Fifty four years ago today two persons each made a new beginning. They did not know each other then or ever. Their only apparent link is the date in history: Thursday, March 28, 1957. On that day they both embarked on new journeys: common, but very special milestones in many if not most persons' lives: ones that have tangible and intangible elements, and the nascences of which, by their natures, are events that almost always bring renewed hope and perhaps a silent prayer for greater blessings. This writer is likely the only person, until now, who knows both of their stories (or rather these somewhat small fragments of their respective life stories) and that these fragments or occurrences took place on that day.
Because this blogger is a fairly inveterate listener of certain genres of American popular music (in the case relative to this essay, that of "Singers and Standards", as once auto-described by a cable television music channel playing such tunes and still available with a different but similar designation today on the digital airwaves in metropolitan New York), I came to learn more about the late blues singer and icon, Billie Holiday. Her nearly unmatched and assuredly unique talent, conjoined with an equal, or arguably, a greater share of pain and sorrow throughout her shortened life, remain the essential, if familiar elements in her story and those of many singularly celebrated but flawed and injured personages. However, on that early spring day more than half a century past, Miss "Lady Day", as she was affectionately known, pronounced, in her 42nd year, marriage vows for the last time in what must have been a day of hope, promise and an expression of the unfathomable depth of the human need to believe. The hunger and thirst to love and to be loved are achingly powerful forces that may have appeared on the verge of being harnessed in the service of fulfilling a certain radiant dream on that day.
Or was that not really so? Did the years, not so battering in their length as in the relentlessness of their brutalities, prevent Billie from honestly having any realistic expectations of peace and joy? Was she just allowing a thin film of gaiety and distraction to cover over a lifetime of family shame, humiliations, misery, race hatred, substance abuse and all manner of neglect alternating with subjugation by those covetous of her talent?
No, I choose to believe also. To believe, that is, that her hope was pure and that she intended and believed that her road would now be a far less rocky one for once and for the remainder of her days. I believe that she believed. It's a trust one sees in the most frightened and lost creatures imaginable. The anger may explode. The unattractive attention-seeking and the faux cynicism may dominate their posturing. But these strategies are just that and they only obscure, for the indifferent or the insensitive, the need. The sad heart, sometimes heedless of cost, seeks a home and the interrogatives tumble forth from quivering lips that ask, even if only silently, "can you please help me?" and "please love me?" History tells us that Lady Day's marriage suffered along with her health and that her life would last less than another twenty eight months. Still, as she took her final breaths in a New York hospital bed, fresh drug charges hanging over her, and 750 dollars strapped to her body: a fee for a prospective career-resuscitating newspaper interview (and only another 70 cents remaining to her name), she went, once again, one wants to believe, toward the light and continued to hope, however forlorn and wildly flickering her "candle" was and however seemingly victorious, to the world's eyes, was about to be the cold wind of death.
A couple of thousand miles away, more or less, north by northeast from Billie's wedding's setting in Mexico, lived a Mr. Albert Woringer of Weehawken, N.J. who was preparing to bring home a new possession. I know very little about his life except for a few facts. His name appears on a bill of sale (imprinted in an old familiar font of a mid-century manual typewwriter) together with other documents pertaining to and discovered in the glove compartment of a 1957 Ford Custom 300 (Fordor sedan) automobile that this blogger purchased in 1995. The de facto first owner of the then brand new car, "Al Woringer" (as he signed his paperwork) was enjoying, assumedly, his "new beginnng" on this last Thursday in March, the third month of the first year of the second term of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidency. It was also the beginning of the last two weeks of major league baseball's spring training season before the last regular season ever for the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. Osama Bin Laden was eighteen days old and a young Debbie Reynolds was several months away from enjoying the success of her recording of "Tammy." The Cold War had slightly more years yet to run than the Thirty Years' one. America (and the world) was a very different place from what it is today.
Well, anyway, to repeat, on this day Al became the proud new owner of the latest, if not the greatest that Detroit had to offer. A plausible psychological ploy for encouraging one to buy a new Custom 300 in the spring of 1957 was that a new owner would have "arrived", or at least would have now traveled more than half the way mathematically to the rarefied status represented by Ford's top of the line model: the Fairlane 500. "Quality cars in the low priced field" was a familiar and successful marketing slogan for the bigwigs in Dearborn and this particular model that Al snapped up was to be a quintessential example of that. In fact, it was the number one selling Ford that year and helped the company nose out Chevrolet in unit sales for the first time ever. One imagines that it suited Al to a "T", this new beauty of his. And that it, pun intended, thrilled even more than an imagined "first car ever" for a teenaged Mr. Woringer: a flivver dubbed with the same letter. The second owner of the '57, whose name appeared on a 1984 invoice for a new muffler (also found in the glove compartment) informed me that Al was an employee of the car's dealership and that he was fond of rubbing a clean rag dipped in motor oil on numerous parts of the auto's undercarriage. Was this both a testament to Al's meticulous frugality as well as his perhaps intimate knowledge of the truth about Ford's lingering reputation as producers of "rust buckets?" Other possible evidence of his disinclination towards extravagance were the colors chosen for his "baby." They were "woodsmoke" gray over "gunmetal" gray, the latter nearly black. Also, he chose a standard transmission ("three on the tree") and no power steering. For this thankful fourth owner, Al did not eschew a heater.
But what of his frame of mind on that long ago day? Surely, one may argue that the purchase of an automobile cannot compare to the momentous occasion of matrimony. Whether a bachelor or not, Al may have reached the emotional pinnacle of his existence with the acquisition of these 2.4 tons of steel and beautifully sculpted sheetmetal, chrome, potmetal, rubber, plastic and paint. What of the life of the mind and of his soul? We don't know that he did not experience psychic and physical pain of the dimensions of Miss Holiday. If a juxtaposed quasi-pun may be indulged, maybe life was no "picnic" for Al either. Even if his days, unlike Billie's, were the oft remarked upon ones of "quiet desperation", one hazards that on that Thursday, on a street in northeast New Jersey, U.S.A., whatever his past, however misty his future, Al walked a little taller, maybe whistled a little louder, and perhaps flipped a whole four bit piece to a pleasantly surprised, bow tied and spotlessly overalled young gas attendant for doing his usual routine of washing a car's windshield (this time that of Al's soon-to-be traded in car). We, most probably will never know.
What one would like to know, that is, to state without equivocation or doubt, is that both Billie and Al are alive and well somewhere, because we know they were alive once, as corporeal beings who laughed and cried, worked and played, hoped and feared, planned and dreamed and had, each, the gift of at least one day, like a day we all have had, at least one, where the sun was somehow, more than just shining as it shimmered wondrously on people and trees, or new cars or new wedding rings and the air was something that filled the lungs in a way that reminded us delightedly of the dual meaning of the word "inspiration." Thank you, Billie and Al.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Friday, March 18, 2011
Salvation
Pistons rise, then pause, a sputter
Sleep, you can't, you cry, you mutter.
Hope: a heap
Triumphant clutter.
Woman warns
You cringe and splutter.
Need a friend
No words to utter.
Windows of my heart
Just shutters.
Thrown upon a sea
No rudder.
Habit, rote, the drill:
Bread/butter.
Forgetful of
How you cut her.
When I die, let me sleep
Green my grave with clover cheap.
Hug a child from wind's sweep
Tell not of my loss too deep
Such as sown, no doubt reap.
Willows only touch and weep
Marker mine (paid) to keep.
You went far away, my dear
Lend a wreath, if not an ear.
I choked upon the spray you gave
'Twas swallowed by an evil wave.
Neglect so strong it rotted steel
And stole the human pow'r to heal.
The Ghost of Ice shall close the deal
His books he slams shut with a squeal
Of dark delight o'er my demise.
No phoenix here nor 'morrow's skies?
Yet anchor of our loving Lord
Holds fast; He places me aboard.
Not fragile bark of life on earth:
"Titanic" new, hubris-less birth.
Never more, despair and pride
To cloud the Light
Or not abide
In Him and those with love unending
Who spent their all for my soul's mending.
Sleep, you can't, you cry, you mutter.
Hope: a heap
Triumphant clutter.
Woman warns
You cringe and splutter.
Need a friend
No words to utter.
Windows of my heart
Just shutters.
Thrown upon a sea
No rudder.
Habit, rote, the drill:
Bread/butter.
Forgetful of
How you cut her.
When I die, let me sleep
Green my grave with clover cheap.
Hug a child from wind's sweep
Tell not of my loss too deep
Such as sown, no doubt reap.
Willows only touch and weep
Marker mine (paid) to keep.
You went far away, my dear
Lend a wreath, if not an ear.
I choked upon the spray you gave
'Twas swallowed by an evil wave.
Neglect so strong it rotted steel
And stole the human pow'r to heal.
The Ghost of Ice shall close the deal
His books he slams shut with a squeal
Of dark delight o'er my demise.
No phoenix here nor 'morrow's skies?
Yet anchor of our loving Lord
Holds fast; He places me aboard.
Not fragile bark of life on earth:
"Titanic" new, hubris-less birth.
Never more, despair and pride
To cloud the Light
Or not abide
In Him and those with love unending
Who spent their all for my soul's mending.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
American Love
We were loved. The Great Depression was over. The greatest war in human history was over. The craving for normalcy was a hunger that now could be, if not sated, then regularly fed. Abundant were our hopes, majestic were our industries, marvelous were our collective and personal industries and indeed fecund was our "fruited plain", as were our people, both in mind and body. These all were realities and yet dreams too, wondrous phenomena that we could now see and were about to touch. As promised, in the words of that pop tune beloved of Anglo-American audiences, a paean to a beautifully imagined peace to come (released just days before the assault on Pearl Harbor), "The White Cliffs of Dover": "Jimmy" did "go to sleep in his own little room again." Soon many other Jimmys and Johnnys and Joanies and Marys would enter this deeply scarred, yet phoenix-like world and, in turn, sleep in their respective own little rooms, the vast, vast majority of them truly loved and wanted.
Bogeymen, there were: real ones. To the East was the Other, or the aggrieved mobocracy of Slavic bolshevism (surviving twin of, and blind to its relatedness to its hated brother, the Teutonic Beast of fascism) along with its newborn sibling, just before mid-century, a murderous oriental Marxism that throttled, and still does, the noble people of old Cathay. Then too, The Bomb: annihilation of one and all through atomic energy was now more than just a bad dream. Still, we were loved. Life affirming ways and means were our tools (lurking tyrants and the hovering specter of non-existence notwithstanding and, perhaps especially, because of them) as we bumped, shoved and struggled to breathe and to dance to the songs of earth and sun and yes, to honor the covenant of our forefathers' deeds and prayers for prosperity and liberty. Like blades of bright green grass up through cinders, rusting junk and cracked chunks of concrete of an empty lot (like the ones in my little corner of the world of a working class neighborhood in a n.w. section of New York City's borough of Queens), we, embracing the old verities, as most others elsewhere in the land, could and did resume our American way with full vigor. Hope and growth, amity and trust: these were the soils that we, the little ones then, germinated and flourished in. We stood, sometimes literally as toddlers, on the shoulders of giants, careworn shoulders (but not slumped or stooped...and never shrugging ones) of fathers still young, but forever changed, even if not visibly so, by war and the immutability of its thievery. These men were aware that the sun had not yet begun to set on "The Best Years of Our Lives." But like the ambiguous meaning of that iconic film's title, there remained the questions: WHICH were the best years and in fact, were they yet to come or were they the ones that might have been? Women, still young, freed from, (or in many cases liberated by) defense plant jobs, as well as U.S.O. duties, letter writing... to not only sweethearts but to lonely brothers, cousins, neighbors, friends or friends of friends and countless other acts of love on the home front, now were sighing in relief for the divine assent to peace and for the prospective continuance of our race that victory had achieved and that He had permitted.
The term "Baby Boomers" always has had, for me, an unpleasant sound to its almost flippant alliteration. Were we just another interesting commodity that would now soon be in very plentiful supply as indicated on some merchant's tote sheet? Many a cynic or greedy entrepeneur no doubt thought and acted with such a mindset, but I think that the greater truth was that a remarkable biological event, or rather the marvel of the number of repetitions of a particular blessed event, was the occasion for so much "flesh" to enable a certain spirit to advance mightily while the latter could and did enoble the former.
Yes, we were loved. And this was so before we entered, as it was the reason why we entered, this "vale of tears."
Korea: the first wakeup call from Hell, after rainbows had been imagined unfadable. We knew how to once again "imitate the action of the tiger", but war was too recent and for the first time a certain different kind of weariness began to assert itself as we puffed out our cheeks in pained awareness that all serpents had not yet been crushed. St. Michael's other-worldly stamina for this new fight was what we would need. "The Bridges at Toko-Ri" was a period film that seemed to foreshadow a diminution of optimism and a black "zeitgeist." The insistence by its star, William Holden, of an ending true to the book: the death of his character and his would-be rescuer in combat, at the hands of the North Koreans, heralded a realism that started almost an embracing of the ugly and the gloomy. Stalemate and the sullen truce that followed this war assured the abortion of a "happily ever after" and led to, almost a dozen years later, the beginning of the perhaps inevitable psychic exhaustion for the new struggle in Indochina. Now we, the former "little ones" of mid-century were to take our father's places in this next test of our civilization's fortitude.
Self-loathing, mind altering drugs and an intellectual cretinism that confused license with liberty, aided and abetted by, of course, libertines as well as plain old Marxists and fellow travelers helped to rip apart our unity and our purpose. We never lost a single major battle or firefight to the communists throughout the years of the conflict. Yet the American congress and a crippled presidency allowed the destruction of democracy in Vietnam and neighboring countries as we abandoned our friends for perhaps the first time in our history. Rationalizations galore there were, including the now epidemic and corrosive habit of excusing bad behavior by pointing to other bad behavior (corrupt South Vietnamese leaders, war profiteers, etc.). Pol Pot's madness and the other atrocities of the Viet Cong were, incredibly, always ignored while the blood shed for a noble cause by many of the "little ones" of mid-century, was of sublime indifference to the likes of Jane Fonda and far too many others, not nearly as blatant in their perfidy. Through it all, nevertheless, we were loved. The only new subject for reflection: were we loved too much? While barbecues, vacations, sprawling new suburbs, shiny new automobiles (for many, nearly annually), and more and more of material wealth came our way and was pursued or coveted sometimes shamelessly, were we starving our souls in the process? No, this was too simplistic and again, too similar to the self-flagellation that condemned our leaders, our policies and most hurtfully, our soldiers. We were and remain a generous people, but a hard working and traditionally, a thrifty nation, entitled to our hard earned treasure and the fruits of this labor, both the tangible and the intangible.
Where do we stand today? That's a subject for another essay for another day. However, since the fall of Soviet communism, thanks in no small measure to a renaissance of our republic's self-esteem after the malaise and psychic nausea of the late 1960s and all of the 1970's, a brief Pax Americana was enjoyed. This was followed by an almost unnoticed uptick of a long simmering Islamo-fascism, its first phase culminating, of course, in the abominations of Sept. 11, 2001. Our response to this new challenge continues to unfold and the jury is certainly still out on whether or not we truly understand that (I risk repeating myself and the message of many a bumper sticker, but novelty is usually inferior to, even if more attention-arresting than truth) "Freedom Is Not Free."
Bogeymen, there were: real ones. To the East was the Other, or the aggrieved mobocracy of Slavic bolshevism (surviving twin of, and blind to its relatedness to its hated brother, the Teutonic Beast of fascism) along with its newborn sibling, just before mid-century, a murderous oriental Marxism that throttled, and still does, the noble people of old Cathay. Then too, The Bomb: annihilation of one and all through atomic energy was now more than just a bad dream. Still, we were loved. Life affirming ways and means were our tools (lurking tyrants and the hovering specter of non-existence notwithstanding and, perhaps especially, because of them) as we bumped, shoved and struggled to breathe and to dance to the songs of earth and sun and yes, to honor the covenant of our forefathers' deeds and prayers for prosperity and liberty. Like blades of bright green grass up through cinders, rusting junk and cracked chunks of concrete of an empty lot (like the ones in my little corner of the world of a working class neighborhood in a n.w. section of New York City's borough of Queens), we, embracing the old verities, as most others elsewhere in the land, could and did resume our American way with full vigor. Hope and growth, amity and trust: these were the soils that we, the little ones then, germinated and flourished in. We stood, sometimes literally as toddlers, on the shoulders of giants, careworn shoulders (but not slumped or stooped...and never shrugging ones) of fathers still young, but forever changed, even if not visibly so, by war and the immutability of its thievery. These men were aware that the sun had not yet begun to set on "The Best Years of Our Lives." But like the ambiguous meaning of that iconic film's title, there remained the questions: WHICH were the best years and in fact, were they yet to come or were they the ones that might have been? Women, still young, freed from, (or in many cases liberated by) defense plant jobs, as well as U.S.O. duties, letter writing... to not only sweethearts but to lonely brothers, cousins, neighbors, friends or friends of friends and countless other acts of love on the home front, now were sighing in relief for the divine assent to peace and for the prospective continuance of our race that victory had achieved and that He had permitted.
The term "Baby Boomers" always has had, for me, an unpleasant sound to its almost flippant alliteration. Were we just another interesting commodity that would now soon be in very plentiful supply as indicated on some merchant's tote sheet? Many a cynic or greedy entrepeneur no doubt thought and acted with such a mindset, but I think that the greater truth was that a remarkable biological event, or rather the marvel of the number of repetitions of a particular blessed event, was the occasion for so much "flesh" to enable a certain spirit to advance mightily while the latter could and did enoble the former.
Yes, we were loved. And this was so before we entered, as it was the reason why we entered, this "vale of tears."
Korea: the first wakeup call from Hell, after rainbows had been imagined unfadable. We knew how to once again "imitate the action of the tiger", but war was too recent and for the first time a certain different kind of weariness began to assert itself as we puffed out our cheeks in pained awareness that all serpents had not yet been crushed. St. Michael's other-worldly stamina for this new fight was what we would need. "The Bridges at Toko-Ri" was a period film that seemed to foreshadow a diminution of optimism and a black "zeitgeist." The insistence by its star, William Holden, of an ending true to the book: the death of his character and his would-be rescuer in combat, at the hands of the North Koreans, heralded a realism that started almost an embracing of the ugly and the gloomy. Stalemate and the sullen truce that followed this war assured the abortion of a "happily ever after" and led to, almost a dozen years later, the beginning of the perhaps inevitable psychic exhaustion for the new struggle in Indochina. Now we, the former "little ones" of mid-century were to take our father's places in this next test of our civilization's fortitude.
Self-loathing, mind altering drugs and an intellectual cretinism that confused license with liberty, aided and abetted by, of course, libertines as well as plain old Marxists and fellow travelers helped to rip apart our unity and our purpose. We never lost a single major battle or firefight to the communists throughout the years of the conflict. Yet the American congress and a crippled presidency allowed the destruction of democracy in Vietnam and neighboring countries as we abandoned our friends for perhaps the first time in our history. Rationalizations galore there were, including the now epidemic and corrosive habit of excusing bad behavior by pointing to other bad behavior (corrupt South Vietnamese leaders, war profiteers, etc.). Pol Pot's madness and the other atrocities of the Viet Cong were, incredibly, always ignored while the blood shed for a noble cause by many of the "little ones" of mid-century, was of sublime indifference to the likes of Jane Fonda and far too many others, not nearly as blatant in their perfidy. Through it all, nevertheless, we were loved. The only new subject for reflection: were we loved too much? While barbecues, vacations, sprawling new suburbs, shiny new automobiles (for many, nearly annually), and more and more of material wealth came our way and was pursued or coveted sometimes shamelessly, were we starving our souls in the process? No, this was too simplistic and again, too similar to the self-flagellation that condemned our leaders, our policies and most hurtfully, our soldiers. We were and remain a generous people, but a hard working and traditionally, a thrifty nation, entitled to our hard earned treasure and the fruits of this labor, both the tangible and the intangible.
Where do we stand today? That's a subject for another essay for another day. However, since the fall of Soviet communism, thanks in no small measure to a renaissance of our republic's self-esteem after the malaise and psychic nausea of the late 1960s and all of the 1970's, a brief Pax Americana was enjoyed. This was followed by an almost unnoticed uptick of a long simmering Islamo-fascism, its first phase culminating, of course, in the abominations of Sept. 11, 2001. Our response to this new challenge continues to unfold and the jury is certainly still out on whether or not we truly understand that (I risk repeating myself and the message of many a bumper sticker, but novelty is usually inferior to, even if more attention-arresting than truth) "Freedom Is Not Free."
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