Brooks with Mark Twain at Village Books and Paper Dreams, Bellingham, WA., June 26, 2026

The Chuckanut Writers Conference in Bellingham, Washington, has been good to me. When I attended the 2019 conference, I pitched an early draft of Landscape in Lavender to agents and took classes on how to get published. This led to publication of an excerpt of Chapter Two in Interconnectedness, the 2022 Whatcom Reads anthology.

Later, when I attended the 2024 conference, I met Brooke Warner, the publisher of She Writes Press and Spark Press. In addition to recording a live session of her podcast, “Writerly Things,” with author Grant Faulkner during a plenary session, Brooke taught two excellent classes, one on writing memoir and one on how to create an author’s platform. Standing in line behind Brooke at the lunchtime taco truck, I introduced myself and asked her how to apply to be published by Spark Press. Brooke encouraged me to submit Chapter One of my manuscript through her website, which led less than a year later to signing my publishing contract with Spark.

Most recently, I advertised my June 26, 2026 book launch event at Bellingham’s independent bookstore, Village Books and Paper Dreams, in the conference program. At the conference that same day I took a class from author Lucy Tan called “The Writer as a Multi-Tasker.” After a short conversation with Tan at the same taco truck where I met Brooke Warner two years earlier, I purchased her first novel, What We Were Promised, from Village Books. Following is my book review:

An ivory necklace provides the fulcrum upon which the plot of What We Were Promised hinges, linking three generations of a Chinese family. When the necklace goes missing, it has an almost visceral impact on all the dramatis personae, from its owner, Lina, to the mysterious admirer who gifted it to her decades earlier, to the two hotel maids accused of stealing it. Recently returned to Shanghai after a sojourn of over twenty years in America, where Lina’s husband Wei studied engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and joined a prominent marketing firm, Lina is viewed by her maids as a “taitai” or lady of leisure. Despite being Chinese born and raised, Lina and Wei are considered Chinese American by virtually all the people in their wake. Lina appears to have everything—a brilliant and affluent husband, an Americanized daughter, and permanent residence in one of Shanghai’s most glittering high-rise hotels, with its restaurants, gym and pool—but her discontentment reaches beyond her state of idleness. She still pines for Quiang, the young boy she fell in love with as a teenager, a boy who happens to be Wei’s brother.

That’s the surface tension of this story as it first appears to the reader, but what I found more entrancing is the novel’s vertiginous backdrop, which is nothing less panoramic than the complete transformation of China in only three generations. Lina and Wei were not born rich: Wei’s father was a small farmer and Lina’s was a young professor of chemistry plucked from his university by the Red Guard to serve in a labor camp where his elitism was abrasively rubbed away, proletarian callouses sprouting on his aristocratic hands. Lina’s mother was forced to burn all her Western books and records after her own merchant father’s linen business was yanked away from him for being a capitalist enterprise. With a background like this, it’s astonishing to picture Lina morphing into a fashionably dressed urban taitai by the age of forty, mother to a ten-year-old daughter wearing sunglasses and Dolce & Gabbana swimwear. Lina’s ambitious maid, Sunny, looks upon her as a card-carrying member of Shanghai’s international elite, and therefore a person meant to be despised. Sunny never suspects Lina of her modest origins during the Cultural Revolution.

Who is Lina, anyway? Is she fundamentally Chinese or has she become an American living in China? Can she be regarded as thoroughly modern and bourgeois or is part of her still aligned with her proletarian origins? That seems to be the essential question posed by this novel. The answer, or at least the key to the question, links the new Lina to the old Lina, even as it links the futurism of twenty-first century China to the traditionalism of nineteenth-century China. That device is the institution of arranged marriage. Lina was betrothed to Wei at the tender age of seven, assured by her parents that he was the most eligible boy in his nearby village in Suzhou. It’s a betrothal she never really questions, one she assumes will assure her a stable and happy life, even as she falls in love with Wei’s younger brother, Quiang. Yes, Lina is a modern woman in an arranged marriage, and yes, Wei checks all the boxes of eligibility: He’s exceedingly bright and well educated; he’s an excellent provider, a respectful lover, and an attentive father.

What’s missing is the rebellious spark of true love, the kind of fireworks that prompted Romeo to elope with Juliet. What if Lina were to leave Wei for Quiang, a man so taciturn and unreliable that the last time anyone saw him he was a nocturnal animal making money by winning card games for a gambling gang? That question kept me on the edge of my seat as I turned the pages of What We Were Promised. But truthfully, it points to a bigger question: is China’s astonishing twenty-first century advancement a solid and enduring product of legitimate, hard-working strivers like Wei and Sunny, or is it at best a wobbly status quo, rotten at its base, held together only by the gambling, bribes and secret handshake deals of underworld figures like Qiang and his gang brothers?

Jen McCormick in conversation with Brooks at Barnes & Noble University of Washington Bookstore on Saturday, June 27, 2026

The following conversation was published on June 23, 2026 on Deborah Kalb’s online column: Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb: Q&A with Brooks Kolb

Why did you decide to write this memoir?

Landscape in Lavender began in a very happenstance fashion. One day in 2018 after a lap swim, I was getting dressed in the locker room of my local YMCA when I overheard a man talking to another guy about how he had lived in London for several years. He soon approached a locker near mine, so I spoke up and mentioned that I, too, had lived in London on scholarship for one year, way back in 1975, and had thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I then launched into a tale of how Sir Ian Davies, head of the Royal Dental School, had personally bailed me out after I failed to receive the check I was expecting to cover my living expenses at the beginning of the academic year.

On my way out the door, it occurred to me that I could have told the man a lot of other anecdotes as well. I should write a memoir, I said to myself on the drive home. But when I sat down to write, I didn’t know what story I was trying to tell; I only felt a strong urge to reconnect with my younger self. Now I was leading an entirely different life in Seattle with a new cast of friends and loved ones, so I wanted to ask the younger me who he was and why he had left Seattle to travel far and wide over a span of twenty-three years. Eventually, my random scrawling coalesced into my story of coming out and coming of age in the 1980s.

How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

Choosing a good title was a dilemma, which surprised me because I have a spontaneous habit of thinking up great titles for books I have no intention of writing! For several years, my working title had the word ‘rainbow’ in it, referring not only to the LGBTQ rainbow flag, but also to the almost inevitable fact that I twice refer to The Wizard of Oz in the book. My baby-boomer generation even had an erstwhile discreet habit of referring to gay men as ‘Friends of Dorothy.’

When my editors pointed out that all this was hopelessly cliché, I had to find a different approach. Eventually, I settled on Landscape in Lavender. ‘Landscape’ refers to my career as a landscape architect and ‘lavender’ to my identity as a queer man, pointing to the rising conflict I describe experiencing between the two halves of my identity. Despite the risk of sounding like a coffee table book of photographs, it works!

The author William Kenower said of the book, “Landscape in Lavender is more than a story of one man’s sexual self-discovery; it’s the story of an entire era in America.” What do you think of that description?

I absolutely love Bill for saying that because, once I figured out why I was writing Landscape in Lavender, I realized that I had lived through not one, but two eras in America: the sexual revolution of the 1970s and the devastating AIDS era that immediately followed. What’s more, I had the good fortune to live in a time and place of prime significance to the history of LGBTQ people in America: San Francisco in the years following Harvey Milk’s assassination in 1978.

What impact did it have on you to write the book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?

I understand who I am as a whole person much better now that I’ve written Landscape in Lavender. For decades, I’ve devoted myself to my professional career—the landscape part—but I wanted readers to know about the lavender part, and I wanted to celebrate all the people who nurtured the lavender side of my identity. Beyond that, I’m more fully aware of how amazingly lucky and blessed I am to have survived the AIDS pandemic, especially after losing my first great love, James Draper, to it.

There are two main ideas I hope readers take away from the book. The first is that the spirit of every single person who died of AIDS is worthy of our sustained grief and our fond memories. Those individual stories, and the individual value of each and every person lost, tend to get forgotten in the overwhelming force of the pandemic, when so many people—mostly men—were dying all at once.

The second takeaway is more positive. I hope readers have a chance to experience the joys as well as the frustrations of actual lived gay relationships, and particularly the nuances of interracial gay relationships. Having read more than a few gay memoirs, I’ve been surprised by how seldom they explore their author’s relationships with his gay partners in any detail.

What are you working on now?

For now, I’m mainly working on my Substack blog, brookskolb.substack.com, but I’ve been toying around with the idea of writing a collection of essays. Maybe I’ll revisit my rough draft of a manuscript on a secular or interfaith spirituality. The working title is “Many Paths, One Mountain.”

Anything else we should know?

Please tell the young me, the narrator of Landscape in Lavender, that the old me turned out all right. He found a wonderful new love and a terrific community to engage with! His decision to return to Seattle was the right call.

When I was writing Landscape in Lavender, I felt an urgent need to release my story into the world—even before I fully understood what it was about. As if I were pointing a camera at an object and turning the lens, my desire to share my story only grew as the image came more sharply into focus. Eventually, after eight years of writing and revising, the long gestation period made my need almost visceral. Happily, my book is being released this month, and my story will finally be born.

No matter how big my need to share my experiences was, the resistance I encountered threatened to grow even larger. At the top of the layers of resistance lay my feelings of inadequacy as a writer and even as a protagonist. Was the writing any good? Did the plot development have enough narrative tension? In fact, did it have any narrative tension? Would anybody care about my struggles as the protagonist? Would any of my friends and colleagues take offense at what I had written? These were my everyday worries.

And I had another worry: I knew that if I were ever granted the privilege of sharing my story, I would have to stop protecting it; I would have to loosen my tight grip on it and willingly abandon my control over it. “You have to bless it and release it,” my husband, Dennis, likes to say. Regardless of whether I did so with joy or with anxiety, I knew that the book would cease being just my story, the better to become our shared story as writer and readers.

Just below these surface layers of inadequacy, though, an even larger layer of resistance radiated from what felt like the indifference of the universe. The universe appeared to be rolling along just fine without my story; in fact, it was nearly drowning under the weight of so many other people’s memoirs, novels, plays, and films. The universe seemed to say ‘No, I don’t need your story,’ and this was of course especially true when I submitted it to the more than 50 agents who rejected it, one after the other. ‘Is the writing any good?’ I asked myself, time and again, with each and every new rejection.

Eventually I came to visualize the universe as manifesting a giant set of curtains pulled tight across my path as if to protect itself from the impertinence of my offering. After months of being weighed down by this universal indifference, I began to realize that it was my job, and even my right, to force the curtains apart by an inch or two, just enough to squeeze open a narrow slot through which I could push my story. It was a job that required will, chutzpah, and determination. ‘I am a creature of the universe, and my story matters,’ I told myself on my better days.

Being of a philosophical disposition, I meditated on the situation. If the universe is expanding in all directions at once, I ruminated, didn’t it also need to expand a tiny fraction in my direction, thereby growing broad enough to encompass my book? With that perception, I set about to part the universal curtains. It was, and continues to be, an act of supreme will. I don’t mean that parting the curtains required me to set my will against the universe; rather, I had to use my will to get the universe’s attention. I had to get it to acknowledge my existence, and thereby to embrace the existence of my tale. First, I willed my story into existence, then I willed the universe into accepting my story, and now I find myself willing the universe into sharing it.

The watchword here, of course, is persistence. Years ago, a work colleague told me, “Brooks, you have the tenacity of a bulldog,” and I regarded that as a compliment. It takes tenacity to tell the universe you have a story to tell, and it takes the persistence of daily reminders to convince first yourself and then the universe to accept and broadcast it.

The curtain comes down on Landscape in Lavender in late fall, 1994, when I returned home to Seattle and found a wonderful mentor in Bill Talley, whom I worked for and eventually joined as partner in the landscape architectural firm of Talley & Kolb. Then, seven months after going to work for Bill, I met Dennis, and we have been together ever since, 31 years and counting!

By the time I met Dennis, I had managed to resolve three of the major conflicts that propel my character’s arc in the book: I no longer felt divided into two selves; I no longer struggled with self-homophobia or the choice between satisfying my lust and pursuing long-term love. One of Landscape in Lavender’s themes, however, haunts me to this day: I have not yet managed to loosen and untie all the knots of racism that too often bind interracial relationships. Sometimes I am blind to the racist microaggressions that Dennis continues to experience; sometimes I exert my white privilege without realizing how I’m impacting others.

Thankfully, Dennis and I trust each other, because trust is the necessary foundation of any wholesome or functional relationship. But that doesn’t mean that he and I trust others in the same way. Wisely or unwisely, my white get-out-of-jail-free card leads me to trust strangers who enter our lives, while Dennis will admit no solid basis for trusting them. They have my implicit trust, but they have to earn his, and it does not come quickly or easily.

Trusting others is like parting those curtains. Sometimes it makes sense to throw them open; at other times it is wiser only to push them an inch or so apart. When we hold the curtains tight, we are acting for the universe as it acted toward me. We are displaying the resistance that those strangers must break down if they want to come into our world.

Pre-Order on Amazon

About Landscape in Lavender

When society regards you as an outcast even before AIDS starts killing your gay brothers, coming out of the closet is hard enough—yet it’s only the first step. Afterward, finding lasting love and building an authentic identity can be even more challenging.

In this heartfelt memoir—set in Seattle, Philadelphia, and San Francisco against the backdrop of the 1970s sexual revolution and the devastating AIDS pandemic—Brooks Kolb becomes a landscape architect, crosses racial barriers to win love, loses that love, and searches for a place to call home. Along the way he learns that freedom demands constructing your own morality, loss is an inevitable part of life, and the need to belong can be just as urgent as the longing for love.

*⁑⁕⁑*

Landscape in Lavender’s Societal Context

Two excerpts from “You Up?”, Jennifer Wilson’s March 23 2026 New Yorker article about Arsenio Hall’s memoir of his life as a late-night talk show host, perfectly encapsulate the background themes of Landscape in Lavender:

“Revisiting the culture wars of the late eighties and early nineties, I gathered that the only thing scarier to Middle America than the word ‘urban’ was sex that occurred outside the confines of heterosexual marriage. The AIDS crisis had inspired a wave of conservative backlash against the gains of the women’s and queer-liberation movements. The disease was painted as punishment for a sexually liberated life style. …”

“… One forgets that interracial dating was considered illicit in the nineties –Spike Lee made the contentious topic the subject of his 1991 film, Jungle Fever.”

Praise for Landscape in Lavender

“In this honest, heartwarming and heartbreaking tale, Kolb beautifully captures in sensory language what it was like to be gay during the AIDS era. I cheered, I cried, and those two things made this memoir one of my favorites of all time.”

• Valerie J. Brooks, award-winning author of 1 Last Betrayal (book three of the Angeline Porter trilogy) and queen of the femmes-noir thriller

“Landscape in Lavender is more than a story of one man’s journey of sexual self-discovery; it’s the story of an entire era in America. No matter who you are or what you’ve lived, you’ll see yourself in this wonderful, entertaining, and inspiring memoir.”

• William Kenower, author of Fearless Writing: How to Create Boldly and Write with Confidence and Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt

“This elegant sweep of a memoir has all the marks of a fine epic novel: complex family dynamics, honest revelations, hard-won triumphs, and most of all, a lovable protagonist whose strength and grand sense of humor will have readers begging for the movie version. Bravo!”

• Jessica Maxwell, author of the award-winning memoir, Roll Around Heaven

“Brooks Kolb tells a heartfelt tale of searching, discovery, lust, leather, and love. Landscape in Lavender is the memoir of an adventurous, aspiring young man on his way to liberation and wisdom.”

• Laura Kalpakian, author of Memory Into Memoir

“A moving, meditative memoir about the nonlinear process of coming out to oneself and one’s family… The prose is fluid, accessible, and often beautiful …”

• Foreword Clarion Reviews

A Landscape in Lavender Playlist

In Landscape in Lavender, Brooks mentions many songs and artists whose music provided inflection points in his young life. Can you find all of them in the text? Visit Substack to find more information about the Landscape in Lavender soundtrack and listen to it on Spotify. Enjoy!

Listen Here

Coming Soon to the Artsy Raven

Brooks was interviewed by Canadian author J.F. Garrard on her “Artsy Raven” literary podcast on April 13th. Recordings on Spotify and YouTube will be posted in a couple of weeks at The Artsy Raven – Home of a curious bird. Check the website for the exact date!

Learn More About the Artsy Raven

Meet Brooks and celebrate PRIDE month at a Summer Book Event!

Brooks will be reading from Landscape in Lavender and

signing books soon at the following locations:

June 26, 5:30 • Village Books • Bellingham, WA

June 27, 5:00 • Barnes & Noble / University of Washington Bookstore • Seattle, WA

Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-brooks-kolb-tickets-1989178419199?aff=oddtdtcreator

B&N Calendar: An evening with Brooks Kolb

July 9, 6:00 • Charlie’s Queer Books • Seattle, WA

July 12, 2:00 • Book Passage - Ferry Building • San Francisco, CA

Fall, 2026 • Giovanni’s Room • Philadelphia, PA

Fall, 2026 • Penn Spectrum Weekend • Philadelphia, PA

When I was writing, revising, and later editing “Landscape in Lavender,” I felt as if I were simultaneously living in two distinct time periods—our current day and the 1980s. Sitting at my writing desk, I plunged myself into the past so thoroughly that when my husband, Dennis, entered the room to let me know he was going on an errand, I flinched at the interruption, momentarily disoriented. How could I possibly be living in San Francisco in my thirties while objectively embodying a man in his early seventies sitting at a desk? Bill Kenower is not the first writer to speak of the trance one falls into when writing. From that welcome trance the spring of creativity bubbles forth, and the joy of creating flows in its current.

Of course, nothing reawakens the past so effectively as a remembered sensation. For Marcel Proust it was, famously, the taste of a Madeleine biscuit. But arguably, music is an even more effective time traveler than a taste or a smell. There are certain songs that I will forever associate with a specific moment in time. In “Landscape in Lavender” more than a few of those remembered songs serve as pivots in the story, inflection points in the plot. Even when I listen to them today, I’m immediately transported back to those key moments in my personal development.

For example, in Chapter Two, I mention how Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” held a different significance for each of my classmates in a dormitory called Low-Rise North. Later, I write about an amazing congruence: I came out of the closet at the exact moment that Diana Ross’s hit, “I’m Coming Out,” climbed the charts. Then, when I broke up with my first boyfriend, Deniece Williams’s song “Silly” helped me access my grief. And on it goes throughout my story of coming out and coming of age in the 1980s.

Realizing how many songs and recording artists transformed my emotional state at key moments over the course of the twenty-three years that my story follows, I asked my godson Charlie Smitherman, a talented jazz bassist, to assemble a Spotify playlist to accompany the text. He enthusiastically complied, and the result is nothing less than the soundtrack of “Landscape in Lavender.” Thank you, Charlie!

When you read the book, be on the lookout for the pages where I mention specific songs or artists and take a listen to the playlist! Here’s a link to the soundtrack, followed by a list of the songs in the order they appear in the book:

LANDSCAPE IN LAVENDER playlist

1. Stephanie Mills, ‘Never Knew Love Like This Before’

2. Rick James, ‘Give It To Me Baby’

3. Marvin Gaye, ‘ What’s Going On’

4. Judy Garland, ‘Over the Rainbow’

5. Hall and Oates, ‘She’s Gone’

6. The Beatles, ‘Yesterday’

7. Boz Scaggs, ‘Lowdown’

8. Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, ‘The Fever’

9. Stan Getz, ‘So Danco Samba’

10. Donna Summer, ‘I Feel Love’

11. Lipps Inc, ‘Funkytown’

12. Abba, ‘Lay All Your Love On Me’

13. Diana Ross, ‘I’m Coming out’

14. Frank Sinatra, ‘New York, New York’

15. Parliament, ‘Give Up The Funk’

16. Toni Basil, ‘Hey Mickey’

17. Laura Branigan, ‘Gloria’

18. The Human League, ‘Don’t You Want Me’

19. Soft Cell, ‘Tainted Love’

20. Teena Marie, ‘Lovergirl’

21. Quincy Jones, ‘Ai No Corrida’

22. Sylvester, ‘Do You Wanna Funk’

23. Deniece Williams, ‘Silly’

24. Carmen McRae, ‘Dear Ruby’

25. Steve Miller Band, ‘Abracadabra’

26. Ashford and Simpson, ‘Solid’

27. Toni Braxton, ‘Another Sad Love Song’

Golden Gate Bridge from Buena Vista Park

After eight long years of my writing and publishing journey, my baby, LANDSCAPE IN LAVENDER, will be released into the world in only four months’ time. Crack out the champagne, let the celebration begin! Especially after being rejected by over fifty agents.

In fact, there would be nothing to celebrate today had I not been introduced to the amazing Brooke Warner, publisher of She Writes Press and Spark Press. Brooke is arguably the Queen of Memoir and the Queen of Hybrid Publishing, and from her TED X talk and her weekly online column, “Writerly Things,” I learned that traditional publishers rarely take a risk on any type of memoir other than celebrity memoir. After all, who but celebrities can boast a platform of a million or more followers on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, or all four? What could be more obvious to risk-averse traditional publishers than that a million followers will easily translate into at least tens of thousands of sales?

Essentially, the memoir genre is divided into three basic categories—celebrity memoir, trauma memoir, and adventure memoir. Probably the smallest category, adventure memoir covers such unusual and extreme living scenarios as, for example, a family that home schools four children on a boat while sailing around the world. Much more common is trauma memoir, which usually revolves around sexual abuse, divorce, or surviving long-term cancer. But where do LGBTQIA+ stories fit? Most gay memoirs are variants of trauma memoir, while a few—like Jeffrey Sellers’s “Theatre Kid” and Billy Porter’s “Unprotected”—are celebrity memoirs with, as in Billy’s case, a trauma component.

LANDSCAPE IN LAVENDER is obviously not a celebrity memoir, as my unimpressive tally of Facebook followers attests, but neither is it a trauma memoir. Yes, a tragedy occurs within its pages, but it was a type of tragedy that did not leave me with on-going PTSD. What it is, first and foremost, is a story about coming out of the closet and navigating the confusing, clandestine gay world that I first encountered in 1980. It’s every bit as much a story about the challenges I encountered attracting and building gay relationships, and it’s especially concerned with the unique nuances of interracial gay relationships. At the same time, it’s also a story about what it means to become a landscape architect—it’s a career memoir about a type of career rarely written about outside professional publications like Landscape Architecture magazine. (As a genre, I guess you could say that career memoir is a particular subset of adventure memoir and/or celebrity memoir.)

In other words, LANDSCAPE IN LAVENDER is a memoir that crosses several sub-categories, and that, I believe, is its greatest strength. But what on earth possessed me to write a memoir in the first place? The answer is that my book germinated from a tiny seed that was randomly and arbitrarily planted in a tiny pot, except that the pot, of course, contained not soil but a part of my soul. The seed got planted early in 2018 during a random social encounter. I was toweling off in the locker room of my local YMCA after one of my accustomed lap swims—I’m pleased to report that I have faithfully swum a quarter mile of laps three times a week, every week for going on fifty years. Getting dressed, I overheard a man about my age, which is to say a newly minted senior, talking to another man about how he had lived in London for many years. He soon approached a locker near mine, so I said to him, “I hear you lived in London. I too lived there for a year, in 1975-1976, and I could tell you some stories about that.”

“What happened?” he asked me.

“Well, to set the scene, first you need to know that I won a prestigious scholarship called the Thouron Fellowship for British American Student Exchange, allowing me to study architecture at University College London. All of us students competing for the scholarship were interviewed at length at a country club in New Jersey by a panel of professors from the University of Pennsylvania—my alma mater—along with some British professors who had once attended Penn. One of the British interviewers was Sir Ian Davies, who lived in London. When I was fortunate enough to win the scholarship, an official from the program handed me Sir Ian’s business card and told me that if I encountered any difficulties in London, I should contact him.

“As it turned out, I did encounter a difficulty within the first two or three weeks of arriving in Britain. Once a month, we were told to expect a check (or as the Brits would call it, a cheque) from the scholarship to cover our living expenses, but my first check did not arrive and I was nearly broke. Probably the reason it didn’t show up was because I had been accepted for residence in a London dorm at the last minute and had only just moved there from a room I was renting in Kentish Town.

“Fortunately, I managed to find Sir Ian’s business card, and I set about making an appointment with him. When I arrived at his office, it turned out to be housed in the Royal Dental School. After waiting a short time in a large waiting room, a door opened, and Sir Ian Davies appeared in a jacket and tie, ushering me into his luxurious private office, with its vintage mahogany desk and elegant Persian carpet.

“ ‘What can I do for you, Brooks?’ he asked.

“Well, I was supposed to receive my monthly Thouron check and it never arrived. I’m running out of money. What should I do?

“At that information, Sir Ian wordlessly reached into his jacket pocket and proffered his personal checkbook. ‘How much do you need?’ he asked, and when I told him, he produced a fountain pen and wrote me a check for that exact amount right on the spot, no questions asked.

“Naturally, I was not only infinitely relieved, but also very impressed. So that’s why this scholarship is prestigious, I thought, as we shook hands. Then, when Sir Ian said goodbye and closed the door, I noticed that it bore a plaque in gold lettering. The lettering proclaimed ‘Director, Royal Dental School.’”

“Well, that’s a story!” my locker room companion said, and the seed was planted. As I drove home from the Y, I began to realize that if I could tell that story, I could tell a hundred others, perhaps a thousand, and I began writing. Of course, at the beginning, I had no idea what I was writing about. In fact, it took at least two years until the eventual themes and momentum of my story emerged, with the help of several talented developmental editors. But first, I jettisoned hundreds of anecdotes, dropping them as if they were so many snippets of film swept of my desk onto the editing room floor. One of the dropped snippets was the Ian Davies story.

As I wrote and wrote, dropping some snippets and rewinding others, I slowly began to understand what my story was about. I remembered how, when I first came out of the closet, I enthusiastically asked every gay man I met how he had first come out, and I was fascinated by their answers. The stories they told were as varied and vivid as painted strokes on a colorful abstract expressionist canvas, but one theme that emerged was how many of the men had come out in their teen or even their tween years. This was in direct contrast to my own experience, since I didn’t come out until I was twenty-six years old.

Then, as time went by, I realized that I had once been fortunate to live in a time and place that were uniquely important in the history of gay rights in America: San Francisco in the 1980s. As I describe it in LANDSCAPE IN LAVENDER, I arrived in San Francisco less than four years after the great gay leader, Harvey Milk, was assassinated in an impulsive act of rage by the homophobic Supervisor Dan White in City Hall, along with Mayor George Moscone. That singular and tragic event led immediately and directly to the impressive political rise of the mayor-in-waiting, Senator Dianne Feinstein. And, as I next mention, when I arrived in San Francisco in 1982, AIDS was a distant train barreling down the tracks toward us, its terrifying cyclops-like eye illuminating the night sky.

From the confluence of Milk’s assassination with the hurricane force of the AIDS epidemic, the main themes of my story were born, but there was another reason why my writing became increasingly urgent as I plowed on. It was urgent because, as I thought back to that time in my life, I realized I had lost touch with my younger self, the person I was in those long-ago days, when I was in my thirties. Who was he and why did he do the things he did? I urgently wanted to know, I needed very much to find out. And I wanted to tell him that things have turned out all right, that I am another person today, but the person I am today owes everything to him and who he was. If you read LANDSCAPE IN LAVENDER, and I sincerely hope that you do, you will meet a Brooks that you have never known until now, no matter how many similarities you recognize between him and me.

“We show up, burn brightly in the moment,

live passionately, and when the moment is over,

when our work is done, we step back and let go.”

- Rolf Gates

As of this writing I am 72 years old, the same age Mark Nepo was when he recently published “The Fifth Season,” his luminous book-length meditation on aging. Nepo argues that our senior years offer all of us an opportunity to open ourselves to life in much the way that the petals of a flower open to the sun. Instead of closing down, our senior years, if lived intentionally, can be a marvelous time of opening up. But how can we accomplish that? One key way, he says, is to let go of our area of expertise, the career we have spent a lifetime mastering, or at least trying to master. And why? Because, comforting as our mastery is, it no longer offers us the challenge of learning something new. Instead, it becomes rote and repetitive, a well-trodden neural pathway. By contrast, when we are at work—or truthfully, at play—seeking to master a new skill, we feel most alive. Learning something new offers the joy of psychic renewal, the opening up of a flower.

Nepo’s wise advice resonated with me because for several years I’ve been toying around with retiring from my career designing residential gardens. I still love gardens and plants, but I no longer feel compelled to design them. My design skills, such as they are, amount to a deeply trodden neural pathway that I’m increasingly ready to abandon. Doing so, however, requires retuning my most fundamental attitudes toward myself and my role in life. As a youth, I was highly ambitious, and I basically assumed that whatever career I selected, I would rise to the pinnacles of achievement it offered. Eventually, landscape architecture became my muse, my Mount Olympus, and I was determined to scale its dizzying heights.

However, after passing through the crucible of my professional training and apprenticeship, my attitude shifted. Without abandoning my ambition, I became equally determined to find the secret key to achieving a work-life balance. Having a vital personal life grew in importance to me until I resolved that I would give myself to my chosen profession but without becoming a workaholic. I vividly remember recognizing the seed of that desire long before I achieved my professional pedigree. My insight came in a fleeting thought that occurred to me while I was still in high school, when I felt pressure from my father to become an architect. In my reverie, I pictured myself going through the daily motions of my career in much the way my father did. But where did my friendships fit into that picture? I dearly loved my friends, and I worried that if I were to devote myself to a profession like architecture, my interactions with them would become increasingly pro-forma, which meant more rigid and less spontaneous. For example, if a friend were to approach me for professional advice, where would our laughter be? What would happen to the joy we felt simply reveling in each other’s wacky personalities? I pictured myself becoming robotic, as if the more I mastered the mysterious and rigorous demands of my career, the less of a vibrant personality I would preserve to offer my friends. Worried by this, I resolved that I would refuse to sacrifice my personality to the demands of a career.

Of course, this youthful anxiety amounted to a false dichotomy. Eventually, I achieved the work-life balance I so desired, but there was a catch: I was no longer confident that I could scale the heights of landscape architecture’s Mount Olympus in this lifetime. I wanted to stifle that anxiety; I wanted to prove myself wrong. So, nose to the grindstone, I set about building my independent practice in garden design. I fantasized that glossy photographs of my work would soon appear in “Luxe – Pacific Northwest” or “Architectural Digest.” And eventually they did appear, if not in “Luxe,” then at least in the Seattle Times “Pacific NW“ magazine. But did this achievement represent the pinnacle of ambition? I feared not, and I compared myself adversely to many of my colleagues. Like Sisyphus, I resolved, once again, to push my ball up the hill, but this time I would push it up a higher hill.

Then I turned 65, then 66. I went onto Medicare; I began receiving social security payments. Even so, did this mean that I had pushed the ball as high as it would go? I continued to assume that I could push it higher, but my arms grew tired and the ball kept stopping at the same elevation where it had come to rest the day before. Eventually, I began questioning if I even wanted to push that ball up the slope, but there was a part of me that rejected my ambivalence. Didn’t that mean I was giving up? I had long prided myself on being someone who does not give up, so Nepo’s advice offered me a tantalizing off-ramp.

“You’re right on schedule,” my mother used to say, when I mentioned to her the anxieties I felt at every stage of my development into adulthood. Finding and reading “The Fifth Season” meant that I was ‘right on schedule’ once again. Nepo’s image of opening up, his description of the advantages of setting aside our professional mastery in our senior years, the better to experience the psychic renewal that comes with taking on new challenges, gave me the wisdom I needed to quiet the increasingly anxious voice of my remaining ambition. It was finally safe to tell myself that I had achieved enough, that I could stop trying to push the ball higher. At last, it was time to retire, but now I could retire without shutting down. Instead, I could retire by taking flight—by accepting the promise of setting out on new pathways and mastering new skills. Enter creative writing. No wonder I felt more alive when writing “Landscape in Lavender” than when designing my latest garden!

Nepo counsels, however, that opening up does not mean we can stop pushing the ball altogether. Each of us is still a Sisyphus because every day each of us is obliged to get up once again, take our medications, make coffee, and put the dishes in the dishwasher. Our dog is wagging its tail; our dog needs another walk. But we are not restricted to being Sisyphus; each of us is also Plato, a philosopher king with new-found time to smell the roses and grow in compassion. Oh, what vistas await when we take flight with a new interest or passion! Closing my eyes, I was reminded of the classic Buddhist paradox of the lotus: Its feet are fated to remain firmly rooted in the mud even as its petals open to bask in the sun.

When society regards you as an outcast even before AIDS starts killing your gay brothers, coming out of the closet is hard enough—but it’s only the first step. Afterward, it can be challenging to cultivate self-respect, find the lasting love you deserve and the authentic identify you crave.

In this heartfelt memoir set in Seattle, Philadelphia, and San Francisco against the backdrop of the 1970s sexual revolution and the devastating AIDS pandemic, Brooks becomes a landscape architect, crosses racial barriers to win lasting love, loses that love, and searches for a place to call home. Along the way he learns that freedom demands constructing your own morality, that loss is an inherent attribute of love, and that the need to belong can be just as urgent as the need for love.

Testimonials:

“In this honest, heartwarming, and heartbreaking tale, he [Kolb] beautifully captures what it was like to be gay during the AIDS era. I cheered, I cried, and those two things made this memoir one of my favorites of all time.”—Valerie J. Brooks, author of 1 Last Betrayal

“Landscape in Lavender is more than a story of one man’s sexual self-discovery; it’s the story of an entire era in America. Told through the prism of Kolb’s honest and candid voice, it explores what change really means, and how difficult and rewarding it can be. No matter who you are, you’ll see yourself in this wonderful, entertaining, and inspiring memoir.”—William Kenower, author of Fearless Writing and Everyone Has What It Takes

Blue Donkey by Sherry Markovitz

Sherry was my next-door neighbor and my very good friend. We had wonderful walks and talks around the neighborhood. One day, our miniature Schnauzer, Stella, escaped out our front door and began running around the neighborhood. Sherry volunteered to help me go catch her. After a block or two, Stella let us walk up to her and then turned to run away again. After the third block, Sherry said, “Dennis, she’s playing with us. Let’s turn around and start walking home. She’ll follow.” And Sherry was right; she followed us home.

Stella is our third dog that Sherry knew. When we moved into the neighborhood, we brought along our first dog, Foxy. At first, Foxy growled at Sherry and Peter’s dog, Tina, and Tina growled back. Sherry, being the wise woman she was, said, “When they wake up in the morning, they are going to realize they live next door to each other, and they will get along.” She was right – they became best friends, although they were both afraid of Sherry and Peter’s chicken, Delores. Later, long after Foxy passed away, Sherry would check out Stella like a library book and take her on long walks. After Tina died, Sherry spent a lot of time at the Genesee dog park where she began sketches for her wonderful dog paintings on cotton sheets.

Sherry and I shared a love of garage sale shopping. She would see either a bag of buttons or something unusual that would not have caught my eye, and she would tell me, “I have an idea for these.” Later, I would find the objects incorporated into her work. For instance, when Foxy passed away, Sherry created a sculpture of her as a gift for me and my husband, Brooks, and I found beads, buttons, a pearl, and a little ceramic dog incorporated into Foxy’s image. She made Foxy’s eyes out of garage-sale marbles.

Sherry was very unassuming. When we first met, I had no idea she was such a well-known artist. One day when I came home from work after an extremely stressful day, Sherry was sitting in her chair in the driveway in front of her house doing bead work. With a big smile, she said, “Good afternoon, Dennis!”

I said, “Hi, Sherry, it was not such a good afternoon for me.” I thought she was just doing a little hobbying and I had the impression that she was not really working. Then, when I attended “Shimmer,” her 2008

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art retrospective at the Bellevue Arts Museum, I was overwhelmed with all the amazing work that she had done. I remember her walking by me at the opening, and she whispered in my ear, “See, Dennis, I do work.”

I replied, “Yes, you do, Sherry. Yes, you do.” I truly miss saying, “Hi, Sherry,” and catching up on the neighborhood news with her.

When I began writing a Substack column, never did I imagine that I would devote an essay to a single hotel. Then my husband and I checked into the Star Grand Hotel in Brisbane, Australia, and everything changed. Never having set foot in Brisbane before, we took an uber from the central rail station to the hotel. Our driver was unusually grumpy, but perh…

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After our tourist expeditions in Sydney, Australia, Dennis and I often joined the queue on Park Street in the Central Business District, waiting for the #506 bus to transport us back to our friend Marilyn’s house. While we stood at the curb outside the Criterion Hotel, I couldn’t help noticing the main entrance to Sydney’s central metro station, directly across the street. As passengers emerged from and descended into its open maw, I looked up at the large lettering above the station. “Gadigal,” the sign said, and although this name sounds like a charming town in Ireland, I already knew better.

According to Microsoft CoPilot, “The Gadigal people are the traditional custodians of the land now known as Sydney, Australia, and are part of the Eora Nation, which encompasses various clans in the Sydney region.” In other words, the name of Sydney’s central metro station is a one-word ‘land acknowledgment.’

What is a land acknowledgment, you ask? Those of us who live in Seattle could not be more familiar with the term, because these days it is not possible to attend any local public event or meeting without first hearing the moderator voice words like these:

“Before beginning this (meeting/conference/opera/concert/lecture or what have you), we want to acknowledge that we are on the land of the Coast Salish people, who have hunted and fished here on the Salish Sea for many millennia.”

Of course, the speaker always conveniently leaves out one crucial phrase which should inevitably follow:

“…until the land was forcibly removed from them by the white people who colonized them, gave them smallpox and other European diseases heretofore absent from North America, and nearly wiped out their population.”

Notwithstanding the anti-DEI policies of the current administration in Washington, D.C., it has always seemed to me that making a land acknowledgment without mentioning the genocide perpetrated on American Indians represents the height of hypocrisy. If nothing else, it reveals a cloying complacency on the part of the speaker that, by their silence, extends to the audience members.

Logic and compassion both suggest that, if we Seattleites are going to go all-in on land acknowledgment, we have a moral responsibility to make monetary reparations for the many local tribes who are collectively known as the Coast Salish, if not to give them back their land. Sadly, I have never once heard a speaker add these words that the occasion demands:

“For these reasons, we are hereby granting 50% of the (ticket, registration, etc.) revenue of this event to the Muckleshoot and Duwamish peoples.”

Until I traveled to Australia, I had assumed that the tradition of voicing land acknowledgments belongs exclusively to the bleeding-heart liberals of the greater Seattle area. For example, friends on the East Coast have assured me that it would never occur to New Yorkers to salute the members of the local Lenape tribe as the traditional custodians of Manhattan.

However, I was wrong to believe that land acknowledgment handwringing belongs exclusively to the Pacific Northwest. I was also wrong to assume that Australia’s Aborigines dwell exclusively in the north, in the vicinity of sacred Uluru, which the English colonizers conveniently renamed Ayers Rock. Nothing could be further from the truth, as we learned on our travels to the three states that together comprise Australia’s eastern seaboard – New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland. From the Great Ocean Road, south of Melbourne, to Cairns in the tropical north, a panoply of different Aboriginal peoples—they are never called tribes—has lived and thrived since time immemorial, each with its own language, customs and claims to “country.” Everywhere we visited, white Australians were as quick to voice the traditional land custodianship of local indigenous groups as were the many plaques at historic sites to announce them. I was surprised to discover that land acknowledgment statements tripped off the tongues of young Australian tour leaders as quickly, easily, and unself-consciously as their ubiquitous phrase, “No worries.”

At first, my reaction to Australian land acknowledgments matched what I feel at home in Seattle: the statements are hypocritical and should be discredited on that basis. But I had a change of heart when I realized that I was grateful to be learning something about the many native peoples who originally inhabited the lands in and around Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. Could land acknowledgment statements turn out to be helpful? Possibly, if only to inform tourists about the continuing existence of those original land custodians. One could also argue that, in Australia’s case, the colonizers were not technically to blame for the plight of the many Aboriginal peoples, considering that the first white settlers of Australia were convicts brought forcibly from England. They hadn’t intended to visit Australia, let alone conquer it.

Just as with Native Americans, the concept of land ownership is foreign to Aboriginal culture. The belief of native people in most corners of the world is that they belong to the land, not the other way around. The colonizer’s idea that he owns the land goes far to explain the environmental degradation that white people have propagated everywhere they settle, and it goes to the heart of the social conflict between whites and native peoples. Seattleites should add to our land acknowledgment statements, “We recognize that the Coast Salish have been better custodians of the land than we have.”

My understanding that the Aborigines are spread throughout Australia came into sharp focus when we toured the Aboriginal art wing in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which was a revelation. The bright colors and intriguing forms of Aboriginal painting are striking, even mesmerizing. While the examples on display were sourced from across the entire continent of Australia, the aesthetic language of the paintings seemed unified to my uneducated eye. One could title a book on Aboriginal art “Dots and Stripes,” so consistent and dominant are those two visual notations across the work of many artists and places or “countries.” The dark, closely spaced parallel stripes are nearly always interwoven with a second set of narrow parallel lines at a slight angle to the first, as if the object were to create a painterly equivalent of fabric weaving.

In contrast to the earth tones of the striped fields, patterns of dots, often raised from the painted surface, are rendered in vibrant primary colors. While I gleaned that the dots have been a feature of Aboriginal art for centuries, recent artists have taken great joy in working with the bright acrylic and oil pigments that were not previously available to them. The galaxies of vivid dots are like chocolate chips delivered in a rainbow of M & M colors.

While from across the room the Aboriginal paintings appear as spontaneous and free as any American works of abstract expressionism, the closer you approach to examine them, the more you realize how meticulous and refined the techniques are that went to produce them. Their intricate compositions evince a rigor that can only be interpreted as meditational. To make these paintings, the artists must be infinitely patient. Imagining the contemplation it must take to create one of these paintings reminded me of what goes into making a mandala, even if the visual result is entirely unlike one.

But what of the Aboriginal people themselves? We saw little of them in the big cities and hardly noticed them at all until we toured the village of Kuranda in the mountain rainforest east of Cairns, in northern Queensland. Transported high above the rainforest canopy in one of the Skyrail gondolas that climb the mountain zip-line style, we arrived in Kuranda with just enough time for lunch and a visit to a butterfly sanctuary. Approaching the entrance, we encountered a few Aborigines sitting aimlessly on a couple of benches facing the road, smoking and chatting among themselves.

We wondered if they had jobs. To reach the aviary, we had had to pass a half mile of souvenir shops and cafes, all staffed by white people. Why weren’t any of the Aborigines running those shops? Pondering that question, we looked up at a nearby building. Its sign read (I’m paraphrasing here) ‘Indigenous Community Center, low-income apartments available.’ The message strongly implied that the indigenous people of Kuranda are a group apart, as removed from white Australians as America’s Indian reservations are from the towns along the nearest interstate.

This was a revelation. It suggested that another clause should be added to the generic Australian land acknowledgment statement, just as it should be appended to the Seattle version: “We acknowledge that the Gadigal people have not yet fully integrated into modern society.”

When a dear friend recently invited us to visit her in Sydney, Australia, I came expecting to hear the phrase, “G’Day, Mate,” repeated on a daily basis. But while I was in fact greeted more than once with that hallowed phrase, I was surprised by how much more often I heard another, entirely different phrase: “No worries.” Whenever I thanked any person for a helpful answer to a rudimentary question, such as, “Which is the right platform for the train to Lorne?” I invariably received a single, unequivocal response. “No worries,” the agent said, giving me a big smile. People told me “No worries” so many times, in response to so many unrelated questions, that I began to think of it as a sort of Australian national motto, and a good one at that.

“No worries” means there is nothing to worry about, which in turn implies that Australians are essentially unconcerned that the trains might not be running on time. On the contrary, not only do they appear confident in the promptness of trains, but I got the distinct impression that many if not most of them believe that their society is functioning as it should. While this perception could be no more than the illusion of an American traveler passing only briefly through Australia, it was nevertheless my big take-away. “No worries!”

“No worries” has an inclusive quality that its counterpart American phrase, “No problem,” lacks. When an American thanks a customer service representative for resolving some thorny issue with his phone bill or internet service, and the representative responds by saying “No problem,” it does not imply that there are no problems in the world; only that he or she ‘did not have a problem’ resolving that one small matter. “No problem” is reductive, whereas “No worries” is expansive – its assertive confidence balloons from a comment on the matter at hand to encompass an opinion about the entire society. And, as I said, when the happy phrase is spoken, it almost always comes with a big smile.

My husband, Dennis, and I spent only three and a half weeks in Australia, but it was long enough to leave the impression that Australians generally like each other. They seem to enjoy one another’s company; they are not at each other’s throats or up in each other’s faces the way Americans so often are these days. To offer one small example, at home in Seattle, we are plagued by ‘The Seattle Freeze.’ The Seattle Freeze is a very personal, physical expression of what the pundits call ‘cancel culture.’ It occurs when you’re walking down the street, and you stop to greet a passer-by with a “hello” or “good morning.” Even though you expect him to return the greeting, nine times out of ten he will walk by you without so much as a word or even a glance in your direction. The Freezer, if we choose to call him that, is simply too busy looking down at his feet or his phone to bother acknowledging your existence. By contrast, when I swam my laps at the Ryde Aquatic Center in Sydney’s western suburbs, the woman who shared my lane smiled at me and said, “We’re well matched to swim together!” In thirty years of swimming in Seattle’s YMCAs, exactly nobody has told me anything like that.

To put it another way, Australia felt to Dennis and me like a normal country, and these days, America feels anything but normal. What if we Americans could like each other again? What would it take? What if instead of Blue America and Red America, we were one nation divided not socially but only geographically, in the same way Australia is divided by the coastal plane and the Outback? As of this writing, that is no more than an aspirational dream, but now that I have traveled Down Under and seen it with my own eyes, my hope for America is that we eventually become more like Australia. How ironic that a country founded by convicts deported from England would end up feeling freer and more light-hearted than America!

There is so much to enjoy. Sydney is like London with good weather. Its modern skyscrapers share the streets with beautiful classical buildings carved from the ubiquitous orange sandstone of Sydney’s oceanside bluffs. There is an undeniable British influence in its world-class botanical garden and in the way its Hyde Park interlocks with the ‘CBD,’ or Central Business District, so reminiscent of the way Mayfair intersects with the original Hyde Park in London. And can we talk about Sydney Harbor? One explorer referred to it as the best natural harbor in the world, and that doesn’t surprise me, because the harbor spreads inland from the Pacific for miles upon miles, punctuated by myriad small, protected bays and minor capes or peninsulas. It has often been said that Sydney has more than 100 beaches, which means that it also has more than 100 bays and inlets.

Among Sydney’s great delights is the opportunity to embark on one of the many walk-on passenger ferries that depart from Circular Quay. Sandwiched between the iconic Opera House and Harbour Bridge, Circular Quay is the epicenter of Sydney, but I had to ask myself, ‘why is it called Circular Quay?’ There is nothing circular about it today; in fact, it is an embankment as rigidly rectangular as a railway terminal, except that instead of having perpendicular train platforms, it boasts a series of parallel ferry piers, each with its own destination. A quick Google search reveals that in 1837, the quay debuted as a semi-circular stone bulwark constructed on mudflats by convict laborers. If it isn’t a circular quay today, it was then.

From Circular Quay, you can take a ferry to the zoo or, as we did, to Woolwich, in the western suburbs and, on another day, to the beguiling Mosman Bay, east of downtown. As the boat hums along, we were treated first to outstanding views of the Opera House, and later to a constellation of the myriad upscale residences and apartment houses that cascade cheek by jowl down the undulating sandstone bluffs lining Sydney Harbor. As our Sydneysider friend, Marilyn, explained, “Everybody wants to live near the water.” It’s a sentiment completely familiar to Seattleites, as was her follow-up comment, “That’s why homes are so expensive here.” Indeed, during our visit, a four-bedroom house owned by one of Marilyn’s friends sold for $4.7 million Australian, which in spite of the favorable US dollar exchange rate, means that Sydney has an affordability problem rivaling Seattle’s.

Dennis and I weren’t Down Under long enough to find out what young Sydneysiders think about their chances of buying a house, but as I mentioned, the prevailing mood we witnessed everywhere can best be encapsulated by the ubiquitous phrase, “No worries!” On several occasions, we took the #506 bus back to Marilyn’s place from crowded Park Street, next to Town Hall, in the heart of the CBD. During the peak hours of the afternoon, Transport for New South Wales employees stand on the curb, loudly announcing the number of each bus as it approaches, so that passengers milling on the sidewalk know exactly when and where to queue for the bus they need.

Once we boarded the 506, we couldn’t help but notice that every time it stopped, each departing passenger would say “thank you” to the driver. They said “thank you” even when leaving by the back door, from which I doubted the driver could hear their salutations. That friendliness and courteousness impressed me, but it was even more impressive when a middle-aged lady with light-brown hair, one of the transport employees on Park Street, told Dennis and me, “Oh, I remember you were right here yesterday afternoon!” And she said it with a friendly smile. “No worries, mate!”

Be on the lookout for more about our Australia visit in my next post!

Lord Shiva

A couple of years ago, I wrote in this blog that I was transitioning to retirement but I didn’t feel “all-in” with the life change it implied. I spoke about possessing the luxury of turning up the spigot of work or turning it down as I wished. When I re-read my words now, I’m struck by the realization that the spigot’s flow has slowed for quite a while now and I have no great desire to ramp it back up. In any case, my volunteer work for the Allied Arts Foundation and Volunteer Park Trust has flooded in to fill the kitchen sink of what used to be my billable hours. On some days I feel like I’m a retired person; on other days I feel like I’m still working.

Today I feel retired, with a newly open horizon of free time ahead of me for contemplating and philosophizing. I’ve always had a philosophical bent and now, for once, I have time to indulge that trait. But what does that mean? It means that I’m now ready to search for my Inner Self or my Higher Self, which Hinduism teaches is our essential being.

Hinduism. Several years ago, I devoured Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, and ever since I have been drawn to what the author and Hindu scholar Linda Johnson calls “the world’s oldest religion.” At the same time, as a Westerner, I’ve been confounded by what appears to be Hinduism’s complexity and contradictions. So many gods and goddesses, so many divine avatars, yet Hinduism teaches that there is only one God and that God is the Supreme Reality.

How can this be? It’s really not so hard to explain. The light of God is so bright that we humans can no more look at it directly than we can look directly at the sun. To approach God, then, we can only gaze at one of the many reflections of God’s eternal light. Hinduism calls those reflections God’s manifestations as Krishna, Kali, Lakshmi, and so many other gods and goddesses.

Another essential teaching of Hinduism is that God resides inside us every bit as much as He/She/It is outside us. God is in us and we are part of God. This formula contrasts radically with Christianity, which tells us that we are separate from God until such time as Christ intervenes to save us. According to Hinduism, if we can find our Inner Self, we have found our Higher Self, and if we have found our Higher Self, we have felt the presence of God inside us.

The Inner Self or the Higher Self is the self that was never born and will never die. It is our immortal being, the being that hides behind our body, which is no more than the fresh set of clothes we originally put on when we were born and that we will later cast off when we die. In the cycle of reincarnation, we will don and discard new sets of clothing countless times as we strive ultimately to reunite with God, to drown our separate individuality in the boundless sea of God’s oneness.

Ever since I was a child, I have felt the presence of a higher self buried somewhere deep inside me, but I have never come face-to-face with it. Now I want to go looking for it, which means looking inside myself. Next step: find a guru who can lead the way, a lamp moving along the path ahead, a lamp I can follow from the darkness into the light. Hinduism teaches that it is not enough to simply intellectualize this higher self: we must feel it to know it. I don’t expect to reach anything close to enlightenment in my current lifetime, but if I can feel it just once before I shed the soiled clothes of my current body, I will die a happy man.

The following essay pursues some of the themes I explore in my forthcoming memoir, LANDSCAPE IN LAVENDER: A YOUNG MAN’S SEARCH FOR HIS GAY IDENTITY

A profile of Britain’s most pre-eminent architect in the January 20, 2025 issue of The New Yorker bears the headline, “Norman Foster’s Empire of Image Control.” Ian Parker’s piece takes a deep dive into Foster’s attempt to control vast numbers of architectural projects, not to mention the teams of humans that produce them, across “eighteen offices in twelve countries.” I don’t know which is more impressive—that Foster assigned himself such a gargantuan task or that he has seemingly pulled it off.

One vignette sheds light on Foster’s relationship with his Spanish-born wife, Elena.

Parker reports that Elena initially found their partnership “hard work:”

“Her husband laughed but didn’t look entirely comfortable: ‘What do you mean?’

‘You were architecture, architecture,’ she said.”

But Elena confided that their relationship had eased over time. As Parker explains, “He’ll greet guests, have a drink. Even on occasions when he’s clearly eager to resume working, Elena said, ‘he’s able to wait.’”

This anecdote resonated with me because I grew up with an architect father, Professor Keith Kolb of the University of Washington Department of Architecture. At our home, Dad lectured ponderously and regularly on architectural topics ranging from the inspirational (Michelangelo) to the merely practical (the advantages of bush-hammering concrete, compared with sandblasting it.)

Parker’s description of Foster’s relationship with Elena could just as well have been about Mom and Dad. According to Mom, early in their marriage when Dad was teaching at Montana State University, he brought home a student and launched into a long private architectural lesson in their living room.

“A cup of tea, please,” Dad enjoined Mom, who was hidden away in the kitchen.

Mom obediently brought out the tea—and I picture her dressed in a kimono, presenting the lacquered tray with an exquisite little bow—but not before setting the kitchen timer. Fifteen minutes later, it made a loud noise.

“What’s that infernal racket?” Dad asked angrily. Mom replied only with her silence, and the timer did not ring again.

Later, when the student finally left, Dad asked her why she had let the timer ring.

“I thought you’d get the hint, Keith,” she said in her customary meek but firm tone. “Dinner was ready and it was high time for you to escort your student to the door.”

“He needed my help,” Dad explained, as if that settled the issue; as if he would have continued talking to the young man all night had the boy needed more help.

Mom took all of this in and didn’t try the timer again. The next time a student came around, it was in the early morning and Mom put two slices of bread in the toaster. A few minutes later she served toast, neglecting to butter it.

“This toast is burnt!” Dad yelled.

“You can scrape off the black bits with your knife,” Mom said helpfully. If this hint didn’t work, nothing would.

While I grew up, Dad slowly learned to accommodate Mom, although she often remained consigned to the claustrophobic galley kitchen he designed for her in what was otherwise an airy, open glass house.

Even so, the dynamic continued when the three of us went shopping at the flagship QFC in the University Village Shopping Center, our local grocery store. No sooner had we entered the store than Dad invariably encountered one of his former students, a group I designated with the abbreviation “F.S.”

Glimpsing the latest F.S., Mom and I quickly plunged the grocery cart down the next aisle, leaving Dad rooted on the spot, where he began advising his student on the relative merits of Le Corbusier and Philip Johnson. The poor F.S. must have thought Mom was rude to deprive him of the opportunity to meet Mrs. Kolb, but in fact she was being polite. Mom knew that Dad would not remember the young man’s name, so she was saving him the embarrassment of failing to introduce them. Dad undoubtedly remembered every minute pencil mark on the man’s latest architectural project, but the F.S.’s name? That was a complete mystery.

“God is in the Details,” Mies van der Rohe famously said, and God, was Dad ever detail-oriented! His constant aim for perfection prompted him to line up our family in front of a Camellia hedge for annual portraits. Every time I remember how he waved his light meter toward us in the jerky flight pattern of a wasp, I recall the irritation I felt as the smile froze on my immobile face. But later, after Dad settled on his preferred aperture, selected the proper F-Stop and developed the film, I had to admit that his photographs were magnificent. Nearly everybody in our family, including my three living grandparents, wore glasses, but owing to Dad’s light meter calculations, no reflections or glare ever bounced off the lenses shielding our five pairs of eyes.

As I grew up and decided to become a landscape architect, I studied at the University of Pennsylvania under several Norman Foster stand-ins, three of whom were actual former students of Dad’s. Of these three, Bob Hanna confided that one of his greatest pleasures was sipping a dry martini while working hard on his latest Prismacolor pencil drawing of brick walls and sidewalks surrounding a tree-studded bluestone terrace.

At some point in my education, I concluded that this behavior was an observable phenomenon and it needed a name. I decided to call it ‘The Architect Personality.’

Here’s a definition: an individual, highly trained in architecture or one of the related environmental design fields, who approaches his subject with the zeal of a monomaniac.

What’s a monomaniac, you ask? It’s a person who obsesses over a single subject or idea, to the exclusion of all others.

I once worked for a talented landscape architect who suffered from an unusually eccentric version of monomania. Otherwise laudably reasonable when outlining his design concepts, he insisted that geometric vectors—vectors as subtle as those that direct the path of the sun between the tallest dolmens at Stonehenge on the summer solstice—connect the pyramids at Giza with not only the US Capitol dome in Washington, D.C., but also with Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, and, well, fill in your important cultural monument here___________.

But monomania is not the only aspect of the Architect Personality. It is nearly always accompanied by Superior Taste. The architect with an architect personality possesses the certain knowledge that only one color is appropriate for the walls, floor, and ceiling of a given room or building. What’s more, he also knows exactly which objects should appear in or be banned from that space. Nobody else knows these things, which is why we all need to shut up and submit to the transcendental vision of the architect in question. Move over papal infallibility; make way for architectural infallibility!

Dad illustrated this concept with an anecdote. It involved his mentor, Lionel “Spike” Pries, the Beaux Arts School-trained subject of Jeffrey Ochsner’s book, Lionel Pries: Architect, Artist, Educator. The last house Spike designed was the 1965 Gurvich House on the tip of Webster Point in Seattle’s Laurelhurst neighborhood.

According to Dad, when the house was finished, Spike told Mrs. Gurvich that he’d like to photograph the interiors, but when he arrived with his entourage and a collection of those tall high-intensity floor lamps, he saw with his architectural infallibility that Mrs. Gurvich had arranged her living room furniture all wrong.

“May I offer you a martini?” asked Mrs. Gurvich, ever the consummate hostess.

“That would be kind of you,” replied Spike. Then, while she retreated to the kitchen to fetch the cocktail shaker, he directed his minions to begin re-arranging the furniture.

The burst of activity must have flustered Mrs. Gurvich, who was perhaps looking on from the kitchen. She returned to the living room and handed Spike his martini. He took a sip and puckered his lips. “What is this?” he asked in an arrogant tone. “You forgot to pour in the gin!”

Our esteemed Pacific Northwest author, Erica Bauermeister, published a delightful memoir called House Lessons: Renovating a Life. In it, she describes buying a decrepit, century-old house in Port Townsend, Washington, removing the archaeological strata of junk filling its every room, and proceeding with the restoration.

To do so, she had to find a compatible architect, and she astutely observes that architects can be divided into two types: visionaries and collaborators. The visionaries are “demigods,” the famous starchitects who command their clients to pay for and appreciate the inspirational designs they have in mind, regardless of any impracticalities the resulting buildings might contain. For example, Mies van der Rohe insisted that his reputed lover, Dr. Edith Farnsworth, must spend her days in a glass house he designed with no opaque perimeter walls whatsoever, despite the reservations she must have expressed concerning her need for privacy.

Dad knew the Farnsworth House well and taught it to his students. He once told my brother and me about the time when he and Mom stopped off in Chicago on their way back to Seattle from Harvard University, where Dad had studied under Walter Gropius. Since the Farnsworth House was not far away, he drove Mom over to take a look. Dad parked, got out of the car, and stealthily approached the house, camera and light meter in hand.

Mom wisely insisted on remaining in the car, strenuously objecting to his brazenness. “Keith, don’t do that!” she said.

According to Dad, when he got up close and stuck his camera lens against one of the glass walls, whom should he encounter behind the window but a mortified Dr. Farnsworth, who quickly dashed away to hide behind an interior partition.

Oddly enough, Dad officially belonged to the “collaborators” branch of architects, not the visionaries. Collaboration was the gospel preached by ‘Grope,’ as Dad called Gropius, and he briefly worked for Grope’s firm, “The Architects Collaborative.”

But, as I explained to Erica Bauermeister in a letter complimenting her House Lessons, the distinction has always been blurred for me because Dad had one foot in each camp. He declared that the architect’s word is law when it comes to client relations, and he spoke about the architect’s need to fire clients who refused to submit to his design vision. After all, that’s what Frank Lloyd Wright would have done, and in fact, Mies ended up suing Dr. Farnsworth for non-payment of fees.

In Dad’s case, though, his bark was worse than his bite. He needed to get paid by his residential clients, so he often made collaborative compromises with them. The mark of the true Architect Personality is the visionary demigod who can get away with dismissing his clients, only to embrace many more clamoring for his highly tasteful services. Dad must have hoped for that, but he never achieved it.

Among the boys, a friendly young Canadian named Kevin smiled at me when we shook hands. He and I quickly fell into effortless conversation, free of the barriers I was used to from boys. When we shared a cappuccino at a little café in the shadow of the grand old “Duomo,” as I learned the cathedral of Florence is called, our easy rapport reminded me of my friends at home. Gazing into his kind eyes, an under-current of attraction buzzed between us, but I discounted it, telling myself that I was misjudging the situation. I wasn’t bold enough to risk rejection by caressing his cheek or trying to kiss him. What if he got angry and took offense?

After a couple of delectable days touring the Florentine masterpieces, it was time to head to Assisi by motorcoach. The engine groaned and whined as we climbed switchbacks to the hilltop town, arriving late on Thursday afternoon, the day before Good Friday. There we were hosted in an actual working convent with the impressive double-leafed iron door of a fortress. Dinner was served at long, rough wooden tables in the refectory, and the rustic Italian fare was fresh and wholesome, albeit a bit bland. I wanted to say, “pass the salt,” but then I remembered that the nuns, in their penitence, had taken a vow to abstain from it.

After dinner, several of us made our way up the narrow, winding medieval streets to Assisi’s central piazza, high on the hill’s bony ridge.

“Do not fail to return before we lock the door at ten o’clock prompt!” the leading nun intoned sternly, before we left. Insolently nodding our heads to assure her we would obey, we headed for the picturesque fountain in the center of the piazza, where a young Italian regaled the crowd on his guitar, taking requests. The night was agreeably warm, the cosmopolitan atmosphere was immensely convivial, and we were all in high spirits. Much as I was enjoying myself, though, I couldn’t help but feel mechanical hands moving inexorably across the faces of invisible clocks, and I was nervous.

“We have to keep track of the time,” I reminded one of my companions, tapping my watch.

“Oh, Brooks, don’t be such a bore,’ she said. “Come on, let’s stay a while longer.”

I glanced around at my mostly French companions. Dressed in jeans and casual blouses, often with a silk scarf tied just so, many of the girls oozed the effortless chic that seemed to be their French birthright. Kevin joined easily in their joie-de-vivre, his face turned away from me, as he laughed and sang along with the others. As they all lit their cigarettes, flicking ashes dismissively on the ground, I felt boorish and square. Wanting to stay and enjoy the ambiance as much as they did, I wondered why I was so tightly wound, so unable to cut loose. Like my mother, I had always been careful to play by the rules, but, like Manie, the French girls exuded a haughty and rebellious independence, a contempt for authority that I longed to share. Hoping that maybe they could teach me how to be cool, I decided to play along. One song led to another until I looked at my watch and discovered that it was already 11:30.

“We’ve got to head back” I said, “It’s way past ten o’clock!” This time the others reluctantly agreed, so we zigzagged downhill through the cobblestone lanes until we arrived at the convent gate. The double iron door was closed, a heavy bolt pulled tight through its two dungeon-like iron rings. What were we to do? The natural leader of our group, a stocky Parisian girl with long black hair, whom I later learned was the daughter of an important French diplomat, took charge. Cupping her mouth with her hands, she yelled up, in French, at a shuttered window high on the wall above the door. Nothing happened, so she yelled again. Still the shutters refused to budge.

On her third attempt, the shutters suddenly burst open with a loud clack and Mother Superior appeared in the window. Arms spread as wide as Christ on the cross, one hand on each shutter, her impressive black wimple crowned her irate head. I felt sure that at any moment she might take off from the window and soar over us like Sally Field in “The Flying Nun.” Instead, her mouth opened and a long volley of furious but melodious Italian spewed forth from her throat at high volume. While I understood not a word of what she said, I felt as if we were privileged to be witnessing an invitation-only performance of Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville.”

While she struggled with all her might not to take the Lord’s name in vain, I wondered if we were doomed to lie down on the cold pavement all night long. As if to confirm my fears, the volley of Italian stopped as suddenly as it had commenced, the shutters snapped shut, and the night returned to lovely silence. Then, just as I was imagining how hard and pebbly the cobblestones would feel against our poor backs, one of the two doors opened wide enough to reveal a slot of light, and a single, disembodied hand appeared in the gap to beckon us inside.

The next morning was Good Friday, which was the perfect occasion to reflect on what I thought of as our transgression the night before, when we had disobeyed Mother Superior’s strict orders. I had let the French girls convince me to loosen up enough to enjoy a night out on the piazza, but what had it brought us besides loud disapproval? Of course, I could have just as easily thrilled to the fact that we had gotten away with it, arguably even with aplomb. Although that thought did occur to me, my superego won the day, reinforcing my conviction that it was wisest to stay in my lane and follow the rules, just as my goody two-shoes mother would have done. Either way, I was glad when we left the next day for Rome.

(a spiritual thought for the day)

One of the most absurd things about life is how we’re all chained to the relentless forward march of time. Tick-tock, tick-tock, time never stops in its inexorable progress toward our deaths. Everything we do and everything that happens to us has a beginning, a middle, and an end. That formula is endlessly stressful. Time obliges us to plan ahead for every single thing on our daily calendar, no matter how small, mapping out how long it will take to drive to an appointment and show up on time (or, we ask ourselves, would it be quicker to take the bus? Will we get home in time to cook dinner? Will we have any time left afterwards to relax?) Forever caught up in these burdensome calculations, we tell ourselves, maybe it would be better to cancel the appointment and just stay home.

Nor are we ever satisfied with the pace of time. We seem always to be trying to speed it up or slow it down. When we’re waiting our turn in the prescription line at Walgreens we want time to move more quickly, but when we’re clinking glasses with our beloved one on the beach at sunset, we whisper, “please, Time, please slow down.” If only time were a metronome and we could continually adjust it to the pace we desire, increasing or decreasing its tempo at our will.

To look on the bright side, everything in life has a beginning, a middle, and an end, which of course is the most basic requirement for storytelling. Without time there would be no stories to tell. But everything in this world of ours has its opposite. Without darkness, there is no light. Without silence, there is no sound. So what of time? Surely it too must have an opposite. Our name for its opposite is eternity, but we tend to imagine eternity as an infinite continuation of the march of time after our death, tick-tocking on forever.

However, a more compelling and arguably more accurate idea is that the opposite of time is simply non-time. Non-time is or can be conceived as an existence entirely outside of time. In other words, non-time is an infinite present. If there is a God, God dwells in that infinite present. God is the Divine Presence in the present, and when we die, we are blessedly freed of the burden of time.

During the two-plus hours of run time, I failed to concentrate on the music because my addled brain, exposed to the visual onslaught of a cinematic spectacle, returned again and again to one troubling enigma: what was it that kept the singers who appeared in the cutout door frames from falling twenty feet or more to the stage? I could see no visible mini-balconies on which they stood, and when the doors pivoted halfway shut, the singers appeared flattened against them, as if squashed by the giant animated spider that personified “The Queen of the Night,” one of the opera’s key personas. The optical illusion was so intense that one had to ask oneself, were the singers who appeared in the doors mere cinematic images, of a piece with the LSD-inspired imagery surrounding them? They were no doubt real, but were they at least strapped to the doors by lap belts? As afraid of heights as I am, I hoped so. After all, one doesn’t normally go to the opera expecting to applaud the antics of Cirque du Soleil.

The overall effect was to render the opera as two-dimensional as a movie screen, and in fact the production was designed by an amazing animation company based in London called “1927,” whose stated goal on its website is to combine animation with live performance. Named for a year at the pinnacle of the Jazz Age, 1927’s animators were so clearly inspired by the height of the silent film era that they even employed melodramatic script to explain to the audience the goings-on on stage, or rather, on screen. For example, Pamina, the opera’s heroine and the daughter of the Queen of the Night, might say, “Tamino, do you still love me?” in a quasi-Gothic font.

Back to the Queen of the Night for a moment: please explain to me why it was that Pamina described her mother as “sweet?” Can we really be expected to believe that she was blind to the fact that her mother’s body consisted of a skeletal carapace supported by the scaffolding of at least four menacing pairs of inverted L-shaped daddy-long-legs? These were narrow, gigantic, and lethal animated legs rendered in black ink with periodic nodes reminiscent of a rose’s thorns; legs whose feet hammered the stage with all the grace and noise of a tap dancer’s shoes. No, this production should not have been called “The Magic Flute.” A more accurate title would have been “The Magic Mushrooms Flute.” The Van Gogh Immersive exhibition that I attended in Los Angeles in 2022 was no less hallucinogenic than this “Flute,” although its optimistic meadows of sunflowers and deep blue starry skies were more colorful than 1927’s production, which relies primarily on blacks, whites and reds—the black of those legs, the white of mama’s bulbous head, and the red of lover’s lips, of beating hearts, of blood.

Much has been made of the Masonic mythology in Emanuel Schikaneder’s original libretto for “The Magic Flute,” and in fact, Mozart belonged to the “Zur Wohltätigkeit” Masonic lodge in Vienna. The Masonic mythology in “Flute” was in turn inspired by ancient Egyptian legends. When, in Act II, Tamino and Pamina are forced by the ostensibly evil Sarastro to endure three purification rituals of Freemason-style initiation before being allowed to reunite and kiss, direct appeals are made to the Egyptian gods Isis and Osiris. Isis was a mother goddess, while her husband, Osiris, was god of the dead and of agriculture.

To clue us in on this esoteric analogy, 1927’s animated cues dish up a lot of cyclops eyes and pyramids reminiscent of those on a one-dollar bill. But other audience members may have experienced the same whiplash I did when I saw those Egyptian symbols accompanied by animated clockwork animals—black creatures propelled by visible moving gears inside their bodies, where one would have expected to see hearts and lungs. Did ancient Egyptian mythology emphasize clockwork dogs and giant clockwork human faces? Of course not. So then why did we see so many of them in Act II? Because, I assume, 1927’s animators meant to connote the Enlightenment religion of Deism, with its concept of “Deus ex Machina,” or the invisible God behind the Clockwork that runs the Universe. These concepts would have been familiar to audiences at “The Magic Flute’s” debut in Vienna in 1791.

That notwithstanding, the counterpoint of 1927’s conflicting animated imagery is as nothing compared with the whiplash of the outlandish story, which is so excessive as to make the lurid plots of so many other operas seem almost ho-hum. In Act I, the Queen of the Night leads us to believe that Pamina has been kidnapped by the evil Sarastro. Indeed, she commands the hapless Tamino, whose stage presence as the leading man rarely rises above the dramatic intensity of a cardboard cutout, to rescue her equally insipid daughter. Next up, though, a high priest of Sarastro’s temple informs Tamino that the Queen is the real villain of the piece. He doesn’t deny that Pamina has been delivered unto Sarastro, but he spins it as more of a rescue mission from the Queen’s evil clutches than an abduction. It turns out that Sarastro is some sort of high priest of a quasi-Masonic Society of dark-suited men whose purpose is to bring Beauty, Wisdom, and Light into our dark, fallen world.

While the sartorial choice of these priestly men calls to mind the mysterious dark brethren of the bizarre orgy cult portrayed in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” I was at least relieved that someone besides myself had noticed the more disturbing fact that Pamina’s mother is, as I said, a menacing, giant daddy-long-legs with the white, oblong face of an evil extra-terrestrial conqueror. Oh, Sweet Mama! In Act II, she commands Pamina to kill Sarastro, even though we have learned that he is actually a force for Good.

Pleasant little girl that she is, Pamina recoils at the thought of murder, although I wished that committing arachnicide had occurred to her. Poor girl, she has been separated from Tamino on Sarastro’s command, in order to complete the absurd purification trials that Sarastro has dreamed up for both of them. Thus it is no surprise that, when Sarastro orders Tamino to remain silent (trial number one) and to abstain from conversation, food, and women (trial number two), Pamina falls into despair and contemplates suicide due to what she interprets as rejection from her cardboard-cutout lover/hero.

In this hallucinogenic, silent movie of an opera production, the only real flesh-and-blood human beings are provided by the comic-relief figures of Papageno and Papagena, whose storyline parallels that of the leading man and woman. In his horniness, bonhomie, and gourmandize, Papageno reminded me of that Shakespearean character so beloved by audiences, Falstaff. At the end of the trials Papageno is rewarded by an introduction to the Papagena he dreams of, a flesh-and-blood wench whose tits and ass are of a larger dimension than Pamina’s. Pamina is so thin and nondescript that one could easily picture her, in a different silent movie, tied to a railroad track with a train bearing down on her, rather than standing, as she does, at the top of a craggy animated precipice, ready to jump to her death.

According to Britannica online, “The first performances of ‘The Magic Flute’ likely utilized elaborate stage devices typical of the late 18th century, inspired by Baroque theatre innovations. During this period, theatre productions often featured intricate stage machinery to create spectacular visual effects. This included the use of perspective scenery, moving wings, and machinery for rapid scene changes, as well as devices for supernatural or magical illusions. Theatres were equipped with overhead pulley systems for flying scenery and mechanized stages for moving set pieces. These devices allowed for the creation of dramatic effects that were integral to operas and other theatrical performances of the time.”

In other words, the audience of the original performance in the Vienna of 1791 would have been treated to state-of-the-art theatrical devices that must have seemed no less awe-inspiring then than the animated spectacle that 1927 furnished to Seattle Opera does to us now. If you love groundbreaking animation more than traditional opera settings, in which the singers take center stage, then this production of “Flute” is a must-see. Now it has departed Seattle, but it premiered in Berlin in 2012, and I’m sure it will soon find its way to other cities.

Nearly two hours into one’s drive eastwards from Los Angeles on Route 10, the freeway speeds through dry desert flanked by even drier, treeless mountain ranges on both sides. No visual cues pop up to signify that you are approaching any sort of travel destination until dozens of exuberantly waving windmill blades suddenly appear in the distance, announcing the imminent appearance of the lonely Palm Springs exit sign. Nor does the exit road deliver anything more promising—its barren, empty verges offer not a single clue that you are approaching a lively resort town; more likely, you took the wrong exit and you’re headed nowhere. Traversing many talus cones of tumbling boulders, the right side of the road skirts the undulating flank of Mount San Jacinto for so many miles that you begin to give up hope of arriving anywhere at all.

Then, all at once, a single small but striking building appears on your right. Jutting out at a perpendicular angle to the steep slope of the nearby mountainside, Its uplifted triangular roof resembles the open mouth of an alligator or the snapping beak of a pelican. This building is, for all intents and purposes, Palm Springs’ the entry gate. Designed in the mid nineteen fifties by celebrated Palm Springs architect, Albert Frey, its original purpose was, appropriately enough, a gas station, but in recent years it has been rehabilitated into the Palm Springs Visitor Center.

Once you pass the visitor center, a handful of palm trees appears on your left and another on your right, but their procession is no more majestic than what has come before. Only after another mile or two does the commercial thoroughfare of Palm Canyon Drive announce itself with its double line of marching soldiers, the California Fan Palms. When I observed this tableau for the first time at dusk, I distinctly remember thinking that it had hardly been worth the effort to make the trek from the glamour of Los Angeles, with its sparkling beaches and tawny mountains. First impressions, though, are not everything, and my hasty negative judgment turned out to be wrong. When I woke the next morning, the sun had already risen into a cloudless firmament of towering blue, and when I ventured out into the gleaming sunshine, I gazed up into the dancing fans of a radiant grove of palm trees. There was no more disputing it: I had arrived in a delightful oasis called Palm Springs.

For Seattleites and Portlanders alike, Palm Springs in winter has an irresistible allure, and I have heard people joking that every other pedestrian on Palm Canyon Drive has just arrived from the gloomy skies, chilly air, and dripping sidewalks of the Pacific Northwest. There in the desert, many of them remain for all of five months and twenty-nine days, only to board the same flight home, with the shared purpose of avoiding the California income tax that is imposed upon visitors who remain for more than six months. Indeed, the allure is so strong that the State of California recently extended its tax-free timeline to nine months.

Part of the allure is due to the fact that the liberal clusters of palm trees have not been imported from Florida or Hawaii. In the canyons bordering the town, you can easily find native palms in abundance. Snaking along perennial springs, they have been used by the Cahuilla band of the Agua Caliente Indians since time immemorial. The actual hot spring for which Palm Springs is named still pops up in the exact center of town, at the corner of Indian Canyon Drive and Tahquitz Canyon Way. The fact that it is now entirely hidden, having been covered by a khaki-colored modern stucco building housing the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum, does not detract from the fact that it is, to this day, a destination spa called “Sec-ha” in the Chahuilla language. You enter it by a door off to the side of the museum.

But if the spring for which the town is named is no longer visible, you can find similar ones threading through the Indian Canyons on reservation land just south of town. Last month, when I hiked the Murray Canyon trail, I crossed its stream five or seven times on my way to the waterfall at its source in the headlands. Fan Palms provide the very symbol of an oasis: they thrive in standing water and mushy soils, their brown castoff fans interlaced in piles along the muddy banks. The creeks are as lush as the facing canyon slopes are bare, and when my rugged hike approached a nearby ridge bearing a perpendicular trail, I was greeted by a sign reading, “Beware: no water and no shade beyond.” Needless to say, I avoided that trail, but I stopped to enjoy the view over the entire Coachella Valley, all the way to the far-off flank of the northerly mountains that announce the high Mojave Desert and the backslopes of Joshua Tree National Park. In the near distance, I gazed over the ranks of artificially planted palm trees that delineate Palm Springs’ street grid while simultaneously providing evidence of its population’s reliance on the far-off dams of the Colorado River.

One of the oddest but most evocative aspects of Palm Springs is that its grid of one-mile squares, imposed by the southerly reach of the transcontinental railroad system in the nineteenth century, has a unique dual ownership. Every other square is owned by random citizens, nearly all of them white, but the intervening squares make up the Agua Caliente Indian reservation. The result is that the town’s geographic profile is a checkerboard of urbanized squares alternating with undeveloped ones. If you walk north from Ramon Road on Calle Encilia, or east from Calle El Segundo on Saturnino Road, developed squares give way to long, sandy reaches of desert scrub without so much as a sidewalk.

For this reason, when you buy a condo or a house in Palm Springs, you must do a little research to determine the answer to two important questions: first, is the unit on Indian land? If so, you will only be leasing the land beneath your future home, and the lease will have a specific expiration date. Second, and equally important: has the City permitted short-term vacation rentals on your property? If it has not—and there has been pressure to restrict vacation rentals as a countermeasure to the inflation that already makes the town too expensive for its most important workers, its waiters and bartenders—then you will not be able to rent out your unit during the stifling summers in which the mercury climbs over 100 or even 110, for weeks at a time.

Rugged, tan-colored mountains juxtaposed with the angular geometries of midcentury modern architecture, embodied so perfectly by the jutting beak of Frey’s landmark gas station/visitor center, constitute the first two of four essential elements that comprise what might be called the Palm Springs Style. Its other two ingredients are the persistent and glamorous background presence of Hollywood stars past and present, paired with a sort of gay camp that rejoices in sending up Hollywood and the midcentury vibe in a single stroke.

The unique Palm Springs mashup between modern architecture and Hollywood lore begins with an interesting fact about Hollywood’s storied studio system. Back in the golden age, the leading studios established a rule that no star could wander farther from Hollywood than one hundred miles or two hours (I’ve heard the story expressed both ways.) The effect this had was that if Ava Gardner or Frank Sinatra wanted to get out of town, they could go no farther than the golf courses and watering holes of Palms Springs, which clocks in at just under 99 miles as the crow flies. Undoubtedly, this is why Frank built “Twin Palms,” his marvelous midcentury house between Alejo Road and Via Colusa in “The Movie Colony,” one of Palm Springs’ 52 named neighborhoods identified by themed “blades” installed above the street corner signs.

Twin Palms, with its pool in the abstract form of a baby grand piano, made the career of the celebrated Palm Springs architect, E. Stewart Williams, as I learned on one of the fantastic neighborhood tours led by the Palm Springs Historical Society. As the story goes, one day in 1947, Frank and Ava wandered into Williams’ architectural office licking ice cream cones. Frank was dressed in a sailor suit. “Build me a colonial house,” Frank told Williams.

The latter paused to consider the matter, then gave Frank a striking counter offer. “Tell you what,” Williams said, and I’m paraphrasing here. “I’ll design you a colonial house and I’ll design you a modern house on the same site. You can choose whichever one you prefer.” Luckily, Frank chose the modern version, because, as Williams later reported (and again I’m paraphrasing), “Otherwise, I would never have had a career.” Williams went on to design many of the town’s most iconic modernist structures, including the Palm Springs Art Museum, which is one of Southern California’s most prominent art institutions. This past January, I toured its awesome retrospective of David Hockney paintings, including a whole suite of his colorful iPad paintings.

When Frank and Ava moved into Twin Palms, it sat by itself so far out into the desert that you could only reach it by an unpaved road. Perhaps that was why, on any given day, Frank found it convenient to raise a Jack Daniels flag on the pole just outside the house, the better to advertise to Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Junior that he was ready to serve them cocktails. You can tour the Frank Sinatra house during Modernism Week, which occurs every February. If you’re lucky enough to do so, you will be shown the built-in console where Frank did some of his recordings. You’ll also see a large chip in the bathroom counter, which was created by the impact made when either Frank or Ava (nobody remembers which) threw a wine glass at it in a fit of pique. This foreshadowed the end of their tempestuous relationship, because you will also be shown the exact spot on the driveway where Frank later threw out all of Ava’s clothes and suitcases, telling her to “Get Out!”

No piece about the allure of Palm Springs would be complete without mentioning four of its other most significant midcentury-modern houses. Three hug the mountain slopes that ring the town, and the fourth backs up to the foothills of Mount San Jacinto. With its long window-wall and seamless indoor/outdoor living, that fourth dwelling would be Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House, designed for the same Pittsburgh department store magnate for whom Frank Lloyd Wright created “Fallingwater.” Meanwhile, the tiny “Frey House 2” is built right into the mountain slope directly behind the Art Museum. Since the museum owns it, you can visit it, and when you do, you can sit at a breakfast nook overlooking the Coachella Valley. There, you can’t avoid touching a wall of solid rock that, like a lava flow, descends right through the ceiling and engulfs the counter next to your seat.

Frey had clearly hit on something new: the idea of allowing natural features to invade the interior of a house was something that the younger architect, John Lautner, exploited when he designed the other two houses I alluded to: the Bob Hope House and its next-door neighbor on Southridge Drive, the Elrod House. On YouTube, you can find a video of Sean Connery entering the house in the James Bond film, ”Diamonds are Forever.” When he does, a beautiful Black wench leaps off an exposed outcrop inside the house and introduces herself to James Bond. “I’m Bambi!” she says proudly. Too bad the Elrod House is never open to the public.

Bambi introduces the fourth element of the Palm Springs style—gay camp—as well as anybody, and you can find more of it in four marvelous shops on Palm Canyon and Indian Canyon Drives: “P.S. Homeboy,” “Destination PSP,” “Greetings,” and “Just Fabulous.” “Greetings” dispenses the funniest, raunchiest greeting cards you can imagine, nearly all of them portraying vintage Fifties housewives in various states of attire, each one adorned by a unique thought bubble. The other three shops sell a variety of home furnishings, midcentury-themed attire, and books on Modernism in the desert.

By now I’m sure I’ve given you at least one good reason to visit Palm Springs, but one question remains: why go there when you could travel to Hawaii? After all, the Hawaiian islands offer a tropical paradise as well as desert environments, so why limit yourself to the arid backdrop of Palm Springs? I have a two-word answer: night life. It’s a version of night life with more than a twinge of camp, especially when you get tickets to “The Judy Show,” at the “Purple Room,” the fifties club where the Rat Pack first convened. There’s also more than a hint of camp at “PS Air Bar,” where you sit in a reconstituted jet fuselage on actual airplane seating, listening to live music while watching the board of arriving and departing “flights.” If you don’t like either of those joints, there’s always the Sunday morning drag brunch at Oscars.

Back in the daytime, the relentless aridity of Palm Springs is more than offset by the changing drama of the mountain ranges that form a horseshoe around the town. Mount San Jacinto’s rugged tan profile descends precipitously into the very backyard of the Palm Springs Art Museum, but you can’t see to the top of it until you venture a mile or two east of downtown, where its topmost tier telescopes into view. The mountain ranges on the east and north sides of town appear farther off, but no matter which way you turn, you are confronted with mountains of differing colors and shapes: a hazy bluish-beige ridge to the north and a set of deeply folded orange peaks to the south, where the Elrod and Bob Hope houses climb Southridge Drive. When, in the late afternoon, the palm trees are backlit against the western mountains, sunshine bounces off their glossy tassels as if they’re so many threads of tinsel on a Christmas tree. It is one of the most beautiful environmental effects I have seen anywhere.

I was an excited nine-year-old boy when my parents led my brother and me up to one of the carefully guarded entry gates at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair. Stamping my foot as we bumped along, slowly advancing up the long line to the ticket booths, I stood on tiptoes and strained to see around the flank of tall, bulky adults who blocked my sightline into what promised to be a tantalizing vision of America’s space-age future. When we finally arrived at the gate, Dad pulled out his wallet and forked over whatever enormous sum the fair charged for our entry fee.

It was at then that I received one of the biggest surprises of my young life. A smiling woman ticket agent told me and my brother, Bliss, to hold out our hands. Then, reaching into a bag by her side, she pulled out two live turtles, placing one in my palm and the other in Bliss’s. The little green creature, only two and a half inches long, felt cool and damp as it wriggled tentatively in my outstretched hand. But the most curious thing was that the turtle’s shell was not green. Instead, it had been painted a vivid cadmium yellow, offset by the black logo of the Fair’s theme, a squashed oval with a fat arrow pointing to the upper right, inscribed with the phrase “Century 21.”

I looked over at Bliss, who was struggling to get his turtle under control. To my surprise, his was not yellow. Instead, it had been painted red. Then, quickly gazing around me as we proceeded into the magical grounds of the “Century 21 World’s Fair,” I noticed that other children were handling blue turtles or purple ones. I don’t remember how we managed to hold on to our turtles during our fun-filled day in the festival, or whether or not we found a way to feed and water them, but of course I loved my very own amphibian.

Our first day at the fair was filled with many wonders. Chief among these, of course, was the brand-new Space Needle towering over the grounds. Staring up at its flying-saucer top, so vertiginously high in the sky above us, I couldn’t help imagining George and Judy Jetson buzzing around it in their flying cars. I smiled, knowing that the Jetsons were a family of four just like we were. (At the time, I was mainly informed by three animated cartoons. “The Flintstones” gave me a view into man’s distant stone age past, and “Rocky and Bullwinkle” taught me about the Cold War via its comic Russian villains, Boris and Natasha, but “The Jetsons” thrilled me with what surely promised to be America’s aerodynamic and supersonic future in the Jet Age. Of course, a year or two later, I was old enough to grasp an intriguing paradox: the Flintstones and the Jetsons were essentially the same family. The only difference between them was that Fred Flintstone carried a club that resembled a giant turkey drumstick and drove a car with stone wheels, whereas George Jetson had a robot named Rosie and flew around in what looked like a personal flying saucer.)

Oh, how sophisticated the World’s Fair was: for lunch, we hurried over to an outdoor food court with tents featuring the cuisine of all the nations of the world. In the French tent, a woman flipped omelets and exclaimed “Ooh-la-la!” However, I reserved my biggest wonder for the German booth, where a curious sausage called “bratwurst” was served. At the time, I had no idea that the world had ever produced any other type of sausage than a hot dog and it seemed to me that a bratwurst was the most sophisticated foodstuff ever invented. In this, I displayed my kinship with Cathy in “The Patty Duke Show,” who “adores the minuet, the Ballet Russes and Crepe Suzette, while Patty loves to rock-n-roll, the hot dog makes her lose control!” I had memorized the entire song. “What a Wild Duet” they were indeed! Clearly, my preference for Cathy, with her inward-curled hairdo—so much more refined than Patty’s outward flip--demonstrated that the incipient gay man inside me was already forming.

After lunching on bratwurst on a hot dog bun, we proceeded to an exhibit called “World of Tomorrow.” This was held in a swoopy-roofed new building called the Colosseum (today’s Climate Pledge Arena.) Entering its cavernous interior, we ascended to the World of Tomorrow in a large, transparent sphere of an elevator called, appropriately enough, “The Bubbleator.” As we stood in line to enter the slow-moving giant space helmet of a Bubbleator, I gazed up at the shiny, mirrored ceiling high above. It was composed of thousands of cubes that jutted downwards and receded upwards like abstract stalagmites. The ceiling resembled an inverted topographic model composed entirely of shiny cubes, each one about three feet square. My body tingled with excitement. How wondrous it was going to be to penetrate this mysterious space-age cloud to view whatever was displayed above. I was Jack and the Bubbleator was the Beanstalk!

Unfortunately, the World of Tomorrow failed to live up to the full promise of its dramatic elevated entry. While the Bubblelator rose at its stately pace, my fertile imagination had every opportunity to conjure a world as exciting as Narnia, but once we ascended through the topmost cube in the ceiling’s cubist cloudscape, we found ourselves on a disappointingly flat floor. Exhibits of this, that, and the other thing clung to normal vertical walls as we proceeded through the exhibit.

Eventually, we arrived at “The House of Tomorrow.” My memory of this so-called house has almost entirely disappeared, but I believe it had undulating walls that were concave like those of a jet fuselage. Large oval windows pierced the walls, looking onto brightly lit light shafts that didn’t even attempt to render the futuristic cityscape that undoubtedly would have surrounded the home. But at least the house came equipped with some sort of phone that allowed you to modulate the heating system or order a computer around like Captain Kirk would memorably do four years later, when “Star Trek” premiered on TV. (Years later, I distinctly remember Captain Jean Luc Picard in “Star Trek: Next Generation” standing in his captain’s quarters and commanding, “Computer: Tea, Earl Grey, hot.”)

If the World of Tomorrow did not rise to the occasion of the mirrored cloud through which one reached it, the United States Science Pavilion was an entirely different story. As we climbed the stairs which separated it from one of the fair’s main thoroughfares, five lofty free-standing Gothic arches rose into view, piercing the sky. Then, when we reached the top of the stairs, I eagerly looked down at a gigantic rectangular reflecting pool interrupted here and there by discreet fountain jets that rocketed up from low concrete bowls shaped like water lilies. There was that flying saucer theme again! The lovely scene was framed and enclosed by a series of pristine white walls imprinted with a delicate pattern of arches, forming a sort of Gothic exoskeleton over the entire building. The overall effect pointed confidently toward a utopian future while simultaneously absorbing an idealized architectural past.

As we continued along the white terrazzo walkway toward the Science Pavilion’s entrance, I noticed that we were on the upper tier of a double-tiered system of walks punctuated by square terraces. The thin slab of the lower tier appeared to float magically above its lake, and I was transported by this shimmering vision of white concrete, white pebbles, and sparkling water. Now, for the first time, my active imagination assured me that I would be witnessing all the marvels of the amazing century to come, Century 21!

“This was designed by Minoru Yamasaki,” my architect father informed my brother and me in his usual pedantic tone. “He’s one of the most important architects of our time.” To me, Yamasaki was just another name in the long catalog of architect’s names Dad had conferred upon us, but the poetic effect of its assonance resonated with me: ‘Ya-ma-sa-ki.”

Of course, we capped our day by whooshing up to the top of the Space Needle in its windowed, stainless-steel elevator from which our view of Queen Anne Hill receded quickly beneath us. Unlike the Bubbleator, the Space Needle’s elevator rose to its lofty height so quickly, and I should say so silently, that I felt my ears pop. When the doors opened at the top, I ran to the continuous, outward-slanted window wall that ringed the needle’s shaft like a 45-rpm record on a turntable. Elliott Bay gleamed in the distance, its ferries gliding majestically across the water to Bainbridge Island. However, when I looked directly down, the fairgrounds appeared small and insignificant beneath me. What really stood out was the gigantic belt of parking lots that circled the fair like Saturn’s rings. How disappointing, I thought. Even from our position in a near orbit of planet Earth, they looked dull and boring to my child’s eyes. Little did I know that in my lifetime they would be replaced, one by one, by a cityscape of blocky buildings that would amount to a full-size replica of the cubic topography in the World of Tomorrow’s cloud.

When I fell exhausted into bed that night, I dreamed of colored turtles, soaring Gothic arches, and flying saucers. Most of all I dreamed about the Jetsons with their robot maid, Rosie, and their flying cars. But when I got up the next morning to check on my beloved turtle in its makeshift terrarium I was shocked to see that it had died. Bliss’s turtle was as dead as mine. This was shocking for nine-year-old me, but with my current power of hindsight, I can only conclude that the paint on the turtles’ shells was toxic. ‘What were they thinking,’ one might say today. Wasn’t it fairly obvious that if you painted a turtle’s shell you were filling its pores with a poisonous substance? It turned out that the future was destined to be as shiny and bright as brand new paint, but every bit as treacherous.

Author’s note: Yamasaki’s Pacific Science Center pools have recently leaked so badly that the north pool has been drained. Meanwhile, PSC’s director and board have proposed filling the north pool with a meadow. If you believe, like I do, that the courtyard and pools should be restored and preserved in their original glory, please visit and sign up as a Friend of Yamasaki at https://friendsofyamasaki.org. There is no cost to join.

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Paul J. Korshin, 1980. Photograph by Roberta Klein

In this fourth installment of passages that I cut from my memoir, LANDSCAPE IN LAVENDER, my unofficial college advisor, the highly esteemed Dr. Paul J. Korshin of Penn’s English Department, unexpectedly invites me to dinner. To this day, I am ever so grateful to Paul for taking me under his wing and mentoring me, but as a naive undergraduate, I was unsure what to make of his attentions. Fifty years later, I’m still not entirely sure.

With a cartoonish “beep, beep,” Paul Korshin’s orange VW Beetle screeched to a halt in front of the Wynnewood, PA commuter rail station. After surprising me by inviting me to dinner, he had come to “collect me” at the station. Not sure what I had done to deserve this honor, it made me nervous. Yes, I was a good student, but so were quite a few of my classmates. Over the years, I have repeatedly asked myself what it was that Paul saw in me, without ever clinching it. Maybe he recognized that I was genuinely interested in what he was teaching, as opposed to taking his class merely because I needed the credit. Regardless of the reason, I had enthusiastically accepted Paul’s invitation.

When I hopped in the car, Paul took off at a rapid clip, regaling me with amusing stories about his fellow English professors over the loud buzz of the engine. After darting to the left and then to the right, we pulled up at a little cul-de-sac. We had arrived at Ten Arthur’s Round Table, one of a matching set of Tudor houses with half-timbered gables and steep slate-tiled roofs. What a perfect address for an English professor, I reflected—the very name was steeped in Arthurian legend. 

Paul led me to the lilac-colored front door, which was decorated with a wrought-iron peep window and massive ornamental hinges. Just as I was observing how the door managed to look at once inviting and imposing, it swung open, revealing the hospitable figure of Paul’s wife, Kate, whom I had not yet met. With her chestnut-colored hair swept into a ponytail, she wore wire-framed glasses and a large white apron over a simple house dress. “So you’re Brooks,” she said with a warm smile, “Come on in.” 

In the comfortable living room, sofas and armchairs huddled around a coffee table on a Persian carpet, under a high-coved plaster ceiling. The effect was elegant yet casual, which meant that it was charming as all get-out. Sitting on the sofa were a well-dressed academic couple that Paul introduced as Tim and Ursula McCarthy. Ursula’s large green eyes sparkled as she greeted me in her German accent. They must have been in their forties, although I really had no idea how old any of my professors were. As far as I was concerned, they were simply grown-ups, while I remained in some awkward nether zone between youth and adulthood.

Gazing around, I noticed that all the rooms were painted in warm pastel shades of tangerine, salmon, and watermelon. Beyond the living room, a wide archway led into the dining room, which was furnished with a long oak table and eight or ten dining chairs. At the far end of the room, a nondescript swinging door led into the kitchen. Kate led me on a private tour of the kitchen, which was large enough to form a separate wing of the house. As she pointed proudly at her battalion of polished copper pots and pans hanging from the ceiling on hooks, she explained that she was taking cooking classes at the Cordon Bleu Academy, in a nearby Main Line town.

While Kate served glasses of wine, the doorbell rang, and within a few minutes three other guests arrived—Father Reedy, a professor of theology at Fordham University Divinity School; an enormously fat man called Mr. Kirshner; and Dave Conant. Paul had prepared me in advance, explaining that Dave was an announcer on one of Philadelphia’s two classical music radio stations. This was the station that annoyingly repeated two advertisements with mind-numbing frequency throughout the day. One was a pitch for “The More than One Hundred Extraordinary Shops of Chestnut Hill;” the other, an ad for “The First Lady of Orientals.” Not only was “The First Lady” a store that sold Persian carpets, but it was in fact one of those more than one hundred extraordinary shops in the tony north Philadelphia suburb. Listening to the classical station, you quickly got the impression that the entire audience spent its time strolling up and down Germantown Avenue, all in search of the perfect tea set.

After serving canapes, Kate excused herself to finish the dinner preparations. As the kitchen door swung behind her, the cocktail phase of the evening slipped into high gear. Paul was chatting intently with Father Reedy in one corner of the living room, and soon I found myself face to face with Dave Conant, with absolutely nothing to say. Tongue-tied, I finally blurted out, “So...I hear you’re a DJ.”  At this, Mr. Conant leaned backwards slightly, then drew his chin up as high as he could manage.

 “I am not a DJ, I am an announcer,” he growled, clearly taking umbrage. 

“Um, well I know that you’re in charge of programming at W—,” I responded, trying desperately to remember the station’s call letters. Later on, I managed to steal a private moment with Paul, who was highly amused. 

“Nothing wrong with what you said, Brooks, he’s had that coming for quite a while.”

Surprised that Paul was actually proud of me for cutting Dave down to size, I began to wish that I had done so deliberately. In those moments of confidence, Paul’s approval felt like warm sunshine, just as it did when we were working in the office and I managed to say something witty enough to make him laugh.

Then again, Paul’s pleasure at my inadvertent put-down of the radio announcer only reinforced the intimidation technique I had witnessed him use on the phone. Once more, I found myself conflicted between basking in his approval and cringing at his elitist arrogance. There was something so well-bred about it, something that no doubt helped him achieve his goals, but where did that leave me? I didn’t want to go through life being a bitch to everybody. Still, I felt sure that he had my best interests at heart. He was not going to steer me wrong.

Suddenly, we heard the loud trill of a kitchen timer. After a short pause, it buzzed again, and Kate emerged from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. “Dinner is served,” she announced, and we filed into the dining room with heady anticipation. After indicating which place each of us should take, Paul seated himself at the opposite end of the table from the kitchen. Then Kate came in again, carrying a steaming platter. 

I don’t remember the name of a single dish that was served at that theatrical dinner, but each one was exotic and delectable. As steam rose from the fragrant, colorful offerings on our plates, each one an ingenious mélange of ingredients, Kate left the room again, the kitchen door squeaking behind her. 

Paul was well into a clever and witty disquisition when we heard the kitchen timer yet again. Immediately afterwards, the door swung open and in came Kate once more, carrying a plate which contrasted vividly with all the others. It bore a humble mound of unseasoned cabbage, with a few short and lean slices of corned beef piled on top. Poor Kate. She was maybe a few pounds overweight—only a few, mind you—and this was to be her penance, that while the rest of us dined on the ambrosia of the Gods, she was forced to content herself with a few bites of slimy cabbage. Her cruel and unusual punishment was compounded once more when, after two or three distinctive courses, each perfectly paired with wines personally curated by Paul, dessert was served. While we all feasted on a divine Kahlua chocolate mousse garnished with orange zest, Kate served herself a small bowl of plain yogurt. I found myself wondering if Paul ordered her to diet to preserve their marriage.  

While we savored our chocolate mousse, Paul continued to hold forth, as he liked to call it, on current events and scholarly topics with equal panache. After we licked our spoons, he glanced at his watch and announced that it was time to run me up to the station. It was precisely 10:30 PM, and with a little luck I’d make the 10:40 train. I hopped up from the table, thanked Kate, and jumped into Paul’s Beetle for the return run. Zipping to the station, he energetically shook my hand and bade me good night. For a fleeting moment I wondered if he was sexually attracted to me. An energy flowed between us that sometimes verged on an electric current, but he never touched me, and the whole situation was wrapped in ambiguity. 

The train took a long time making its way back to the city, allowing me to reflect that, despite having been in the midst of a fabulous set of A-listers only moments before, now I felt lonely and bereft. Unsure why Paul had singled me out for the privilege of dining at his home, and even less sure of what he expected from me, I was a bit shaken. Although grateful for all his attention, I felt unworthy, as if I were an imposter. Now, like Cinderella at the stroke of midnight, I was reduced once more to the bohemian milieu of student life. This served to remind me that I didn’t belong among the rarefied professors, but where exactly did I belong?  I had no idea. I badly needed guidance from an older male mentor—either my father or Paul or both. But I needed a mentor who ‘got’ me as a whole person, not someone who wanted to mold me into an architect or a worldly intellectual.

Many similar dinner parties ensued, each one ending when Paul checked his watch and ran me up to the station, where I’d rush to catch the train just as it was pulling into the station. The next year, he generously hosted my twenty-first birthday party, inviting two of my classmates to accompany me. At the party, Paul presented me with two gifts: a copy of Alastair Cooke’s “America,” which was currently a PBS television sensation, and what he called a lifetime supply of tabasco sauce. A lifetime supply turned out to be a box of ten small bottles. 

Just as he was getting ready to spirit me off to the station, he said, “Brooks, I have something to show you.” At that, he and Kate led me to one of the dining room windows. Lifting the blind, Paul pointed to a tiny cactus on the windowsill. A porcupine pin cushion, the diminutive blue-green object stood erect in its pot, rising above two small needle-covered spheres, one on each side.

 “You see that cactus?” Paul asked.   

“We decided to name it Brooks,” said Kate. Blushing, I didn’t know what to say. So was it true that he was attracted to me? And was Kate too? Did they honestly want a threesome with a lowly college student who was still, to his shame, a virgin? The situation was so ambiguous that it only added to my confusion.