There's a small wooded hill about two miles south of the town where I was born. It was once populated by a passel of squirrels and one human, a jolly man named Bigelow Benny. It was a tar paper shack that he lived in on the small plateau near the top of the rise that was part of the terminal moraine that the last glacier from the last ice age formed when completing its mighty work about 18,000 years ago. Benny wore the same olive drab woolen cap that he owned a dozen years ago when I was a little kid playing with the Dobrolski twins and their sister Thaddea, the tow headed gal to whom I pledged my troth with a cardboard ring one autumn day back then as school was starting.
Benny gave free advice but he never cajoled or pushed. He let you grow up and make your own mistakes, unless danger was an issue. Now at nineteen, my view of him and his ways had grown a bit toward a flippancy that made me sometimes forget our mutual fondness. When he asked about the fancy ragtop I had recently put a downpayment on and I told him of its supercharger, he whistled with appropriate admiration, but he looked a bit worried about the situation, maybe remembering my accident on "The Hill" on my tenth birthday when I had furiously pedaled past his place to keep up with Chris Dobrolski on his Schwinn racer and tangled up one of the cuffs of my denims with the bike's greasy chain that had no chain guard. Ol' "Big" had rubbed a stick of butter on my abrasions, realigned the frame and gave me a pair of his late son's corduroys while he packed the torn and smudged bluejeans into an old paper bag for me to deliver to my Mom once I returned down to our bungalow near the old mill by Jenner's pond.
Benny was older, older than I had always pictured him in my mind's eye. He still had that boyish giggle, an incongruous sound given his turtle-like movements and the sagging flesh that now hung off his frame like pinkish curtains that revealed a weight loss that subverted that roly poly image we had all recognized immediately whenever we journeyed to "The Hill." The sun was high in the sky, but a haze blocked its rays and the air was a tad stagnant given the usual breeze "up Benny's way", as my Dad used to say. "Well, Bud, when am I gonna meet Mona?" he asked, knowing I'd chafe at the personal question. Mona Cafarelli was my first real girlfriend of my post-pubescent period. Thaddea forgive me. She quickened my pulse and seemed somehow inextricable from the excitement generated by my "new" convertible. "She'll come by. I'll bring her in the G.T.O." "'Chickmobile par excellence' eh, young man?" I brushed off the teasing and remembered what had brought me to "The Hill" after all this time. END OF PART 1
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Rita and Bob
Yesterday, May 14th was the anniversary of the death of Rita Hayworth exactly one quarter century earlier. I don't know very much about her life except what most of us who are casual old time movie fans do: that she was extraordinarily beautiful and was a true star of Hollywood's golden age, also that she was briefly married to foreign royalty and suffered from Alzheimer's disease for the last fifteen or so years of her life. Her story struck me today while reading the actor Frank Langella's book "Dropped Names", a likely bestseller, if not already so, in which he offers his unique reminiscences of certain great luminaries of the stage and screen (as well as the world stage) that he has known, some through many years, others briefly and a few that he simply met once or more by chance. His tale of Hayworth is especially poignant. Working with her on her last movie "The Wrath of God" (1972), the two actors began to routinely socialize on and off the set as her deterioration was evidenced and sadly, not fully understood (her then incipient disease). Jeers rather than cheers were tossed at her in thinly veiled ways by cast and crew as she struggled pathetically to remember her lines. Langella befriended her but could not help to slow the woman's downward spiral that had long since been set in motion by booze and other self abuses well before the physiological changes to her brain were apparent.
The 14th also would have been the 95th birthday of Bob Thurman, a major league baseball player for the Cincinnati Red Legs, who were increasingly being referred to as the Reds (perhaps a curious fact in view of the zeal of anti-communism then) by the time of his brief career with them beginning in 1955. I remember Bob because I remember his face on a 1957 Topps Chewing Gum Co.'s baseball card that was among many in my collection. This was the first year ever that I gladly and often plunked down my nickel for a six pack of cards wrapped in shiny colored opaque plastic paper and exuding the sweet aroma of a powdery pink, thin slab of bubble gum nestled under the stacked cards. Bob's card was one I began to accumulate duplicates of, but not so numerously as those of certain other players whose images one began to groan about upon seeing them appear ad nauseum while opening newly purchased packs as one sought to complete each of the several series for that season. Bob's card was a portrait photo and I preferred these to the "full body" shots of players, usually in typical poses such as a pitcher's with arms raised overhead, hands coming together and one holding a baseball lodged in the glove of the other; an infielder's hunched over an imaginary ground ball; or a hitter's with bat cocked at the ready and alternatively with body uncoiled after a supposedly successful swing. Thurman was so unmistakably there each time I admired my little treasures, his bust inviting reflection: big brown skinned Negro, not quite a profile and the rich tobacco-like shade of his upturned visage giving an impression of warmth and passion that complemented the bright red of his Cincinnati cap. Brown and red were becoming my favorite colors during this year of my life deemed to be the start of the Age of Reason. Blue had been my first choice since kindergarten. Now I knew right from wrong, or at least a judge would be armed with this alleged fact about my age group had I committed some heinous "adult" crime that year. No dark thoughts or any especial precocity was I burdened with at that point nor do I have any clue about why browns and reds might be associated with incipient maturity. I just knew that I was falling in love with card collecting and that these little color photographs mounted on cardboard were increasingly coveted while a genuine fanaticism for the game was actually two summers away. That year the cards were a throwback to the "Color" Bowman Co.'s card of 1953. i.e. unadorned shots, emphasizing the "real" backgrounds of several major league stadia (chiefly Philadelphia's Connie Mack Stadium, Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, Manhattan's Polo Grounds and the famed Yankee Stadium in The Bronx) and unlike in other years featuring the trim of bright primary colors, team logos, icons and other designs alongside the players' images and on the edges of the cards. Again, the choleric vibes of Thurman's brown/red world was reinforced by another portrait card of his teammate, an earthy Mr. Rocky Bridges. Rocky's face seemed too big for the card. A "straight on" shot, Bridges' red cap is squarely upon his head and his jaw on one side seems to be bursting sideways until one's closer examination (or rather the explanation of an older playmate and then confirmed by an adult) determined that the "bulge" was of his cheek, behind which a deep brown plug of tobacco was the ensconced cause. I wanted to try this "trick" but Mom would have none of it. I remembered Dad's snuff box and thought he might be more amenable to the idea but he backed up Mom on this one. Still, the red/brown world beckoned and chocolate syrup, tomato sauce, fire engines, beautiful blood bay colts seen in color western movies featuring John Wayne, containers of Sealtest ice cream, mud ("glorious mud, nothing quite like it for cooling the blood"), Phillies' pinstripes, fresh tobacco wafting from a Lucky Strike factory in Virginia and a plethora of other sights and smells were a riot of sensorial delight for this seven year old.
But what about Bob? His image on that bubblegum card may have been just one of my many "oysters." Still, the grownup me was now inclined to learn something about the actual man and who he was. Wikipedia informs us that he was older than the age indicated ("born 1921") on his several cards printed from 1955 through 1959. Baseball players as vain as movie stars: could that be? No, Thurman's motive was economic and wholly justified. Playing most of his adult life in the Negro Leagues, his goal of making the majors, realized at long last in '55, needed the added security of a perceived atmosphere of a player in his prime or at least not in his dotage, compared to the average big league athlete who might have been pushing forty. Thus, the 38 year old native Oklahoman determined to promote himself with the biography and birthdate of a 34 year old man. It was thus, as a result of this dissembling, a very private celebration when, on May 14, 1957, his fortieth birthday, he homered in a game against the Phillies. He was the first man in major league baseball to accomplish this feat. The slow pace of the color barrier's demise allowed a last few wounds of racism to be inflicted and the abbreviation of more than a few black men's careers, like Thurman's, were not atypical results. And his somewhat closeted joy over the milestone homerun, though perhaps not tragic, reminded one of the collateral diminution of simple human pleasures wrought by injustice.
So the date May 14th was perhaps a bittersweet one for Bob Thurman and, provided she had someone to mourn, an unambiguously bitter one for Rita Hayworth's loved ones. Langella points out that the person who was Rita had passed from the scene many years before her biological day of death. Maybe the oft repeated cliche of "it (her death) was a blessing" was an accurate characterization of the event. Like Bob, Rita no doubt knew happiness, hers unbridled and magical given the wonderment of the Dream Factory from which she was a Summa Cum Laude graduate. Bob's journey may have been one of more pedestrian victories, but clearly, they were both very talented persons in their respective fields (he was elected to the Puerto Rican Baseball Hall of Fame and still holds the record for most home runs in that commonwealth's league ). Her stardom was, of course, particularly luminous. Still, the longing for immortality seems to always express itself a bit more achingly when we ponder the lives and stories of our wounded gods and goddesses. The twilight and dawn of Bob's major league career were nearly one and the same and its zenith, that day of the unique birthday present to his middle aged self, all were during the then newly setting sun of the waning halcyon days of Rita's career that included the song "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" that she "sang" in the film "Pal Joey." She did all those things and more to us, her adoring public. Finally, the feast day of the patron saint for those suffering from alcoholism, St. Matthias, is celebrated on May 14th as well as that of St. Boniface of Tarsus who was a slave to his lover and who, together with her renounced their life choices and became Christians. Thurman's assumed ancestry of slaves is the only connection, admittedly tenuous, I could find with the feast day and his life. These facts are however, to my mind, not mere coincidences but psychologically significant small bits of information that are the minute stitches in the tapestry of human affairs and I treasure them as I did those baseball cards of long ago.
The 14th also would have been the 95th birthday of Bob Thurman, a major league baseball player for the Cincinnati Red Legs, who were increasingly being referred to as the Reds (perhaps a curious fact in view of the zeal of anti-communism then) by the time of his brief career with them beginning in 1955. I remember Bob because I remember his face on a 1957 Topps Chewing Gum Co.'s baseball card that was among many in my collection. This was the first year ever that I gladly and often plunked down my nickel for a six pack of cards wrapped in shiny colored opaque plastic paper and exuding the sweet aroma of a powdery pink, thin slab of bubble gum nestled under the stacked cards. Bob's card was one I began to accumulate duplicates of, but not so numerously as those of certain other players whose images one began to groan about upon seeing them appear ad nauseum while opening newly purchased packs as one sought to complete each of the several series for that season. Bob's card was a portrait photo and I preferred these to the "full body" shots of players, usually in typical poses such as a pitcher's with arms raised overhead, hands coming together and one holding a baseball lodged in the glove of the other; an infielder's hunched over an imaginary ground ball; or a hitter's with bat cocked at the ready and alternatively with body uncoiled after a supposedly successful swing. Thurman was so unmistakably there each time I admired my little treasures, his bust inviting reflection: big brown skinned Negro, not quite a profile and the rich tobacco-like shade of his upturned visage giving an impression of warmth and passion that complemented the bright red of his Cincinnati cap. Brown and red were becoming my favorite colors during this year of my life deemed to be the start of the Age of Reason. Blue had been my first choice since kindergarten. Now I knew right from wrong, or at least a judge would be armed with this alleged fact about my age group had I committed some heinous "adult" crime that year. No dark thoughts or any especial precocity was I burdened with at that point nor do I have any clue about why browns and reds might be associated with incipient maturity. I just knew that I was falling in love with card collecting and that these little color photographs mounted on cardboard were increasingly coveted while a genuine fanaticism for the game was actually two summers away. That year the cards were a throwback to the "Color" Bowman Co.'s card of 1953. i.e. unadorned shots, emphasizing the "real" backgrounds of several major league stadia (chiefly Philadelphia's Connie Mack Stadium, Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, Manhattan's Polo Grounds and the famed Yankee Stadium in The Bronx) and unlike in other years featuring the trim of bright primary colors, team logos, icons and other designs alongside the players' images and on the edges of the cards. Again, the choleric vibes of Thurman's brown/red world was reinforced by another portrait card of his teammate, an earthy Mr. Rocky Bridges. Rocky's face seemed too big for the card. A "straight on" shot, Bridges' red cap is squarely upon his head and his jaw on one side seems to be bursting sideways until one's closer examination (or rather the explanation of an older playmate and then confirmed by an adult) determined that the "bulge" was of his cheek, behind which a deep brown plug of tobacco was the ensconced cause. I wanted to try this "trick" but Mom would have none of it. I remembered Dad's snuff box and thought he might be more amenable to the idea but he backed up Mom on this one. Still, the red/brown world beckoned and chocolate syrup, tomato sauce, fire engines, beautiful blood bay colts seen in color western movies featuring John Wayne, containers of Sealtest ice cream, mud ("glorious mud, nothing quite like it for cooling the blood"), Phillies' pinstripes, fresh tobacco wafting from a Lucky Strike factory in Virginia and a plethora of other sights and smells were a riot of sensorial delight for this seven year old.
But what about Bob? His image on that bubblegum card may have been just one of my many "oysters." Still, the grownup me was now inclined to learn something about the actual man and who he was. Wikipedia informs us that he was older than the age indicated ("born 1921") on his several cards printed from 1955 through 1959. Baseball players as vain as movie stars: could that be? No, Thurman's motive was economic and wholly justified. Playing most of his adult life in the Negro Leagues, his goal of making the majors, realized at long last in '55, needed the added security of a perceived atmosphere of a player in his prime or at least not in his dotage, compared to the average big league athlete who might have been pushing forty. Thus, the 38 year old native Oklahoman determined to promote himself with the biography and birthdate of a 34 year old man. It was thus, as a result of this dissembling, a very private celebration when, on May 14, 1957, his fortieth birthday, he homered in a game against the Phillies. He was the first man in major league baseball to accomplish this feat. The slow pace of the color barrier's demise allowed a last few wounds of racism to be inflicted and the abbreviation of more than a few black men's careers, like Thurman's, were not atypical results. And his somewhat closeted joy over the milestone homerun, though perhaps not tragic, reminded one of the collateral diminution of simple human pleasures wrought by injustice.
So the date May 14th was perhaps a bittersweet one for Bob Thurman and, provided she had someone to mourn, an unambiguously bitter one for Rita Hayworth's loved ones. Langella points out that the person who was Rita had passed from the scene many years before her biological day of death. Maybe the oft repeated cliche of "it (her death) was a blessing" was an accurate characterization of the event. Like Bob, Rita no doubt knew happiness, hers unbridled and magical given the wonderment of the Dream Factory from which she was a Summa Cum Laude graduate. Bob's journey may have been one of more pedestrian victories, but clearly, they were both very talented persons in their respective fields (he was elected to the Puerto Rican Baseball Hall of Fame and still holds the record for most home runs in that commonwealth's league ). Her stardom was, of course, particularly luminous. Still, the longing for immortality seems to always express itself a bit more achingly when we ponder the lives and stories of our wounded gods and goddesses. The twilight and dawn of Bob's major league career were nearly one and the same and its zenith, that day of the unique birthday present to his middle aged self, all were during the then newly setting sun of the waning halcyon days of Rita's career that included the song "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" that she "sang" in the film "Pal Joey." She did all those things and more to us, her adoring public. Finally, the feast day of the patron saint for those suffering from alcoholism, St. Matthias, is celebrated on May 14th as well as that of St. Boniface of Tarsus who was a slave to his lover and who, together with her renounced their life choices and became Christians. Thurman's assumed ancestry of slaves is the only connection, admittedly tenuous, I could find with the feast day and his life. These facts are however, to my mind, not mere coincidences but psychologically significant small bits of information that are the minute stitches in the tapestry of human affairs and I treasure them as I did those baseball cards of long ago.
Saturday, May 5, 2012
Into Each Life….
The puddle is fine. It is not the one that ruined Dr. Foster's day. Yet, if you cling to your beauteous ornaments and love your reflection in the mirror or even in the afore mentioned puddle, then you may not roll well with the punches thrown by Mother Nature's right cross in the form of angels crying on your parade. Simply, I was in a rare way: something approaching sartorial splendor with my Brooks Brothers white and blue pinstriped shirt and its white collar and cuffs with 1956 Thunderbird faux gold cufflinks and especially, my shiny rarely used burgundy beef roll penny loafers upon my feet. Enroute to my late great Uncle Frank's daughter's home for a reunion after nearly forty years, I decided to first visit Frank's nearby grave within a street level cemetery, simple and a bit forlorn surrounded by a rusting chain link fence in a little suburban neighborhood on Staten Island. My unchecked self-satisfaction for making this stop was dampened quite literally by the less than manicured grass between the headstones that retained oh so much of the very recent rain that had stopped but that I had smugly and foolishly assumed signaled a green light toward a dry path to Frank's burial site. Care and forethought, constant adjustments and due dilligence: these are qualities for successful living or for negotiating one's way through life, whether it's preserving one's wardrobe or appearance or safely getting a man to the moon and back. Is it all vanity as the bible teaches? Or is success nothing to apologize for? Is triumphing over nature's indifference to our artificial world of clothing and other worldly possessions or ambitions to conquer space, victories worth the effort? If ruining one's shoes somehow miraculously lessened Frank's time in purgatory (assuming one could know that it existed or that he was doing "time" there) would one slog through massively flooded streets to more quickly speed him on his way to St. Peter's gates? The optimist entreats: you can be well dressed AND help Uncle Frank's soul. They're not mutually exclusive goals. Yet somewhow, the wet footwear seemed to remind me that there is a cost for most everything we do, especially when it involves loving someone or their memory. Visiting his grave ought not to be an occasion exclusively for the sake of me feeling better about myself. Yet, loving does anticipate, inevitably or at least secretly, a reward, not to be interminably denied. Instant gratification is rarely cost free. Even a spiritually shallow reason like the one mentioned above, requires some planning. Donning galoshes would have likely avoided any distraction from praying for and remembering Uncle Frank. But, would it had helped me to better commune with him or should the approach, literally, to his resting place have been more imitative of those who crawl or move forward on their knees to Lourdes or Fatima? Love hurts, but where does true sacrifice end and masochism begin? I guess there are simpler ways to view matters and that Uncle Frank would have been (or is) just happy that I came to visit. I hope we meet again.
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Being Mom and Dad
Do you know the way home? There is much to recommend sitting down and accepting certain things. The lost keys and the unremembered task can wait. Consciousness ought to focus on what is readily digestible and let the stomach churnings, metaphysical or actual, do their own work without anxious encouragement or fearful condemnation. It's an autonomous organ in the involuntary muscles category so let go of control that you never had to begin with. You must rest. Really, be kind to yourself. Enquire after your own health. Do it often. Those concerns of others, while lovely, are simply not expressed frequently enough to sufficiently soothe and cradle your fretting little noggin. Be realistic: folks are minding their own business, as Hank Williams urgently recommended. He further strongly suggested: "if you mind your own business you'll stay busy all the time" (hence, you won't pout over imagined neglect). Popping a homemade personal pizza in the microwave or brewing that fresh cup of java just for yourself are surely creature comforts along with that favorite old sweater that substitute, well, fairly well for that hug or silent gladness for your presence that Dad's mildness always conveyed. Hear a hortatory voice in your head reminding you of something requiring your attention? O.K., you knew you wouldn't forget it completely. That's years of good training by Mom. It may go off in your brain like an alarm clock, but just stop procrastinating and get it done and you'll be done with it. Wash those dishes: don't wish 'em away. It all comes to pass and the magic is all in your understanding that there isn't any except the wonder in your heart, head and willing hands.
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