The Slippery Slope of Joy

A few years ago I was invited to a fundraiser for a drug rehab facility by a friend of mine who was one of its alums. My friend, like most of the rest of the gathering, was African-American, and before we lit into our dinners, a minister stood up and began to clap on the upbeat and half sing and half preach a welcoming incantation that had the whole room on its feet, clapping and nodding and shouting amen’s.

     The whole room, that is, except me. I was fascinated by the spontaneous response of the other attendees. But I remained seated. This was in part because there was a lot of Jesus talk in the reverend's incantation, and I do not believe in Jesus. Even if I did believe in Jesus, I regard Christianity's persecution complex as unseemly among any but the persecuted, which I am not. 

     On the other hand, I do not wish to offend, and so at such times as this I never know how to respond, especially if the music is any good. As I remained seated, my host looked down at me and, seeing that I had begun to tap one foot slightly, gave me a wry smile. 

     “Easy now, Andy” he said.

      When Cordelia fatally refused to flatter her father, she declared that she could not "heave her heart into her mouth." I share this problem, though not her predicament, as my father was not King Lear: Dad distrusted flattery, dismissing its practitioners as people who, "you know, try to crawl in under your vest." 

But it's not just flattery I find difficult. It's joy, especially of the unalloyed variety.  
     This morning my wife and I went to the farmer’s market, where one of the University's marching bands was putting on a freeform concert at which, for a donation of $25, you could conduct the band in one of its numbers. I stood listening to the jolly racket they made and enjoying their line-dance moves as they blatted and blasted their way through seventies standards-turned-marching-songs.

     I began to imagine what would happen if I were to fork over $25 and climb onto the little stepladder that passed for the conductor’s dais. I began to choreograph the whole routine. I would identify myself as Arturo Bernstein, perhaps, and play the martinet maestro, commanding them in a German accent to play their pianofortes pizzicato, keep their allegros andante and their andantes al dente and so on, then tapping my baton and declaring, “All right, on seven,” to my wife's astonishment and the crowd's delight. 

     I remembered how Jerry Lewis and Danny Kaye used to take up the baton and lead whole choruses and orchestras in what seemed like spontaneous routines that were actually carefully rehearsed. I would try to follow in that tradition. So on and on I fantasized about my act and the gales of appreciative laughter from the crowd and the musicians, until my wife and I had finished buying vegetables and returned to the car.

Today was Whole Earth Day here in Davis -- not just Earth Day, mind ou, but Whole Earth Day. So this afternoon my wife and I headed off to join the throngs that had gathered on the university quad to celebrate the Whole Earth with whole drum circles, falafel, tie-dye booths, and didgeridus. 

     The crowd was full of people who seemed time-locked in the early seventies (which is the period most people mean when they say the sixties) with their long hair and gypsy outfits and beatific grins. Face-painted and beaded and bare-midriffed young persons in eccentric head gear and sloganeering T-shirts traipsed barefoot through the grass, hackey-sacking and hula hooping, romping and cavorting.

     A capoiera drum line wended its way toward the dance stage, with a large crowd bumping around in rhythm in its wake. My wife began to follow as well, and as I stumbled after her, I managed a couple of slight knee bends and maybe two sways and a few rhythmic shrugs as the drummers led us along. 

     But all this festivity only brought back to me how ill suited I was to my own era, how unfit I am for some varieties of human company, how much time and energy I have spent trying not to make a fool of myself, only to make a derisive ass of myself instead.

        Maybe I would have been better off in upper class 19th century England, when decorousness rather than disinhibition was one of the cardinal virtues. But I don’t really think so. I think that just as I felt stuffy and out of it in the 1970s, I would have suffocated in the 1870s.

     The great ballplayer Satchel Page once prescribed three roads to happiness: to work like you don't need the money, to love like you've never been hurt, and to dance like nobody's watching. 

     I don't know what the hell he was talking about. 

As long as he needs me

My wife has been doing a lot of traveling lately, getting the word out about the new nursing school she's helping to found at the University of California at Davis. This leaves me to my own devices, which seem to deteriorate as the days go by. 
     At first I am the model single male: rising early; cooking myself a wholesome, well balanced meal; cleaning up as I go along (because isn't that half the fun?); buckling down to write. But then I forget lunch, unless the hunger pangs get too pronounced, in which case I pull out a bag of chips, a soda, and some dip, if I can find any. Suppertime passes into night, and around ten I may microwave a hot dog or call out for a pizza, then it's over to the television for some late night viewing, after which I resume writing, snack some more, leave a couple of lights on, turn in, read for an hour or two, and finally drop off around three in the morning. 
     I don't think I'm particularly sleep-averse, and Debbie's regime is not so oppressive that it's as though I must go romping around the schoolyard when she's away. But something truly giddy and juvenile comes over me during her more prolonged absences. 
     I am not entirely helpless. In fact I am handy, can cook my meals, keep my environs relatively tidy, and by the time she gets back I've usually managed to clear away all evidence of my delinquency. The dishes are done, the kitchen sink is spotless, the laundry is washed and dried and sorted, the garbage has been dumped; the recyclables have been, well, recycled; and if I took the opportunity that her absence afforded of taking on some handyman project I have usually completed it, put away the tools, swept up the sawdust. 
     In other words, I usually present a home that's in better shape than when she left it. But I myself am a mess -- malnourished, sugar-high, sleep-deprived -- and may well greet her with my fly open. 


Her homecomings are always marked by a close and bustling inspection of the premises. I call these her fault-finding missions. The more immaculate the home when she gets back, the more intense her scrutiny, as though by getting everything ship-shape I were merely trying to put one over on her. 
     When, inevitably, she does find something amiss -- a paint drop on the laundry room floor, an errant screwdriver, a bottle left uncapped in the refrigerator, a letter unmailed, a call to the furnace repairman unmade  -- it seems to be almost a comfort to her, a confirmation of her core belief that I am a nitwit. 
     I am in no position to argue with that. Nevertheless, these inspections of hers do tend to diminish some of the pleasure I take in her homecomings. 
     But there's nothing like a little belated insight to soothe my wounded feelings, so I have decided that I know what really lies behind these inspections. It is a need to believe that I cannot live without her: that she is necessary to me, so central to my life that without her I would spin off into the void. 

Hyde Park Bred

I watched the Obamas at the Press Club last week, and enjoyed the comedy lesson the President gave a blowsy Jay Leno, especially when Obama followed a gentle jab at Michael Steele with a sly and perfectly timed, "My brother." 
     But what struck me again was the deep but wry affection in which Michelle and Barack Obama hold each other. It all seems to me utterly charming and entirely recognizable. 
     I was raised where the Obamas lived before coming to Washington: in the Hyde Park section of Chicago, where my father was Dean of the College at the University of Chicago in the early 1950s. There is something in the cerebral atmosphere of my old neighborhood that seemed to nurture relationships like theirs. 
     My parents shared it, as did several of their married friends. It was passion enriched by intellect,  devotion garnished with humor, erudition with humility. 
     My father went on to work for the Ford Foundation in India and in Africa, and died three years ago, at the age of 96. But before his death, my mother read Obama's autobiography to him, and he would make her pause every now and then to ask why Americans didn't choose men of Obama's quality and complexity for their President. How he would have rejoiced in Obama's election, and taken pride in the way he has handled himself. 
     
When I was very small my mother would sometimes say, perhaps in part to comfort herself that the sacrifices she made on his behalf were worthwhile, that my father should have been president. 
     I sometimes wondered to myself what sort of president my father would have made. I used to invent scenarios in which my father would be appointed, say, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. Then some catastrophe -- an electrical accident at a White House pool party, or a shipment of toxic hair dye -- wiped out the rest of the line of presidential succession, leaving my father holding the bag. 
     I suppose my father would have made a better, or at least smarter and better spoken and more honorable Chief of State than Nixon, Johnson, Ford, or either Bush. But would he have been crippled by his erudition and fair-mindedness, his sometimes lofty rationality and instinctive trust in the other guy's good faith? And would the country have forgiven him his sense of humor? 
     Though I could never really imagine it, Obama comes close. The Presidency is a terrible job to wish on anybody. But it has been fascinating, for better or for worse, to watch one of our own go about his business. 

Bwanas and Sahibs

My brother Geoff is an amateur tiger conservationist, and he and I were talking the other day about a recent New Yorker article I recommended he read. It concerned a telegenic American couple named Mark and Delia Owens, whose passion for African elephants seems to have gotten out of hand. 
     Perhaps that is putting it mildly, as there's evidence that their troubled son shot an unarmed poacher to death as an ABC News team stood by, that Mark may have retrieved the body and dumped it into a nearby river, and that at least a portion of the ABC crew went along with the coverup.


There's less debate among conservationists than you might imagine about whether or not it is justified to shoot poachers on sight, especially when they're carrying AK-47's, and especially when whole species are being hunted to extinction for their parts, including several on which Chinese men are apparently willing to spend millions of yuan to avoid taking Viagra.
     But as Geoff and I got to talking, we returned to a beef we both have with Animal Planet, The Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and PBS, when it comes to nature documentaries. We were brought up on Mutual of Omaha's Animal Kingdom with Merlin Perkins, and Walt Disney's Truelife Adventures, and both of us recognize the extraordinary improvements that have been made to the genre. 
    We are agreed that no-one ever wrote a better documentary script than David Attenborough, and we thrill to the footage intrepid teams of cinematographers have captured for such series as Nature, Blue Planet and Life, including, recently, astounding images shot through falling snow of that most elusive of cats, the snow leopard, dragging its kill up a rocky Himalayan slope.


But our complaint is with the producers of a lot of other wildlife documentaries who, like the writers of historical romances set in exotic places, center their stories around white people instead of the real heroes of animal conservancy: local game wardens and animal conservationists. 
     With little remuneration and no fanfare; at risk to their lives; and often in defiance of their own governments; they are the ones who strive most courageously to sustain the world's wildlife. And yet, at best, they are relegated in most animal documentaries to bit parts: as loyal guides and faithful sidekicks to the sahibs and bwanas who come rolling in from L.A. with their film crews, safari jackets, lomotil, and little bottles of Purell: peppy, entrepreneurial, self dramatizing young people who have narrowly chosen animal conservation over skydiving or bungee jumping.
     We know of a few steadfast indigenes who have been featured, notably Geoff's friends Fateh Singh and the late Billy Arjan Singh, both tiger wallas of irresistible charisma, and I suppose a producer would argue that Western viewers need someone on the screen with whom they can identify. But it seems unfortunate and shortsighted to neglect the real heros of animal conservation and to understimate our capacity to identify with them.