Billie and Al

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.