Harvey and Bud were yin-yang brothers. Bud’s yin pulled him to the pastoral lands of Bill’s forty-two acre farm, to six apple trees and a slate roofed barn, to a Case tractor and feed mill gossip, to an overweight brown and white pony named Babe and four male peacocks from which Bud always gave feathers to the children on Christmas day; and although then traveling to Bill’s farm was only an annual tradition, driving a Model A over dirt roads, the visits were the highlights of Bud’s childhood, they were his secret pilgrimages; and although Harvey horsed around with the pitch forks and loose piled hay, he did not respect the scene, he did not understand the milieu; and thus, with Harvey gravitating toward urban factory life, Bud, looking through prophetic lenses, refused to even wade in those polluted waters, and although Harvey told him he would regret the seven day work week and the small returns, being at the mercy of the weather and the lack of a retirement pension, and although Harvey told him all the reasons for not being a farmer, tried to sell him all the lines that he himself was buying, when my father’s Great Uncle Bill died, Bud took over his small-time operation, and over the years as Harvey gave his youth to the Man, Bud gave his to the earth, and the two drifted apart, each intuitively longing for his other half, but each called in different directions, and although Harvey and Bud never meant to sit across from each other at the holiday table and have nothing to say, that is what they did, and as the years and the drinks flowed, Harvey and Bud’s opportunities slipped away, and their shared history eventually came down to an old photograph of two boys on a sled, Bud sitting in front between Harvey’s legs with his feet on the steering bar, and Harvey, bigger, behind his brother with his arms wrapped around Bud’s waist, and it took the two of them, trading off, to raise my father who was only searching for one solid man and instead received two troubled brothers, and Harvey and Bud would both die as they had lived––fragmentary men.
The only stores Bud ever patronized were pawn shops; thus, for my father’s graduation from high school, his Uncle Bud gave him a pair of gray field glasses he had rummaged from a back-street shop a week earlier. Years later, sitting in the rain at old Municipal Stadium, my father told me that Bud’s real name was Conrad, however, he could not explain the derivative, Bud; but none of this mattered then, in 1956, when his Uncle Bud accepted my father’s hand, outstretched in gratitude, not only for the binoculars, but for the drafty farm house with its hand-pumped water that Bud had opened to my father when Harvey’s drinking turned my father’s father into a maimed and odorous grizzly who struck with ugly black claws; for the ticket to game three of the ‘48 series where Larry Doby’s third inning home run landed just a few rows from their bleacher seats; for the rhubarb pies Aunt Lena, Bud’s second wife, sliced across the middle and split between my father and her husband as they recovered from August afternoons cross-stacking bales of green alfalfa in dusty hay lofts; for the Guernsey cream, skimmed off the top of wide-mouth gallon jugs, in which his Uncle Bud suggested my father drown his pie; for the rope-frame bed and the rag mattress to lay on it that his Uncle Bud salvaged from St. Catherine’s basement after receiving the blessing of Monsignor Kleese; for the grape soda his Uncle Bud had purchased for my father after the deflated crowd, they amongst them, moved away from the black and white television sets in Strauss’ downtown store, still disbelieving that Wertz could hit a ball over four-hundred feet and Mays could catch it; for the lessons learned on those cold morning milkings when ice skims would form over the full buckets before my father could empty them into the tank; for being a man; and for all that remains unspoken, even unthought, but known, known the way the apple knows its seeds and the locust knows its boughs; and so all these stories, this familial history, I learned from my father, not all at once, but in fragments and antidotes told during thirty years of ballpark talk, for nowhere else did my father and I fit together, nowhere else did we stand on even ground. I, with my linguistics classes and rhetorical research, with my two story condominium and bohemian goatee, with my passion for Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, with my amateur sculptures of nude bodies and mad dogs, with my fallen-Catholic agnosticism and forgotten photos of old girlfriends, with my soft-hands and smooth baby-face, with my cerebral leanings and abstract conundrums, with my Miles Davis Kind of Blue and Kerouac beatitudes, with my graduate school moratorium and fears of commitment, with my dead-end psychoanalysis and reflective scrutiny, found little to say to a worker, to a man who washed after work instead of before, to a man who has too many projects to know the beauty of a snowy Saturday afternoon wasted reading Chekov’s stories in an avant-garde coffee shop, to understand the liberation of sitting all day in front of Caillebotte’s Paris: A Rainy Day at The Art Institute of Chicago, to listen to the wind while standing on your head in the Wyoming desert, to waste time; to the man who knows how to fix a broken furnace, a wrecked car, a noisy drier; to the man who lives in antidotes, who disparages complexity, who sees a messy oak tree where I see a primeval archetype; to the man who answers riddles pragmatically. And I too once wanted to do those things, I too want to see that way, I too tried to do what he did, but I could not, and thus, with he embarrassed for me, and I embarrassed at his embarrassment, we have passed awkward holidays and strained birthday parties, and have managed the best we could, and yet, the ballpark is where we talk, the ballpark is the frame of our only real relationship, and it was there, in old Municipal Stadium, that my father told me about those aforementioned binoculars and about that September day, nine years later, before my father would beget me, his only child; before the first season since ‘59 that the Indians would finish ahead of the Yankees, when, after climbing onto the old barn’s slate roof, after loosing his footing and falling thirty feet, his Uncle Bud, lying in a rented hospital bed in the farm house dining room, with wiry chin hairs needle-like below his dentured mouth, shirtless and doughy, attired in threadbare blue pajama bottoms strapped at the waist and matted brown slippers, called my father a son-of-a-bitch bastard and lobbed a feeble fist at his sagging brown eyes.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Friday, June 17, 2011
Archive #3
As previously stated, one of my motivations in starting a blog is to gather together the poems and stories I have written over the past 25 years. I want to get them all together and posted on the web primarily for the sake of knowing where they all are and feeling some comfort in their accessibility.
So with that said, here is "Part One" of a story I wrote some time ago. I decided to post it in parts so as not to tax the one or two readers who might be kind enough to actually read it. If I am speaking of you, thank you.
The Value of Baseball
The Value of Baseball
Part I:
Harvey rolled like a pinball. In 1934, four months after leaving school at sixteen, he worked twelve hours a week unloading flatbed produce trucks at Patruli’s Deli. During his off time, Harvey leaned against rusted piers under the Market Street bridge with the other men––the German, the Slovak, and the Lithuanian immigrants––groping for steady work. Interchangeable, expendable men slouching fifty feet below the bridge and just outside the yards, clad in filthy, drab work cloths and boots of worn leather with their steel-toe caps peeking out here and there like patches of gray primer beneath chipped paint, smoking cheap tobacco in hand-rolled cigarettes and green Lucky Strikes and hitting off hazy homemade booze until it did not much matter that the bearded Croat in the booth had posted the NO sign for the fourth day that week; and until it did not much matter that even when the man did give the order to insert three or four guys to this mill or that yard, that the Croat would not so much as spit at you if you were unfortunate enough to carry no vouchers from those already inside; and until it did not much matter that even mill work was unlikely for a two-bit punk like him. And so, blunt and vagrant, time passed for Harvey, and just when he figured he could stand under that bridge no longer, just as he was about to abandon ideas of mill work, to hit the open road, to pick up and jump trains to California, or Texas or somewhere different, to slip out of the mill before ever slipping in, Harvey caught a bone. A bone tossed by a grimy man with forearms bigger than Harvey’s thighs who saw Bud’s kid brother walking to Patruli’s and remembered his visage from when they used to skip rocks at him until he would run away, and from when they used to wet-willy him until he would cry; and thus, the next morning, Harvey walked aside this man, aside this heavy plate and black iron worker who looked just as filthy that morning as he did the night before; aside this stoic figure of labor who casually wore a leather tool belt over his shoulder and who carried a dented and scratched lunch pail––an industrial knight so long clad in the armor of the trade that Harvey could not have imagined him looking any other way; aside this progenitor of scarred and bruised children who ran wild in the streets jumping free rides on the back of milk trucks and playing football with an old soup can before belly-flopping into the murky Mahoning River; aside a worker so unaware of leisure, happiness, and holiday that he clustered the concepts with that of death and tossed them all down to be trampled by duty and obligation; aside a grown son whose own father had incinerated in a coke furnace during the long-shift; aside his precursor; and, indeed, from seven o’clock that drizzly Wednesday morning until three-thirty in the afternoon forty-seven years later, between which time begetting three children from a wife who broke vertebrae after slipping on bathroom tile, between which time cultivating a dry hacking cough which eventually would lay him to rest, between which time enduring two severed fingers and the unstable knees of a laborer, between which time learning how to hide flasks in toilet tanks and tool box drawers, between which time tattooing welts on his forearms with the leaping embers that accompany the welder, Harvey worked sheet metal. When Harvey crossed the threshold that last afternoon, he wore a gold-plated watch presented to him by the owner, he carried a pension booklet passed to him from the shop steward, and, most importantly, Harvey held the memory of that summer afternoon, in 1956, when he spoke to his eldest son, my father, about an apprenticeship in the trade and hooked my father into that same shop that entrapped so many good men into three bedroom homes and American automobiles, into little leagues and booster clubs, into Florida vacations and Fourth of July cookouts, into black coffee and tomato juice, into Sunday mass and visits to Catholic cemeteries, into twilight double-headers and high school football games, into cheap domestic beer and cigarette coupon booklets, into January first kielbasa in sauerkraut and wedding tables covered with platters of kalalcity and pizzelles, into a way-of-life, a structure, out of which a man develops pride, loyalty, security, perseverance, and comfort, and it was these qualities that turned good men into pigeons, that blinded the prophets and sages, that allowed the structure to crumbled upon them as the mills collapsed and their understanding of how the world worked, of order, of logic, of life, ceased to exist like a flame extinguished, like an alarm silenced, like a scream muffled; and these men watched Youngstown wrest into a ghetto of aimless middle-aged workers by US Steel and Republic Steel, and even Bethlehem Steel, one by one shutting the gates of their antiquated mills and leaving for Asia, Mexico, and the south-western United States where trade unions carried the stigma of greedy workers and ruined industry; but my father, who somehow stayed afloat while his comrades sunk into ruin––lost their homes, their families, their dignity––refused to abandon Youngstown, refused to extract our family and float south where skilled welders worked for half of his wage and felt lucky. The shop somehow prevailed over the erosion which surrounded its dilapidated buildings and sweaty men. My father still worked, and thus he was still able to believe in honesty and loyalty and the creed of the worker––if I work harder, if I work longer, if I do a better job, I will prosper––and so much did my father believe in these ideals that even in 1981, well after the mills had abandoned the valley, well after the lifeless ex-workers ceased to be angry and settled into the despair of shattered existence, when the shop, which once operated six days a week with three shifts of forty men crews, was operating merely one shift of ten men––a ghost town of five B workers, four foremen working labor on the floor, and a one-armed shop superintendent––my father declined an opportunity to quit and open his own sheet metal company––risks demeaned prudence. Instead, he followed his creed and held strong to his belief that the shop would be there for him, but beliefs and creeds are intangibles which have never spoken with a strong enough voice to throw down a crooked owner increasing profits and ignoring deferred maintenance, forlorn buildings, and antiquated equipment; and who alone dropped the company so deep into a chasm that after thirty-five years of physical labor, my father lost his job, and the bank sold the foreclosed property that was what I had always known as the shop to developers who dreamed of a trendy Mahoning River district, and who left one building standing amongst piles of rubble when they drifted away in the night.
Harvey rolled like a pinball. In 1934, four months after leaving school at sixteen, he worked twelve hours a week unloading flatbed produce trucks at Patruli’s Deli. During his off time, Harvey leaned against rusted piers under the Market Street bridge with the other men––the German, the Slovak, and the Lithuanian immigrants––groping for steady work. Interchangeable, expendable men slouching fifty feet below the bridge and just outside the yards, clad in filthy, drab work cloths and boots of worn leather with their steel-toe caps peeking out here and there like patches of gray primer beneath chipped paint, smoking cheap tobacco in hand-rolled cigarettes and green Lucky Strikes and hitting off hazy homemade booze until it did not much matter that the bearded Croat in the booth had posted the NO sign for the fourth day that week; and until it did not much matter that even when the man did give the order to insert three or four guys to this mill or that yard, that the Croat would not so much as spit at you if you were unfortunate enough to carry no vouchers from those already inside; and until it did not much matter that even mill work was unlikely for a two-bit punk like him. And so, blunt and vagrant, time passed for Harvey, and just when he figured he could stand under that bridge no longer, just as he was about to abandon ideas of mill work, to hit the open road, to pick up and jump trains to California, or Texas or somewhere different, to slip out of the mill before ever slipping in, Harvey caught a bone. A bone tossed by a grimy man with forearms bigger than Harvey’s thighs who saw Bud’s kid brother walking to Patruli’s and remembered his visage from when they used to skip rocks at him until he would run away, and from when they used to wet-willy him until he would cry; and thus, the next morning, Harvey walked aside this man, aside this heavy plate and black iron worker who looked just as filthy that morning as he did the night before; aside this stoic figure of labor who casually wore a leather tool belt over his shoulder and who carried a dented and scratched lunch pail––an industrial knight so long clad in the armor of the trade that Harvey could not have imagined him looking any other way; aside this progenitor of scarred and bruised children who ran wild in the streets jumping free rides on the back of milk trucks and playing football with an old soup can before belly-flopping into the murky Mahoning River; aside a worker so unaware of leisure, happiness, and holiday that he clustered the concepts with that of death and tossed them all down to be trampled by duty and obligation; aside a grown son whose own father had incinerated in a coke furnace during the long-shift; aside his precursor; and, indeed, from seven o’clock that drizzly Wednesday morning until three-thirty in the afternoon forty-seven years later, between which time begetting three children from a wife who broke vertebrae after slipping on bathroom tile, between which time cultivating a dry hacking cough which eventually would lay him to rest, between which time enduring two severed fingers and the unstable knees of a laborer, between which time learning how to hide flasks in toilet tanks and tool box drawers, between which time tattooing welts on his forearms with the leaping embers that accompany the welder, Harvey worked sheet metal. When Harvey crossed the threshold that last afternoon, he wore a gold-plated watch presented to him by the owner, he carried a pension booklet passed to him from the shop steward, and, most importantly, Harvey held the memory of that summer afternoon, in 1956, when he spoke to his eldest son, my father, about an apprenticeship in the trade and hooked my father into that same shop that entrapped so many good men into three bedroom homes and American automobiles, into little leagues and booster clubs, into Florida vacations and Fourth of July cookouts, into black coffee and tomato juice, into Sunday mass and visits to Catholic cemeteries, into twilight double-headers and high school football games, into cheap domestic beer and cigarette coupon booklets, into January first kielbasa in sauerkraut and wedding tables covered with platters of kalalcity and pizzelles, into a way-of-life, a structure, out of which a man develops pride, loyalty, security, perseverance, and comfort, and it was these qualities that turned good men into pigeons, that blinded the prophets and sages, that allowed the structure to crumbled upon them as the mills collapsed and their understanding of how the world worked, of order, of logic, of life, ceased to exist like a flame extinguished, like an alarm silenced, like a scream muffled; and these men watched Youngstown wrest into a ghetto of aimless middle-aged workers by US Steel and Republic Steel, and even Bethlehem Steel, one by one shutting the gates of their antiquated mills and leaving for Asia, Mexico, and the south-western United States where trade unions carried the stigma of greedy workers and ruined industry; but my father, who somehow stayed afloat while his comrades sunk into ruin––lost their homes, their families, their dignity––refused to abandon Youngstown, refused to extract our family and float south where skilled welders worked for half of his wage and felt lucky. The shop somehow prevailed over the erosion which surrounded its dilapidated buildings and sweaty men. My father still worked, and thus he was still able to believe in honesty and loyalty and the creed of the worker––if I work harder, if I work longer, if I do a better job, I will prosper––and so much did my father believe in these ideals that even in 1981, well after the mills had abandoned the valley, well after the lifeless ex-workers ceased to be angry and settled into the despair of shattered existence, when the shop, which once operated six days a week with three shifts of forty men crews, was operating merely one shift of ten men––a ghost town of five B workers, four foremen working labor on the floor, and a one-armed shop superintendent––my father declined an opportunity to quit and open his own sheet metal company––risks demeaned prudence. Instead, he followed his creed and held strong to his belief that the shop would be there for him, but beliefs and creeds are intangibles which have never spoken with a strong enough voice to throw down a crooked owner increasing profits and ignoring deferred maintenance, forlorn buildings, and antiquated equipment; and who alone dropped the company so deep into a chasm that after thirty-five years of physical labor, my father lost his job, and the bank sold the foreclosed property that was what I had always known as the shop to developers who dreamed of a trendy Mahoning River district, and who left one building standing amongst piles of rubble when they drifted away in the night.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Summer Reading
I have often heard the phrase summer reading tossed about, and although I understand what is meant by it, I don’t understand its popularity or its polarization of reading material into light and heavy reading. The New Yorker played on this idea with their summer reading cartoon featuring a guy reading Crime and Punishment while sitting on the beach. The caption is uttered by a police officer approaching the guy. He says, "I'm sorry, sir, but Dostoyevsky is not considered summer reading. I'll have to ask you to come with me.”
What is strange about this, is that this guy could very easily be me. I sat this June morning on my back porch and read many pages of Moby Dick (a book that does not qualified as summer reading). But why have we developed this idea that we can only read fluffy books when the sun is shimmering and literature in the deep dark days of early January? Of course this means that if you live in Florida you should only read fluffy books and if you live in Saskatchewan you are condemned to reading only Tolstoy, Faulkner, and Morrison. By this line of reasoning, it should also be true that writers from warm climates should only write fluffy books (unless, of course, they are vacationing in Siberia) and writers from those cold spots on the globe should only be writing serious literature except when they vacation in Greece where they can write some fluff.
If you are a true literary nerd, you have a favorite literary critic. Mine is Harold Bloom.
Here are two quotes by Mark Twain about literature.
I don't believe any of you have ever read PARADISE LOST, and you don't want to. That's something that you just want to take on trust. It's a classic, just as Professor Winchester
says, and it meets his definition of a classic --something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.
What is strange about this, is that this guy could very easily be me. I sat this June morning on my back porch and read many pages of Moby Dick (a book that does not qualified as summer reading). But why have we developed this idea that we can only read fluffy books when the sun is shimmering and literature in the deep dark days of early January? Of course this means that if you live in Florida you should only read fluffy books and if you live in Saskatchewan you are condemned to reading only Tolstoy, Faulkner, and Morrison. By this line of reasoning, it should also be true that writers from warm climates should only write fluffy books (unless, of course, they are vacationing in Siberia) and writers from those cold spots on the globe should only be writing serious literature except when they vacation in Greece where they can write some fluff.
If you are a true literary nerd, you have a favorite literary critic. Mine is Harold Bloom.
He is criticized at times for being too traditional and canonical, but I tend to agree with Bloom that there are some works of literature that rise above other works regardless of the gender, ethnicity, and/or religion of the author. How to qualify this statement with concrete evidence that The Great Gatsby is better than any of the seven Harry Potter books or that War and Peace is far superior to The Help is sometime difficult. It’s like the idea that it is hard to define exactly what pornography is, but you know it when you see it. Like that, I know literature when I see it, and literature is what I want to read, regardless of the weather or location.
The classics, for lack of a better term, are often surprisingly readable, fun, lively, suspenseful, and relevant; yet they are also surprising avoided as too heavy or too serious or too old. I too sometimes don’t think I’m in the mood for Moby Dick when the sun is rising
on my back porch, but when I crack open the book, I see that it does not only offer the great story that is featured in fluffy books, but it also offers wonderful language, fascinating characters and resonating ideas.
Here are two quotes by Mark Twain about literature.
I don't believe any of you have ever read PARADISE LOST, and you don't want to. That's something that you just want to take on trust. It's a classic, just as Professor Winchester
says, and it meets his definition of a classic --something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
The Good Old Days
Saw the latest Woody Allen project last night, and although Midnight In Paris is not Annie Hall or Manhattan, it does work around an interesting premises. Allen explores what I will call the myth of the golden age. As a high school teacher, this myth presents itself to me almost daily. The students are mostly sure that they and their generation are just fine; the adults are mostly convinced that this new wave of students will surely mark the end of progress, science, and perhaps even life as we know it and thus long for days of yore.
So here are two lines from Woody Allen that have nothing to do with my point today, but I like them.
I am not afraid of death, I just don't want to be there when it happens.
Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon.
Like most of us, I too sometimes think that living in some foregone era would have been better. I imagine posing as a hipster with Kerouac, Ginsberg, Cassidy, and the Beats back in Time Square in the late 40s.
I think about how cool it would be to be in Paris with Hemingway and Picasso’s Lost Generation of the 20s. I
wonder about walking up to Walden Pond and having a chat with good ol’ Thoreau. I’m sure we all have eras we
idealize as a golden age. Perhaps as we age, it is even a time from our own lives that seemed more stable, or more authentic, or more exciting. Probably we go back to when we were young and just starting out. Remember before computers? and cable TV? and DVRs? and VCRs? and video games? Oh how glorious it was. Folks sat on their front porches and sipped real lemonade, and kids ran around the yards in happy childhood bliss. But as Gil realizes in Allen’s work, the myth of the golden age is just that, a myth. Ironically, the Beats thought that there was a time before them that was “golden.” The Lost Generation romanticized a previous era. And we must assume that those folks sipping lemonade on their front porches were fairly sure that the kids of their day would not amount to a hill of beans; that way back then times were better, men were men, women were women.
But then reality sets in. First, to live anytime before modern medicine would be risky at best. Break a leg and either die or limp for the rest of your life. Get TB, Polio, the plague, you name it. Live anytime before modern refrigeration and try to store food. We can do it, but we’re going to spend the majority of our day on it. Live before phones and I can’t talk to my sister in Detroit. You get the point, but maybe this isn’t the point. Maybe it is not the old technology and medicine and food that we long for, but the old sensibilities and values. Those old values scare me though. I think of racism, bigotry, religious intolerance, sexual repression, domestic violence, child abuse, etc., and I like to believe we are at least slightly better than we used to be.
Anyway, this is a mute point, isn’t it? We cannot go back. Even if the past were better, we are not permitted to return. We move forward. This is our fate. As Fitzgerald wrote, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." We live in the present and look toward the future. The more we fight against it, the more we become sour, grumpy, luddites and mostly irrelevant.
Anyway, this is a mute point, isn’t it? We cannot go back. Even if the past were better, we are not permitted to return. We move forward. This is our fate. As Fitzgerald wrote, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." We live in the present and look toward the future. The more we fight against it, the more we become sour, grumpy, luddites and mostly irrelevant.
So here are two lines from Woody Allen that have nothing to do with my point today, but I like them.
I am not afraid of death, I just don't want to be there when it happens.
Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Walking old Roads
Yesterday I had a chance to drive and walk around my hometown of Leetonia, Ohio.
My kids have not seen the town since they were too small to remember it, and I had not been there since they razed the high school and built a K-12 campus on what was in my day the old middle school complex. We also had a chance to walk around the old farm where I lived my formative years.
Visiting a place where one experienced adolescence is odd. As a poet and short story writer, I am always hesitant to go back to places because I want my memories and my imagination and my romanticism to gel together into my creative writing. Otherwise I’d be a historian or a memoirist. So returning has a way of pushing reality to the forefront. The romantic notions sentimentalized into summer afternoons climbing around the great mysterious barn
are now replaced with the strong visual of a dilapidated and obsolete structure full of rusted out archaic farm equipments and disheveled piles of buckets, broken pitchforks, feedbags, and corn cobs.
So to bring things back to fiction, here’s a poem I wrote a few months ago. It represents that blend of romantic imagination and real ground.
I remember JT and Fry and ’73 Chevy Novas, lift-kits, crazy maroon furry-fabric epoxied to the dash, wide-tires and chrome-rims that we greased in the winter to keep impressive on summer nights; 350s and glass-packed mufflers, headers and after-market shifters, cheap cans of convenience-store beer and Columbiana girls who no one really knew how we knew.
Her name was Janice and her father lived in a trailer and we all believed he had once slaughtered a Grizzly Bear with a sawed-off twelve-gauge he hid under the seat of his Chevy truck.
I remember the coldness of the concrete steps below the dam, the roaring water powerfully fighting through the gates, the fingernail moon, the falling stars, the shadows of our lives as we hunkered down to avoid being seen while we smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and drank red-rose wine and supposed we understood grace and serenity.
Her sister was Marie and I loved her in a way that only a sixteen year-old can love, like I loved my fingers, my blood, my eyes and she believed I was the moon, the canyon, a train-track running northwest across the floor of a deep briny sea.
I remember bonfires in mowed alfalfa fields and one perfectly formed wild apple tree, standing proudly, never pruned, always plowed around. Uneaten wind-fallen yellow/red apples that will never earn a name wasting next to dandelion girls perched on the warm hoods of our ’73 Chevy Novas while Fry fooled with the equalizer and JT tied a purple bandana around his head and how we looked in the dark sky above like this could go on forever.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
The times they are a changin'
Today I want to think about change. It has always fascinated and frustrated me that we have to work so hard to maintain our lives––from our bodies, to our homes, to our villages, to our world. It seems that we fight against the natural order––change––almost every second of our existence. I remember reading an article about steroids and a quote from a juicer: “Our muscles will never love us as much as we love them.” It’s so true. Try lifting weights for a few years and then stopping for a few weeks. Every bit of muscle toning and strengthening will quickly evaporate. But it is not just our bodies, it’s our weed infested flower beds that are overrun overnight; it is our lawns that flip-off the power mowers and constantly fight to be taller; it is the vegetation that forces its way into the cracks in the sidewalk and through the buried drain pipes. Yes, decay is inherent in all things. We know this, yet there is something in our nature that fights against it––that still goes out there and mows and paints and hits the gym and desperately strives to maintain what cannot be maintained.
If you’ve been faithfully reading my blog (thank you), then you know that I like to quote Wikipedia. Partially I do this because I love the idea of Wikipedia and what it says about how we develop knowledge. Perhaps I’ll blog on this someday, but for now here’s what Wikipedia says about this old Greek dude named Heraclitus
Ηράκλειτος (Herakleitos; Heraclitus) of Ephesus (c.535 BC - 475 BC) was a Greek philosopher, known for his doctrine of change being central to the universe.
OK, you can stop reading now, because yes this is nothing new. Anyone who is even slightly reflective knows all this; and others, perhaps more eloquently then I, have already said it. The first example that comes to mind is from one of my idols, who too is constantly changing, Bob Dylan. Here is a small clip from one of his most successful songs.
Come me gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimming'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.
Oh, but wait, maybe I found something that ain’t a-changin’: the lyrics to this song––Art. Is it possible that I love literature, music, film because once it’s released it stays the same. It is always there. I mean Dylan wrote this song in 1965 (the year I was born). Dylan is 46 years older now. He certainly has changed, but the lyrics are still here carved in stone.
Come me gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimming'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.
Oh, but wait, maybe I found something that ain’t a-changin’: the lyrics to this song––Art. Is it possible that I love literature, music, film because once it’s released it stays the same. It is always there. I mean Dylan wrote this song in 1965 (the year I was born). Dylan is 46 years older now. He certainly has changed, but the lyrics are still here carved in stone.
If you’ve been faithfully reading my blog (thank you), then you know that I like to quote Wikipedia. Partially I do this because I love the idea of Wikipedia and what it says about how we develop knowledge. Perhaps I’ll blog on this someday, but for now here’s what Wikipedia says about this old Greek dude named Heraclitus
Ηράκλειτος (Herakleitos; Heraclitus) of Ephesus (c.535 BC - 475 BC) was a Greek philosopher, known for his doctrine of change being central to the universe.
So even way back in 500 BC people noticed this struggle for maintenance. Here are some sayings attributed to good ol’ Heraclitus.
Everything flows, nothing stands still.
Nothing endures but change.
The only constant is change.
and my personal favorite:
History is a child building a sand-castle by the sea, and that child is the whole majesty of man’s power in the world.
Let’s end this with one other example from the humanities: Holden Caulfield from J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in The Rye. Perhaps there is no other character in literature who hates change more than this guy. He wants to stop children from growing up; he wants to stop himself from growing up; he wants the ducks to stay in the park; and he, of course, loves the museum.
"The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. . . . Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.”
Art, and maybe even this blog, are to me what museums are to Holden. Yes, I know that someday my literal and figurative house will fall down, and I fight against it with every scrap of energy I can muster. But sometimes I need to retreat to the world of constancy and stability––to the world of Art.
Everything flows, nothing stands still.
Nothing endures but change.
The only constant is change.
and my personal favorite:
History is a child building a sand-castle by the sea, and that child is the whole majesty of man’s power in the world.
Let’s end this with one other example from the humanities: Holden Caulfield from J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in The Rye. Perhaps there is no other character in literature who hates change more than this guy. He wants to stop children from growing up; he wants to stop himself from growing up; he wants the ducks to stay in the park; and he, of course, loves the museum.
"The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. . . . Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.”
Art, and maybe even this blog, are to me what museums are to Holden. Yes, I know that someday my literal and figurative house will fall down, and I fight against it with every scrap of energy I can muster. But sometimes I need to retreat to the world of constancy and stability––to the world of Art.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)