I sat in my seat, in a state of voluptuous agitation, of agitated of volupuousness,until my stop. Then I staggered out.

No patriarchal linearity here. We Greeks get married in circles, to impress upon ourselves the essential matrimonial facts: that be happy you have find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back where you began.

Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly lines. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: We've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.

With the birth of his son, Eleutherois Stephanides saw his future and continuing diminishment in the eyes of his wife, and as he buried his face in his pillow, he understood the complaint of fathers everywhere who lived like boarders in their own homes. He felt a mad jealousy toward his infant son, whose cries were the only sounds Desdemona seemed to hear, whose little body was the recipient of unending ministrations and caresses, and who had muscled his own father aside in Desdemona's affections by aseemingly divine subterfuge, a god taking the form of a piglet in order to suckle at a woman's breast.

Unconsciously Milton was adhering to the Greek custom of not saving after a death in the family. Only in the case what had ended wasn't a life but a livelihood. The beard fattened up his already plump face. He didn't keep it trimmed or very clean. And because he didn't utter a word about his troubles, his beard began to express silently all the things he wouldn't allow himself to say. Its knots and whorls indicated his increasingly tangled thoughts. Its bitter odor released the ketones of stress. As summer progressed, the beard grew shaggy, unmown, and it was obvious that Milton was thinking about Pingree Street; he was going to seed the way Pingree Street was.

At which point, my father jumped out of bed. As though he still weighed one hundred and forty pounds instead of one ninety, Milton flipped gymnastically into the air and landed on his feet, completely unaware of both his nakedness and his dream-filled morning erection. (So it was that the Detroit riots will always be connected in my mind with my first sight of the aroused male genitalia.)

I step down, Lefty doesn't. Instead, he drpos, cleanly, six inches into the street. Still holding his hand, I laugh at him for being so clumsy. Lefty laughs, too. But he doesn't look at me. He keeps staring straight ahead into space. And, gazing up, I suddenly can see things about my grandfather I should be too to see. I see fear in his eyes, and bewilderment, and, most astonishing of all, the fact some adult worry is taking precedence over our walk together.The sun is in his eyes. His pupils contract. We remain at the curb, in its dust and leaf matter. Five seconds. Ten seconds. Long enough for Lefty to come face-to-face with the evidence of his own diminished faculties and for me to feel the onrush of my own growing ones.

Whereas my grandfather was getting used to a much more terrifying reality. Holding my hand to keep his balance, as trees and bushes made strange, sliding movements in his peripheral vision, Lefty was confronting the possibility that consciousness was a biological accident.

Over the next tree years, the hard disk of his memory slowly to be erased, beginning with the most recent information and proceeding backward.
Chunk of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back.

In his mind Lefty Stephanides grew younger and younger while in actuality he continued to age, so that he tried to lift things he couldn't or to tackle stairs his legs couldn't climb. Falls ensued. Things sattered. At these moments, bending to help him up, Desdemona would see a momentary clarity in her husband's eyes, as if he were playing along too, pretending to relive his life in the past so as not to face the present. Then he would begin to cry and Desdemona would lie down next to him, holding him until the fit ended.

The boxlike room, stripped of all embellishment or parlor fussiness, a room that wished to be timeless or ahistorcal, and there, in the middle of it, my deeply historical, timeworn grandmother. Everything about Middlesex spoke of forgetting and everything about Desdemona made plain the inescapability of remembering. Against her heap of pillows she lay, exuding woe vapors, but in a kindly way. That was the signature of my grandmother and the Greek ladies of her generation: the kindliness of their despair. How they moaned while offering you sweets! How they complained of physical ailments while patting your knee! My visit always cheered Desdemona up.

Part of my interest was scientific, zoological. I'd never seen a creature with so many freckles before. A Big Bang had occurred, originating at the bridge of her nose, and the force of this explosion had sent galaxies of freckles hurtling and drifting to every end of her curved, warm-blooded universe.

Glory be to God for dappled things.

From 20,000 B.C. were still controlling us. And so today on television and in magazines you get the current simplifications. Why can't men communicate? (Because they had to be quiet on the hunt.) Why do women communicate so well? (Because they had to call out to one another where the fruits and berries were.) Why can men never find things around the house? (Because they have a narrow field of vision, useful in tracking prey.) Why can women find things so easily? (Because in protecting the nest they were used to scanninga wide field.) Why can't women parallel-park? (Because low testosterone inhibits spatial ability.) Why won't men ask for directions? (Because asking for directions is a sign of weakness, and hunters never show weakness.) This is where we are today. Men and women, tired of being the same, want to be different again.