Editor’s note: This commentary is by Jules Rabin, who came to Vermont in 1968 to teach at Goddard College and 10 years later shifted to baking bread in a wood-fired oven. He lives in Plainfield.
[I] live on a dirt road 10 miles from town, where cars pass at the rate of one in 20 to 30 minutes. I’m of an age to be retired from work, well retired, and have no regular reason to go to town. When I do drive in, once or twice a week, it’s an occasion for me.
Situated as I am, I’ve come to enjoy the confluence of people I meet and rub shoulders with — scrape shopping carts with — at the ever-busy Hunger Mountain Co-op in Montpelier. For me, coming from the deep countryside, the co-op has some of the feeling of a town plaza, a village square. There are people aplenty at the Shaw’s supermarket too in downtown Montpelier. But as things have shaken out in my life, I’m more likely to encounter friends and soulmates and fellow skeptics at the co-op than I do in Shaw’s, much less any other supermarket in my orbit.
In the friendly and cleverly confusing aisles of the Hunger Mountain Co-op, I sometimes become a voyeur, of children, a favorite species who are gone from my life now. I sometimes come on that one-more-new-baby being wheeled in a shopping cart by its preoccupied mother, she scanning between shelves and her shopping list. I have grandchildren of my own to dote on, and oh how I doted on my two daughters when we were all entangled and scrambling in our young years. But now, in my very old age, life has become what you might call dry of very little children. Parched.
So infantile beauty draws my eyes. The wonder! The wonder! … of those tiny beings, visibly awakening to the world … the world of other faces, most prominently … and on both sides: the old man’s and the little one’s … the wonder at it all, in the all-yielding long glance, eye to eye, that babies, especially, fall into.
And then there’s the beautiful occasion when the mother pushing the cart stops in full encounter with her little one sitting there, shopping list and the rest forgotten — just the little one, with the gaze between them of the deepest of lovers, with enchantment unbounded.
“There you are … again! You dearest being! For sure! For sure!”
Sometimes I have commented to the mother, using the license I feel I have as a 93-year-old — commenting on the beauty of her child, and the fineness of the relationship I saw flare up momentarily, just now, between them … that moment just now, of lovers in the state of renewed recognition, that I’ve seen transpire between them, in full public view. To speak so to complete strangers is an intrusion on my part, but I feel licensed to do that as an elder of our community — for we are almost a community, we shoppers in the safe and communal and familiar space that is the co-op. I think of olden times in Russia (not my times, but my parents’, going back to the 1890s), when every adult man and woman in the little community stood as uncle or aunt to every child, and might formally be called so.
And so I venture to intrude … to speak to the mother-I-don’t-know, and tell her the joy it gave me just now, to see her baby, and to see her with her baby, in that flourishing moment when she stopped her busy shopping for a minute to set eyes again on her baby, and regain for herself the fullness of that kind of moment.
Say “Oh, my!” for this sentimentality.
But you must allow it, let it have play.
â—ŠÂ â—ŠÂ â—ŠÂ â—ŠÂ â—Š
[B]ut I haven’t yet come to the point of this writing, which is the following.
I once — again in the co-op — extended that promiscuity of my eyes, to a grown young woman who was temporarily installed at a demonstrator’s table in one of the co-op’s busy aisles. A somewhat short, somewhat shy, somewhat plain-looking woman, she was dressed in the decolleté manner that is common now. With a tropism that is engrained in me, unrevised American male that I am, I let my eyes follow the fall of her bosom as she bent momentarily at her work, revealing more of her bust — oh, the beauty of it! — than had been evident when she had stood straight.
Well and good.
Or not so good.
What right did I have to eye — ogle? — her exposed bosom, even fractionally, split-secondly? I could have averted my eyes, or castrated my inevitable male curiosity with a prayer, or cauterized my general feeling for the female.
You might as well cover up all those nude Greek statues, from neck to graceful foot, before opening the doors of your grand art museum.
Display, ogle, appreciate — at the Metropolitan Museum, or in the aisles of the Hunger Mountain Co-op … it goes on, that endless life of the eye.
So where are we, where am I, a bewildered old man, in all this, in the age of Harvey Weinstein and Bill Clinton and Donald Trump?
Where lies the wisdom that draws a sensible and courteous line between admiration and lechery?
Well. So things went this way. In the same spirit, as I then thought, that I have allowed myself to comment to mothers about the ineffable beauty of their child, and the love and utter devotion arising between both of them that I have just seen flare up momentarily … I said to the young woman, half of whose bosom I had just seen, how glad that sight had made me; just the sight, in that fractional moment. That sight was a gift to the world, I told her confidentially, almost reverentially — that emotionality of my old age — and left.
But not before announcing to her my age as safeguard and permission for intruding on her privacy, and declaring and assuring her besides that I was way past the age of flirting or “intending” or “coming on to …” I meant or purported to speak to her as a person might speak on glimpsing the Venus de Milo. And I said to her that the sight she had inadvertently granted me was a “gift” to the passing world.
When she got the drift of my meaning, after the first surprised second, she acknowledged me, shyly and surprised. (“Where’s this old guy coming from?”) For my part, I needed to think that she accepted my gratuitous remark as an esthetic avowal, and hoped she appreciated it as an affirmation of the gift she was to the world in that plain hour of the day.
Well, this one-minute-and-30-second event that transpired, months ago, is what comes to mind as I consider my part within the ordinary mass of manhood — malehood — as the drama of big Harvey Weinstein and his wildly sacralized brothers in the big time plays out. I’ve done worse things sexually in my life than ogle that woman’s bosom and then mention to her the effect that had on me as … you know … an appreciator of beauty in all its manifestations, from fine buildings and bisons to bosoms.
Now unsettled by revelations of unbounded male lechery that have come pounding at us these last months, I think I was obfuscating when I spoke those few words to the surprised young woman in what I purported to be the spirit of an appreciator of the beauty of the human form. The sight of her bosom, it’s true, had given me a moment of glory as might any moment of sheer beauty perceived. I had felt inspired, it’s true with a kind of gladness resulting.
But I’m mindful, after all that Harvey Weinsteinery and Bill Cosbyism that we’ve been drenched in, in recent weeks, of the French saying, that “to speak of love is to make love, a little.” That perception makes me think that my 10-word ode to the surprised woman, about the sheer beauty embodied in her bosom, exposed to me as it had been moments before, was in fact a sexual molestation. “Why bring that up, Mister? Keep your unruly ‘aesthetics’ to yourself!”
I didn’t encounter those words, but I well might have, from a lippy woman.
Ought I have kept my mouth shut, and kept to myself my exalted ideas about that flash of life’s beauty?
I think so, now. In all decency I should have.
While I, excited by the poetry of the moment, had thought as I walked away that my words might just have gladdened her, as she had gladdened me, differently, a minute before.
Thought so then but not so sure now.