Mr. Hawxhurst (Part 2)

The decade had turned. I had been in school for five of the six fall/winter/springs since that car ride and the adventure in the bar. The world was a slightly less exotic place, as I had grown up a bit and the wonderment around me receded with routines like homework, going to school, to church, chores, and other tasks along the road dotted with society's frequent signposts pointing toward adulthood and responsibility urging me relentlessly in that direction. Still, looking back, there was an enormous amount of freedom though I did not fully realize it. Taxes, a job, bills, caregiving, maintenance of vehicles, a garden and of a house were all still in the distant future. One could and did, with Mom's or Dad's permission, still climb aboard someone's car and enjoy an outing. That is what I did twice that summer thanks again to Mr. Hawxhurst. He had purchased in May another sedan, his first since the long gone Oldsmobile. This used vehicle was a gray '49 Pontiac with its now familiar (in my catalogue of memories today) fastback styling and the arresting hood ornament of Chief Pontiac's profile shaped from a hard plastic the color of amber. A quick mathematical calculation apprises me of the fact that this car was older than the Olds was on that pre-school summer's day. Mr. Hawxhurst was clearly, not a wealthy man. I had learned, by the time of this pre-pubescent period of my life, that he worked in the city as an elevator operator. The house he lived in was built the summer after the Blizzard of '88 and had been in his wife's family since shortly after the first world war. I did not recall him and the family ever apparently vacationing or leaving the house for any extended trips. But now Mr. Hawxhurst, though his commuting still did not require it, decided to utilize his recent acquisition to, among other things, at last entertain himself and his children, as well as my brother and I during this school-free season. With Mrs. Hawxhurst's blessing, the first journey began with the five of us sallying forth to upper Manhattan and the boyhood haunts of Mr. Hawxhurst.

In this summer of talk about a young senator named Kennedy, an angry man named Khrushchev and a frightening pocket book and movie entitled "On The Beach" ("don't worry, it's fiction…that's make believe, Timmy" Mr. Hawxhurst had assured me) the first stirrings of a sense of mortality, that had been quiescent since just about the time of the first auto trip with Mickey's dad (a precocity and a preoccupation then with death had caused me, for several weeks, to pester my mother while she attempted to dust the furniture and make the beds, giving neither of us much peace until hunger, a nap and Grandpa's cheerful interactions dissolved these worries) returned to interrupt the stream of my usually carefree musings. Mr. Hawxhurst's plans provided a novel diversion that worked as well as Grandpa's games and Dad's sunny personality, and that would probably have brought even the most withdrawn child (which I was not) out of his shell. Like my Dad, George Hawxhurst was a combat veteran of the second world war and the air of confidence that both men exuded was taken for granted by we little ones. For misbehaving we might incur a slap across the fanny, a loud warning or expression of prohibition, but like six years earlier and consistently since, these were rare and loving acts all for the sake of safety and were overwhelmingly outnumbered by equally loving, nuturing and educational examples of how to comport oneself and encouraging ways and attitudes that were simply wise and priceless jewels of child rearing. As in the bar, we were safe and trusting and these feelings were all reinforced by countless other acts and forbearances that revealed the good character of each of our parents. How fortuitous was this state of affairs and how, only relatively recently did I come to fully appreciate it.

We approached Washington Heights, oblivious to any traffic which was no doubt exceedingly light anyway, by 21st century standards. Our first stop was The Museum of The American Indian on Audubon Terrace. Coming here seemed so natural and it dovetailed with so much we had already absorbed. Books, magazines, history lessons in school and of course, western adventure shows on television and in the movies, made us fully cognizant of the native American in our history. The enormous interest his story engendered in our young minds guaranteed that no yawning or crankiness would ensue as may have occurred with a visit to a more conventional museum of fine art, statuary or dry displays of bones, tomes and artifacts devoid of any hoopla or promise of action and danger. The buckskins and clothing of various animals' pelts, the feathers, war paint, the dugouts, the weaponry of tomahawks, arrowheads, spears, and the three dimensionality of imposing mannequins wearing and carrying these items, thrilled us and intensified the fascination with what we had only seen in two dimensions up to that point. The past had now come alive and we were learning as one benefits physically from an exciting, competitive game in sports, unaware of its profit while thoroughly enjoying the process unlike a recitation by rote in a classroom or the monotony of a weightlifting workout. Afterwards, we snacked outside on a bench near the museum's entrance and then a chance for Mr. Hawxhurst to light up from his pack of Oasis filter cigarettes helped us to digest both the meal and our experience. Jamie, the youngest and least inhibited of us, started to whoop like a "redskin" (as his dad had usually described the subjects of our recent attention) recalling the sights and sounds of the dioramas and displays. Political correctness had not been conceived yet in 1960. Mr. Hawxhurst's use of the term, much like "injun", was almost purely descriptive and arguably "shorthand", by one syllable, for that of "indian." The fact of a land completely the domain of Americans of European ancestry and of white skin, was accepted almost unconsciously with neither any animus towards Indians nor any triumphalism over one's race's rule. "The nobility of the redman" was not a patronizing phrase as many a modern day revisionist historian might assert. Among his tattoos, most prominently and just below his left shoulder and near to the bicep, was one of the image of the profile of an Indian brave in full war bonnet and with the year "1934" appearing immediately below the neck of the two dimensional bust. George had been precisely in his mid teens when assumedly this particular body art was created. Mr. Hawxhurst had clearly been no child from a sheltered or pampered world or not without some "street smarts" or at least very strong inclinations to explore the world, its myths and to live out some of the dreams of a thoroughly dynamic American youth. This early rambunctiousness, then a hitch during the big war where he saw action in France, Belgium, Luxembourg and deep inside Germany (preceded by a dream very nearly pursued, but for economic constraints and family ties: to volunteer with the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1940), and now the stature of a mature citizen/civilian and integral part of a Pax Americana, despite a Cold War: Mr. Hawxhurst had reason to be proud of his journey from "wild kid" to decorated veteran to his current role of working husband and father. He was hopeful about the future. It was now a time of peace and stability and it was a good time for America.

Presently we returned to the Pontiac and Mr. Hawxhurst shortly and wordlessly motored away from the museum seemingly lost in his own thoughts and continued thusly when after several minutes he circled and doubled back in an area in view of the mighty Hudson. "Where are we going?" asked Mickey with a slight hint of restlessness in his voice. "You'll see soon, son" answered his dad. Empty lots and weeds, not unlike our own neighborhood across the East river, but larger, more overgrown and with sizable industrial debris strewn about characterized most of the landscape before us. Mickey's dad parked the car. We were now fairly close to the water and tall cliffs nearby mirrored what we saw in the distance and hard by the Hudson's far shore. Looking carefully toward the near distance on the New York side of the river, Mr. Hawxhurst suddenly stood stock still. "There it is" he said, almost to himself as if he had found a valuable possession, the location of which, time had at first, eroded a wee bit his confidence in pinpointing. "What is it, dad?" asked Jamie. "Boys, come with me. Everybody hold hands and watch your step." A narrow path between the piles of loose concrete and rusted parts of automobiles and trucks wended its way closer to the edge of the mostly empty expanse of the urban wasteland we stood in. "Now stay right here with me boys. Jamie, stop fidgeting." The gulf between the area where we were and the sheer cliffs (and also man made walls), was a tremendous artificial canyon, at the bottom of which freight train tracks crisscrossed the entire space while close by, sooty smokestacks belched languorously and intermittently puffs of dark clouds that then drifted speedily away toward the river. "See that big tree growing almost sideways out of that wall? There! Way up but below the red paint along the top….the white letters!" "I see it daddy!" "Yes, I see it too" my brother piped up. There, against the smooth, yet rocky face of the huge verticality of a heavily rust stained retaining wall built to protect the rail yards below, were two gigantic letters painted in white with short drips extending downward not much more narrowly than the characters that read unmistakably: "G.H." "I did that" said Mickey's dad in a tone expressing more thoughtfulness than pride. "It was the summer after I got the tattoos." Several other initials, smaller and further down the facade were translated into the names of his companions of yesteryear. Twice he stated that "he's gone." The second time he mentioned "The Bulge."

A week later, Mr. Hawxhurst invited us again for a ride. My brother did not want to go, but Dad and Mom said that I could if I wished. With his sons and I, we all ventured down to the sea. Always the chatterbox in my early youth, familiarity and curiosity finally emboldened me to ask Mr. Hawxhurst questions, some of which I had long wondered about. "Did you know my Dad during the war? When did you first smoke? Did your parents allow it? How did you paint your initials without falling? Did the police catch you?" "Wait 'til we get to the beach and we're all settled" he quietly advised as he negotiated the rusting sedan through surprisingly thick traffic. Rockaway Beach was our destination. We bathed in the surf, again holding hands as before, but only when we stepped toward deeper water to jump up as a wave crested. Jamie once broke away as we made another advance away from the shore just before lunch, but he stayed closer to the sand as his dad's hortatory cries reigned him in and riveted him to one spot with an intense fatherly glare. Later, French fries and hot dogs were enjoyed and the salt air seemed to further loosen my tongue as I asked him about what each tattoo meant. He said that he didn't remember the reason for every one. The Indian chief's face was based on a cigar store wooden Indian that he loved and that stood forever, it seemed, outside a smoke shop on the corner near where he lived off Convent avenue. A faded image of a clown's face near the opposite bicep was simply picked out from a book that the tattoo parlor proprietor had shown him. A snake entwining a cross with a partially veiled woman weeping next to it covered much of his right forearm. He did not reply to the enquiry about it. In only his bathing trunks, I noticed for the first time droplets of blood falling from the tattoo of the heart over his heart and I pushed my shyness aside again with great effort to ask about it. "Oh, it's the last one I got… France, 1944. My buddy Jimmy on Utah beach had one and I liked it and wanted it to honor Mrs. Hawxhurst. See her name alongside?" "Marlene" was barely visible but decipherable now that it was called to my attention.

To our right while facing the sea the sun began its slow descent in the direction of the city and toward the point where the shore, the ocean and the once wild blue yonder all merged goldenly. The fair skinned Mickey looked quite the lobster despite the use of primitive suntan lotion. "Time to make tracks boys" Mr. Hawxhurst announced. I felt extra sleepy after the long day in the wind and sun and was falling quickly in the corner of the passenger's side of the Pontiac's rear bench seat. Just then Jamie decided to vocalize, long since surpassing his brother's efforts at entertaining. One of the summer's crossover hits from the country & western charts was "Mule Skinner Blues." More than a yodel and less terrifying than a Rebel yell, part of the refrain of the tune was a joyous, guttural yelp which was quickly and often imitated by Jamie who was obviously enamored of its expression of sheer delight, like his Indian war cry of the previous week. The car's radio reinforced his fixation with this melody as the local pop station played it seemingly incessantly while we headed back home. END OF PART 2

Mr. Hawxhurst

George Hawxhurst was the father of Mickey Hawxhurst, a playmate of mine and next door neighbor. George was a handsome man with a vague resemblance to Alan Ladd though brown haired. He was not particularly tall, and had tattoos covering both arms that were fully revealed in the summer in the days when sleeveless undershirts were not uncommon. On an especially sweltering day I first espied the only other example of body art that he apparently sported. It was a small dark purplish heart over his own with an arrow piercing, of course, the former. Mr. Hawxhurst would quietly greet you, in any season, if he saw you playing outside when he was coming home from work via the subway enroute to walking up the steps of his stoop. The Hawxhursts did not own a car for what seemed like the longest time in the perception of a grade schooler like myself. When I was perhaps four years old he did briefly own a shabby Oldsmobile, a kind of chocolaty brown colored one with that roundish body typical of most post war cars before the explosion of the eye candy of aerodynamically improved shapes and forms, sexy and lower to the ground (with joyous, primary colors as well as pastels of two and even three tones) that designers brought forth in profusion and great variety, as the advent of the second half of the 1950s marked the realization, expressed through such exuberant creativity, that peace and prosperity were at last a reality.

Mr. & Mrs. Hawxhurst invited my brother and I to join them along with Mickey and his brother for a ride once in that car. Our Mom gave permission and it was quite the adventure to amble into a strange vehicle and to hold onto leather straps covered in soft gray felt-like material dangling just below the headliner and adjacent to the windlace, while standing on the rear seat as we all headed toward a building several blocks away. Mr. Hawxhurst explained that we would be entering a "bar." In a twinkling we did, and the darkness and coolness of the place was very exciting as it contrasted with the summery brightness of the outside daylight. It must have been a late morning weekday and the tavern owners were likely friends of the Hawxhursts and may have ushered us in before the place's opening time. I was so young that I had no frame of reference for when a bar opened or closed or for what a gin mill crowded with customers was like or how exceptional it may have been: coming to this pub at this time. I only knew that I was in a strange and stimulating place where certain new odors and a very grownup atmosphere seemed to envelop me. There was no fear, but rather the sense that we had been permitted to roam in this new playpen and that there were no severe restrictions or warnings about our behavior or expectations about the same. I guess George and Marlene (his wife) found this place a comfort and a haven and they communicated these feelings to us little ones and in turn, we were equally at ease. I was given, along with the other three boys, a drink from the very big man behind the bar. They were each sparkling little tumblers, not much bigger than a shot glass and were filled with wonderfully fizzy and cold ginger ale. Mickey was the first to notice the raised platform and alcove partially enshrouded by dark curtains in a far corner of the room with objects and other mysterious and beckoning forms within it. We asked, almost in unison, if we could go there and the relaxed adults assented, again communicating a certain confidence in this quiet little universe of shadows, cigarette smoke, beer and perfume.

Mickey's kid brother Jamie discovered the set of drums and my brother and I noticed that the huge "desk" close by was a piano, its keys inaccessible, though we were, again, too tender in years to feel deprived of the opportunity of experimenting with its powers. We did know that we were free to use our imaginations that needed no coaxing at this fertile juncture in our development as our energetic little brains, bodies and, of course, spirits soared with the presence of these "toys" before us. We were more than delighted to mime the act of playing a peppy tune as we tickled phantom ivories while touching the keyboard's heavy cover of dark wood. Now Mickey laid eyes upon the tall stick of silvery metal that stood upright in the middle of this alcove with a black cord attached to it and more shiny metal at the top of it looking like a sort of big lollipop. With mercurial invention he clambered onto a wooden chair with a round thin seat, curved back without spindles but a quasi-concentric inner configuration of more curved wood and legs also slightly curved. This enabled him to bring his mouth level with the "lollipop" and to "green light" aspirations he had been nurturing all week: a chance to belt out "Shake, Rattle and Roll!" It was not his volume, but his less than perfect pitch that turned the adults' heads. They admonished us for the first time, but not with the slightest trace of a scolding spirit in their words. "Mickey, do you know how to hum that song like Mommy does when she's cleaning the house?" Mickey warmed instantaneously to the suggestion and just a bit belatedly Jamie also caught the drift of his mother's little talk and calculated about a new game of strumming his fingers on two chairs identical to the one his brother was standing on, but not before he had indulged the impulse to strike twice with one of the nearby drumsticks onto the taut skin stretched across one of the drums. My brother, the oldest of the four of us, needed no modification of his fun. He had terminated our piano duet a few moments earlier as he happily "conducted" our very merry junior band by sawing the air with regal solemnity. It was the first and only time I rode in that car and it was the last time I was in that building until nearly forty years later when it had become a somewhat snooty restaurant (by the standards of our modest neighborhood) serving northern Italian cuisine (after having undergone several reincarnations as a local watering hole). END OF PART 1

"And We Promise That We'll Remember The Seventh Of December"

On Wednesday, December 7, 2011, the seventieth anniversary of the day that naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor and other nearby facilities of the U.S. army and army air force, was marked with solemn ceremonies in Hawaii and across the nation. The day after this occasion it was also announced that the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association was disbanding. How shall we remember, when those alive at the time of any event, even an exceedingly momentous one such as this, are gone? It is done by a kind of alchemy that makes history a living entity though the subject is by definition, the study of things gone by, defunct, in the past, ended. This is challenging, but of vital importance, as mine (like those of most Americans, and one day soon: all Americans), is really only a memory of a memory of the "day that will live in infamy."

The date was remembered. The intention was to attend ceremonies that day at the National cemetery where my father and uncles, all veterans of World War II, are buried. Life intervened. Major renovations on our house, somewhat delayed, were rescheduled on that day at our contractor's convenience and frankly, at mine. Still, I could have noted the anniversary on its day ten days ago, as has been my wont in other cases, on this blog. I've a twinge of personal guilt in this regard. The above title is a lyric from the "Song of the Seabees." The Seabees are the U.S. Navy's Construction Battalion, and their nickname is a delightful and witty homophone of their official name's initials.

A promise is something that I was taught ought not be broken except for reasons of a grave nature. My late uncle and godfather Damiano was a member of the 30th Seabees from 1942-1945. For him, the song and the event had extra dimensions of meaning and were part of a visceral patriotism that was communicated to us (his seven nephews and niece) when we were still very small children and the memories then, again for him, were especially fresh. Once more, the subject of memory and its value in our lives is foremost in my mind. Several years ago I viewed "The Fighting Seabees", a film starring John Wayne and I vaguely recalled the song. Yesterday, I researched its lyrics and the wording did not make complete sense. Two different sources indicated the words as follows: "And we promise that we remember the 'Seventh of December'." That's like telling one's teacher that you promise that you know the answers to the homework questions of yesterday even though the written assignment is due today and you do not have it available for submission. Such a student needs to perform his "promise" then and there to be credible. A promise is, instead, a kind of covenant whereby future behavior is pledged to one who or something which we respect and honor. This line that I read was not so much a typographical error as it was a telling reflection of an unthinking transcription by someone who didn't care and/or couldn't think clearly enough to appreciate the precision that language demands and the respect and simple but intelligent message it can transmit. I decided to seek primary sources, short of a copy of the original sheet music. Two YouTube selections brought relief and satisfaction: one was of an authentic Navy chorus, Seabees members perhaps, and the other was a wartime clip of the great Judy Garland saluting these particular sailors with her rendition. The above title/quote is, in both cases, their exact words, as I heard them, and makes sense while telling with sweet simplicity, the meaning and value of a promise and a remembrance.

Why remember that day? Well, may as well ask, why remember September 11, 2001? Forgiveness is not the subject of this blog entry, nor is hatred or revenge the matter at hand. However, knowing, understanding and retaining the knowledge and fully comprehending, in all its facets, what evil did and can do in the future to what and to whom one loves and holds dear, is well worth, many times over, the effort required to never forget.

About a half century ago, there was a priest in the parish where I lived. His name was Fr. Duffy and he once gave a homily that, for some reason I have never forgotten. He asked us, his congregants, "what does it mean when we say we are 'sorry'?" A long pause was followed by his startlingly sharp answer to his own question: "it means you're not going to do it again!!" Similarly, faithfully saluting the fallen is, though not the avoidance of a sin of commission, a kind of "virtue of commission" and shares the goal of Fr. Duffy's implied strong suggestion of yore: that of "doing good", a much maligned practice in recent decades, as in "do gooder" or "he's a 'goody-goody'." In both cases what is required is a devotion to the practice, yes, the art of remembering. Consciousness and Conscience as Philosopher King and Queen of something called Civilization: too grandiose a concept? Not "cool" enough a world view for the cognoscenti of this planet? Well, Christendom and the wise of all faiths still seek these paths. The anniversary of the birthday of a special child will be celebrated in a few days. It's another event "deep in December" that's more than "nice to remember" and we promise to, because of His promise.

"Deep in December It's Nice to Remember"

"Without a hurt the heart is hollow." So many of the lyrics like those above from "Try To Remember", the unforgettable song from the remarkably long running play "The Fantasticks" (1960-2002), are arrows of joyous sorrow, weapons of deadly delight, striking the heart unfailingly on target and they're not really uncommonly oxymoronic ones for we who incline heavily toward nostalgia and in equal proportions to its "what was" and "what might have been" components. The song is not the gentle semi-cynical take on youth of Maurice Chevalier's "I'm Glad I'm Not Young Anymore" ("Gigi", 1958). Though they're both wistful tunes, "Try To Remember" laments an earlier time and its ghosts as beloved brothers or sisters, forever "tender and callow", whom the old survivor and singer hopelessly longs to caress and somehow protect through remembrance and "following." Contrastingly, the iconic Frenchman's chant is primarily one of relief and liberation from the blunders and anxieties of one's immature days. Whose reminiscences are the truer ones? It would seem that they both partake of authenticity and wisdom, but they each represent a different world view: the former perhaps that of the poet, the latter that of the philosopher.

The past has often been treated, especially throughout much of America's history, with widely varying degrees of respect. As a nation born and bathed in the "hot springs" of revolutionary ardor, change and supposed progress has always been embraced, while dwelling on what was or has been dismantled or "turned upside down", has in many a case held very little interest for us. Short memories have resulted and these have, in many instances, been the enemy of true progress, though modern day "progressives" imagine that their denigration of the past is almost always good and necessary. The hidebound can and do stultify of course, as well. Also, with advancing years memories can fade and this can be a cruel irony of the presumed wisdom of Chevalier's character. Earlier in the film this is touched upon comically but emphatically in his duet "I Remember It Well" with Hermione Gingold. Perhaps it's not so much a matter of senescence gaining ground, but the human need, in constant dramatic tension with its counterpart remembrance, for that of forgetfulness. This may be a healthy psychic mechanism that allows one to "let go" and it surely heals or at least anesthetizes from what, in the past, may be too painful for some in the present. Those of us with the proverbial memory of an elephant are sometimes envied and cause even occasionally thinly veiled reactions that reveal no little irritation as in "How did you remember THAT?" The feelings are sometimes mutual, as the overly sensitive poets/elephants among us are not seldom filled with a longing as in "How did he/she manage to get past that old insult by so-and-so and how could he/she possibly forget it? What energy and drive he/she has to move on like that with his/her life!" This is not to suggest that those who can flush unpleasantness and other traumas from their memories are the only ones who can progress and succeed in the present and future. Some of us, those most depressed and weighed upon with cares and lingering memories (or chemical imbalances in their brains as modern science increasingly asserts), can and do create and serve up a storm of accomplishments, often precisely because of their afflictions. Called to mind are some of the the admirable and courageous known to history and relatively recently, from the entertainment field: Lincoln, Poe, Cole Porter, Christopher Reeve and Dick Cavett. They all soldiered on and gave (give) their best, displaying their demons never, except to share the art or wisdom born from their tormentors' crucibles.

Neither temperament nor nature is necessarily any more or less morally superior to the other. The problems begin perhaps, when either inclination shifts too decidedly towards its respective pole: remembrance or forgetfulness. What brings me down on the side of the "rememberers" is just an ineffable kinship with the past and what has, at least so far, been my possession of a good memory that I use to try to relive certain events because of a hope to learn from them. Admittedly though, there is a tremendous unwillingness to cease remembering and by extension, to discontinue loving someone or something. Honoring our dead and the deeds that helped to forge the world we live in now (not just military heroes) requires that we guard against consigning someone or something to oblivion. In this sense it is quite more than simply "nice" to remember. Still unimpressed by those enthralled by memories? Consider this simple example. What would Facebook and other similar phenomena of cyberspace be, in terms of their awesome power to attract followers without the human capacity to remember? Does someone "friend" you because they have forgotten who you are? No, remembrance, short of an obsessive mania to inhale every subatomic particle of a fond memory, is perhaps the greatest gift we possess as humans. Shared histories, stories and myths that bind a people and a race, events from a formative stage of one's development inextricable from a beloved grandparent or unique character and friend, all these and more comprise an almost unimaginably rich personal tapestry that depends utterly and completely on the life blood of memory. Yes, deep in December, along with a reliable source of physical warmth (whether an ancient hearth or electric blanket), this other warmth is most welcome and something beyond reassuring.

Technical Sergeant Salvatore Joseph Salemi

November 30, 1945 fell on a Friday. It was the second "good" Friday that year for my grandparents and for the rest of my father's family. At Fort Dix, New Jersey on that day, after three long years and twenty three days, Dad was honorably discharged from his service in the United States Army.

What happens to a person after three years? When advancing from the age of twenty nine to that of thirty two, changes are often nearly imperceptible in normal times and circumstances. Clearly, the greatest event in human history, really the hugest cluster of cataclysmic and violent man-made events ever and collectively known as World War II, was anything but a normal period in human affairs. Though thankfully, no one could nor did personally experience all of the horrors and atrocities that befell all of Europe, Russia, the Pacific, most of the Far and some of the Middle East, North Africa, the North Atlantic and other outposts of Allied and Axis interests, still, one individual, particularly a combat soldier, could easily absorb enough of the global maelstrom within his relatively little corner of the world for thousands of lifetimes over. In the case of my Dad this was true; he "saw his share" of "man's inhumanity to man" and the inevitable fruit from this poisonous tree of mankind's transgressions against nature as well as himself, were a kind of produce my father could not ignore but which he chose not to taste (and which was most terribly foreign and repugnant to him compared to the literal produce that in peacetime, as a fruit and vegetable vendor, he lovingly presented to his customers). Gratitude, not bitterness, were so much a part of Dad's character, and abominations of the battlefield and the tribulations of innocent civilians caught up in the vicious crossfires in the places where he fought and served: North Africa, Sicily, Italy, Southern France, again in Italy and Austria: all these experiences seemed to deepen his natural compassion and afforded him so many opportunities to express it. Whether humanely interrogating a captured Italian enemy soldier or helping to feed some of the monks in the destroyed abbey at Monte Cassino, Dad, though his stock in trade as a soldier was death, his focus was, in the particular, to alleviate pain and suffering and ultimately to accomplish the same unimpeded, once the monster of Nazism was slain.

Change was inevitable. He and the world were never to return to the old order once victory was declared. Immutable scars, both seen and unseen, made him, though still a young man, wise beyond his years. Together with all other G.I.s, adjustment to peacetime and a transformed America, though eagerly looked forward to, would result in widely varying degrees of success, depending on the spiritual wealth of each individual, and usually hinging on the loving support systems of families and friends back home. Once again, and in this regard, dad was lucky: as lucky as he had been during the war. There was so much worth fighting for and the fact that it was intact, like a lovely homestead in a hurricane that one feared for while so far away…. a place one delightedly rediscovers untouched by an evil fury, an incredibly beautiful flower that silently but fairly shouted its affirmation of life over death: all this was a special gift. My mother was waiting for Dad as well as for her brothers and other family friends to come home safely, but she was not consciously aware that her life would change forever in eighteen months. Dad may have not envisioned their union at the time either. Though she was "the girl next door" nearly literally, theirs was a platonic friendship, but most importantly, it was a true friendship that timeliness and the hand of God or fate, if you will, helped to grow like an offshoot of that aforementioned beautiful blossom of our preserved nation, watered anew by a hard won peace and the deepest aspirations of the welcomers and the sorely missed welcomed.

My brother, and then I, in about two and four and a half years respectively, were the new fruits of a new wife and her peaceable husband, a fruit and produce man returned to the livelihood that his father had taught him and to a land that still holds the greatest promise for a world that yet longs for freedom while it remains, seemingly forever tempted by the seductions of the totalitarian and enslaving mindsets. Of my Dad, I can only say: like "Abou Ben Adhem" (the title of a poem he loved), and like all the Forces of Light, "may his (their) tribe increase."

Miss Elizabeth June Thornburg

For the first time, I viewed the other evening in its entirety, the film "Annie Get Your Gun." Released the year that I was born, am proud to share the same birth year, in a manner of speaking, with this great American mid-century musical that exuberantly, sentimentally and spectacularly tells the tale of Annie Oakley through the unmatched talents of both Howard Kheel and the exquisitely generous Betty Hutton, one of our National Treasures, who, had she lived to 110 would have left us too soon. Atomic energy had nothing on Betty and she gave ecstatically and deliriously as well as unstintingly. Her psyche's transmission had but one gear: 7th (as in, audiences were in seventh heaven when she performed) and it was in "drive" and forward, all the way and all the time when she was behind the wheel. Somehow she never seemed manic, just a cut above even the best of us who only imagine that we have cornered the market on enthusiasm and a zest for living; her vitality and comedic genius was infectious and irresistible and her unabashed plea to be loved that came through so unmistakably with each loving effort, could have failed to touch only the coldest of hearts, given her awesome display of both theatrical majesty and human vulnerability. Like Garland and Monroe or Holiday or Seberg, the sorrows of life were perhaps the joys of art for Miss Hutton, nee Elizabeth June Thornburg. She, her mother and her sister were abandoned by her father when she was a small child. He entered their lives again only when news of his suicide reached them when she was eighteen. Struggling during the Great Depression, the three of them worked in a speakeasy that her mother owned and run-ins with the police were frequent as were encounters with unsavory characters who patronized the illicit tavern. No doubt these formative years of a hardscrabble, knockabout existence toughened Betty's exterior and her ambition and talent were surely whetted and honed, respectively, by adversity as she successfully met and eventually conquered the challenges that lay ahead.

She freely confessed in interviews in later years that her marriage to her career as a genuine "triple threat" performer inevitably was destructive of many of her personal relationships. Four marriages, all ending in divorce, depression, estrangement from her children, a nervous breakdown in 1967 after the death, in a house fire, of her alcoholic mother, her own substance abuse, a suicide attempt, and various stops and starts to her faltering career in the 1960s: all were part of a pattern that was somehow slowly and torturously reversed and which led to a new and radically different path for Betty. Rehabilitation included the ministrations of a Fr. Maguire whom she credited with saving her life. Her conversion to Catholicism occurred also in this period. She worked as a cook in a parish rectory's kitchen then and several years later was reported to be happily serving as a hostess in a jai alai arena. She eventually returned to show business on a limited basis and granted a very few interviews in the last thirty years of her life, the last recorded one with Robert Osbourne of the Turner Classic Movies network in 2000. It was rebroadcast at about the time of her death in 2007 and I watched it then. When I recently viewed her in an old episode of the television program "What's My Line?" of easily over fifty years ago, I was struck by the similarity of her behavior on each occasion. In the Osbourne interview Betty often repeated, with almost child-like intensity that her interviewer was a wonderful man, one of the kindest persons she had ever met and that she loved him very much. Also shared was the fact that she was nearly paralyzed by fear and seriously considered canceling the interview. Finally coaxed and reassured, she appeared and, as mentioned, expressed her love for him several times and throughout the proceeding. During the circa 1956 program in which she was the celebrity mystery guest, it was revealed (besides her identity, which was correctly and fairly quickly guessed by panelist Fred Allen) by the show's host John Daly, with as much "show" as "tell", that Betty's anxiety was such that she had implored him, successfully, to hold both of her hands in his until her identity was revealed to the panelists. Daly held up their entwined fingers from behind his desk to a delighted audience with a charming assurance to his wife: "Mrs. Daly, don't you mind now" (a bonus delight for me to be reminded of a time when fidelity was valued so highly that even theatrical affection could come with a disclaimer). After nearly half a century, Betty, unlike most of us, had never stopped openly asking the question that most of us silently pose every day of our lives to someone (even to someone who isn't there): "please love me."

Finally, in "Annie Get Your Gun" it was decided that the character of Miss Oakley would be an outgoing, naive kind of bumpkin (likely unlike the reserved real life sharpshooter) particularly in affairs of the heart. Comical, over-the-top, broad and wonderful, Betty's acting talents, and again, her likability, sincerity and softness precluded any chance of a cartoonish performance that any lesser star would have had great difficulty avoiding. When she guilelessly eyeballs Frank Butler (Kheel) and is struck by the thunderbolt of a crushing crush on him, the hilarity of her "goo-goo" eyes and sighs is immeasurably heightened by the truth she expresses: of youthful adoration conjoined with a healthy libido. Betty Hutton, we miss you and love you forever. And we'll hold your hands, God willing, one day for as long as you wish or until the end of time. Thanks for being our angel then, now and always.

Scumbags In Charge

Yes, I know. That is an offensive word in the above title. I hope to use it in the spirit of the late comedic genius George Carlin, mindful, as he was, that gratuitous use of verbal filth can be a "no-no" unless its author has a brilliantly funny point (in his case, such points were countless). I don't doubt for a moment that my usual stuffy efforts to persuade will not be in the same league with ol' George's H-bombs (and F-bombs) of mirth and that all I can hope for is to have made a valid point or two about vituperation, "dirty" words and the unpleasant beings among us who merit this particular epithet and similar ones (before a mug of hot coffee or a "click" onto another blogger's page is reckoned by you, dear reader, as the only way to stay awake).

I remember when I first learned the meaning of the compound word from male members of my peer group. I had not yet reached puberty (then about three summers into the future) and a malevolent connotation of the word was communicated to me by them. This was disturbing and frightening. "Scum" was already understood to refer to something vile, but I was not sure exactly even what that was. "Pond scum" was an unknown term for a city kid and the coining of the term as a highly insulting description of a morally bankrupt individual would not occur until the 1980s as far as I can recall. Also, the emotionally neutral term referring to any white or frothy collection of unwanted substance on the surface of certain boiling foodstuffs was not within the ken of a kid whose parents performed all the culinary tasks in the kitchen at that time.

Anyway, my "teachers" presented to me a crash course in the meaning of this receptacle and its contents. Again, both were conveyed to my young and inexperienced self as dirty and revolting things: my companions' vague descriptions of the "bag" only unsettling me more. My vision was of a kind of miniature hot water bottle (or a tinier version of that circular ice filled bag that an actor like William Powell in a 1930s mad ball comedy placed on his noggin to combat a hangover) that had to remain hidden from view along with its abominable load. All this further heightened my already growing fears about sexuality and adulthood. Why and how would one collect this fluid? Is it toxic? Does scum then only refer to what will come out of my penis in the near future? Can I forego this rite of passage? "No" I was told. "You can ignore it for awhile, but sooner or later you will experience it and have to deal with it." Someone, after all of these scary and confusing reports remarked, almost as an aside, that it would "feel good when it came out of you." At that point, my anxiety was so developed by my imagination that I concluded that "feeling good" might entail some chaotic, uncontrollable event, something akin to being tickled mercilessly until one realized that the laughing would never stop (not far off as a purely erotic description or fantasy, but totally lacking in any understanding of the expression of the beauty and divinity of the reproductive act, of course). I guess this may be how superstition and puritanism derived some of their powers. How unfortunate to have had as educators, those hardly more informed than myself and well short of the wisdom that would have best shepherded a kind of lamb who could have been reassured that there was no slaughter in the offing along the journey to becoming a man.

It is interesting to note, that after this episode of more than fifty years ago, my miseducation was after all, revealed to be not completely devoid of certain truths. That is, any bodily fluid or waste, once expelled, is not regarded as sanitary or usually anything but disgusting. This is not an exclusively Victorian or repressed world view. Also, a condom is, when viewed simply and dispassionately, an unnatural device with no commonsensical reason, as far as a child could see, to be used to clothe one's "pee-pee." Though probably nearly as old as the first copulation in history, the bag baffles the guileless of any age. Its user seeks to thwart nature, and as with most human manipulation, unpleasantness always seems to be right around the corner, regardless of the success or failure of the device's purpose. Highly functional (at least generally and in its intent), it speaks to our unfailing inclination to try to control events even at the expense of unbridled carnal pleasure and, obviously, the creation of a new human being. The "bag" is, consequently for me, a repugnant object philosophically if not physically: the former adverb referring not to any "ick" factor but again, to the simple but ugly perversion of thwarting the medium by which human life may continue. The latter adverb could only be applied positively ( as in "attractive" rather than "repugnant" object) , I feel, by some pretentious so-called artist who in the tradition of "Piss Christ" and other Mapplethorpe-type phony art might argue for the "beauty" of the intensely green thorax of a house fly in proximity to a sun drenched, richly brown pile of dung and, by that logic, the supposed loveliness of a flesh colored, flattened, torn and wrinkled cylinder of rubber or lamb's skin, a full moon's rays causing its contents to glisten on a city sidewalk with "high" inducing gasoline fumes dispersing slowly from the recent proximity of the "bag" to a "muscle" car whose driver just "peeled out" a nano second after "peeling it off." So, confident, though prayerfully, that these cultural misfits are still a tiny minority (the "artistes" that is…. the neanderthals who negotiate tons of sheet metal along streets and highways with the help of high compression internal combustion engines will always be with us, and in abundance, despite employing, ironically, prophylactics to "have their cake and eat it too"….I am not THAT delusional) I do feel safe in averring the following as a societal consensus: "scumbag" is a joltingly and exceedingly unpleasant word. And as a richly deserved term of contempt, it should be applied to describe only a very few persons, though it's awfully tempting to increase the use of its application as an appellation, given the state of the world in 2011 A.D.

Well, who are the top scumbags today? The truly scary thought is that a huge plurality of them (if not a majority) would proudly step forward rather than shrink back if one began a roll call: the militancy and self-congratulatory habits of the stupid, despicable and narcissistic now having reached pandemic proportions. Well, before naming names, I'll state unequivocally that this dubious "badge" or "bag" of distinction needs to be awarded, as the title of this blog implies, only to powerful persons, those "in charge" who have royally screwed these United States, the world and the vast majority of us who, though also sinners indeed, have by and large, because of our relative impotence in affairs of state, and as effectual leaders in ethics and religion or grand finance, have amassed mostly just a relatively few tons of venial peccadilloes and have only, in a few cases earned the slightly less odious title of "Pond Scum" (post 1980, non-lacustrine meaning of the term). Some politicians are difficult to place, i.e. in either the S.B. or P.S. category. By the way, for concision and space, as well as for the more puissant effect of minimal use of "dirty" word vituperations, the above abbreviations will from now on and herein be primarily used. An excellent example of a "borderline" case (in more ways than one), is the thoroughly unpleasant fellow from Massachusetts, the very recently announced resigner from Congress, Mr. Barney Frank. For all his sustained nastiness, wrongheadedness on ALL issues vital to America's best interests and even his major role in nearly successfully destroying the U.S. economy with his "bananas banking" schemes (his handiwork still capable, like a terminal disease, of accomplishing, whether intentionally or not, the goals, now in sight, born from his poisonings), we can only decorate ol' Barney with the highest ranking in the also-ran league of vileness. Let's ceremoniously place on his shoulders the epaulets of a five star general in the Army of Pond Scum, oops…P.S. (the promotion that I hereby bestow upon him sure as hell ain't P.C.). Bravo Barney! Only his distaste and weariness for the coming 2012 campaign/war against the radical Left (him and his buddies) bumps Frank from S.B. status, though he no doubt would have been a mere buck private in that more loathsome man's army of S.B.s.

No brainer, genuine S.B.'s? A card carrying member must be living and still in power, i.e. causing mayhem and great suffering in the here and now. But to give an idea of the degree of dastardliness required, here's a short list of former but relatively recent members whose incredibly richly deserved demises or incarcerations are the sole reasons that they no longer are the urgent objects of good men's wrath or brightly listed names on a current Grand Marquee of Shameful Ones:

1.Osama bin Laden; 2.Saddam Hussein; 3.Moammar al-Khaddafy; 4.Bernard Madoff; 5.Orenthal James Simpson (shall never forgive the sullying of that happy childhood memory for so many of us and of its abbreviation…. one of the world's favorite breakfast beverages, plus epitome of good health, goodness, flavor and good taste: orange juice and its having to share its initials with this horrific psychopathic murderer).

….And, in the category of unalloyed, warts and all TOP S.B.'s IN THE WORLD TODAY……the envelope please!

Well, complete the list of names as you see fit, Mr. & Ms. Blog-ee. Again, dirty words/names should be used sparingly and sometimes the exposure of and confrontation with evil (though so often vital and never to be shrunk from when push comes to shove) can be especially effective strategies through stony silences and determined shunning that can choke off the oxygen of these S.B.s (a.k.a. S.O.B.s) who should not be permitted to share this planet's supply of it. You know who you are!

Quiet

It is the day after Thanksgiving. I click off my television and its interminably and colossally boring broadcasts about something dubbed "Black Friday." Now one may truly be thankful. There are hardly any cars at this moment on the street where I live. I do not hear a sound. This is most unusual and wonderful. Alas! The peace was just shattered by a honking horn. One mustn't talk too loudly about good news. Gremlins will always notice, it seems, and place their greasy fingerprints on your little park bench of tranquility that you lovingly dabbed with a sleepy powder blue shade of forgetfulness and upon which you foolishly placed a "WET PAINT" sign.

Okay, stillness again…. and I won't celebrate or shout about it. Will just enjoy its no doubt, short-lived presence and pretend I'm in Comatose, Oklahoma (pop. 14). Am not a numerologist, but I like that number for some reason. Perhaps my childhood baseball hero, Gil Hodges' uniform's number has something to do with it. Why "The Sooner State?" Maybe it's the imagined tranquility of a quintessentially middle American place where boisterousness and shouting is positive and purposeful like when statehood is achieved, one's Laurie has become one's girl and Judd has gone the way, providentially, of the snake under the Virgin Mary's feet.

The sandman is a pal o' mine but I've given him short shrift in recent months. Soon we'll revive our friendship and a rich dream life will hopefully work its curative magic again to set right the current imbalance between consciousness and oblivion. Stephen Foster's "Beautiful Dreamer" (1864) has always had a special place in my heart, even as a child. Also, Kellette and Kenbrovin's "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles" (1918) struck a chord as well with my younger (pre-kindergarten) self. Somehow, I "got" the melancholia and wistfulness of the tune. Peace at a price? As I blew bubbles from a toy bottle of soap with the little plastic wand that enabled my floating creations to dance and wiggle, I became aware that my pleasure had a cost: fragile spheres of playmates that played with me only briefly. I had to breathe life into them, literally and often, to have any more than short-lived company. This endeavor, alone in our family garden at dusk on a summer's day only heightened my precocious meditations:

"Fortune's always hiding,
I've looked everywhere.
I'm forever blowing bubbles,
Pretty bubbles in the air."

Sitting and Spitting or Stewing and Brewing?

As a New Yorker did you ever silently decide that there was no reasoning with any Homo sapiens within your ken or geographical comfort zone? That is, did you ever reckon that you did not have the shoe leather or the psychic energy to channel your inner Diogenes and start trekking in search of that honest or at least intelligent and considerate man or woman? You DID decide that you would not bludgeon or garrote the next insensitive lout who either blocked your driveway, used your unlocked garbage pail to place his rubbish (indifferent to and usually wrong about the correct recyclable receptacle of yours to cram with his trash), or eschewed his pooper scooper in favor of allowing his beloved Fido to express himself with canine artistry in the form of steaming, brown minarets of most unfortunately placed (along your sidewalk and directly in front of your front door) organic waste. But you DID reserve the right to fantasize the righting of these wrongs (and banish insomnia, in a way more effective than counting sheep or draining a warm glass of milk), by machine gunning as you drift off (in the best 1929 Chicago traditions of wielders of the then latest in "chopper" firepower) all of the above mentioned bozos who routinely send the quality of life, in particular: your life….into the toilet (where, in my utopia, even canines would unfailingly park their poop).

"It's NATURAL!" So goes the modern cry of purveyors of all kinds of foodstuffs in the 21st century. The word has been appropriated by many and applied more and more with only a positive connotation (something like the nineteenth century love affair with literary genres that extolled the virtues of the "noble savage") to numerous objects and behaviors that only yesterday were deemed rude, inappropriate, tasteless, brutish, ugly and most importantly: demonstrative of incredibly thinly veiled contempt for one's fellow man. Well, yes, the sentiments of nearly unvarnished animosity are mutual, but this blogger's views of some (not all) of his fellow pilgrims are wholly justified by their boorish acts (as well as sins of omission) witnessed every day. The psychological truism that correctly asserts that people behave toward you pretty much as you behave toward them is only a useful blueprint for coping if certain fundamental, shared values are there and are ever likely to blossom with the slightest prod in the form of decency or turning of the other cheek (in the real world where I live, in the form of picking up other's trash, or tolerating someone's running of a red light: "Gee, I guess he needs to express himself creatively or destructively…and, oh, let me walk around and pick up the thousands of bits of refuse tossed by others each and every day that magically blow into my front garden along with cigarette butts deliberately tossed there since my postage stamp plot of greenery is clearly viewed as one big convenient soil-filled ashtray. Gee, I'm glad to oblige and make life a bit more convenient for my unfortunate neighbors bitten by the litterbug."). No, this form of cheek turning is both useless and the H.O.V. lane of the superhighway to downtown Masochism, as the anonymity of life in New York renders any selfless deeds in the service of sanitation and beauty, acts of supreme indifference to the transient pedestrian, worker enroute to his job, hygienically challenged neighbor or certainly any vagrant enroute to his next handout or bottle of Sneaky Pete.

So, what to do? Spitting is no fun. To avoid the double standard of behaving like one's tormentors, one must expectorate into one's handkerchief. Boy, this "civilization thing" is hard work! (Note to all the reprobates out there: begin by at least learning this fact.) Stewing could lead to boiling over. Surely, we don't want any Vesuvius-like outbursts. Poilcemen and E.M.S. workers with straight jackets at the ready will not empathize with my stories about the years of provocations. Brewing (a cup of coffee) may prove helpful, but then again, insomnia and hyperactivity may result as one broods while turning over and over in one's brain, all the kaleidoscopic instances of slights and "arrows of outrageous fortune." At such a point the mowing down of the barbarians with a phantom AK-47 will not suffice to bring tranquility or an embrace by the sweet arms of Morpheus. One is left sitting. If hemorhhoids are non-existent or a distant memory, this may work for a while, provided that one has a good book or a well developed regimen of meditation and a good pair of ear plugs. Noise pollution in the Wormy Big Apple is another subject for another blog entry, but it is worthy of another round of bellyaching. Don't sit too long and certainly don't watch too much television. Mr. Newt Minnow, may have had a particularly nerdy moniker, but it had nothing to do with the accuracy and continuing, immutable truth about his famous remark about the boob tube: it was (and remains more so than ever), a "vast wasteland." Just channel surfing the literally hundreds of choices on my cable set each evening proves this fact over and over again. Talent and creativity in America is becoming as shriveled and atrophied as the muscularity of our morals. And regarding that honesty issue: there's nothing LESS real than an exceedingly contrived "reality" show (shades of that Bolshevik/Majority Big Lie, and for that matter, the "99%" claim of the cretins of the Occupy Wall Street crowd). By process of elimination, my survival strategy has emerged: a bracing single fresh cup of java in the a.m. after a good night's sleep, brief viewing of the weather channel on the t.v. in order to confirm the availability of a clement day and thus a promising walk toward the remaining strip of greenbelt in my neighborhood, with ear plugs in place, clothespin on my proboscis, and a blinder for each eye as I place a hand on the shoulder of a Rent-A-Diogenes who has the stomach for the journey. His fee will include a fresh pair of New Balance sneakers for me, more a prayerful pun about "a contemplation devoutly to be wished", i.e., a renewed America (not so out of whack in so many ways), than comfortable footwear to aid the spiritual quest. It will be the blind leading the blind, but that inner vision of truth must be relied upon to get out of this funk along with a faith and trust along the lines of that parlor game of my young adulthood whereby one relaxed and fell backward, trusting to the loving arms of one's fellow partygoers. Wait, I've no health insurance.

Three Hundred Sixty Three Days 'Til "The Year of Jubilo"*

There once was a U. S. of A.

'Twas peopled by folks who did pray.

And they worked and played hard,

Their nest eggs they did guard

From spendthrifts down ol' D.C. way.

Sticking to their guns and the Lord

Such doings made one B.O. bored.

But the actual stink

Is from how he does think.

This lefty is out of his gourd.

So come 2012 we shall see

If folks really dig bein' free.

Will The Snake Oil man

Continue his scam?

Or Freedom's Cry force him to flee?

*With apologies to the noble shade of Henry Clay Work ("Work??!!" Thus spake Maynard G. 'Occupy Wall St.' Krebs).

Hollow, Weaned (Not)

Today most of America celebrates, almost hungrily, what is the day before All Saints Day. When I was a child, a scant decade or so after the greatest and most horrific event in recorded human history, we, i.e. my peers, celebrated Halloween with mellow partying (joyful but not exactly bacchanalian): ducking for apples, jacko'lanterns in our windows, silhouettes cut from black construction paper of witches on brooms and sable cats dangling from mirrors or ceilings, store bought or homemade costumes of skeletons, devils, princesses or clowns and maybe a stocking filled with chalk or flour to pound against the stoop or door of those we "haunted." This last item represented the darkest degree of our spirits when we expressed ourselves with this "trick" if denied any candy or apples. In fact, I never carried this "weapon" or was even aware of its impish practice until my last couple of years of societally sanctioned begging which had commenced at about the age of reason (six or seven) and concluded when I was eleven. And I was never inclined to wish I had such an item. Neighbors were all known to us and were sweet and encouraging, especially dear Mrs. Hupe, the old German-American lady across the street who required that we "sing for our supper" before the treats were distributed. My parents never accompanied me on these doorbell ringing adventures (a testimony to the quality of life in our neighborhood then, rather than a commentary on their confidence in my early strides towards independence). I probably would have ventured out for a "last hurrah" of my pre-pubescence in my twelfth year, but an event known to history as The Cuban Missile Crisis had been freshly minted and seared into all of our hearts and souls (young and old alike) some nine days earlier that particular October and the annual game of playacting at evil lost its charms for me after the ultimate game of Armageddon/Chicken had already been performed with the result of unmatched and genuine apprehension to the extremest degree, making it the all time champ of spookiness. But except for that one year wherein imminent and total annihilation was a taumatizing and all too real possibility, the Halloween seasons of my youth were far different and far less unpleasant than those experienced in the last quarter century or so. I do not believe that this conclusion is a result of yet another reminiscence by a grouchy, soon-to-be senior citizen, lamenting the good old days and railing against benighted youngsters and hopeless outsiders who don't understand the true meaning of Halloween.

Well, for starters, the true meaning of this holiday (which still, mercifully, is not a legally sanctioned one) cannot casually be articulated nor should anyone claim one's necessarily sentimental and naturally colored personal memories as the historical "last word" about the long and evolving (or devolving) tradition. Scholars, far more knowledgeable than myself could illuminate us, no doubt, about the ancient pagan and early Christian roots of the day and I'm sure that one might be pleasantly surprised as well as repelled by long forgotten practices, mindsets and motivations. The changes that I'd like to focus on though: those in my lifetime (plus a curious variant of the observance of the occasion, regionally based perhaps and generally before the second world war, reported by my parents and their contemporaries) are significant and most interesting and they seem to reflect, like more and more things, the growing cultural clashes in this country since the mid-1960s.

Aside from my admittedly "warm and fuzzy" take on the season and despite truly scary news items in the past (nearly as far back as my days of scurrying around the neighborhood) such as the reports of razor blades inserted into apples and other tampered treats, the Halloween festivities of then were simpler and less complicated. Today they're far more purposeful, concentrated, and organized events, primarily geared for adults. There seems to be, more and more, a serious tone to the day's affairs. Choosing a costume and preparing one's social itinerary appears to consume more time than in the past and expressing one's self strikes me as paramount and a detriment to the fun of being with friends and family. The season is remarkably longer than it was even 15 or so years ago. I recall several years ago seeing homes decorated for the mid-autumn holiday during sweltering days in mid-September and the enormous energy devoted to the day (and especially the night) in the gay and lesbian communities is quite well known and increasingly ballyhooed through gatherings like the parade in New York's Greenwich Village. That the N.Y.C. Transit Authority this year made plans to suspend all bus service in the event of organized rowdiness on Halloween, gives great pause and reminds me of the regrettable "tradition" of only a very few years back in Detroit in which the torching of buildings was deemed indispensable by some to the proper celebrating of the night.

I don't know the figures, but I do know that the enormous increase in sales of Halloween related items now surpasses those of any other holiday except Christmas, but that that gap is rapidly closing. Why this attraction, if not obsession, with a holiday that lionizes not the Prince of Peace but the darker side of the human heart? A healthy playfulness that includes psychic "rough housing" if you will, is not to be condemned. "Letting off steam" and all the other phrases that describe a tolerance for human frailty and the need to permit creativity and all its concomitant messiness, are understood and Halloween will or should always embody this spirit. But the avenues of pursuit that I observe in many of the newer celebrations include a greater and greater attraction for the occult and the glorifying of self over community. Individualism is at least as American as apple pie, but the trends are, it seems, more and more about how much one can call attention to one's self via more and more peacock-like regalia in the manner of a Lady Gaga or a Liberace. The entertainment value is significant and the spectacles can enrich us as theatrical events. But the need to parade is suspect. Yes, we don't want a humorless, puritanical society that is unable to appreciate or even countenance the existence of Halloween. There is no danger of that. But the pendulum may have long since begun to swing in the other direction: toward a place of emptiness, yes hollowness, that clubbing, partying, relentless "hooking up", friending a la Facebook, etc., and self-exaltation (and exultation) can only hide from view for a time. We all escape and we all need to from time to time. But the self-deluding, whether through alcohol, drugs, sexual addiction, food, gambling or even sometimes pontificating blogs (I'd best get a grip and take heed, just like anyone else!) imperils the innocuous fun of the holiday. If we take the time to reflect, more than just occasionally, take ourselves less seriously and try to remember that we are not constantly compelled by anyone or anything, to "go solo" like Lindbergh flying the Atlantic for the first time or Hillary climbing Mt. Everest. When having a good time increasingly seems to resemble hard work, take a pause.

You can disabuse yourself of (yes, wean yourself away from) the pressures of this world to compete, to strain, and the compulsion to fight against (as in the boastful "I play hard!") the peace and tranquility that is always beckoning if we'll just listen to that small but indomitable voice which is our own.

Post Script: The variant on the Halloween tradition of Trick or Treating (or Guising, in parts of Scotland and Ireland) that I referred to above, was the custom of dressing in costumes and begging on Thanksgiving morning rather than on Halloween. The usual cry was simply "Anything for Thanksgiving?" There is anecdotal evidence of this on the internet and my aunt, an octogenarian, corroborated recently what my older parents also confirmed, that this practice seems to have died out shortly after the war. More about this anon.

How Coarse Can The Fabric Get?

I watched, like anyone else who regularly views news coverage on television these days, the photographs and footage of the last moments of Col. al-Qaddafi's life. How inured to graphic scenes of inhuman behavior have we become that many of us don't seem to recoil from such violent images? Sure, we've been viewing guys in those black hats, if we're baby boomers or older, being dispatched by the white hatted guys for more than sixty years on t.v., and in the movies for nearly a century, if we're nonagenarians and even older still. As a society we have lived through or learned of two world wars and countless others, read of these or similarly described sanguinary tales as well as the non-fictional ones in newspapers, periodicals, etc. and have seen or heard of protests, crimes, car accidents, plane crashes and all kinds of natural and unnatural disasters. This is simply life. Fact is though, we've soaked in enough images of brutality into our collective spongy gray matter to theoretically shatter the inner St. Francis of nearly all of us. Of course, we compartmentalize, intellectualize, rationalize and therefore are usually not traumatized by these indirect encounters with the deeply spiritually ugly, particularly with t.v. images of yore and their consistently sanitized depictions, and with atrocities journalistically presented in a similarly non-explicit manner until about the mid 1960s. Lucky thing that. Yet now (since, let's say, a convenient-to-designate-as-watershed film such as "Bonnie and Clyde" in 1967) we seem to have become, with increasing regularity, unaffected by such scenes of unspeakable carnage. I believe this kind of numbness may be worse than having one's psyche reduced to a kind of quivering jelly by one's first experience of a shocking event after being societally sheltered in a gentler time.

I recall, it must have been about 1974, that while visiting the apartment of a friend from my then relatively recent high school days, his younger brother, perhaps in his early teens or even younger, entered the room we were in, energetically moving about the premises while clutching what appeared to be a small flesh colored rubber doll. He was a bit manic in his mannerisms and speech, but the gist of his pronouncements was this: "I'm holding a human fetus. Someone I know who works in a nearby hospital obtained it for me and I'm going to keep it!" To this day I don't I know if he was speaking the truth or not. I had never before (or since) seen such an alleged object. Was it just an imitation of the real thing, in fact made of rubber, or was it the actual remains of a person (or just a potential person, as some imprudently assert) that had been preserved in formaldehyde? Guess I'll never know. Whether this little snot nose was a con-man-in-training or not, the point of his exhibition was equally profoundly crude and disturbing wherever the truth lay. The zeitgeist of that period was (and I'm afraid, is) for me, encapsulated in that display that proclaimed "I can do or say or behave in any way that pleases me and I shall view anything or anyone I wish and rip any curtain aside because my will is the only thing I consider 'sacred.' Otherwise, that word is meaningless to me!"

Please do not misunderstand. The Qaddafis, the Saddam Husseins, the Bin Ladens, the Hitlers, the Stalins, the Pol Pots, the Mussolinis, etc., etc., all got (or failed to get in Stalin's and Pol Pot's cases) their just deserts. And I'm no foe of the death penalty nor do I subscribe to the old pacifist caution that violence only begets more violence. What I am saying is this: when there is no perceived horror in the world, how can there be any beauty and goodness in it? The avoidance of the mere squeamishness experienced by still a few of us, by not showing these images, is not what I am urging. There is no moral component necessarily in sparing one of this or in the physiological reaction itself, that it primarily is. After all, Himmler was reportedly often seen with his eyelids violently twitching along with other facial tics as he viewed the slaughter of Jews and others in the concentration camps.

I read daily a newspaper to my mother whose vision is quite limited. She's very fond of the gossip columns and with each passing month I've noticed the uptick (perhaps I should keep a log of the instances) in blasphemies and Anglo-Saxon words referencing sex acts and intimate body parts that are printed in these pathetic examples of reportage descended from the yellow journalism mindset of an earlier time. With the scantest amount of self-censorship, as in "f--k" and the like, they pollute further, what for decades now has been a world of print devoid of real reflection and serious human thought. Except for some incisive and insightful columns about the national and geopolitical scenes, there is precious little to recommend American journalism in the 21st century. With these particular words it seems increasingly merely a superannuated and endangered formality to delete a few letters of such when printing them, not dissimilar to "deleting" as it were, through the non-total nudity of pasties and g-string on a stripper at an establishment that, legally or not, authorizes its female performers/employees to nightly dispense at some dramatic moment with these vestigial articles of minimalist modesty. One expects "mainstream" newspapers like the one I read to very soon graduate to their version of final "denuding" via the end of deletions and other instances of journalistic forbearance.

How about the prospect of literature (and assumedly instruction) distributed to grade school children in N.Y.C. public schools that expounds on various aspects of sexuality, both heterosexual and homosexual practices and their acts with specific, explicit and detailed explanations of the same? Is this not a coarsening of our social fabric also? I'd say it's the secular version of the early Christian hair shirt in terms of discomfort though it's light years from the concept of self-mortification. A garment of steel wool and fiberglass with an overcoat of top quality sandpaper (coarsest grade, naturally) is what the well dressed nihilist is wearing this season.

There are so many other examples, too numerous to recount all of them here, in hundreds of other spheres of our fragile social structure that reinforce the conclusion I am forced to draw about these repulsive but ineluctable facts. Western civilization is on the decline. Big time. Our Judeo-Christian world and the Hellenic traditions of Reason and democratic principles that were strengthened immeasurably by Anglo-American philosophies of self-government, have been under siege for a long time and is now worse than "on the ropes." Whether it's elements of a corrupt police organization defending ticket fixing, officers on duty making lewd gestures during an ethnic festival, gun and drug smuggling by some of these same professionals sworn to enforce and uphold the law, pension fraudsters, Wall Street double dealers ("Greed Is Good"), Occupiers singing the old tune of the fabled grasshopper: "The World Owes Me A Living", clergymen "Gone Wild", school teachers corrupting their students with sexual liaisons or even political diatribes masquerading as detached, objective presentations of facts, or an unending parade of politicians guzzling with abandon at the public trough together with public sector unions aided and abetted by a quasi-socialist administration in Washington, the truth is this: the guys in the black hats have returned from their graves and seem now impervious to our bullets of righteous indignation.

What to do? Keep our powder dry anew and for a while longer. Watch and wait and seek good counsel. There are men and women of good will still among us. The selfishness needs to end however. We needn't devolve into "useful idiots" as Marxism 101 teaches or to become an actual card carrying Commie bastard to arrive at a less unjust world. No, we need to re-learn the old verities and treat one's neighbor the same way that we wish to be treated. Our individuality and our privacy both need preserving also and we can defeat our sworn enemies, and more importantly, direct our wrath against their transgressions without forgetting that greatest love: agape. Even a Qaddafi was once "somebody's darling, some mother's son." Once we can cease to allow ourselves to exult over the license we gift ourselves with: that of dehumanizing our adversaries or "cockroachizing" them to unleash the vermin within ourselves, then we may start to become more human again and eventually fully so (no demonizing at all, grimly or exuberantly) with continued great effort, contemplation and prayer.

Mighty Fine News: The Yankees Lose!

The big boned, moody mulatto, erstwhile paramour of the sociopathic Madonna swung uselessly at the pitch. It was the third strike, last out of the bottom of the ninth inning and it spelled, joyfully, for: defenders of the downtrodden, National League Metro New York fans, plain ol' Mets fans, ancient Senators/Nats fans ("Damn Yankees!"), septuagenarians and older from Brooklyn and other parts of Queens and N.Y.C., most any sentient being in New England (and the dead ones as well, especially those who bought the farm before 2004), most folks in the lower 48 and Hawaii and Alaska as well..you betcha, and all men of good will….drum roll please…. THE DEATH KNELL OF THE 2011 SEASON FOR THE NEW YORK YANKEES, symbols of arrogance, overweening pride and the objects of misplaced affection/addiction of sycophants, fair weather rooters and boot lickers of a seeming American success story. "Rooting for the New York Yankees", an old beloved and departed friend once told me "is like rooting for Rockefeller to make a million dollars." He was so right.

It's a free country (wait, let me check my watch and what's the latest emanating from D.C.). O.K., so yeah, let the pea brained idolaters of the automatons in pinstripes watch the reruns of past glories on the Yes (Yankees) cable channel and let 'em hope and plot for 2012. But mostly, let 'em learn, with each disappointment, some of the character building that may, I repeat, may come with more regularized losing and second best status. It's a long winter: let 'em ponder "what might have been" and maybe with enough richly deserved comeuppances like this sweet Tigers victory, they'll bother to at least take a peak in a Webster's at the meaning of the words "suffering" and "compassion." Oh, are you thinking dear reader, that I am supposed to bestow some of this rare commodity of saintliness connoted by the latter word upon these obnoxious folks to help "loin 'em" as they say in "Greenpernt?" "Where were they, in this regard, for all these many long years?", say we Cubs, Red Sox, Mets, Dodgers, Giants fans. (though '10's afterglow may have not yet worn off on Jints folks and hence no fresh gall for them). Devotees of all these teams though, have long since earned their doctorates in Crucifixion-By-Loyalty, an interesting field of study of the modern masochist's yearning for love and salvation. And we needed no patronizing and phony condolences from the Yanks and their minions. Come to think of it, that's one of the very few virtues of a Yankees disciple, they give you no quarter (in more ways than one: notoriously chintzy are they…why be surprised?…ask any waiter or bellhop who had to deal with the patron saint of Yankeeism, Joltin' Joe The Vainest Schmo). Let the Cranky Yankees fans go to school and hit the books, long and hard.

Full disclosure: in 1955, with about three weeks of kindergarten experience under my belt (or beneath my metal snap-on suspenders) I watched as my Aunt Pauline thrilled to Johnny Podres' shutout and only World Series Championship clinching for his Brooklyn Dodgers. My Mom had traditionally turned on our old Dumont t.v. every October since '51 and she and my aunt both wearied of the predictable outcome nearly each year: "Yankees win." I knew I was a Dodgers fan on that long ago afternoon when they and my Dad caught the spirit (who can forget the Daily News' headline the next morning "WHO'S A BUM!" with the full page cartoon of Leo O'Mealia's beloved hobo) that ignited as much heavenly delirium in Flatbush and beyond as did V-J Day.

What made tonight's final curtain so particularly lovely was the memory tripped off by the uniform of the potbellied hurler with the eccentric body language on the mound against the final Yankee batter. In May 1959 I had fully discovered the happy mania of the game and all heroics of a non-Yankee nature. That particular season did not disappoint. Except for 1954, it was the only one of the decade of the '50s in which the Yankees failed to win the American league pennant (in fact they would win all five pennants of the first half of the '60s). Part of their frustrations (and one of the reasons for their third place finish that season) were the result of the exciting play of the Detroit Tigers with ace Frank Lary, "The Yankee Killer" and Charlie "Sunday Charlie" Maxwell, home run hitter par excellence. That Sunday in May, when Charlie slugged four homers consecutively against the despised Bombers in a doubleheader, was the occasion for an explosion of delight for a little rabid partisan like me. The twinge of disappointment four months later when the Go-Go Chicago White Sox captured their first pennant in forty years, nudging out the Tigers, was more than ameliorated by my beloved Bums' ascension to the top of the National league heap that year. Their conquest (as the L.A. Dodgers) of the Sox in the World Series was a happy reprise of '55 and a most delicious icing on the cake.

The zenith of exultation though, the very summit of King Of The Hill-ism, was the 1963 World Series in which the Dodgers came face to face against the Yanks for the first time since '56 (that terrible series in which Don Larsen's perfect game and a general collapse of Brooklyn's offense led to the Bombers' speedy revenge for '55's brief moment of paradise). In '63, there were no booming Brooklyn bats of the recent past to suddenly go cold (Snider, Campy, Furillo and Hodges) but these west coast Dodgers now had the fully developed talents of the matchless southpaw Sandy Koufax, the nearly equally awesome Don Drysdale and though relatively punchless, the remarkable speed of a resourceful team led by the ultimate master of mercurial locomotion: Maury Wills. The outcome? The Dodgers: World Champions in four straight games, Yankee bats muted along with their fans' flapping jaws and Nirvana for the Forces of Light. The Horace Clarke era of sustained Yankee mediocrity was only several years away (a truly wonderful period, much like the smashed landscape after the collapse of Rome, but without the barbarians holding sway). For the moment though, before the horror of Dallas one month later, Vietnam and all the other upheavals and assassinations of the next dozen years or so, there was that incomparable moment, at least in the world of baseball, when Goliath lay sprawled out flat on his back with David's rock lodged in the tyrannical ogre's skull and the underdog as gleeful overdog! Go Bums, go Sawx, go all liberators and liberated from Pinheaded Pinstripers (with apologies to Mr. Bill O'Reilly….unless he's a Yankees fan).

A Lovely Face, How So?

Language is so often relied upon. This is especially so when the would-be communicator is me. I struggle for the right written words, and after so many years (the entire second half of the 20th century plus the "decade'n change" of this one) of being among the quick, if not the swift, I realize that my efforts, though bearing some stressed fruit, remain products of a mind of some genetic gifts, but untrained and to date, hardly prolific. Am also aware of the overwritten quality of most of my offerings, a hangover that seems to keep hanging on, from my days as a 38 year old undergraduate, returned to his studies after almost 16 years. I was trying, and continue so, to compensate for a perceived inadequacy, both quantitatively and qualitatively, as a creative writer. This blog offers the opportunity to make literary "omelets" with little or no dire consequences for breaking innumerable "eggs." So here I go again, prolixity via convoluted sentences and parenthetical concoctions like twining morning glories clogging the path to my point that my patient reader (hopefully) searches for and finds, leading to the threshold of, dare I be so pompous: some enlightenment?

Well, I'll try to disabuse myself of these verbosities eventually. In the meantime, the subject of beauty, human female beauty that is, concerns me here today (yes, okay, just about any day). On first blush (and this can literally still happen to some of us, regardless of age, who see and become aware of being seen by a most comely person of the opposite sex) it seems one of the least likely topics to prove a good training ground for developing writers like myself and for encouraging them to work on their tasks of "simplifying." Yes, there are unparalleled poets who, with concision and divine aid can somehow express and recreate the reality of the precise beauty that their eyes and hearts see, and there are others, sculptors and orators, who can also come close to this acme of literary delight through the particular medium of their true art. But most of us, committed to prose and likely to remain "not pros" must build a tedious and complex house of cards with our words, and are held hostage to this task of constructing a dubious palace of verbiage to shelter the queens in our midst. We cannot put our faith in the old dictum "less is more" or expect that our appreciation of this pulchritude will be understood with a Jimmy Stewart-like taciturnity or an almost inscrutable nod that says "Brava!" by an Eastwood or a McQueen. These icons and their living spiritual descendants, men with their own "beauty", i.e. handsomeness, can well afford to understand and be understood with their particular methods. They, after all, are gods to these goddesses and such unfiltered sexuality needs little or no flowery wordsmithing. We pencil pushers, men of mentation, as libidinally revved up as any "stud" in Hollywood or on the mythical range, but unlike the strong silent types, are charged with describing and circumscribing, painting an image and somehow animating this mimicking visage so that the flutter in our own hearts is reborn a thousandfold in the tickers of readers that thump in solidarity with ours because of our hopefully articulate cry to the heavens of what is incomparable beauty.

We shall fail every time. Our efforts may be praised after death (physically or psychically) which promotes us to that status which non-existence somehow always bestows: an end to rancor and exemption from life's critiques and other barbs. A certain gentleness is finally extended when it is no longer needed and hurting or being hurt are irrelevancies. And there is always a kind of eulogy that remarks that we were at least sincere and had striven mightily. But utterly insurmountable is the mountaintop of the Idea of the Fairer Sex and the flawlessness and exquisiteness of its members whether we beholders of beauty be dead or alive. It is not so much that words fail as that the mind and the body cannot remain too long unconnected, particularly when trying to inscribe or carve a recording of what is so intensely and essentially captivating but can only remain in the end, uncaptured by mere verbiage. Might as well try to grab some stardust and paint a smile on the ether that warms as hopefully (and hopelessly) as the "real live girl" of ancient song. Yes, Da Vinci climbed to this summit but it is so rare a thing and perhaps only his Mona Lisa, certainly not all or even most of his creations, were possessed of this near immortality. What of our Mona Lisas? Are they able to come into this world? Are they attainable? Can they be clasped to our longing bosoms when our artistry is less than god-like, or even when it's the best that is humanly possible? What is the goal, truly? Is it to love the object of beauty and delight, or is it to enfold it with our literary powers, whatever their strengths or weaknesses?

Can one tame a mustang? Ought one to even try? Monroe's Roslyn in "The Misfits" viscerally abhorred the concept and began to crumble into broken bits over the violence she witnessed perpetrated by those around her (all men) for whom the hunt was all, perhaps a hard wired thing deep in the male species. Is a straining writer any different from a cowboy straining to rope, brand and subjugate these horses? There is another facet of the whole question, a very sharp edged one, that I should mention. I do not believe it's an idiosyncrasy of my world view on womankind, but a legitimate issue that all men, and conversely women, deal with in certain cases. There are extremely attractive persons of both sexes, who, because of their remarkable physical attributes incite, intentionally or not, extreme reactions in those for whom their vision serves as very vulnerable portals through which their emotions can be assaulted and easily inflamed by such visual delights. Hostility, animosity, even predation in various forms can be the result, and even the slightest hint of political power or the expression of power through the world of dreams and fantasy (particularly in the field of entertainment) by these persons of beauty, can militarize, as it were, those afflicted by this desire or even lust. These situations are proper occasions for intellectualism (and of course, religion), the former long denigrated in America and the latter only recently so, to come to the fore and encourage, forcefully, the forces of sensationalism and The New Morality (just The Old Immorality) to awaken and search long and earnestly for the personhood of and respect for one and all, even those deemed gods and goddesses for whom the temptation to treat in an ungodly fashion may be severe and which is always wholly unacceptable.

But let's at least try to simplify anyway (novel notion for we inclined towards literary loquaciousness)! What is feminine beauty? Is there a mathematical formula that can explain what delights our senses and moves the mind and body to create, artistically and most profoundly, i.e. divinely through the continuation of our human race? A recent television program explored this science of beauty and attractiveness and seemed to assert that "yes" we have a mechanistic answer to the question: with formulas about the shapes and sizes of human faces and other palpably measurable aspects of the subject. The least strenuous journey to a place where this answer may be found however, includes, I believe, traveling down a road called familiarity: like an old melody that we love and begin to hum in glad comfort when its strains are re-introduced into our brains at a chance meeting say, while strolling past a stranger who is absent-mindedly and not self-consciously doing the same. Similarly, when so-and-so insists he has "the perfect date" for you (and when you wearily read him the subdued but still immutable "riot act" of your personal code of social interactions: "no blind dates"), he softens your hardened heart with a gentle, hope inducing description like "she looks an awful lot like a cross between Jamie Lee Curtis and Mary So-and-so. You remember, that very kind gal with the giggles and freckles? Oh, she's very nice, just like her, extremely friendly and intelligent besides." Something or rather someone, guaranteed to reprise a pleasant spirituality and physicality from the past: is this all one needs for a roadmap to bliss and the essence of beauty? What of gals from Mars (rather, they're from Venus, if anywhere exceedingly exotic, we are told)? Could they be sources providing rapturous and ecstatic experiences for we who seek this paradisiacal conjoining of yin and yang? We mustn't close our minds to the possibility that three heads (attached to one body) may be more beautiful than one. And why mustn't an alabaster bosom have more than two globular glands of pneumatic joyfulness? Well, okay, am guilty if charged for setting up straw men, or lighter-than-feathers women, for the sake of a cheap chuckle. The subject at hand remains, after all, female HUMAN beauty. And, is it not so, that what one loved or gravitated to long ago is what will likeliest, inspire and cheer in the future?

I asked this "beauty" question of a friend very recently (in fact, while preparing this blog). He agreed that there was something inexpressible about the answer to the question, even if understood on a "gut" level. He said that whenever we are listing attributes of a person being focused upon, whether of their physical charms or uniquely loveable character, we are basically declaring that that person is "alive." It seemed facile and not satisfying when he first stated this. But then I thought: "what does it mean to be alive?" Dig slightly deeper below the surface of the usual mundane "take" on such a query and "voila": the undeniable mystery of life itself makes stargazing's cousins: the contemplation of innerspace or the pondering of human existence and how and why an individual is beloved, most profoundly understandable in their inability to be understood, as when the French warm to one of their favorite subjects (or as we tend to stereotype their cultural inclinations): love, and declare that the beloved has that certain "Je ne sais quoi." And to fear not one's perhaps budding francophilia, I hereby declare, relative to that boy-girl thing: "Vive la difference!"

Marginalized!

When did this word get its negative connotation, as referring to someone or something that's "unimportant", "a sideshow", "hardly worth it, save as a footnote to history" or "significant, maybe formerly, but now pushed out of the way like a hopelessly stalled wreck, its sidetracking richly earned." With so much unadulterated, pure CRAP between life's margins, especially in this time and place: not long before the Mayan doomsday clock is supposed to strike thirteen here on ol' played-out planet Earth, how about setting our sights on the hidden treasures of life off the highway, well off the "frenetic freeway" and safely tucked in and on her shoulders, or even further away into the woods, beyond any outer guard rails where no one has, hopefully, peed or tossed too many beer bottles or condoms to shatter the illusion of escape to this Shangri-la and from a not-so-kind humankind? There are so many times when not being at the center of attention is quickly discovered to be, as ex-con Ms. Stewart so often tells us, "a good thing!"

It was a pleasant surprise for a, hopefully, innocuous narcissist like myself, when a gorgeous redheaded lady in a smart plum colored pantsuit rang my doorbell early this past summer and gazed briefly, but with the proper degree of professional seductiveness and intensity, to inquire if I were aware of the joys that a complete set of volumes of such-and-such brand encyclopedia could bring into my life. Attention was being paid, regardless of the reason, by this pulchritudinous young specimen of the fairer sex and my self-centeredness was initially tickled enormously. Reason at that moment, actually asked for a moment of my time however, and even though my libido trumped my lumbago and the chance to hold court was nearly irresistible, an even more pleasant surprise than the aforementioned one was that I wanted to hear what that little voice of common sense was trying to tell me. Rationality, I heard, politely enquired of me: "do you need an encyclopedia?" Voices in my head of the non-delusional variety: revolutionary phenomena (not rare instances of sanity, I assure you, but most novel in their simple non-convoluted sensibleness), perhaps signs that my mature years were becoming exceptionally ripe and (especially for a guy with no great track record for practicality), were finally having their say. In one fell swoop of oblique honesty and whimsy, my fantasies of fruitful flirtatiousness shunted aside, I softly declared to this lovely creature, with no malice or trace of sarcasm (and only a hint of sorrow and contrition, as in "I'm sorry to have to inflict my personal burdens and failures on you, but one must, in order to properly answer your question"): "I'm very sorry. I am an illiterate." So conversation stopping. So liberating. So effective. So time saving. So mean. So long.

Alone with my '53 Encyclopedia Britannica, I've no glitzy top notch sales gal to feign "in crowd" status with, no monthly invoices with the prestigious return address and icon of Lotsa Learnin', Inc., Teachers to the Upwardly Mobile since 1969!, nor any chance to trade in coupons for trips to Burkina Faso attached to the rear inner cover of volume 1: "AArdvaark-BUmpkin." I have just willfully played a part in having been marginalized. Will Homeland Security send me an E-mail for not being a patriot and spending some greenbacks on a new American made (sort of) tool of Higher Education, though printed in Singapore? Will I be out of the loop the next time Trivial Pursuit is pursued at someone's next barbecue/charades/sitdown/buffet? Well, blow me down, I will have done been marginalized again!

I had been teased, deservedly so, for agreeing to subscribe to "Jet" magazine some forty plus summers earlier after a pixieish black woman explained my part in her task of racking up points to win a college scholarship via subscription sales. My assent led to wags offering the usual proposals to me, Mr. Softy, to help me become the proud owner of the Brooklyn bridge (and several others of the same name) and to purchase a giant warehouse of previously owned but near "mint" refrigerators a little northeast of Nome, Alaska. Well, I've come a long way baby, from the prepossessing young man (and middle aged one) who almost always aimed to please (and as an atypical non-bar hopper in those salad days, rarely had to be told to "please aim" by fussy bouncers who didn't get my old chestnut explaining the toting of my mug of "suds" to the sanitary facility: "I'm cutting out the middle man."). Now I'm trying to please myself. Instances of my efforts at sales resistance are: no subscriptions not really wanted and no third helpings of quadruple-cheese Mac'n Cheese, lasagna or rugelach accepted (or safely digested) from Italian/Jewish mothers of friends. Laughable baby steps for an incorrigible "shirt off my back" type? Well yes, they are. But who's to judge harshly? Forget not the afflicted one in "Greaser's Palace" and his cry of most relative joy: "I can crawl! I can crawl!! (zounds, an allusion to part of this blog's title, first one since early '11!)"

There's something so delicious about not being part of the Passing Parade. Heck, it's really the Epitome of Peachiness to not even be aware of the dull roar of that struggling gang of Accomplishers and Strivers, their ever frazzled neurons and twitching "Gotta Haves" lashing them ever onward as they strain while in harness, like part of a great team of colts and fillies seemingly bound for glory, but more often than not, merely bound. To not be "front and center", to think of "limelight" as a wonderful shade of green to dapple one's already dappled skin (with "geezer" freckles) with its curious rays to match one's vodka lime ricky as one seeks just the right position in one's banana leaf hammock, nowhere near Nome: that's the life for me. "High Diddle-de-dee! Non-entity: that's me!"

To be forgotten: "A consummation devoutly to be wished?" There is a most telling moment in Fellini's "La Strada" in which Anthony Quinn's circus strongman character can no longer tolerate the disintegration of his assistant and companion, the simple waif Gelsomina. She has been traumatized by his provoked killing of a fellow performer. Their vagabond existence is dogged by her insistent and agonized conscience. He mistakes her pain for fear of arrest and lashes out at her with: "No one is even thinking about us!" This craving to be invisible and to continue to not think or reflect: as he has lived his entire life, is clearly threatened by this death, the reality and implications of which he tries to escape until the film's final scene. Well, this is not exactly the kind of forgetfulness I had in mind. If there are wonders and ecstasies to experience on these highly recommended sidelines of marginalization, how could oblivion play a part in the goings-on? Oblivious to unpleasantness? Yes. How about to stress and stupidity? No argument there, though these seemingly minor abhorrences have a way of demanding more and more attention if ignored too mindlessly. To a limited degree, yes, bring on the psychic anesthesia! But preserving consciousness, that's really the trickiness and worthwhile challenge of this art of being deliriously happily marginalized and yet truly alive! Think and reflect. Do good. And you've "got to serve somebody" as Bob Dylan admonished. How lovely to be one of Geo. H.W. Bush's "points of light" but to never have your light singled out. To have hurled one's body in front of and between a speeding car and a young child-woman on the verge of achieving aspirations of rewarding work and the creation of her own family: all preserved possibilities and then realizations thanks to such a supreme sacrifice, now this is a marginalization that the cynical and terminally selfish do not relish pondering. To contrive to bring about this series of events is another matter: mental illness is so finely separated from true heroism. Still, one ought to pray for an increasingly well honed practice of self-marginalization that might make that scenario possible if danger were to demand it: a sort of healthy antidote to the self-anihilations of the Haters. P.C. forbids naming names, but you know who you are and you can have and keep the conventional and current connotation of "marginalized." It fits you, you "Dead Enders" as Mr. Rumsfeld named you, though prematurely.

Well, enough. "Heavy" happily, rhymes with "Chevy", "levee", and "bevy" (Don MacLean taught us most of this a "long long time ago") and the sunny side of American history shines on, the current gloom notwithstanding. Don't want to be marginalized, positively or otherwise? That's A-okay in my book. Youth and/or vigor are made for the struggle and achievement is the human way and best path for most whose time and philosophical crystallizations have not yet arrived. Go for it. Living, loving: it's a dirty, immaculate, bleak, wondrous kaleidoscope of all the senses and it must be played out on those relentless blacktops of experience, hope and fear, anticipation, rollicking sweet joy and blackest sorrow. The margins won't do. But whenever time or tide has shown, as always it does eventually: that "it waits for no man", then there are special nooks and crannies away from the madding crowd, not hideouts, but refuges for a short time where the weary can rest and a pause may truly refresh if not restore an old soul.