GARLIC PHOBIA

I've been waiting to say this for a long long time. I don't like garlic in any form. I don't like it. I don't like to be near people who have been eating garlic in an elevator, or standing next to me in line. Remember Audrey Hepburn in "The Nun's Story?" She had to assist the dishy surgeon in Africa who reeked of garlic every day until she couldn't take it any more, and fainted. I haven't had it that bad but my heart sinks when I walk into a home as a dinner guest and a wave of garlic greets me at the door.

Now you don't get any support from anyone else in this phobia. Quite the contrary- friends tell you they can't get enough of it. One friend said she had a recipe for some kind of concoction with Forty (40) cloves of garlic, if you can imagine that! I have been served everything with garlic, eggs, delicate fish, butter, even once a fruit salad. This last was in a bank building rooftop restaurant in Phoenix. I don't think they really intended to garlic up the fruit salad, but their knives and cutting boards were just saturated with the stuff. It was years ago but I still haven't forgotten the incident. When is the last time you ever had a piece of virgin French bread with just butter and maybe a little cheese?

I think one of the reasons I can't tolerate garlic is because I come from a German town (Cincinnati) and garlic was not a staple in our house. I doubt if my mother ever saw a bulb of garlic, and it certainly was not big in Cincinnati"s German restaurants. Garlic was O.K. in the town's one Italian spot (Caproni's) and it was treat to go there - but that was where garlic belonged. Even then it was used with a certain amount of discretion, instead of total immersion as it is today. I have heard that the Queen of England does not like garlic, so perhaps it is not a staple of English cuisine. I wonder if Scandinavians like it - somehow I doubt it.

As for garlic supposedly being good for the blood pressure or whatever, I don't believe it. You probably smell so unpleasant that no one wants to get near enough to take your blood pressure.

There, I've said the unthinkable. Some very nice friends I know have the surname of Knoblauch. I think this means garlic. Please, Susan and Richard, think about changing your name!

DO YOU WANT TO LIVE IN LEISUREVILLE?

There is an interesting new book out - " Leisureville: Adventures in America's Retirement Communities". in which a journalist takes a look at what he calls "Age-segregated housing".
This survey of the Sun Cities of the country and how that housing segregation is affecting the nation's culture is fun to read. You can put all of your own praise or criticism of these enclaves of senior citizens into play when you read it. I have my own, God knows, having tried briefly to exist in a retirement community. I have also witnessed the birth of a senior sub-city in Arizona, and watched it almost kill an entire previously healthy school system, its neighbor.

First, what's good about it? Getting old is really a downer. When you are all together with all your wrinkles, thinning hair, hip replacements and the like, you don't feel so much a figure of fun. You can get a walker and it's all right. You don't have to see the bright eyes and smooth skin of the young, hear the new vocabulary you have no knowledge of- you are safe and secure. When you talk about "the war" everyone knows which war you mean. It's comfortable.

That is good, but what is the down side to the senior community? The worst is that living there engenders selfishness and (dare I say it) meanness in a large part of the population. Hence the fervid, cantankerous antipathy toward paying taxes. In Phoenix, for example, the local Sun City enclave voted every school levy down, time and time again. Finally in desperation the boundary was changed, and Sun City was put in a special and unique capsule, with no responsibility for any
of this community obligation. This reluctance to support schools is surprising, given that Sun Citians were educated in public schools and land-grant state universities, as were their own children. The attitude seems to be "I've educated mine, and that's the end of it." The author of "Leisureville" attributes this to a declining notion of community.

The newspaper's letters to the editor columns are usually filled with angry letters from the age segregated communities, a sad negative note. It's true. Part of it, in my opinion, comes from the lack of respect or interest in seniors seen in the outside world. When these people are clumped together in a segregated community, resentment grows.

What is the future of the senior communities? According to the author, not much. When you don't care about future generations, you don't invest for the future. It's a glide to the finish. Read this book, and see what you think.


"Leisureville: Adventures in America's Retirement Utopias" ( Atlantic Monthly Press) by
Andrew D. Blechman