Circe

[The original Circe was a sorceress in Homer's Odyssey who cast a spell on Odysseus and changed all his ship's crew into pigs.]

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"Merry! Merry!" (Herself)

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Once upon a time in post-World War II you'll love living in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit U.S.A., what (POTUS №45) Mr. Donald J. Trump called: "our beautiful and successful suburbs", at the upscale commuter stop on the Metro North New Haven Line: Westport Connecticut, there grew up an artistically talented young lady, of a certain ancestry, from a certain amount of money, who had graduated from fashion school with flying colors, who thought highly of herself, and dreamed herself a free spirit in a light cotton summer dress blowing in a gentle breeze between her two less glamorous sisters....

But that was a photograph. In reality she had childbirthed two hungry little daughters, and had their fop father also to feed who was a self-important fashionisto artist wannabee not bringing in much money, so she had to take the commuter train back and forth to Midtown each day to earn a paycheck designing fashionable leisure clothes. She was good at this, but did not like working all day in an office plus having the 2 hours a day commuting back to housework, when she should have been playing tennis all day at a country club, etcetera and so forth. Neither did foppish hubby take good care of the girls while she was bringing home the bacon, because he was highly taken with himself.

Fortuna smiled on the young lady in the form of the big boss where she worked, a formerly nerdy jewish kid from an outer borough who had skipped two grades in the New York City Public Schools but didn't know his ass from a hole in the ground as far as real life was concerned. He had been sold the American dream and fathered three kids by a frumpy but higher SES wife who took very good care of the 3 kids and himself and eventually managed by carefully managing her days, to also go back to work in muicipal government PR, something she was good at. But she was boring, and the man had hormones even though the only organic chemistry he understsood was in laboratory beakers (he had studied pharmacy in college; he would have become an empathic medical doctor had not his clueless parents screwed up his application for medical school)

Fashion designer lady, whom I will here henceforth call: "fashionista" → Fashionista knew a good thing on two feet when she saw it, and assiduously all through every working day devoted her abundant energies to two jobs: (1) designing leisurewear, and (2'') designing on her clueless boss.

Being innately intelligent, clueless was not entirely satisfied with commuting and paper shuffling, especially after his company got bought out and he came under ever increasing pressure to cut costs i.e.: to treat the employees badly, which was not his natural style. How could he forever keep just saying no to the endless suggestive seductions from the ethereal free spirit💗 which his frumpy wife did not offer or provide?

Her relatives found out about it and advised him to take her as a mistress^[1], but that was too sophisticated for this now grown up nerdy kid from that outer borough. She got her man: He divorced his wife and 3 kids (with, of course, a big child support and alimony burden). Fashionista dumped her useless artist wannabee husband, and the two tied the knot. Under the spell she had cast on him, hubby-2 moved into her remantic little Westport arts and crafts style cottage love nest which was sited on a seasonal swamp, and he got on with his hour's commute to the office and back each day. And she got out of her commute and added a studio to the house for all the paintings of poolside scenes she was going to do after her tennis rounds at "the club" each new day of her now finally appropiate-to-herself-image life with nothing she had to do.

He soon lost his job for not being heartless enough to keep it at his employees' expense, fell into a deep depression due to having no place in the work world any more, and defaulted on his divorce settlement. Frumpy was well enough off to absord the hit and she went on to have a successful life as a small-time society lady with a special interest in things like Broadway Musicals which she not only enjoyed attending, but modestly invested in. Then she somehow married a lump who would end up costing her a lot more than he gave before he died from a monomania for playing Bridge at the expense of his health and ultimately also the mind he needed to play it with. Frumpy kept on going strong.

Fashionista now had everything she always wanted in her new life and it went to her head: she elevated herself to demi-divinity💗. Hubby-2 finally got a new job, at lower salary than in the fashion world, but still with the same long wearying commute on Metro North. Each day, fashionista would occupy herself playing club tennis, painting poolside still lifes, and smiling, while her hips and buttocks grew thicker, her breasts sagged and her nose grew more rosacean as she passed the years in irresponsible bliss and he continued to put in his time in his new office in Midtown. Each nite, when his weary body came home to her lair, fashionista would entice him to make her an alcoholic drink:

Reclining like Cleopatra, she would s-l-o-w-l-y raise and stretch her long, daily aging tennis playing arm with its increasingly but still fashionably lean sagging flesh, holding an empty drink glass in the hand and slowly rotating it to hypnotize and seduce him, with a coy, cloying theatrical flourish: "[Affected endearment withheld] ... a drink...." And it was the greatest pleasure of his day💗, to be permitted once again to kiss her feetbe her bartender💗 also he could make a drink for himself to help put out of mind his day's frustrations and disappointments (reiterate everything tomorrow, all over again...).

All the while, fashionista's family worshipped her, too: Everybody tiptoed around fashionists in fear of making her depressed if, if what? Obviously: anything that might depress her, so everybody catered to her every least whim and kept flattering her that she was everything she imagined herself to be. Either nobody saw her for what she was or at least nobody dared say anything if they did. The annual sacrament of her cult occurred each year near the winter solstice: a Nordic pagen rite of pretend reenactment of the Yules from where her ancestors came from (somewhere had been blessed for her to have come from the place) aka: "Christmas Eve".

As fashionista aged, hubby-2 aged too, more and more looking like he was in an advancing state of pregnancy. They travelled the world in his periodic day release from his unhappy job ("vacations"). He continued to worship his goddess (the spell this witch had cast on him was permanent and had penetrated deep into his soul) and she deigned to let him do so💗. He finally semi-retired and was sometimes better at playing the stock market than most lay persons, and they moved to Florida where they bought a house in a gated community they could not prudently afford and that was not a good inventment, to keep up her lifestyle fantasies, and she got to continue to play club tennis and he could play golf, including even getting 3 hole-in-ones on one or other of the gated community's two 18 hole golf courses. Life was good on creative accounting to let fashionista continue to imagine they were wealthier than they were. Was hubby-2 fully aware his financial situation, that he was kicking the can up the street and frivolously running down their heritable asests each new day? "Camp Granma!"

Having long since given up painting, she took up jewelry making for which he became bookkeeper and barker as one more service to dance around her to try to keep her from getting depressed.

After some years, fashionista got incurable cancer (nobody deserves that!) and died in hospice, attended by the devoted care of her two angelic daughters and everybody else in her social surround's continuing adulation and love💗. Hubby-2 was left stuck with Florida property he could not sell for what they paid for it because each new year brings newer "developments" to south Florida and why buy used at 100 cents on the dollar when you can get better new?

Frumpy's second husband, in the interim, had numerous health problems and suffered pain for which medications he took to reliev it interfered with his clarity of mind playing bridge. Going against doctors advice and having surgery to control the pain to be better able to play his beloved bridge games, he lost his mind and his health further worsened, and fortunately he peacefully passed away in his sleep one night after taking more pain medication.

Now unattached, his enchantress gone, old outer borough boy, after trying to occupy himself at home alone for a couple years, got an idea to approach frumpy (who was now also concurrently unattached), after all the years, and she took him back. He must have put out of mind the albatross hanging around his neck: the property in Florida which fashionista had enjoyed beyond their means that he could not sell for an acceptable price (you can sell anything if you mark it down far enough, of course). He got some illnesses which may have ffurther clouded his already clouded judgment, and after a year of so being underfoot in frumpy's big house, not taking proper care of his physical problems, clueless and helpless, he died of heart failure.

Fashionista's family continued to worship her memory💗. Frumpy continued to live her life, displaying keeping busy enjoying the life she had left, now alone again. Her family loved her, too, but she was not an object of idolatry. and continued to dwell on earth (loved gardening. e.g.), while fasionista was permanently enthroned in the sky, or at least her ashes spread on the ground around a small grave stone in a Connecticut cemetery with hubby-2's ashes next to hers, and a double entangled ring of eternal marital faithfulness of her design engraved on both stones💗.

Fashionista's fop first husband had long since snagged himself a sweet young lady who, unlike fashionista, was graciously attractive, and a far better artist than fashionista or fop, until she died very prematurely of esophageal cancer. I have no idea what the disposition of all fashionista's poolside still life paintings was, but life went on without her even if her worshippers denied it could. All of them will one day have died and, along with the last of them, her cult💗. (Or maybe she will be effectively forgotten sooner?)

The view from the side of the road

I have encountered numerous people in my life whom I have found disgusting. Below is a little Reader Comment I submitted to The New York Times newspaper to presumably be discarded, but maybe which could contribute to my dossier if I ever beg for political asylum somewhere:

People may not like this, but it's true. 
My maternal grandparents, peasant immigrants from Poland, 
had a little plaque on the dining room wall 
in their little 2 bedroom row house 
in Baltimore Maryland, which read:

  A wise old owl once sat on an oak.
  The more he saw, the less he spoke.
  The less he spoke, the more he heard.
  Why can't we all be like that old bird?

As a small child at maybe age 5 or 6 years, I was articulate. 
Nobody ever said anything to me about that plaque. 
They had asigned me the given name: "Brad" 
I misread "bird" as "Brad".

Not that it has done me any good, 
but I still remember that misreading at age 74 years, 
and think it was a not infelicitous error. 
I have in my life encountered many know-it-alls and 
smiling faces that tell lies, and 
my lack of flattering them has not endeared me to them.

The toxic introjects with which such people (especially perp school teaches, and my clueless mother) infected/infested my soul prevented and continue to restrain me from being even more offensive to them. They should never have been born, or, having had the misfortune to see the light of day, gone back swiftly whence they came (quote out of context from Sophocles), or, as my former friend [he's too busy for me in 2021] Tom Gee might say: They are all in need of retroactive birth control.