noir

Delicious. Not what I'd had in mind for breakfast, I was contemplating a toasted whole wheat bread sandwich spread lightly with cream cheese instead of mayonnaise, a thick portiom of salmon lox, and a slice of Vidalia onion; but then I realized that the coleslaw is fixed and ready, and the container of crabmeat open, so coleslaw with crabmeat along with my second mug of hot & black. 

inside. First mug of hot & black was outside on 7H porch, but the gnats drove me inside. They get in my eyes, causing their deaths and my foul language, so retreat to my Bayside window.

Outside that hour, sipping coffee, batting gnats away (a motion that alerts and attracts more of them), and reading The New Yorker magazine that arrived in yesterday's mail. Couple of articles and most of the cartoons. As always, back later for the Fiction, which The New Yorker fiction is interesting if not, as indeed it is from Time to Time, downright bizarre, so always worth reading. 

This is good coleslaw, two or three ounces of crabmeat added, that crabmeat from Sam's is quite satisfactory. Not as perfect as the still warm from the cooker crabmeat we used to get from the crabmeat packer in Eastpoint our years in Apalachicola, but good,

Anyway, a dog-eared page to return to, an essay, "Not Cute" about male friendships. Which, we, are worthy for psychiatric observation. Male friendships have to develop long and past uneasy tension to become real and confiding, which is to say Trusting; I've have a few in life, even still a couple as I approach ninety and think back over my years. You learn to gauge the risks and recognize when a friendship has advanced to Safe. Sometimes you're betrayed. Now and then, once or twice, one may find oneself in what one thought (assumed) was going to be a developing friendship, only to find oneself, exactly as the essay described it, the new guy in a small circle of already existing friendships. My memory of that was in Ottawa in 1978, when I flew up with the Canadian consul from Philadelphia to begin a working relationship that had seemed to be beginning as a friendship: in the bar of the Ottawa hotel where we stayed, his real friends and colleagues showed up and, while cordial to me, immediately disappeared into their colleague lingo. It was a lesson for me. Friendship is far, and maybe very subtly, different from a cordial working relationship. 

From experience, I've learned and tried to be aware when what I was taking for developing friendship was actually a trusting pastoral relationship, which for a priest and confidant is a far different thing, the boundaries are different. Closest, totally trusting friendship may have no boundaries except thoughtful kindness, no judgment, total confidence. 

How many close male friendships do I have at this age? Well, more than one and fewer than a barrel of monkeys, nomesane?

I've ear-marked the essay to go back and read it again, eh? Then the fiction, then doublecheck to make sure I've read all of this issue that intrigues me, then peel off the mailing label and Linda leaves it in the HV mailroom downstairs in the garage level.

In our soon 68 years of marriage, Linda has always been the one who likes to go to the postoffice box and get the mail. I did the big, major tasks, like deciding who should be president.

Enough then.

RSF&PTL

T89&c

noir image from 7H porch this morning: how much of life should be fixed v how much might better be left to a future, hopefully more competent, generation