Tom Hodgkinson’s theme about investments of time and quality of art eventually motivates our group to move on. We chat about different kinds of jobs requiring differential expenditures of labor. “Surely,” Barb begins, and I’m proud as she starts to speak, and I sense that she is surprising herself too. “Surely, if a person enjoys producing something illuminating like Margaret MacMillan’s book or beautiful to behold like the Michael Jordan on the court, well...”

Here Barb quasi-winks at Michael and a catchphrase associated with the athlete, “they should Just Do It, Tom. You have got to recognize the long hard work behind their creativity.”

Every now and then, Barb tries to bring opposites together with sentences or paragraphs just like that one above. On occasion, I also attempt to encapsulate and array the essences of complex individuals. Sometimes my rear end is handed to me. Tonight though, the troops seem to take Barb's mesh in their stride.

More importantly, what is this “It” of “Just Do It”? My wife certainly does not mean one should abandon morality and capture whatever one wants? I’m surprised. Is it her liqueur that's speaking? And what's behind that quasi-wink at Michael?

Our Order of Canada lady agrees with Barb on the importance of diligence. Margaret, however, underplays the hard industry invested in her own scholarship. She says History is like a big ramshackle house where important people meet periodically. The rest of us are outside looking in, curious about particulars. She makes it seem like the writing of History is fun.

It turns out that Tom, our champion of idlers, has been a something of a funster since his university days in the '90s. My nickel summary: he agrees with Barb and Margaret that we do need to value labor -- still, “a lot of the stuff [that we do] is not stuff we’ve particularly chosen to do.” Tom says he supports less hierarchy, less hectic lifestyles, and "mucking about each day. His platform is that it’s important for folk to have the guts to limit themselves “to a 40-hour week, not working 50 hours or 60 or 70. It’s irresponsible to you and to your family and friends.” In a nutshell, “You hate being told what to do – you hate the presumption that someone else can tell you how to live.”

This time he winks, and there's no 'quasi' about it, at Barb. Like Jim Lehrer says on the PBS Newshour,What's going on here?

Ready agreement about the pleasures of certain work emanates from Michael, who speaks of his “first job as a hotel maintenance man. Cleaning out pools, painting rails, changing air-conditioner filters, and cleaning out the back room. I said, never again. I may be a wino first, but I [resolved that] I will not have a nine-to-five job. Me and working were never best friends. I enjoyed playing.” Which involved creating his own identity in his beloved basketball.

Seeming to draw pleasure from Michael's account, Tom takes us back to his special, if disputed, 'handle' on creativity: “Being idle is part of the creative process...Ideas happen when you’re idle. You can’t have ideas if you’re working all the time. They come when you’re lying in the bath or drinking…or bicycling along the streets and whistling and raising their hats to each other…or sleeping, day-dreaming, [having] long lunches with chums, taking sick days whether one is sick or not, learning to fish…even [doing] useless things like bird-watching, sketching flowers, playing guitar in the home…”

Tom pauses, giving me time to start to free-associate. Often in my free-associations, I'm self-involved. It's a character flaw.

Anyway, I entertain a series of images in my mind. They're not about my creative process but about how I too want to play guitar, and in the home. To myself, I recall once -- before life intervened -- hankering to play the harmonica too. My next flashback, from a decade ago, has Barb telling me that these two instruments aren't related, the skills of the guitar not easily transferable to harmonica, and vice-versa.

For several more interior minutes, my mind reconstructs that particular scene, only this time I'm refuting her, I'm saying that Bob Dylan handles both, I'm claiming those two instruments are compatible. So there Barb, so there.

OK, that rebuttal minimizes the genius of Dylan. (We should invite him to dinner sometime.)

That claim of the instruments' compatibility is one I never was able to voice. My comeback didn't dawn on me until several weeks after Barb's remark, too tardy for effective deployment.

Now Michael and Margaret are verbalizing more of their reactions to Tom's notions about creativity.

Tom is saying he's recently taken up ukulele.

I fade out from the word-flow again and focus on that harpsichord sitting in our living room. Friends of ours, not having space at their downsized place these days, gave or loaned us their harpsichord. (Hope it's a gift. You could say it completes the room.)

Pity is, I can't read music, hardly knowing the speed difference between a hollow note and a black one. Worse yet, I now lack the lifetime ahead for the practice that it'd take to become proficient at any musical instrument. But hold on, who says I have to be proficient?

Time to take up the ukulele.

Lisa Kudrow's good at drawing out others. She muses whether, similar to Art Fry and Spence Silver at 3M in Minnesota, Jack Kilby had a revelatory experience en route to his invention.

Jack recalls that he'd placed all the components on a single slab of germanium (“Not the green-and-red plant kind?” Lisa intervenes), wiring them together by hand. Barely five months later, Robert Noyce, another U.S. inventor working separately from Jack, supervised the design of a smaller, easier-to-mass-produce single circuit on a chip of silicon (“Not the breast kind?” I intervene). Jack nods, “We worked hard together to achieve commercial acceptance for integrated circuits.”

In what may pass as sagacity, I nod. As if I even had a rickety grasp of circuit workings.

Jack is prodded to note that his interest evolved from childhood: “My dad ran a power company that served a wide area in rural Kansas, and he used amateur radio in his work. I found it very interesting. In fact, it was during an ice storm during my teens, when customers throughout his area lost power, that I first saw how radio –- and by extension, electronics –- could really impact people’s lives.” The rest of us precisely understand what Jack's taking about: Radio as Lifeline, a bringer-together of people. Perhaps we’re all radio folk.

Tim Berners-Lee is speaking now of his early years and his love for electronics. His parents were programmers for one of England’s first commercial computers. Berners and Lee encouraged their son to play games with imaginary numbers at their breakfast table. He made ‘pretend’ computers out of cardboard boxes and five-hole paper tape.

That was about the time, Lisa says, colossus of art Picasso was saying “Computers are useless –- they only give you answers.” Hah!

At Oxford in the ‘70s, Tim built his first computer. He used a soldering iron, an old TV set, and –- for all I know -- one of Jack’s integrated circuits. One impetus, Tim admits, was that his hacking led Oxford to ban him from the university’s PCs.

"Ohhh, Oggsford!" Lisa qua Phoebe comically mispronounces Oxford like that character in Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby.

I feel good about Barb and I placing ourselves in the company of these folk. Our tone isn't like a tenth-year high school reunion, but I see outcroppings of conviviality.

Preparation for Jack Kilby’s ‘Eureka’ came in part from university studies. “I graduated in 1947, just one year before Bell Labs announced the invention of the transistor. It meant that my vacuum-tube classes were about to become obsolete.”

Jack recalls that the bulky, fragile, fickle, power-gobbling vacuum tubes could not enhance any significant evolution of computers, but the point-contact transistor “offered great opportunities to put my Physics studies to good use.” The transistor’s developers at Bell Labs earned Nobel Prizes in 1956. Robert Gibney, a Metallurgist/Physical Chemist who helped develop their configurations of crystals, was not a winner.

Turns out, those awards are limited to no more than three persons in one field at any one time. Gibney had been key in the “miracle month” of 1947 that culminated in the transistor's invention. Lisa Kudrow points out that Rosalind Franklin too may have deserved a Nobel in 1962 (like Watson, Crick, and Wilkins) for her work pointing to the structure of DNA.

The exclusions of Gibney and Franklin somehow flabbergast me. I am all for giving them Nobels now, on the spot. Posthumously (which also is disallowed).

Not to put too tangential a point on it, I am also for recognition of those family members who have to put up with absent Laureates during those miracle months of theirs when they are chasing big discoveries. Lisa and I are wired for empathy and so we lift our glasses in support of all those discoverers' overlooked wives and children. We feel sorry too for those men in those crunch times -- they may have their soaring career trajectories, but often they miss out on chances to enjoy and help guide their families.

(Of course, talk about people who miss out! Just yesterday, December 6, we commemorated those 14 very young women shot dead at a Montreal university in 1989. Yesterday was an international day of remembrance and of female solidarity. That weighs on me still.)

I would like to be a post-feminist, encouraging and supportive, avoiding the gender wars and divisive male-bashing of certain Boomers. But am I now being a Trouble-Maker to ask our guests about Scientists ducking out of domestic responsibilities while tracking down professional mysteries? Am I going overboard tonight in championing the left-behind wives of young professional guys who hole-up for 14-hour workdays?

Excited, I am really on a roll for the just society and the sisterhood, I add that women are still outsiders in Science, Technology, Law, Investment, Architecture, Politics, Aerospace, Corporate Boards, and Evolutionary Biology. Men in those fields miss out on chances to...oh, I said that already.

Men around the table rebut: my perceptions are off-base, without empirical support. High proportions of their breed are indeed excellent husbands and fathers, even fathers and husbands of excellent Scientists. My sweeping correlation of hard-working Scientists with absentee fathers/husbands fails to explain Cause.

They blather so. About how it's now an exception for scientists to 'forget' about their families. About Scientists being excellent outside their labs -- at Frisbee, chess, diaper-changing, picking up their infants’ toys, showing-up to watch their kids play baseball, beer-drinking, playing tuba, and so forth.

In fact, except for Lisa, every guy down-table cites a different pastime that dedicated Scientists do marvelously. Talking almost like feminists (Third Wave), the men claim women’s “situatedness” in Science is advancing: that there are "more women in more labs" undercuts my “passé narrative of exclusion.”

Whoa, Nelly! I have just learned never to ask Scientists and Inventors about their boys’ clubs. They gloss over the gendered nature of their organizations.

“Well," I rest my case, "Here's to more husbands accompanying their Prize-winning wives to Nobel ceremonies."

Rick asks me to pass the gravy.

Hu Jintao pours cream into his tea, stirs it, and says that yes, things are working out. ”On the whole, the opportunities outweigh the challenges.” Greater democracy is on the horizon inside the Party, with more candidates than there are Politburo positions. But at present social democracy can not usher in the gross domestic product that China needs for its hikes in people-oriented welfare. Accordingly, considerable faith is placed on revving-up in the country’s dynamic private sector: its entrepreneurs are demonstrating how newly efficient and profitable products or processes can elevate the entire economy. The state sector is certainly no slouch either, for it has produced Fortune 500 companies that list their shares abroad, thereby giving the Party a voice in global capital markets. State-owned enterprises now have stakes in global stability: they have been acquiring foreign companies for commercial purposes. Hu also cites technology -- and he explicitly values the world-wide-web invention of our last-month guest Tim Berners-Lee -- as a force for economic, social, and political change in China.

Silently I wonder if Hu regards that electronic force as a socio-political boon or bane.

Lu Freud, still on an economic theme, subsequently asks how the savings of Chinese play out in the country's evolution. Hu agrees his countrymen are prodigious savers. It is a point of pride for many Chinese to cheap out (my term, not Hu's). They track down the good deal and thus economize.

The country’s banks are awash with household accounts (some $2.25 trillion, Hu remarks). Happily too, citizens now have access to overseas markets where their investments can help cool China’s over-heated, export-addicted economy with its double-digit annual growth.

Silently I wonder if that remarkable economy, and the U.S. teetering economy, will go bust this new year.

State-owned enterprises also have stakes in global stability, Hu is saying now. They have been acquiring companies in other countries for commercial purposes. Avoiding extremes, Hu uses the neutral word ‘acquire’ rather than the provocative verb ‘take-over.’

I am not sure that Elisabeth Lloyd is satisfied that Hu has answered her timetable question about democracy, but she does give him some slack. I do too, even though a small paranoid voice in me wonders about overseas acquisitions by foreign countries’ state-owned enterprises. Will those takeovers geopolitically affect the security of nations whose business are taken-over?

And what about China's modernizing military and its foreign assertiveness, plus its efforts to buy up much of the world's oil and gas? How about that, Mr. Prez?

Right now, however, none of us want to spend time and energy arguing with the Paramount Leader.

I am interested to see that Hu does not talk, like his more flamboyant predecessors, about Marxism and anti-imperialist struggles. Rather, he speaks of China's peaceful rise and of overcoming the scarcities that evolve as cities, farms, industries, and state businesses compete for ground water. That shortage, he reminds us, is part of the complex larger picture where state-owned companies and provincial and city governments all compete against one another.

What is more -- and here we get a troubled tone from Hu -- 70 percent of the publicly traded companies are worthless. The banking systems have up to 1 trillion dollars in bad loans. The President quotes his Premier, Wen Jiabao: “The growth in the economy is unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable."

Freud and Lloyd, whose last names could be the last words of a rhyming couplet, admire the Chinese leaders’ honesty. They strike me as truth-tellers themselves.

I could be misreading Elisabeth, but I also detect a wariness about all politicians’ claims of what happening or not happening.

Now Elisabeth is pondering aloud about the stability of families in the country’s rush to materialism and commercialism. Because parents work so hard to get ahead and make money, do they have much time and energy to nurture their only child? Hu replies that these families do have problems and that a growth industry in the service sector is psychological counseling for families.

Hearing that, Lu lets out a roar and a toss of his head. Although not directly deprecating his paternal grandfather Sigmund’s transformative analyses, Lu indicates that psychological counseling and hand-holding nurturing are definitely not his (Lu’s) style.

Oh my. Lu does not formally recognize his offspring until they are adult…

Like countless women before, Elisabeth Lloyd and Barb appear to find this Lucian Freud bloke fascinating. Damn, they hang on his words. Hu Jintao notices too. Why is it that chaps in the arts fascinate women? Is it the excitement and challenge of their roguish, unpredictable personalities? Do wild chaps bring out the rebels lurking in women?

Thirty or more years ago, I remember Barb wearing a certain smile when she once observed from a distance (in a second balcony) that Zubin Metha, the conductor, was ‘Sexy.’ I think she’s smiling like that at Lucian now, from up-close.

Lucian picks up on sensory data fast, and if at this instant he were to ‘do’ his host, he’d paint me a jealous green.

Most likely in Lucian’s case, the attraction is his glorious output. Yes, that must be it.

Definitely the allure is not his input, all those supremely long stretches introspecting his subjects, standing at his easel day after day, with his models laying on a couch, perhaps even his Grandfather’s couch. Lucian takes time out for the artist & model meals that he cooks. With drive and focus like that, who could hang out in cafes with family or friends (isn’t that what visual artists do?)

We learn, however, that one way that Lucian does connect with his daughters is to paint them many times, perhaps in bathrobes. The pictures are benign and paternal, and in his clinical and visceral style.

Oh my, how far have I come, from a fairly straight-laced, small-town, un-bohemian upbringing. Now I am conversing politely with near-strangers about female and male pathways, and about uterine upsucks of sperm through which female orgasms contract to aid conception.

And oh yes. Elisabeth Lloyd reminds Hu Jintao that the evolutionists’ upsuck theory is not substantiated.

What next?

Many of Lu Freud's very human models, pictured intimately on sofas or sprawled across a floor or couch, are beautiful women. Some of them have become lovers and mothers of his children, said to number between 14 and 40. (He is, as he acknowledges, a great absentee father of the age.)

(Unlike Larry Rivers, the avant-garde painter of New York’s ‘50s and ‘60s, Lu however has not painted a nude of his mother-in-law or his mistresses’ mothers…I’ll tell you one thing: my superlative son-in-law, Phil, is no painter. Even if he were and even if he were as as Byronic as Lu Freud is, I can tell you I would not pose naked for him…)

Joan of Arc’s mention of a trial darkens our party’s tone, provoking Billy Graham to draw back and Bob Geldof to furrow a brow or two. No one intrudes with questions about Joan’s trial, her trial’s outcome, or her present ‘nurturing’ relationship with the Francois kid. Those questions hang in the air. We’re silent because, well, because now Joan is beatific as she comes clean with us. She’s definitely not playing the victim to us friends in this room.

(Query to self: is the kid adopted? Francois sorta looks like her, only pudgy. I’m pretty certain no reference to him appears in biographies about Joan.)

Barb, habitually uneasy about prolonged silences at dinner parties, rushes into the void and attempts a smooth transition. She's saying: “Oh my, that is most interesting, Joan....Such an adorable baby too, and so well-behaved...Lucky Francois, Lucky Joan...Now, as we were saying about Paula...” That’s the core of Barb’s pivot of the room’s conversation -- only Barb is less abrupt, far more voluble and endearing.

No objection arising (even from Joan), Barb recalls that Bob Geldof’s ex-wife was a blonde, glamorous, and high-spirited music journalist. Bob produced a TV show where Paula was known for her ‘on-the-bed’ interviews. (That’s not something I see Joan or Barb doing.) Barb further reports that Paula and Bob had three daughters, each with a distinctive name.

(Because Barb and I have three kids, each with an ancestral first name, we savour this adjective ‘distinctive.’ It’s better than the demeaning ‘Such unusual names!’ reactions we used to get back when they were still at home and we would introduce them.)

Bob takes up his story from there. He shares various winsome qualities of Fifi Trixibelle Geldof, Peaches Honeyblossom Geldof, and Little Pixie Geldof. Following the early deaths of Paula and her second husband, Bob went to court and became the legal guardian of Tiger Lily Hutchence, so she could be raised with her half-sisters.

At that, there’s a decided lighten-up in Joan’s grimaces at Bob.

Even Barb, sometime observer of pop culture, is in the proverbial dark, though, about that earlier ‘Breakfast Bob’ tag. The rest of us are too. Bob says he has better things to do with his life than talk about that incarnation. Abrupt?

Boomtown Rats? No one speaks up about Bob’s fore-mentioned association with those varmints either. “Were you doing slum clearance?” Billy chuckles. “Nah,” Bob comes back, “I leave redevelopment to you.”

Barb announces that ‘Boomtown Rats’ was the name of his first rock/punk band in England (funny that she knows about that: it’s not her type of music). The name comes from a line in a Woodie Guthrie song.

We are reproached by Barb for not realizing that Bob later organized a more famous group. “In 1984, his Band Aid was a tip-top group of British and Irish pop & rock musicians who recorded a poignant Christmas song.”

Yes, now of course, I remember. Last month I’d seconded Barb’s initiative to invite Bob tonight -- but that was because of my great admiration for Bob’s concerts, the ones to raise money for African relief. I had plum forget that those concerts’ precursors were the Rats and Bob’s song, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” Sure, vaguely I knew about them as sparky parts of pop culture. Yet up to this moment, I‘d never made the link between that Christmas song and Live Aid’s concert. I was real busy in 1984.

You know how it is with us septuagenarians from the Silent Generation. We remember and then blather on and on about the screwiest things. For a spell now, I wallow about “Do They Know?” being a titanic hit as a single. Three million copies sold. An unprecedented 96 pence for each record for aid relief.

(It’s true, it’s crass: once I too would’ve liked to have had a hit single -- even without proceeds going to provide relief. A dream every kid has when twelve years old? I’ve easily moved away from that dream, but you know, I wouldn’t mind singing at least once in a karaoke bar somewhere. You too?)

UPDATE, a fact that I had to look up: In the ‘90s, Breakfast Bob was a popular program of Bob’s TV production company.

During our tour, James Dean is impressed that our great room/open kitchen has replaced our formal dining room.* James is unaware that such restyled spaces are common these days. Nor does he truly grasp the role that feminism has played in this domestic reconfiguration. James looks uncertain as I bring him up-to-date on this aspect of modern North American women.

Boiled down, my thesis is that the sisterhood no longer wants to be servants in their own homes. We have had it with carting foods back and forth from our kitchens to separate dining rooms. It is not fair for us to absent ourselves from other diners, whether family members or guests. Kitchen parties are ‘in.’

“I like the way you let it all hang out,” says James, waving at the dirty dishes, pots, and measuring cups, looming on our countertop and horribly visible from the dining table.

By our fridge, James asks if he can have some milk “to coat my stomach if we’re going to do some serious drinking.” He chugalugs straight out of our big carton of 1 percent skim, wiping his mouth with his shirtsleeve. The only other person I have seen drink straight from a pitcher is one of Rick’s colleagues. He was on a panel at a conference and he did not dribble like James does now.

Thank goodness our second floor approaches tidiness. The bed is made. No underwear is on the floor. He does not notice the cobwebs in the corners.

In Rick’s den, James bends over to study the five people huddled together in our family portrait, one son with braces showing. That photograph sits upright on the floor because we have no place to hang it. James says he likes it down there, “all lonely.” The picture dates back in the 1970s. James says he does not have such an artifact of his family. That comment hits me as a little self-pitying, but then James puts his aloneness in context: “I was a child of the '50s, in shows that treated the family as a tragic crossroad. That was just the Zeitgeist." He stubs out his cigarette in the ashtray he's been carrying.

I realize that actors seldom resemble the roles they play, yet I had anticipated more histrionics, more soulfulness from him. My impression is that James is not as vain or showy as Rick thought he would be. Also on the positive side, he inquires about our family and is a good listener.

James, I am learning, can be something of a joker. Like when he sees that I see the bottom of a T-shirt sticking out of one of Rick’s bureau drawers: “Don’t worry,” James deadpans, tugging out the bottom of the T-shirt he is wearing, “messiness is part of the human condition.” He peeks into our medicine cabinet and gives a vocal lift to “Ah-hah,” as if he expects to find shelves of Viagra. He congratulates us on having toilet tissues that can be pulled down from the top -- "You'd be surprised how many families have to reach around under the roll."

If this playful young man can keep his wistfulness in check, he should put a little salt into our evening -- or so I tell myself as we move back toward the LR....

* BACKDATE: For more on our kitchen/dining room makeover, see the final posts
here.

Chris Peters and Danica Patrick especially enjoy my second round of appetizers, zucchini with lemon-dill cream. Only 51 calories per serving.

Our guests seem so agreeable with each other that I hesitate to break the spell and serve the dinner they came for.

“I was not very athletic as a kid…,” Chris idly vouches at one point while eating another 51, “but I always loved bowling with my father…And I was always impressed by his bowling trophies.” He still plays on occasion with his dad and brother.

Optimally, conversation breeds conversation. Still standing by the logical site of any trophies that we might have garnered, James Dean ribs again: “I notice you don’t have trophies here [on the mantle], Rick. Are you guys being modest?”

In mock defense, Rick now alludes to an obscure trophy of sorts, the bookend with his name on it upstairs. Fifteen or twenty years ago, Rick was given that one bookend for speaking about Folklore at a Folk-singing conference. When conference organizers had invited him, they had mistaken his field of study as traditional music. Rick cringes at how badly his talk went over.

(That speech, sadly, was the first and last time one of our sons went to see Rick in his professional capacity. Even now, father and son live with that un-proud moment. That misfire, that mishire was not Rick’s fault.)

(For the record, what we do have on the mantle is a vase that this same son gave us from one of his overseas travels. I suppose it is a kind of trophy. It reverts to him when the crematorium bites our dust.)

As I dwell further on James’s playful taunt, I declare that our family does have a ‘status symbol,’ if not an out-and-out trophy. I cite the basketball hoop attached to our garage. True, our boys no longer reside here and they do not use it when they visit. I never realized that hoop was a status symbol until Emily Wellborne, our neighbor, told me so…

Glancing at Danica Patrick, Chris Peters has a recollection that he too grew up in the Midwest, and therefore qualifies as a twin spirit of Danica’s too. James Dean reminds us that Chris’s Ohio is not as close geographically to Illinois as his Indiana. What's more, in last Tuesday’s primary, the majority of voters in the Buckeye State did not align themselves with the senator from Danica's girlhood home. Danica says she treats all Midwesterners equal.

James laments that he did not have the close connection with a father as Danica and Chris evidently did. In his self-report, James was a storm cloud early on. As in his title role in Rebel Without A Cause, James might kick furniture in a rage. He says his younger self exhibited the same bravado, the same hopes and fears, as characters in his two later films. James says he didn’t wish to be called a “chicken.” He didn’t want to be outdone by others either.

James seems disappointed everyone at the table receives this information calmly, without commiseration. Ultimately Barb makes the familiar point that it’s natural for adolescents at some point to give their folks or, for that matter, to give any authority a hard time. “Teen-age-itis is an age where nothing fits. Usually they grow out of it.”

This sounds a lot like the mother in Rebel. James frowns.

“I recall," Barb says, "although I wish I didn’t, the green Mohawk haircut of one son, the parking tickets another son earned for the family car, and the repercussions of our daughter walking out of a high-school German class when her teacher said, ‘If anybody feels they are not learning anything here, they should leave.’ Still, those years could have been a TRILLION times worse. Actually, they probably were worse, but I have repressed those memories.”

Hearing that, I ache again that I didn't spend an hour a week alone with each kid. Just talkin' or playin'. For me at least in those early years, those times would have been infinitely more cherished than all the job things I was doing (or thinking that I had to be doing).

James is saying he’s still alienated, and that he can’t identify with adolescents who aren’t at least a tad demonic, obsessive, and misunderstood. He’s kept his grudge against his real-life father who shipped him out from L.A., when he was eight years old, to relatives back in Indiana. James says he was returned to his birthplace there on the same train as the body of his just-deceased mother.

This part of James’s autobiography brings clucks of rapport from the womenfolk. Chris Peters stares at the ceiling, either bored or irritated, or probably both. I refrain from asking Chris which came first, Irritation or Boredom? Or are those emotions even related?

Barb is the only tablemate who’s sympathetic that James never got to visit Paris. At least James doesn’t blame his Dad for not taking him there.

Usually but not always, I can ‘read’ most of Rick’s reactions. His mien is telling me that he regards James Dean’s stories and psychologizings as “sappy.”

Loosen up, Rick. I for one am gripped by James’s emotional truth and his wrestling with troubles. I have seen that depth in James’s cinema blockbusters. (I thought he was not as effective, though, in his last movie, Giant.)

“My father and I never reconciled,” James says, re-focusing on Danica Patrick, which is odd since she clearly celebrates her father. James names several people in the film industry who claim he simply played a truculent version of himself, mustering his resentment at his dad into his acting.

Out of East of Eden, which Danica replies that she has not seen, James treats us to vignettes of a son muttering and resisting a father who is more preoccupied with freezing lettuce than with helping his perplexed offspring. Out of Rebel Without A Cause, which Danica firmly says she also has not seen, James describes his character as estranged from a henpecked father. That father moped around the house in an apron, never standing up for himself. Again playing primarily to Danica, James says he had to explode on screen over that father’s weakness. “I threw him on the ground and started to strangle the whimp out of him.”

Danica looks away and munches on her dessert (banana cake -- I had used up all sorts of frozen bananas for it, with icing as a bonus). Then Danica stops, “People I know get along with their Dads well. So I could never fathom why Picasso said something along the lines of ‘In art, one must kill one's father.’ Yes, I know Picasso meant that metaphorically: the artist must reject or cannibalize the works of his or her predecessors, but James do you characterize your --”

“Not just artists,” Chris Peters says, citing Great sociologist Max Weber, Great philosopher Voltaire, and Great psychoanalyst Freud. He knows some programmers and bowlers who also are estranged from their fathers.

James: “All righty, everyone knows that Freud claimed all men suffer from a psychological disorder that impels them not only to want to kill their father but to sleep with their mother.” James is right, yep, we all know that, but I would like to ask Chris, Rick, and their moms whether it really works that way.

“All right, James," jousts the other woman at the dinner, "I’m afraid I haven’t had the chance yet to see your film, stage, and TV productions, or else I might know your answer. Freud's in bad repute now, so I have to ask, Did you intentionally pattern your characters on Freud? Even in the '50s, that would have meant replacing reality with an overly academic image, yes?”

“Every role is different,” James begins, tickled to be invited to respond to a question from Lady Danica, “and I did not read Freud. But during my one year in Hollywood, I was developing a niche as a confronter -- not a murderer -- of father figures. I faced the danger of getting type-cast, I was even looking into comic and singing parts. They were things I wanted to do that I hadn’t even verbalized...”

Leaning towards Dietrich, Anna Amalia lowers her voice, “My husband was very gentle.”

Anna Amalia asks if Rick and I are married, and when I specify that we are and that we had two sons and a daughter, she asks if we married once our kinder were old enough to be part of the ceremony.

Earlier, I had noticed that Kenny Chesney twigged to the mention of annulment. Now he says that after a four-month courtship in 2005, he had wed the Hollywood star, Renee Zellweger. “I remember coming back from the wedding and we landed in Little Rock, Arkansas. I had a show. We didn't have a honeymoon, you know? Welcome to Little Rock, Baby! Happy Honeymoon!”

Another four months later, Baby filed for an annulment, citing fraud as the reason. The couple believed that was the broadest of the available legal reasons that could be filed in her home state of California.

It must be difficult for dual celebrities to make a go of it. And then there is that gentleman's code, 'Never badmouth a lady.'

According to Kenny: “The only fraud that was committed was me thinking that I knew what it was like...that I really understood what it was like to be married and I really didn't."

(Allow me this aside: My Rick here is one of those billions of men who love being loved and loving, even in a long-term marriage. But my girlfriends -- we call ourselves “The Golden Girls” -- tell me about bachelors who are busy entrepreneurs, state judges, teachers, et al.) who are commitment-phobes. These guys also have shows coming up, always. They are happy boozing, working, staying up late, traveling, doing jock things, dating Babies-of-the-moment. The complicated relationship and lifestyle of marriage and fatherhood simply is not on those guys’ ‘To-Do’ lists. Like, Kenny has to spend months on tour with the 100 full-time employees of Kenny Chesney Inc. Hence I can understand why he has taken –- at least for now -- an Incomplete in Long-Term Marriage.)

Dietrich jumps in with a reflection on his own experience, much of it as a widower and father of three: ”I was rarely at home, often inaccessible. And when I was at home, I had to work [study scores, familiarize himself with composers as persons and with the times in which their work was created, develop an interpretation that is original]. I was subservient to this work. I was its slave…One tries again and again to scale back, to make adjustments, to fulfill one’s obligations…But in the final analysis, I don’t think it can really be done. You have to make the sacrifice, and unfortunately others are a part of this sacrifice as well. It is a bitter lesson, which everyone in my position will experience. I think the same thing has happened to everyone who has seriously devoted himself to Music...”

How should I react to Dietrich's lesson? Well, people (other than my sister who had to endure hours of my practicing) used to tell me that I could elicit mellow tones out of my clarinet. But now -- as happens most days -- I am glad that I did not seriously devote my whole life to music. I do not verbalize that opinion in front of our guests, though...

Over desert (fresh strawberries with port wine sabayon, a recipe from Barb’s Aunt Elsy), I proclaim, “I’ve called us all together to say how great we all are.”

Back at committee meetings that I used to have to attend years ago, that was a ‘laugh line’ I’d deploy. I’d make that crack that after some of us colleagues had over-waited for our convener to appear. From tonight’s colleagues, though, silence.

I get serious: “Barb and I are pleased to spend time with you tonight. Everybody has potential, yet you three exemplify folk who’ve profoundly taken advantage of yours. I’m not asking you to boast, but I'd appreciate if each of you could give us how you pulled it off. How you actualized yourselves.”

“This sounds like something out of a bad short story,” Jackie Robinson says.

From the others, nothing. Is that Strike 1?

I hadn't said anything about a story. I was simply inviting some 'handles' from guests who have 'made it.' To my brand-new chum, I muster, “A bad story? Jackie, how so?”

“Simple. You and Barb have brought together three very different people, from assorted cultures. Food’s good, we have our moments, and nobody’s stepping on anybody’s toes. For a good short story, though, Rick, what you need is a fight, a contest, a car chase, or something adversarial. That’s not going to happen here. We're too polite. Besides, you’re asking us to toot our own horns, which grounded people don’t need to do. Don’t like to do.”

Sometimes you don’t fight. You try harder. I reply, “You know how a parent always worries about his kids and grandkids, wants them to have the best guidance. Right along with Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son and grandson, giving counsel is a thing that elders feel they ought to do. Up to now, a lot of what I’ve told my family are tired old bromides, like ‘Aim high.’ ‘Save money.’ ‘Find a work/life balance.’ 'Overcome your flaws.' 'Discover your inner self.' 'Serve others.' ‘Dress conservatively so folk will be fooled into thinking your progressive ideas are conservative too.’”

Muhammad's interest had been egging me on in this litany, but he cocks a critical eyebrow at my last prescription.

"Anyway, chaps, I'm not asking for anything as ambitious or arty as a narrative about yourself. No big deal like that. I'm just soliciting a couple quick truths on how you composed your lives. How your careers are happy expression of yourselves... Is that too vague?"

Again, blank faces. Game practically over?

As Rick pours another red wine for Jackie Robinson, I wade in: “Our kids ignore advice. They are plugged into their own worlds. Nonetheless every now and then –- I admit, it is rare these days -- but they almost seek tips from people like us who have life-journeyed further. On many complexities, they are better informed that Rick and I are, but they also seem to almost want something pithy to ponder. Perspective. We do not want to put you on the spot for a long Perspective, a short one to chew on is fine. Our daughter-in-law likes “Food is Love.” Our son Michael likes 'The mark of truly smart persons is to know where they're stupid.'"

Perween Warsi, who evidently has been mulling, says, “Poor Lord Chesterfield. You know, his son didn’t follow through on his father’s many suggestions.”

That I did not know. "There is another thing you should know," I come clean. People our age like to sum-up, pontificate, pass on wisdom to the young. It is not too early for even you to come aboard the advice train."

It is a wistful grimace Perween wears, saying "Life isn't easy, so why should advice be easy?"

Agreement of sorts comes from Jackie: "Advice doesn't always help. Some element makes it pertinent for some and not for others."

“As I learned from my Mother,” Muhammad Yunus shifts in his chair, “with stories, you enter artificial worlds. Those worlds include accurate slices of reality.”

He has not given up on his theme. I thought we had shelved the story-telling notion. It is late in the evening, but Muhammad is glooming onto whole stories. Rick and I were looking for distilled wisdom, just that. Sound-bites, not paragraphs.

Why at this moment does it suddenly occur to Rick that he/we totally forgot to serve his potato/salmon soup? He was riffing about Sardar when the time was apt. Seeing the empty bowls still stacked on our buffet table, Rick offers to fetch the soup from the stovetop...

When I come out of the toilet, folk have moved to the living room. As far as I can figure, they are discussing the apt disposal of excreta. Proper disposal, it appears, can reduce diarrhea by 40 percent. Hand-washing helps further.

Frankly, I’m surprised the conversation has taken this turn. Not that the sanitizing of excrement is unmentionable in polite circles, it’s just that the subject is unexpected.

A little sheepish, I sit down beside Jackie Robinson. “Hey guys, look, I washed my hands.” I’m not sure Perween Warsi is responding to me when she says, “You need to be positive, especially when things go wrong.” I haven’t the foggiest how or if that maxim ties into what they’ve been saying.

Muhammad Yunus continues holding forth: “A latrine is a kind of rare commodity in the villages. It’s not available, so people go out in the open. Right from the beginning, we introduced one practice... If you are becoming a Grameen Bank member, one of the first things you do as a show of your good faith in Grameen Bank, is to dig a hole. And from now on, you’ll use the hole as your latrine.

“In the beginning, there was a lot of opposition to it. People would complain, ‘It smells. Why should we do it in one place when we can do it everywhere?’ We explained the risk of doing it everywhere, how that spreads diseases, and so on…But we promoted that this was the way you joined Grameen Bank…

“A few years later, I was visiting a village…a woman rushed at me and hugged me, and saying something…I couldn’t understand… In Bangladesh, a woman hugging a man in front of everybody is quite a scene. So I was feeling embarrassed… but she wouldn’t let me go. She’s still saying something in the local dialect that I can’t understand. [Then a local colleague interpreted the woman’s words:] ‘You are a great savior. You saved women from the punishment of Hell.’

“I said, ‘What does it mean? How did I save women from the punishment of Hell?’ [The interpreter] explained, ‘Because of those latrines that we built, because you insisted on it…Look, men can do it anytime they want, day and night, but women had to wait until the darkness of night. No mater what problem she has, she couldn’t do it anywhere because women are not allowed to do it. Now she can do it anytime she wants.’”

“I looked at her, and it really gave me something to think about. I said, ‘We argued about the latrines and so on the health grounds. We never even realized what a difference it makes, what kind of impact it makes on women in a society that restricts them from coming out of the house, and what a punishment it is for that person.”

My wife looks like she too wants to hug Muhammad. In front of everybody.

A ladybug crawls across the floor. Barb scoops it up and takes it outside.

I feel back into the conversation, and digress aloud with a years-ago tale our kids tell about how, once when driving them to a game somewhere, Barb saw an old turtle starting to cross a certain road at Okeson's Place. Barb got out of our car, blocking traffic both ways, and carried this member of a turtle family to the other side. When she rejoined the kids in the car, she had scratches on one hand. Barb never mentioned that to me, I never noticed any scratches or heard about any infections, and the story may only be apocryphal.

Lately, at Okeson's Place, I have noticed a new sign installed by the Highway Department: an icon of a turtle followed by 'Xing.'