Los Angeles and Palm Springs

 I finished my second and last term on Morgantown's City Council June 30. Joe had a wedding in early July, a bar mitzvah July 17, and a bat mitzvah August 14. We were working on renegotiating our mortgage. We had a narrow time where we could get away. We were gone July 19 to August 2. 

The Centers For Disease Control said that, since we were fully vaccinated, we could go anywhere without masks and be safe. We discussed driving up to New England, but we both wanted to see our long-time friends in California. We decided on a week in Los Angeles and a week in San Francisco. Joe's credit card gives him points, and they have a travel agent on staff to help out. That took care of much of the plane fare. I booked hotels through "The Usual Chain" where I have points. We were able to rent an overpriced car in Los Angeles, but the agent couldn't find us one in San Francisco. I'll write a separate post about our week in San Francisco.

By the time we left, the Delta variant had shown up in the United States. Los Angeles County required everyone, vaccinated or not, to wear a mask indoors. We had to be more careful than we expected to be.

We drove to Pittsburgh to the airport early for a 9 A.M. flight. I picked up my carry-on bag, which was too heavy, and the strap slid across my arm, taking my paper-like skin with it. This was at 5 A.M. as we were trying to get out of the house. I bandaged it as best I could. We changed planes in Denver, where the airport was crowded with, to my eyes, more people than live in West Virginia. Both planes were full. "Social distancing" was a joke. They did ask everyone to wear a mask in the terminals and on the plane. Almost everyone complied in the terminals, and everyone on the planes. 

We got our car, supposedly mid-size, but actually a compact, which wasn't bad. Compacts are bigger than they used to be. I had booked a motel on Colorado Boulevard in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles, between Glendale and Pasadena. It's not a wealthy or Jewish neighborhood, but there's a mall with a Target and a Macy's and a Trader Joe's. It took an hour and ten minutes to get to the motel from the airport. The desk clerk said "You made good time."

The purpose of the trip was to see our friends, and we had mapped out a schedule for lunches and dinners for the week we were there. Many of my friends are from Beth Chayim Chadashim, the synagogue where most members are LGB or T and where I met Joe in 2005.  Joe was a popular student rabbi there from 2007-2009. I became a member in 1987, and maintain a membership. My closest friends from there are not Hollywood heavies, but teachers and librarians, mostly now retired. Joe's friends in Los Angeles are women who were in rabbinical school with him. 

Despite just getting in and being off by three time zones, we found out that the gay mens' hike in Griffith Park was back on (after being off for a year because of COVID), so we went. It was mostly the same people we knew years ago, maybe fewer of them. They don't go all the way to the top of the hill as they used to, and they rarely go out for dinner afterwards, although they agreed to go with us. We got behind when I saw my friend Meyer, known as Mike, an avid hiker and a Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh native, and we stopped to talk. By the time we got back to the starting point, everyone had left. 

I was worried about my arm, and Tuesday morning I found Eagle Rock Urgent Care online, and we stopped by after breakfast. The motel typically provides breakfast, but all they had to offer was a bag with a microwaveable sandwich, a packaged pastry and juice. We ate that one or two days, otherwise we went out. I had told Joe I wanted to see someone who remembered when I was a substitute teacher in Los Angeles schools, or when I was a bar and bat mitzvah tutor at Temple Israel of Hollywood. 

The woman who checked me in at the clinic was named Karla, and I asked her if she was from around there. She was and had gone to Florence Nightingale and Luther Burbank for middle school and Benjamin Franklin High School, before her parents pulled her out to go to Catholic schools. I told her she was probably too young to remember me, but then she said "I'm forty-two and I thought you looked familiar." She told me some personal stuff which I don't want to share here. I was happy that someone remembered me from my work.

We arranged to be in Long Beach by 11, maybe thirty miles from where we were staying, We met up with two of my favorite couples, Jonathan and George, and Stephen and Thomas. I was friends with Jonathan and Stephen when we were all single, but by the time I met Joe, Jonathan had paired up with George and they had adopted a child, now a rising high school senior, and Stephen and Thomas were together. We walked along the ocean in Long Beach while catching up, and stopped for lunch. Later on, Joe and I went out for coffee with my friend Ted, also in Long Beach, leaving at 5 P.M. in the usual traffic to get back to our motel. Tuesday night we were in Alhambra with my friend Greg, who I used to hike with in Griffith Park, when our group did a much longer and more complicated hike. 

I went back to the clinic Wednesday, then we headed to South Bay, near the airport, for lunch with Deborah, one of Joe's rabbinic colleagues, and her husband and two children. We saw Dahlia, another rabbinic colleague, Saturday night in Woodland Hills, in the far western part of the San Fernando Valley. Joe was close with her in school, and one of my first dates with Joe was to Dahlia's wedding. Their two daughters are thirteen and eleven now, and learning to talk back to their parents.

We spent Wednesday late afternoon and evening with Rabbi Lisa Edwards and her wife, Tracy Moore (not the L.A. writer whose work we've seen recently). Lisa was the rabbi at Beth Chayim Chadashim for twenty-five years before retiring recently. She picked Joe to be her student rabbi for two years (after we were a couple, or else it would have been against the rules for us to get together) and she performed our wedding. We sat by their pool and snacked. I would have gone in the pool but for my bandaged arm. Our friends Jim and Michelle came by. Jim and I were L.A.'s version of Akbar and Jeff, "brothers or lovers, whichever offends you most." We're not brothers and we were never lovers. I sang at his wedding to Michelle. He's still active in BCC. We visited at their home Sunday for lunch.

We took a side trip to Palm Springs, a place where many gay men retire. Two couples, Joe's friends from San Francisco, moved there in recent years, and my friend Richard, a now-retired college-level ESL teacher, also moved there. We spent one night with Dan and Jerry in their mid-century modern house, remodeled. They claim they have more stuff to move in, but I liked it uncluttered and clean looking. We also met with Paul and Deek, longtime pals of Joe from San Francisco. They live in Cathedral City, next to Palm Springs. Friday, we saw Richard, who lives in a large complex that reminds me of where I lived in Florida forty years ago. We all went out Friday night to an early service at a synagogue in Palm Desert (past Palm Springs and Cathedral City). The rabbi there graduated a year or two before Joe, but I met him when I first moved to Los Angeles in 1984, when he was probably just out of college. It was a nice reunion, as Richard also knew him, and he was in school with Joe. We stayed over at Richard's and came back into Los Angeles Saturday.

Joe loved Palm Springs, and suggested we move there when he retires, possibly in three years when his contract at Tree of Life in Morgantown expires and he will be almost 68. I have my doubts. It was 109 F. there and had been 120. I've been to Palm Springs a few times (twice before with Joe) and it's nice, I guess, but I would like a more "real" city and not a collection of resort-style suburbs. 

 I loved seeing everyone, and we're sorry we didn't get to see everyone we wanted to see. BCC had services Friday, but it was only open to board members; they were hoping to have the full congregation back the week after. We didn't get to the West Side and missed Israeli dancing on the beach in Santa Monica with my former dance partner, Reva. We missed Jerry, Gordon and Neal, and friends from Morgantown and Fairmont who live in Los Angeles now. For old times sake, we drove Sunday night to the Farmers Market on Fairfax, near where we lived together, and had dinner outside with hundreds of people. We put at least 700 miles on our little car in a week. I slid right into freeway driving, and I felt "at home."

I want to mention also the "ghosts" who inhabit Los Angeles, friends who died while I lived there and after. I still fell the presence of Sue, Sherry, Art, Fred, Avram and others who are no longer with us. I went through lots of changes in Los Angeles, and everywhere reminds me of something. I pointed out an apartment building to Joe where I rehearsed scenes for an acting class with someone I can't picture, an apartment building in Los Feliz where a wall crumbled in the Northridge earthquake, and I remembered the two young men whose names I can't recall that were in the performance art workshop I attended in the 1990s, and died of AIDS. 

I understand why we are strangers after nine years in Morgantown. We were 62 and 55 when we moved here, and people our age had lifetime friends. I was thirty-four when I came to Los Angeles and sixty when I left. From our temple, I had a community of gay men and lesbian women, singles and couples. That doesn't exist in Morgantown. I'm not criticizing our little town. I understand that people had their long-time friends before we got here, just as my long-term friends are in Los Angeles. 

I don't feel a need to go somewhere else to live, not even to Southern California. I grew up only 200 miles from Morgantown, and there is a familiarity (and familiar allergies) to what I knew in Baltimore. I guess my persona is split these days, and I can cope with that. I'm glad we got away and saw our friends, and I hope the world doesn't shut down again. 

                                             With our hiking group, Great Outdoors, in Griffith Park

                                             The view from Griffith Park across Glendale

          With our crew in Long Beach, l.to r.: Joe, Jonathan, Thomas, Stephen, Barry and George

                                                        On the ocean in Long Beach

             At Lisa and Tracy's pool. Lisa has the glasses. With Jim. The red on my arm is a bandage

                        Bagels and lox and fruit with Jim and Michelle in their garden in Altadena.

Great Outdoors

We've been at home for five weeks now, at least. Joe has classes and services and runs a  a bit of Sunday school. I'm working on a list of about 212 counties I thought might be better places to live than Morgantown. What I've learned from my list is that this is where we live now, and starting over, unless it is specifically in a gay retirement community, is not a good idea. Just today, I looked at Island County, Washington, county seat Coupeville, largest city, Oak Harbor. The weather is mild there, the current President received fewer votes than his opponent, but not by much, and Washington is a gay-friendly state. Still, there is no synagogue there, which is a deal-breaker, and really, we are not going to pack up all our stuff and move back to the West Coast. We are just not going to do that.

I attended a funeral on Zoom from Los Angeles last Sunday, led by the interim rabbi at Beth Chayim Chadashim, where I have been a member since 1987, and the cantor, a friend, who has been there at least eleven years. There were sixty cameras on, and I knew probably 57 of the people from my time in Los Angeles. I think the man who died, Bruce Weil, had a heart attack, because he had not been ill. I met him more than thirty years ago, and although I always thought he was older than I am, I think he was a year or two younger, so late sixties. He was an argumentative sort of stereotypical New Yorker, but also kind and generous. I found out that he had cared for a woman I knew in L.A, who was not well when we left town ten years ago, and died after being committed to a nursing home. I also know that he donated money to the temple for our anniversary a few times. I never would have gone to Los Angeles for this funeral, so I'm glad it was on Zoom. I loved seeing so many people I know online, my real long-time friends. We have congregants here we are close to, and there is a gay social group where we have made some friends we dearly love, but it can't be the same as people we've known for thirty years, and it makes me sad to be away from these people.

A lot is going on in the City of Morgantown, where I am on the Council. Tension between some of us on Council and the City Manager have arisen over a lack of information, and Council is being blamed for decisions we did not make. The Manager has taken a job in his native Michigan, and given  notice, and just this week, the Police Chief tendered his resignation. The City  is being sued for what seems like an exorbitant amount of money. Lots of work and not a lot of fun.

I'm teaching a class at Osher Life-Long Learning that just started, also on Zoom, about pop music in 1968. It's not the same as being live, but it's not bad. The people at OLLI have helped me with the technical stuff. If you want to know what I played this week, go to You Tube and type in "The Great Hits And Albums of 1968 Week One," and videos of all the songs should pop up.

We have been running to the grocery twice a week, although not all of the employees and customers wear masks or socially distance. Grocery shopping feels reckless. We picked up Indian food for dinner. I noticed that our next-door neighbor had pizza delivered tonight. It's the macho in me, which I have tried to kill off several times, that won't let me have people bring food to my door. I don't want to feel like an invalid, although my life will be at risk if I get Covid-19.

Today was the first warm day in a few weeks, and I asked Joe to go to WVU's Core Arboretum, on a hillside overlooking the Monongahela River about a mile and a half from here. The spring wildflowers, early this year, are still blooming, and we ran into our friends Zack and Annie Fowler and their two kids, keeping a distance from them. Zack is the Director of the Arboretum, and he pointed out an owl he named Aldo living in a hole in a tree. We also saw, masked, West Virginia House of Delegates member  Barbara Evans Fleischauer, who had a question for Joe about a program that might happen at the synagogue in the fall. So although we complain that we don't know people here, we do. I put up pics from Core Arboretum at the end of this post.

I've been doing a run and walk through the neighborhood, and today I broke a record by doing it in seventeen minutes and thirty-eight seconds. I'm not sure of the distance, but it might be two miles. Thee is one hill I can't (and shouldn't) run, but I can now run the rest of the course. I do the same course every time, and thanks to the changing season, I can see different things blooming over the last few weeks, and leaves starting to sprout. I say "Hello" to a few dogs along the way, all fenced or chained, and many of the ones who used to bark angrily at me no longer do.

So this is our life now. We still have an income, we can still pay our mortgage and we have health insurance. We had $2400 deposited to our joint checking account. I plan to spend mine to help certain political candidates. At this point, I think that is the best thing I can do.

Here are the pics from Core Arboretum:

Hard to see, but there is an owl in that tree

California 2019

What's not to like? We decided to be adults and stay in a motel, rent a car. We had maid service, breakfast was included, friends took us out to dinner or cooked for us. The rain stopped, as it usually does at the end of May. I glanced at e-mails about the water pipeline and annexation, looked at the Charleston newspaper, but not the one from Morgantown. Joe freed himself, at least a little, from his rabbi persona, and relaxed.

In San Francisco we stayed at My Usual Chain, where we got a free night, at the foot of Russian Hill and walking distance to Fisherman's Wharf. It's a touristy area. In Los Angeles, we stayed in Pasadena, where we have friends, but away from the noise of West Hollywood, the expense of Beverly Hills and West Los Angeles. Parking was free, but we drove 600 miles in a week just to get around.

I had several goals for the trip: generally to get away after the toxic City Council election, which I won by a large majority, to get Joe away from the crush of responsibilities, and his contract negotiations (even though both he and the congregation want him to continue as Tree of Life's leader). More specifically, Joe has a long-time friend in San Francisco who is ill, and I wanted to make sure Joe saw him again, and Rabbi Lisa Edwards, of Beth Chayim Chadashim in Los Angeles, who I met when she was a student rabbi, who mentored Joe as her student rabbi for two years, and who married us in 2008, was retiring, and the annual BCC brunch was honoring her and her wife Tracy Moore. So, a week in San Francisco from May 23 to 30, and a week in Los Angeles from the 30th to June 6.

We hiked, we danced, we saw lots of friends. I went off to the East Bay from San Francisco to see my cousin Eric, his wife Karen, their son David, his wife Julia and their daughter, not yet a year old. They all migrated from Long Island to Contra Costa County, and they had that look that people have when their life markedly improves.

Joe and I gave up lifetimes of friends to go first to Crescent City, which was at least still in California, then to West Virginia, closer to his birthplace in Buffalo and mine in Baltimore. For Joe, it was a career choice; for me, a chance to support my husband.

I learned some things that I can use as a Councilor in Morgantown. San Francisco planned years ago to cut auto traffic, tearing down an earthquake-damaged freeway and not building parking. People with money use Uber and Lyft to ride to and from work to avoid the lack of parking; tech companies run a private bus system while BART, Muni and the busses continue to crumble. There are bike stations around town, and electric scooters, proposed for Morgantown, but not implemented. I never saw anyone wear a helmet while riding an electric scooter, and although the speed is supposed to be limited, they seemed to go fast down San Francisco's hills. I would not want to see them here.

Homelessness is up in Los Angeles. Many freeway overpasses have people living in tents beneath them, a disgrace in a city with as much money floating around as Los Angeles has. A proposed school levy for Los Angeles Unified School District, where I worked for more than eighteen years, Proposition EE, which would have added nurses and counselors to the schools and reduce class sizes, was defeated while we were there. Rich people in Los Angeles don't send their kids to public school. People in Los Angeles told us the subways and busses are dangerous or unpleasant and they avoid them, which is too bad. There is now a good basic system to get around, and a new line is being built to Inglewood and the airport. While I have many friends in the Los Angeles area, and the weather is nearly perfect most of the year, it is a bit like in "Blade Runner," not an entirely functional place.

Many people in West Virginia said "Be careful!" when I told them we would be in Los Angeles for a week, but the only time I was scared was navigating the freeways in our rented Ford Escape. And maybe I was frightened when we hiked up Eaton Canyon north of Pasadena, crossing a stream several times, and, in my case, falling in once and banging up my already injured wrist. Lots of people were hiking up the canyon, even though signs warned us that it was dangerous. Most of the hikers were in their teens and twenties.

We met with two women rabbis in Los Angeles who graduated with Joe, each with a husband, a house, and two children born in the ten years since ordination. One flies to a smallish town in Texas monthly to be the rabbi; the other works as an educator at a synagogue. Both stayed in Los Angeles for their husbands' jobs. Joe feels they are underemployed, but I can see how they care for their children, and I doubt they regret their choices.

And I don't regret our choices either. Yes, we gave up a lot. Some of Joe's friends in San Francisco go back to his college years, and I saw when I first met them that they grieved losing Joe from their circle. I had several communities in Los Angeles, from BCC, from Israeli dancing, from Great Outdoors, a gay hiking group, from the schools where I worked, and the temples where I sang and the one where I worked with bar and bat mitzvah kids. I divided my close friends into two categories: "stuck" and "moved on." One of my gay friends married a beautiful and accomplished woman, who moved him into a social circle that was more appropriate for his own accomplishments. Another gay friend married a man, bought a house and adopted a child, now a teenager. My "stuck" friends never found the right guy, although they are smart, not bad looking, and financially stable, if not wealthy. I thought of them when I met Joe, how easy it would have been to say "I'm not leaving my life here," and then letting him go. I was old enough to make a rational decision, although there may have been more emotion there than I care to admit.

Beth Chayim Chadashim has hired an interim rabbi, a course recommended when a long-time and much-loved rabbi like Lisa Edwards leaves. Maybe after a year or so, a new rabbi won't be compared,  perhaps unfairly, to the former rabbi. Many people asked me at BCC's brunch if Joe would like to come back to Los Angeles to be the rabbi  in a year. We've talked about the possibility, and I know Joe has spoken with Rabbi Lisa. Sure, it would be easier to live in California: the weather, the politics (compare Shelley Moore Capito to Kamala Harris or Jim Justice to Gavin Newsom), the people we love and who love us.

But we've been in West Virginia for seven years now, and Joe is revered at Tree of Life, and I've been reelected to Morgantown's City Council. Traffic here is backed up for one mile on two streets, as opposed to being backed up on 45 miles of eight-lane freeway. Nine years ago, at sixty, I took a giant leap with Joe to move away from the people I knew; he had leapt five years earlier when he left for rabbinical school. As I approach seventy, I'm feeling more settled, and more risk-averse. Morgantown has become a much more gay-friendly place in the years we've been here, and we have helped make that difference, even if we are two generations older than the LGBT activists who are continuing to transform our town.

To travel across the country is hard now, and I don't know when or if we'll get back. I would love to be closer to my cousins, to see my long-time friends more often, for both of us to be more comfortable in our surroundings than we are in West Virginia. But Morgantown is our home now, and I can't complain about the people we've met, especially at Tree of Life and in liberal politics, where we have love and respect.

Yes, it was great being in beautiful San Francisco and Los Angeles with our friends and family, but I understand that our life now is here in Morgantown.

With my Polk family cousins in Walnut Creek, Contra Costa County

Windows on Castro St. in San Francisco celebrating the memory of Harvey Milk

Joe's friend Randy from college, his husband Greg with us in the Castro District, San Francisco

With our friends Glenn and Caroline in the Outer Sunset, San Francisco

Lunch in San Mateo with Joe's long-time friend Paul and his husband

Near the entrance to Eaton Canyon County Park, Altadena, CA near Los Angeles

At BCC's brunch at the Skirball Museum in Bel Air, Los Angeles

After a hike in Griffith Park with thirty mostly older gay men, Twenty of us dined at an Italian restaurant in Los Feliz, Los Angeles. Photo is with John, Mark and Rob, long-time friends, and Steffan (seated), a new friend.

With my long-time friend Jonathan at Dominguez Gap Wetlands in Long Beach,  Los Angeles County

With my Israeli dance partner of Many years, Reva at "Dance With  Orly" 

February Blues

The weather here in February is hard. It may not be as cold as January, but it rains and snows, and there are few sunny days. It's chilly. Both of us have been reading books that make us nostalgic for something else. Joe's is Less, by Andrew Sean Greer, about a San Francisco gay man turning fifty, an author regretting his lost youth, who takes a literary trip around the world to avoid going to his ex-boyfriend's wedding to another man. I'm reading Gary Shteyngart's Lake Success, another picaresque novel about a guy named Barry, his wife Seema (Seema was the name of my first and last serious girlfriend in high school and the beginning of college). Barry in the book leaves his wife and three-year old autistic child in New York to go look for his college girlfriend across the country. Seema visits her parents in Cleveland. Of course, both Arthur Less, from Less, and Barry Cohen from Lake Success have lessons that must be learned to find some sort of redemption.

Last week, a committee in the West Virginia House of Delegates  proposed a rule to annul laws made in several cities, including Morgantown, to add LGBT protection to the anti-discrimination laws. The amendment to the original bill (which would have prohibited cities from changing labor laws, like minimum wage) failed, but 10 Republican men on the committee voted for it, and one went on a rant calling LGBT people "terrorists" and a lot worse. This state does not have a reputation for being gay-friendly, something Morgantown City Council has tried to change.  There is a plan afoot to have a "gay picnic" here in April, and I went to the first planning meeting Saturday, where I was the oldest queer person (including all LGBT people) by several decades. It's been lonely for us, and, with the crappy February weather, the hostility in the House of Delegates, and our literary friends, we've had our doubts.

I was at our local grocery store today, and while I knew few people there, I did run into three friends, which was good. I also saw people who looked familiar: a woman who I thought for a second was Janet the Dentist, who came to Israeli dancing at BCC, the synagogue for gay people, thirty-some years ago, pregnant. She talked about her "partner" with whom she was having the baby. When pressed, she admitted the partner was a very traditional Jewish man, and that they were in fact married. She didn't want to seem different. I saw her more than ten years ago, and she told me about having breast cancer and surgery. I wonder how she is now. And then I saw the Principal Realtor, a woman I knew from temple in L.A., who was an elementary school principal, then retired and sold real estate. Her partner in later years was a woman I had also met dancing at BCC. The Realtor passed away a few years ago from pancreatic cancer. Suddenly, I feel like people from my past, alive or dead, are showing up for me and making me regret the community I lived in, not Los Angeles so much, but the people there who were my community. Still, I think about a young friend, who grew up in Europe (now 40) who complained to me about the constant sunshine in L.A., how boring it was! I loved that about L.A., and I think about his complaint, and how, like him, I should be more grateful for what I have.

We'll stay here and live with our old-people regrets. Maybe with Joe's new contract, we'll be able to take a month in the winter and go to Palm Springs or Ft. Lauderdale, although I fully intend to win my Council election at the end of April, so maybe not, at least not for the next two years. It was our choice to come to Morgantown, and people depend on both of us here. We've made friends, some our age, some much younger, and when we don't get all maudlin but look at reality, we have it good.

Spring is here early in March, at least in the afternoons, so we are almost there. Regrets are real, as is Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Dan Fogelberg

When I travel, I take our newer car, the 2012 Suzuki, because it has a CD player. Our older Honda Civic has a cassette player, but it eats cassettes instead of playing them. I usually bring ten or 12 CDs with me to play while I'm driving.

Two of the CDs I take often are by Dan Fogelberg: "Greatest Hits' from 1982, and "Twin Sons of Different Mothers" with Tim Weisberg, from 1978. I have other albums of his on vinyl.

Normally, I detest cheap sentiment. But I still cry at "Same Old Lang Syne" about running into an old girlfriend at a convenience store on New Year's Eve (and the scandal that he said "Met my old lover at the grocery store.." when gay men at the time called their partners their "lover."). And "Longer," probably the most unabashed love song in history, makes me sigh and get teary. For Rosh Hashana 2008, Pam and Mindy, a couple at BCC, the temple where I met Joe, made a wedding video, showing all the people married and engaged from our temple (including themselves) and set to Fogelberg and Weisberg's cover of Judy Collins' "Since You Asked." Joe and I were engaged at the time and appear in the video. I watch that at least monthly. I can't get a link up that works (darn technology!) but if you go to YouTube and look up "BCC Wedding Montage- No on 8" you can see it.

Maybe it's because I sing high tenor like him, and taught myself to play "Longer" on the piano and sing along. Working on that made me appreciate Fogelberg's talent.

Then there is the sleazy story of how, after a bad week trying to teach a class in Tallahassee for Social Security in 1980, a handsome young man at the gay bar in town took me home because, with my full dark beard , he thought I looked like Dan Fogelberg.

Dan Fogelberg was born in 1951, almost two years after I was born. He died of prostate cancer in December 2007, at the age of fifty-six. Another lesson in not envying people because you perceive them to be more talented, more successful or better looking.

Probably better not to think about why Dan Fogelberg's music moves me. I wouldn't want to think I'm a romantic at heart.