F. I hate flunking students—well, most of the time I hate it. Sometimes I don’t feel one way or the other about it, especially if the student in question has been conspicuous in his/her absence for most of the semester. I find it weirdly amusing if said student shows up two days before the final and asks every so sweetly: “so what can I do about this?” At least it’s an easy answer: you can’t do anything about it. Not now.
Faith. Lovely thing, faith. Nevertheless, two and two still make four.
Faithful. It’s as good an adjective I know to describe my overall attitude to folks or institutions that treat me right. I have been on the faculty at SFCM for 33 years now; at UC Berkeley for 21 years. I have been renting this lovely Victorian house for 26 years. I stick around. I only hope that neither SFCM, Cal, nor my landlords were expecting me to move on after a bit, because they must be tearing their collective hair out by now.
Fat. I was nominal weight for my height for about ten minutes on a Thursday afternoon in 1987. Before then, I was woefully skinny. After then, I was climbing the BMI scale as though the hounds of hell were nipping on my rear end. I’ll never be that wasp-waisted, bird-boned guy who still wore a size 28 waist in his mid-thirties. Once my metabolism started changing, it changed fast. I wasn’t even aware that I was acquiring a spherical middle until it was tattily pointed out to me. Not that I really care all that much. After a near-brush with an early death due to coronary artery disease, I went through a period of daily jogging and maintaining a strict vegan diet. I lost weight—a lot. I was back to a size 32 waist within a few months. A few friends were a bit worried that I had lost too much weight, but none of them had known me back in my praying mantis days. I still wasn’t particularly thin, and I grew increasingly weary of the way supermarkets had become dens of suspicion and restaurants adversaries to be overcome. So I went back to a nice, normal diet and shed the gustatory hangups I had attempted to acquire. I just don’t do well as a food aversive; it isn’t my nature. Now I’m a 38 waist and definitely a man of substance. Fat. Not obese. San Francisco is a town of contradictions: so many people here seem obsessed with jogging and cycling and going to the gym and drinking gallons of water out of little squirt bottles, but they are also living in (and presumably helping to support) one of America’s great culinary cities. One needn’t wind up shaped like Orson Welles, but Karen Carpenter isn’t a particularly good model either. Moderate hedonism; the middle way.
Foglesong. People with unwieldy names should form a club. Inevitably a pecking order along the lines of my-name-is-weirder-than-yours would arise. Mine is not a truly intractable name, say one of those Eastern European jobbers bristling with z’s and w’s and hogging all the consonants in the alphabet. But I’ve had to put up with being misspelled (typically “Fogel” instead of “Fogle”) and mispronounced, usually with a short ‘o’ (as in the word “fog”) instead of the proper long vowel (as in “foley.”) My last name is more common than one might think, oddball spelling and all; there are Foglesongs here, there, and everywhere. I have an exact name-twin down in Carmel who has authored several popular books on transpersonal psychology. Columbia Records had a record producer, an Arizona TV station had an announcer. And let’s not even mention the various Vogelsangs and Birdsongs out there. There’s a Vogelsang in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. I remember a classmate of mine in Denver named Allan Birdsong who was my near-twin physically, except that he was reasonably robust and I was a rickety geek.
Foodie. I suppose that’s almost inevitable after the Fat entry above. At least I have enjoyed running up my BMI. Cooking can be fun and absorbing (sometimes) but even more fun are meals out at spiffy restaurants. I wouldn’t want to spend all my ill-gotten lucre on restaurants—not when there’s audio and computer equipment to buy and records to hear—but nonetheless I really do relish a fancy feed at a posh joint, price be damned. I never consider a restaurant overpriced if I have enjoyed the meal and have received good service. Like most foodies, I go through kicks and fads. But I’m still a Southern boy at heart, and I can be just as happy as a little ol’ clam with a good fried chicken dinner, or a well-made etouffée, or a spicy creole dish. That makes me an easy date on the whole, as long as greasy spoons and dives dripping with attitude are avoided.
Fort Worth. A city of my childhood, where we lived between 1961 and 1965. Fort Worth was, and is, a very nice place, a picture-perfect home town. It’s San Francisco’s polar opposite in many ways. But it’s almost impossible not to like, comfortable and safe and offering the amenities of a big city without all the hassle. And if you need glitz, Dallas is less than an hour away. It isn’t my home town, alas: the honors go to Houston birthwise, whereas emotionally Denver’s the place for me. The sad thing about Fort Worth is that our time there ended badly and we then entered a period of wandering about as my poor dad sought an elusive niche for himself in the insurance industry. He finally found it, but not until I was a senior in high school. For a while there we lived in a new city every year—Dallas, Bloomington, Indianapolis, Denver. But it wasn’t really all that long; in Denver we settled down, at the time we thought for good, although one last upheaval plopped us in Minneapolis. After I left home the folks moved to Chicago, and all the moving around was over. My mother passed away and my father moved to Denver, where my sister and her family live. We’re all steadfast stay-in-one-place types now. Of all the places I wish we had stayed permanently, Denver is #1 on the list, but Fort Worth runs a close second. I could have been very happy growing up there and returning from time to time to visit the paterfamilias. But it didn’t work out that way.
France. I include la musique Française in this entry. What is there to say about a love-hate relationship? Aspects of French culture amaze and inspire me; it produced Debussy, after all. There’s that wonderful French capacity for producing sui generis types like Berlioz, Flaubert, or Rimbaud. But there are all those wispy composers, the ones who (to quote Dorothy Parker) run the gamut from A to B, but who do so with every hair in place. It boils down to every culture having its strong points and weak points. The French are fabulous at food and wine and cheese and couture and poetry and philosophy. But they suck at music publishing, and when it comes to making cars…or pianos…well…