Growing Older

As I am here in Crete and elsewhere in Greece, I am really noticing something. Something like twenty five years ago (and just where does the time go?), when I was last in southern Europe for any length of time and on my own, suffice it to say that I turned the heads of the men. Now, I get a few looks and that’s great but nothing like the intensity of glances that meant that I was but an answering nod away from situations fraught with all kinds of erotic possibilities, if I so wished and, believe you me, I so did. And I had like no Italian! But the language of love needed no translation.

I feel blessed that I have few regrets about possibilities not explored and opportunities of this kind not exploited to the full. My sense of adventure and feelings of invincibility made me really game for these adventures. (I was still a few years from losing that sense of invulnerability—and that day was coming sooner than I imagined at the time.)

And so, in the end as I note this change in my relation to southern Mediterranean men (and the changes that age has undeniably wrought on my body and indeed on my personality), I on the one hand think about the times I have had, my past. But I also think about how I am now more an observer and contemplator of the transient relations that younger men have with each other. (I also quite contentedly and with a happy sense of purpose work on these issues in my scholarship.) I think that this means that I have a different role to play and different way to be in this world. I am not left out. I am included differently. That is not to say that something more transient would not be welcome or may not happen at some point in the future. It may. And if it does, great. But I am content to let opportunity knock. I mean, if our handsome bus-driver were to come up stairs right now, knock, and importune me, or, better, were his somewhat older brother to do these things (he is tad young but pretty woofy in his hirsute magnificence). I would surely not tell him no. One wants to be companionable after all. But the point is that getting it, finding it is not a primary focus of mine any more and it actually has not been for a long time. Somewhere in the years around the turn of the century, I moved on and now I am on different side of the river. I am still at the river but I have different place to be and a different way to be (with TRH as constant through all these changes).