in the hay).

On another subject, yesterday I went to a free conference called "Aging Artfully".  It was a series of lectures and panel discussions aimed at showing seniors how engaging with the arts (as a participant, not a passive viewer or listener) can keep a person young and engaged.  I didn't learn much there that would help me with my quest for venues to produce concerts in, but there was much that I identified with: the need to be seen, how being "seen" makes you an artist, the need to feel safe being "seen", the need to feel grounded, the need to feel safe but that "unfamiliar" and "unsafe" are not synonyms (a big one for me), and how listening to music can calm people with dementia.

Actually, I probably learned more techniques that I can use with my partner, many of which I already use: playing music for her on Youtube, showing her paintings and photographs on my iPad, looking through her old art books.

And they addressed ageism.  One man mentioned that people (including older adults!) make stupid and disparaging jokes about "getting old" and "old people" of a sort that no one (at least no civilized person who moves in the circles we move in) would make about a racial or ethnic group.

One disappointment.  I saw clips of a number of senior choruses but no performance classes (free or low fee) for seniors.  That is what I would be most interested in.  Coaching for solo performers ending in a concert (even just for each other and our friends). 

Throwback Wednesday

I rarely revisit old posts, unless they are "topical" (like the ones I wrote on same-sex marriage, sexism, Trump voters, and the UU church), but I saw that the movie Maytime is on tonight (at 8 pm, so I will definitely watch).  I remembered that quite some time ago (this is from 2012) I had written something about it, so here it is.

I still feel a lot of these things, but I have had to let them go.  (I'm also astounded that there was a time, not that long ago, when I was awake to watch a movie after 11.)

Here is the link to that old post.  Enjoy.