Louis Roney: 'Pot' and Proust

• Last Friday, b.w. and I, along with our good buddy Victor, drove to the west coast of Florida and visited two great museums: the Henry B. Plant and the Salvador Dali — eminently worthwhile! 


• Marijuana: Having never used “pot,” my attitude toward the marketing of the drug in our fair city is negative. If there is urgent need that medical marijuana be available, wouldn’t it make sense to sell it at drug stores located in hospitals? Additionally, hospitals might enjoy the income.

• Almost all New Yorkers come from somewhere else. B.w. came from Columbus, Ohio, and I was an Atlanta-born Cracker raised in Winter Park. B.w. and I met in New York and, after an extended period of admiring each other, finally caught a cab downtown to City Hall and got hitched. In NYC we were “west-siders” — natch, being musical performers and realistic, down-to-earth human beings! B.w. opines that “east siders” in NYC are mostly corporate officials and business types —Dullsville!

B.w. and I probably never did anything the way normal people do. For example: when we went on our Florida honeymoon, we bought a house we didn’t need, when we weren’t even looking for one! (Don’t you just love nuts like us?) Of course, neither one of us was working at the time, but thank God we had both saved up a few shekels for dangerous occasions such as getting married.

You may recall that when we drove down to Winter Park so b.w. could see where I had sprung from, we did the craziest thing we possibly could have done — buying that house with lots of rooms, two stories, and four bathrooms! We were prepared to be a big family, except that I was already pushing 60, and b.w. was some 17 years younger. You may have heard that people in love do stupid things, and I offer our case as a perfect example. 


A higher power soon engaged me as a distinguished professor at the University of Central Florida, and b.w. and I capped off the madness by starting Festival of Orchestras, bringing five world-class symphony orchestras to Orlando each year. B.w., who had played in many orchestras for years, was to run it. Everything we did somehow worked — and we didn’t end up in debtor’s prison. Instead, by the time I was only 85, we were self-sufficient and could enjoy the many beckoning years before us, as well as the misjudgments that, looking back, we had camouflaged as virtues. 


• I had grown up in the heyday of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a man who converted a string of goofs into the longest presidency on record. Today’s political errors we recognize immediately as part of a present that we would like, in vain, to put behind us. 


Time is the most difficult of dimensions to manipulate — however, we’re stuck with it. The human race futzes around studying the history of a barbaric past, while trying unsuccessfully to envision the scary unknown that we must dare to face eventually. In retrospect, human occupancy of this Earth appears to be a long account of destructive activities bundled up into neat little books stacked in rows in libraries. But centuries of history are, in truth, a jumble of man’s inhumanity to man, a hodgepodge of immoralities without much rhyme or reason even as it unfolds. 


We talk a lot about logic, but when have we managed to string any two periods of logic together to make sense for long? It is the permanent unknown that spurs us on as it concomitantly holds us back, while we read Proust and try to rethink “Remembrance of Things Past” — times when we probably never even existed. The past contains our pleasures and our regrets. The future holds our unrealized hopes. A doctor feeling your heartbeat measures your present more meaningfully than you may ever do.