Extraditied Appreciation, Lacunae

The only female foreign minister in the world, Golda Meir was also the only foreign minister who had no use for formalities, who flew tourist class, who shocked hotel staffs by handwashing her own underwear and shining her own shoes, and who entertained foreign dignitaries in her kitchen, in an apron, serving them her homemade pastry along with a stern lecture on Israel’s security.--Letty Cottin Pogrebin

I stabilized my old Quickie on the charger at approximately 4:38 AM Monday morning, flicked through Browning, struggled to drift off. Cats stalked me awake at noon, and the charger was still going. I waited until two and then had to get down to business, washed in desultory fashion, droned to lack of inspiration by my own weakness, why am I doing this if I am already bored?

How can I explain the struggle with palsied muscular contraction to those who are fortunately limber, or under thirty? It takes me 50 to 70 minutes to get stretch slacks on over flaccid toneless shins and flaccid toneless buttocks, heft and pull, heft and pulling, biting my lip in pain, essentially taking me all day to appear at a scheduled and a somewhat laconical event where I was already a known and disruptive element in horridly old sneakers, because I told a staffer of whom I had no clear memory that I would make an effort.

Make an effort indeed. So this is what I hoped would give me connections, a late bid to stay matriculated and advocate for a revival of patronage. Throwing my money around to appease my interior pretensions which do not translate among ambulatory eclectic whites was a failure. I do not belong to this clique, not that anyone would tell me so. I smiled at old women and brayed "I am a failed writer and failed scholar hoping to connect...." Yet dimly, I could see what it must have been like when the upper crust in the city of Philadelphia was less egalitarian.

Egalitarianism is actually somewhat disgusting. "There he is laughing," I observed to the director when young Lance appeared as one might have envisioned Nicholas Nickleby in evening dress. The young and charming Lance kindly got me cheese cubes. I talked about my imbalance couched in a vivacious scatter; he talked about the exhibit, his fellowship. Why am I here? A reverberating outcry not just about the fascinating and oddly a little off world at Delancey Plaza, but how the fuck my life ended up in a very small circumference of a center city grid, my alienation being relieved by compassionate blondes whose grooming makes me feel like vermin, but I could not tell Dana she did not have to obviate my discomfort. I am not so much pointing to lack of inclusion in the activist sense, but about belonging, knowing where you belong, and I guess Aunt Evelyn and cousins Frankie and Robin surfaced to my vocal cords because Evelyn, who is Jewish, would have fit right in with her coif, waddles, her progeny.

And yet, and yet-- something in me finds this little microcosmic preserve of old world caste fascinating and satisfying to the pretensions I harbor. Brilliant and insane?

"Maybe it's both," young Lance suggested in accommodating fashion.