"Next Year" Approaches in Brooklyn While Eternity Beckons to James Dean

September 30, 1955 fell on a Friday. Major league baseball then was a sixteen team affair, eight teams in each league and each team played 154 games.  The season usually ended before September did and this year was no exception. This particular day marked the third contest in post-season play, known as The World Series. Derisive remarks directed my way by a man pontificating atop a wooden box in London's Hyde Park while I was vacationing there in the late '70s, was a reminder that most of the world was not impressed with our self-centered misnomer about the most important final games each year of our beloved National Pastime. Who really cared?  We were and still are (wait, let me check my watch) the greatest country in the world and therefore, there was nothing to be ashamed about regarding what we treasured and would always lovingly call The World Series.                                                                                                    

On this day the Brooklyn Dodgers defeated the New York Yankees for the first time in the '55 Series after losing the first two games.  Brooklyn in the modern era (starting in 1903) had never won a World Series: never, ever. This afternoon in Brooklyn in the friendly "bandbox" that was Ebbets Field and home to the Dodgers since 1913, Roy Campanella, the beloved mulatto and genial catcher for the "Brooks" led the way with a three run homer as the home team prevailed, 8-3.  Every game of this series except one was won by the home team: Yankees winning the first two at the iconic Yankee Stadium, Brooklyn the next three at Ebbets in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn and the Yanks triumphing in the sixth game in The Bronx. The seventh and final game saw the Dodgers in their road "grays" capture the elusive crown of Champions of The World with an unforgettable pitcher's duel that gladdened the previously heavy hearts of several generations of fans of the county of Kings.  For sixty five years Brooklyn teams had struggled and striven mightily, winning eleven pennants since 1890 with nicknames (sometimes alternating through the years) such as the Atlantics, Grays, Superbas, Bridegrooms, Grooms, Robins and of course, Dodgers (named thusly for the first time in 1911 to affectionately honor the citizens of the borough who routinely dodged trolley cars while going about their daily business). Still, the final triumph over a team from the other league, of rough parity in excellence, had always been denied to Brooklyn.  The crushing defeat dealt to them in 1951 by their hated crosstown rivals the New York Giants in the final playoff game (just prior to a World Series) in which "The Shot Heard 'Round The World" occurred (Bobby Thomson's game winning home run), was the culmination of 53 days of a miraculous chase by the Giants to catch the first place Dodgers. The boys from Brooklyn led the Manhattan team by 13 1/2 games on August 11th, but ended their season tied (hence, necessitating the best-of-three playoff games) because of the Giants' torrid pace of winning an amazing 37 of their last 44 games of the season. It was the psychic trauma of this pennant race's conclusion of four years earlier that made the cry "Wait 'til Next Year!" so paradisaically at last, an obsolete prayer. Dodger defeats in the '52 and '53 Series, both against the Yanks, made deliverance from such victory-starved suffering (nearly impossibly painful to endure) and the related, yet again dashed dreams exquisitely punishing in their denial. Now the long agony for Dodger fans was beginning its death throes on this Friday afternoon and a pregnant joy, or certainly a hungering hope that could envision glorious sustenance through a cozy winter, spring and summer of nourishing delights as "World Champions of Baseball", was in the heart of every fanatical partisan of Brooklyn when the game ended a little before 4 o'clock.  

Five hours later on a dusty highway in the gloaming near Paso Robles, Calif., the newly minted Hollywood film star James Dean would die in the crash of his new Porsche Spyder, his persona's immortality assured in the minds of temporally attuned men and those dedicated to the "dream factory" that was (and is) America's movie industry. But his further contributions to art or to a personal future with a beloved, progeny and of course, a more substantial body of work (in his twenty four years, he starred in but three films, the last one released posthumously), were all never to be as was his impact as a truly iconic actor with stature and a legend based on a life fully lived. Instead, he remains frozen in time along with his boyish good looks, and having bequeathed us an endlessly lingering yearning for what was as well as for what might have been.  The love affair in American society with ruination and waste ("The Great Gatsby", "An American Tragedy" and "From Here To Eternity" are some examples of this strain in our film and literature) caused many to rapaciously lap up Dean's story much like the mother of the Sicilian Robin Hood of mid-century, Salvatore Giuliano, lapped up the blood alongside his corpse following her son's betrayal and assassination.

For the Dodgers and their legion of fans smitten, nay, perhaps consumed by a love affair with their team, exceeding any of their personal ones or even of their God, the nirvana at the summit of the baseball world was in many ways indescribably heavenly unless one knew firsthand the gut feeling of tribalism's triumph over the strangers and tormentors of nearly all of one's remembered past and of the memories of one's forefathers as well. Strangely, this ardor was arguably proved unrequited when a mere two years later, the team announced its departure for Los Angeles, the nearest metropolis to, curiously, the scene of Mr. Dean's departure from this world and arrival at both the afore mentioned one of immortality and perhaps the eschatalogical one of our Christian traditions.  And what of the imperishability of the Brooklyn Dodgers and their fans?  Those of living memory must have reached the age of reason (of years not much more tender than those of a seven year old) in 1955 or earlier to have imbibed the love potion of Dodger baseball in Brooklyn. Thus, only those on the cusp of old age or of course, older, can recount tales of this joyous period without the assistance of history books or hand--me-down accounts. Preserved film and other broadcasting artifacts do help.  And the timeless nature of the Dodgers' story, as well as Dean's, if told truthfully and lovingly, will help immeasurably to keep death and forgetfulness at bay.  Jimmy Dean was us and we were him, experienced through his rebelliousness "without a cause" and his aching search for love and the American Dream. The perennial underdogs from Brooklyn were too, like a younger cousin, maybe at first annoying, but with an unquenchable spirit along with a limp or other malady he determinedly ignored or contrastingly, with a youthful exuberance and salubrious physicality unbridled by prudent judgment while crashing into outfield walls like the famed Pete Rieser of post-war Brooklyn teams. These characters had just that: character, and we fell in love. They, all the other Brooklyn Dodgers, their fans and James Dean: all showed us the fragility of life and the gloriousness of its ever so finite arc with their greatest triumphs being but a few heartbeats away from their sparks turning to glowing embers that our love and memory can blow upon to give wan but special light and hope to our descendant seekers of truth, beauty and the precious vivacity gifted to us all.

Wanting To Be Born

This blank page does not ask me to fill its emptiness. It can contribute little to art or literature except with its utilitarian purpose, and that, only if given "life" by a human hand. But the potential to place the symbols of one's thoughts with ink upon this medium and with a modicum of reasoned intelligence to send a message, is still a gift that I may in turn give fancifully, to this lonely and obedient white "sheet" and cyberspace cousin to the wood pulp bi-product of yesteryear.  The unborn child contrastingly, is instinctively cooperating with the natural changes that bring it closer and closer to its destiny or its normal potentiality: birth. Everything we do volitionally or otherwise is made possible by a series of very complex events, all of them descended from the miracle of conception, the irresistible forces of the universe and the willing nurturing of mature humans and/or prospective parents.

There is the "smart" remark that many an adolescent suffering the angst and/or revolutionary fervor of his age group proclaims: "I never asked to be born!"  The one dimensional truthfulness of this statement impresses, but only within the confines of the resentment of an immature world view that snickers at a Supreme Intelligence.  Of course, there are millions of things that are beyond our control, chief among them: our births and our deaths. No doubt, abortion and suicide may seem to give the lie to such an assertion. But who deems control a virtue (and why?) regarding these profoundly important subjects? And how does the destruction of human life (or certainly, in the case of abortion, at the very least: its annihilation of obvious, flowering potentiality) bring forth blessings or promote the affirmation of life and lessen human suffering? The usual assertions about the need for population control and the fight against indigence, always struck me as coldly clinical and disturbingly dismissive of the power of human love.  When friends would unexpectedly visit our house when I was a child, I remember my mother's natural temperament of anxiety and doubt: "Is there enough food, do we have enough chairs, what shall we do?" My Dad, contrastingly, though no more or less decent a person than his wife, always extended a greeting for the visitors that was unmistakably inviting to the degree that any diffidence or tentative shyness on their part evaporated like a raindrop on an August afternoon. "We are very happy to see you and glad that you are here!" was what he expressed unfailingly in his manner and in his body language. Mom forgot her worries too and the spirit of joy and a salute to L'chaim was what characterized each and every one of these gatherings.

So too, with the approach of a new member to the Family of Man, there seems no good reason for such similar welcoming ways not to be embraced as the only acceptable manner in which to relate to a "blessed event." There is room for one more always... room for one to be loved and in turn, to learn of and to practice its majesty and to repeat the wonder again and again and yet again. Love is not constricted by occupancy laws or tote sheets. But we know that the miracle of life is far from an inevitable reality. Since 1973, 54.6 million lives have been aborted. That's more than nine times the number of persons slaughtered in the Holocaust of 1942-45.  The banality of the reactions to these facts and the enervation of feelings for or against these staggering statistics are infinitely more horrific than the rantings and spasmodic, homicidal acts of the showy mass murderers of recent decades and tabloid tales of infamy. Like zombies, few ponder the consequences of this Culture of Death or seem capable of doing so.  Our current political climate apparently mirrors this sleepwalking, as the charlatan in The White House seems to defy gravity with his ponderous chains of failure and incompetence unable to significantly weigh down his popularity with, yes, 47% of the electorate and fearfully, perhaps more. But not to digress: the "vote" for Life is cast less and less as the century advances and the soul sickness of these abominations, these pro-"choice" posturings that enshroud hatred and possessiveness in an emperor's clothes of imagined dignity and "reproductive rights" continue their retreat from The Light and toward the vileness of demonic realms. As long as one terms something a right, its legitimacy is somehow deemed guaranteed by these losers.

Roe v. Wade may not be overturned anytime soon.  More lives will be snuffed out.  But evil will be rebuked and more.  Obama may return to sully the Oval Office further (to the delight of bribe takers everywhere), Iran may get the Bomb, Israel may finally be "solved" to the delight of Schicklgruber's shade and Islamo-fascism may flourish again. Still, the "lightning of His terrible swift sword" is coming and all the cynicism and derisive cackling will not stop it and then the fear and loathing of babies being allowed into the world will be mightily dwarfed by the blinding "birth"of a religious reawakening and immeasurably more so by The Second Coming.  He will not be mocked.

Death In The Family

There was a dream that I once dreamt when in my middle teens. In it, Mom came into my room in the dead of the night to draw our old Venetian blinds. She announced quietly, as if giving a weather report, that the world was coming to an end and that a mushroom cloud was about to form beyond my darkened window looking toward Manhattan.  I did not awaken with a scream and my heart was not pounding, but the blackness was not dispelled when daylight came. The only thing that was unreal and thus, relieving, was the impossible scenario of reporting an imminent event less than three miles away, the destructive force of which, together with its blinding light, would have obliterated, nay, vaporized my bedroom, our house, and us before any such horrific vision could have materialized or been, mercifully, comprehended. Living through the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 only several years earlier contributed, no doubt, to the creation of such an imagining of my unconscious mind.

It was about thirty five years later and exactly eleven years ago yesterday that my dream arguably came true. Yes, yesterday was the anniversary of the assault on the twin towers of The World Trade Center with commercial airliners, brimming with jet fuel, passengers and crews, by hijackers who were religious zealots burning with a collective wounded pride, beyond burdensome sexual repression and with utter contempt for human life, including their own. My personal account in response to the oft posed query "where were you on that day?" is not a very interesting one (I was, for the record, about a dozen miles away in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn working in an office and learning of the holocaust like everyone else via radio and then television). But how the day's events and their aftermath affected me and those I love are what I would like to relate here. Our world as we knew it, did indeed come to an end on that clear crisp late summer's day and the sky beyond my little room's window looking westward was stained for weeks with the discolored streaks from the billions of particles of airborne debris and smoke from the destroyed buildings. Lingering in the air, especially when journeying into "the city" (as all residents of Queens, Brooklyn, The Bronx and Staten Island routinely refer to Manhattan) were various stenches, most of them strange and unpleasant. But it was the silence or rather, the unusual or more easily noticed intervals of quiet in the days and weeks following the atrocities that impressed me especially as the beautiful weather continued and the little garden that I had curiously tended to lovingly for the first time the past spring and now waning summer, became the object of intense attention and love.

It felt, each day, like a wake, without the ability to retreat to a wood paneled smoking area in the basement or restroom of the typical funeral home. The appearance of police, firemen, state troopers, National Guardsmen and others felt both reassuring and saddening while the explosion of blooming, waving and displayed American flags was akin to the simultaneous comfort and pain (each and every time a specimen of The Stars and Stripes fluttered before your eyes) of kissing, also each and every time, a newly arrived friend or relative to the funeral parlor where one's beloved is laid out. I must have lost a dozen or more Old Glories as the plastic flag "poles" broke, typically when I forgot to reposition or remove the flag when lowering or raising the power window on my car to which it was attached. Often I would "rescue" a flag that some motorist had also lost, if I were a pedestrian or if the traffic was so heavy that I could leave my car to retrieve it. The stress and grief that we carried around with us could be relieved quite spontaneously sometimes. One afternoon I was driving the stretch limousine that my employer required that I use to chauffeur him to or from business luncheons in "the city." Enroute to a restaurant in Murray Hill, I was quite near the United Nations complex while waiting for a red light to change. Alongside me was a gaudily shiny new tow truck with a huge American flag displayed near its rear hook. At that moment, an impeccably dressed man in an obviously bespoke suit but with a tremendously wide and brightly colored (aquamarine and gold) turban on his head began crossing in front of us. The tow truck driver leaned his head out from his window and proclaimed: "There you are! Now we've got you Osama. The jig is up!" The pedestrian understood that he was the object of this derisive and ethnically wholly inaccurate, bad joke. Still, under the circumstances, he managed to admirably continue on his way, neither confronting nor shrinking from the taunt that seemed devoid of any real menace. Maintaining his dignity, I offered, rather unnecessarily, a meek apology for the boorish remark as the foreign gent walked past my hood.  The tension of the last several days then immediately evaporated and I began to uncontrollably giggle like a junior high school student in the enclosed limo.  The outsized headgear, quite like that of Johnny Carson's character The Great Carnac and simply the need to let go of all the recent hurt, culminated in a laughing jag that didn't subside until my boss entered the vehicle twenty minutes later.

One final recollection, chilling, I'm afraid, was yet another facet of the complex and unending learning lesson and grandaddy of all cautionary tales that was and is the darkest day in American history.  Two nights following the attacks, Thursday evening, the mild weather continued and our screened windows all remained opened. An unknown neighbor in a three story house diagonally beyond our backyard was apparently throwing a party.  It was not particularly loud or raucous, but a certain steadiness in the strange music's beat, followed by what seemed to be a kind of chanting was a very curious event on this weekday evening and during this somber time. The participants were completely within the premises and were largely unseen, but the chanting began to increase in volume with shorter and shorter intervals of silence.  Clearly heard was now the word "Allah!" repeated over and over until one's sorrow and weariness was finally roused from its lethargically well set position. One vaguely knew that salt was being poured into one's wounds, but it was not until several days later and after news reports advised of the need to communicate with law enforcement authorities about strange or inappropriate behavior that I called to report what transpired.  I later imagined that had battle hardened Londoners during The Blitz come upon a secret rathskeller somewhere near, let's say, Buckingham Palace, in which sodden Teutonics clinked tall beer steins and drank to the good health of Der Fuhrer, there would have been one huge and bloody row with no German speaking reveler alive to tell the tale. So too, did I belatedly fantasize a grizzly fate for those celebrating enemies of my country, my state, my city, my borough, my neighborhood and my family.  If revenge is a dish best served cold, then the near decade it took to liquidate the mastermind of that accursed day should have marked the day of Bin Laden's demise as a delicious repast. But it was not. The war continues and the blackness in men's hearts seems immutable and unheeding of advances in science or any other human strivings without reliance on a Greater Intelligence than ourselves. Yet certainly, a perverted monotheism serves us not and yet we must pray and try to do better….much better. And yes, as scrawled in chalk on a cargo truck's tailgate the day the fight against the Taliban began that October: "Let Us (continue to) Prey."

Rejection

You are not welcome. You know this and you respect this. There is no remedy. Heroism as redemption is but a fantasy. No kudos are bestowed for your suffering. You will die alone, forgotten. The headstone of your grave will have deeply incised lettering. But what of it? The occasional human may see it further into the future than we may gaze upon a colonial one today with its oxymoronically cheery death's head.  But likely, this will occur while the future visitor is enroute to a viewing of his or her loved one's marker. There will be an infinitesimal moment of conscious recognition that you once lived, but no imaginings or interest in who you were will probably happen. To avoid this you might consider a funny epitaph; it may cause a pause, a chuckle…but nothing more.

Self pity will grow tiresome, especially for you while mouldering in your casket. If hell be your destination, maybe an old friend's imagined tale will be an eschatological reality as you squat on those hot coals: relief in the form of a single drop of Coca Cola placed upon your tongue once every millennium by an angelic and saved former friend. Buried alive and unable to die: this is your end unending. Maybe love can find a way. Maybe this is all a bad dream. The boulders, collapsed timbers and rubble are yours to move and dig you must. "Despair is the only true sin" you heard remarked somewhere. Again, is this real or just the shadows of a cautionary tale? Would that an extended hand, yours or another's, could be seen and heard accompanied by an "I'm sorry." Peace, oh lovely peace….may it enter your world and cradle you with Gandhian compassion or the understanding of Old Abe.