Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Telling Difference “Man, to be critic, must be connoisseur.” —Anna Wickham, “XXXVI Friend Cato” Since I ran around Central Park the park has shrunk. I was proud of my hard-bitten body, but the cost of victory! When we watched Amarcord , Fellini’s small-town record, you complained that it did not have a plot. I couldn’t tell if you were serious or not. I explained the rounds of sex and seasons. You were not persuaded by reasons so abstruse. I saw I could run rings around you. I was in danger of thinking you a stranger when I remembered you walking into the heart of the park with me and identifying the tulip tree. How reckless I was to figure that a park equals its perimeter, just because I ran around it for a bit.

A weekend with a lot of people, or so it seems to us, living in moderate isolation now on the Upper West Side. On Friday we took the Trailways bus to Kingston to stay with T and D, who live near to Woodstock. The two-hour bus ride turned closer to three due to traffic. On arrival, our hosts whisked us to dinner with their friends, G and R, at the Steel House Restaurant. We sat in the patio and watched the boats on the Rondout River. It was very pleasant and relaxing. Before turning in, at T and D's house, we watched an old PBS documentary on being gay. There was nothing very special about the gay men and women interviewed, but perhaps their very ordinariness was part of the point. The next day T and D drove us to see their friend C, who liked staying with T and D so much that he rented a vacation home near them for his family for a week. The large house, with three double and two single bedrooms, sat on top of a hill and had beautiful views of the country. GH knew C from Cincinna...