Ari Goldman - The Late Starters Orchestra

About a dozen LSO players came to the RTO concert. I was looking forward to showing off my family and introducing them to Elena and Andrea, who are both in their thirties, to Dan and Joe, both in their fifties, and to my older friends Eve and Mary and Adriana. But I didn’t see any of the older folks that night at Town Hall, just some of the younger LSO players.

As the house lights dimmed, the members of the Really Terrible Orchestra began to take their places on stage. They were a bedraggled group that looked like they came directly from the airport. Many orchestras perform in formal wear; this group came out in sweat pants, jeans, and traveling clothes. The only ones dressed for the occasion were McCall Smith, his hair wild but his bow tie in place, and the conductor, Richard Neville-Towle.

After an inordinate amount of time tuning, Neville-Towle raised his baton and the orchestra began playing the final movement of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture.” It seemed like the time tuning was for naught. There was a familiar melody somewhere in there but it was hard to spot. The audience laughed and applauded, but Judah just slumped in his seat. “They’re awful!” he groaned.

“You mean terrible, ” I said. “C’mon, Judah, they’re funny.” But Judah just sank even lower in his chair and pulled his sweatshirt hood tight around his face.

“Leave him alone,” Shira instructed gently. “He’s fourteen. He’s in the pre-ironic age.”

It wasn’t just that he was pre-ironic, he was like the little boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes . The RTO was pretty lame. The orchestra made a stab at one more piece and then the silliness began. Musical selections from The Sound of Music were next and the audience was encouraged to clap and sing along. Then it was time for Gilbert and Sullivan, with a Scotsman dressed in a kilt doing a rendition of “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General.”

Judah took advantage of the intermission by begging us to leave. He wore us down. He had just begun to ride the subways by himself — during the day. We didn’t let him ride at night, but he seemed so truly miserable, we decided to make an exception. We let him go home alone.

Judah didn’t miss much in the second half of the concert. It was more of the same. When the house lights went up, I thanked Elena for arranging the outing and waved good-bye to my friends.

No one loves a postmortem more than Shira. She generally can’t wait to analyze, evaluate, and critique after we leave an event. We even have our own name for it. We call it the “MacNeil,” as in The MacNeil/Lehrer Report, the analytic and rather static news show that was the precursor to what is now the PBS Newshour. But Shira was strangely silent after we left the concert. I thought she was disappointed by the program, but when she did speak she took me by surprise.

“Ari, you told me that LSO was a bunch of old people,” she said, clearly hurt. “Those weren’t old people. Those were babes.”

“Wait. Wait,” I said. “That’s not the whole group. Didn’t I tell you about Mary and Eve? Eve’s the one who looks like my Grandma Nettie.”

But Shira wasn’t buying any of it. “So that’s who you’ve been hanging out with, having cocktails with on Sunday afternoons, instead of me? Finally, our kids don’t need us on Sundays, and you bail? How would you feel if I found a new hobby and circle of friends?”

While I was going through changes as I approached sixty, Shira, eleven years younger than me, was going through her own.

Shira is one of those rare people who grow more and more striking with age. Relatives who apparently were underwhelmed when they first met her at our wedding often marvel at her beauty today. “When did she get so pretty?” they ask, as if talking about a child.

She was just twenty-two when we met, gamine-like, with chocolate brown eyes, raven black hair, an upturned nose, and the trim figure of a dancer. Shira is a raw force of nature, dark sometimes, sunny at others, smart all the time. The first time I met her, I knew this was it. I had found her. Or she found me.

Why was Shira uncomfortable with my LSO forays?

To understand her reaction, I had to go back to one of our very first dates. It was evening and we were sauntering, arm in arm, along Fifth Avenue when Shira mentioned tomatoes. “They’re my favorite vegetable,” I said.

“They’re a fruit.”

“A fruit? Are you kidding? Tomatoes are a vegetable.”

A good-natured fight ensued over this matter.

For younger readers, let me pause to explain that there was no Google in those days, no way to quickly check simple facts like the genus of a tomato. Oddly, though, I was experienced in disputes of this kind. When I was a young news clerk working the night shift, I’d often have to juggle calls from semidrunk patrons at a bar asking questions like, “Who won the 1956 World Series?” or “How many pounds are there in a ton?” In those days if you wanted the definitive answer — and you were tipsy — you called the Times.

Making a call from a pay phone — no cell phones! — to my own newspaper for this purpose was out of the question, but there were bookstores. And some of them were open late at night.

“Let’s go to Rizzoli and look in the dictionary under ‘tomato,’ ” I suggested.

“No,” said Shira. “Rizzoli closes early. Scribner’s is open.”

“We’re right near Rizzoli,” I said. “I know it’s open. Let’s go.”

We walked to Rizzoli. It was closed. Shira tried, without success, to suppress a triumphant smile. I let go of her arm.

We walked to Scribner’s. It was open. We headed for the reference section at the back of the mezzanine and pulled out the Webster’s. She was right again. A tomato is a fruit.

“Ha!” she said gleefully.

I was perplexed. Didn’t her mother tell her that men don’t like to feel stupid? But Shira never played the ego-boosting game with me or anyone else. She presented herself as a contender, right from the start, a force to be reckoned with.

Her will is strong, very strong, yet, over the course of our marriage, it has been my needs that have determined our family’s path. My career, first as a reporter and then as a professor, dictated how — and where — we’d lived. Each of these transitions could have been fraught with tension, but in each case, Shira diffused it by making the move into an adventure — and a joint project.

That was the pattern right from the beginning of our marriage. After our wedding we set off for three weeks of overseas travel, but we cut our honeymoon short because the Times asked me to come back to cover the opening of the United Nation’s General Assembly.

Soon after the birth of our first child, Adam, the Times sent me to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a year to study religion at Harvard. Shira didn’t simply “come along,” she began to write freelance articles for the Times bureau in Boston. Years later, when we sold our suburban home and moved into university housing in Manhattan, Shira took a job as a media specialist and discovered a new, if unexpected, professional calling. A few years later when I took a sabbatical to teach and do research in Israel, Shira came along, but not until she landed a book contract to write about the experience from her perspective. When, a few years later, I spent a semester in Oxford, England, Shira expanded her business. Her new business card read SHIRA DICKER MEDIA INTERNATIONAL and listed offices in New York, Oxford, and Jerusalem. That semester, she shuttled between all three cities.

Throughout our marriage, Shira and I have had a partnership that not merely included each other but celebrated, recognized, and prized each other. But, alas, music was not something we shared. Perhaps it had to do with our age gap. When we first met, Shira was a diehard fan of the Talking Heads and also loved the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Squeeze, Dire Straits, and other contemporary artists that made my ears hurt, with singers and groups like David Bowie, Cyndi Lauper, Duran Duran, Supertramp, even Madonna. She shared an apartment in Manhattan with a college friend and her Rastafarian boyfriend. One night I picked her up and she excitedly showed me an Elton John album — yes, an LP or long-playing vinyl record — and popped it on her turntable. Out of the speakers came “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” truly one of the worst songs ever written. I quickly suggested that we go out for the evening. “Let’s go dancing!” Shira said. Surely my idea of hell, but there was no resisting her or her sense of adventure.