Month: January 2024

DISILLUSIONMENT

How shall I define disillusionment?

With an anecdote. A memory.

Summer, 1967. I’ve wrapped up work at a national park in east central California. I visit San Francisco for the first time with about a half dozen co-workers. It is the first time in the fabled city for most of us. We were excited during the long drive and we are excited now upon arrival.

We find our way to a deli-style corner restaurant in the heart of the city for an early dinner. There is nothing special or famous about the place. It might have been part of a California chain for all we know. But it’s bustling and a little noisy and feels special because it’s in San Franciso. The customers, most of whom are probably tourists like us, all seem equally excited to be there before their big night looking for Fisherman’s Wharf or the Cable Cars or some other attraction. The waitress is zany, friendly and memorable. A friendly older guy is sitting with his wife at the next table. They are most likely out-of-towners like us. He says to me that the waitress reminds him of the comedian Martha Ray. I’m thinking — well, maybe or maybe not and who but an old guy would be thinking about Martha Ray in 1967, but I appreciate the intergenerational comraderie.

Young and old and excited, we’re all together. The food comes and is nothing specials, but it’s not expensive and we’re all still excited, and we leave excited and I’m thinking I’ll always remember that place, that meal and that moment.

Some years later, I found myself in San Francisco again. As I sit here, I can’t recall if it was during an anxious California trip in 1969 which ended when my draft notice caught up with me and I had to rush back east to report for military duty — or if it was in 1971 when I was visiting my brother, then living in the San Franciso area, after my Army discharge up in Washington state. During each visit, San Franciso seemed less and less special, despite its abiding charm and many attractions. After my overseas military experience especially, I was feeling a little wizened and jaded and lonely and thinking of my old California co-workers and wondering where they were or if I’d ever see them again. One of them had been a summer of ’67 girlfriend, a lively Mexican-American girl. I’d lost touch with her. They were all gone.

For old time’s sake, on one of those visits, I found my way back to that same restaurant. Business was slow, it was quiet. It didn’t seem at all special — in fact, it seemed very somber and ordinary, as if it might be on its last legs.

I don’t recall the waitress (or waiter) or what I ordered.

But I do recall that there was a small bug crawling on the lettuce.

That’s disillusionment.

AN OUTERMOST WINTER MOMENT

When I was working as an editorial assistant and occasional free-lance reporter for the Boston Globe back in the early 1970s, a reporter named Ann-Mary Currier, who occupied a desk near mine, wrote a splendid feature story about the little house that then stood along the shoreline on the far reaches of Cape Cod. It was called, Fo’castle, as on a ship. It would later come to be known as The Outermost House and evolve into a naturalist shrine surviving by the open ocean.

The book’s story, more than anything, was about Henry Beston, the 1st World War Navy veteran and nature-lover who moved into the tiny house for an entire year, that year being 1926-27. I don’t believe he built the house, which stood within the town of Eastham.

As I write about the house and Beston, I realize I may have written here about it and him before. No matter, I believe him — and the house — worthy subjects, and regard that year in which Beston lived alone with nature to be especially worth our time.

But when Ann-Mary’s story appeared in the Globe, it was the first I’d heard of either. I’m going to say the year was 1972. She interviewed, as I recall, surviving friends and relatives of Beston, who thought of himself as a writer-naturalist. I also recall a picture of Ann-Mary walking the wild, open stretch of beach with her interview subjects. Those photos appeared along with the story.

Nonetheless, it would be decades before I somehow came to do a televison story about the book, Outermost House, Beston and the society — The Henry Beston Society — that grew up around his book and his legacy.

Beston was a gifted writer who would turn out other books about New England seasons, but nothing remains as famous as Outermost House, published in 1928. A French edition of the book is called, Une Maison au bout du Monde (A House at the End of the World)

Beston spent that year in virtual seclusion making copious notes about everything he observed of the sea and the wildlife and the raw, active nature and impact of the tides encircling and buffeting his outermost locale. It is also a story of a fruitful solitude in what was essentially a two-room white cabin.

What prompted me to write about all this today was a desire, living in a Florida winter of only slightly dipping temperatures and grayer than usual skies in a community of vinyl, tin and wood modular homes, to write about a northern winter. They are having another fierce one up there.

But I also want to share with you a sample of Beston’s prose. Yes, I’ve probably done it before, but was it winter?

There is a chapter called, Midwinter. And Beston writes, after coming out of autumn, about the journey of the sun which he says is a far greater adventure than “(A) year indoors…(and)…”a journey along a paper calendar.

“…a year in outer nature is the accomplishment of a tremendous ritual. To share in it, one must have a knoweldge of the pilgrimages of the sun, and something of that natural sense of him and feeling for him which made even the most primitive people mark the summer limits.”

And so, Henry Beston has personified The Sun. The song writer wrote of Old Devil Moon. In fact, the moon gets lots of ink. I see both sun and moon as also having endearing female qualities — of warmth and nurturing….

But I’m wanderingly stupidly here, ruining things with my prattle. Back to Henry Beston….

“When all has been said,” he writes, “the adventure of the sun is the great natural drama by which we live, and not to have joy in it and awe of it, not to share in it, is to close a dull door on nature’s sustaining and poetic spirit.”

Beston is really no “sun worshiper.” He is — was — obviously just a naturalist- writer with the eye and soul of a poet. And poets see human qualities in everything, or so it has seemed since the time of the Romantics.

And, of the change from a Cape Cod autumn to a Cape winter, most likely in the autumn of 1926, Beston writes, “(T)he splendor of colour in this world of sea and dune ebbed from it like a tide; it shallowed first without seeming to lose ground and presently vanished all at once, almost, so it seemed, in one gray week. Warmth left the sea, and winter came down with storms of rushing wind and icy pelting rain. The first snow fell early in November, just before the dawn of a gray and bitter day.”

Then comes a visit to Outermost House by the postman. Henry certainly welcomed that visit as much as he welcomed the visit of the sun. He gave the postman a letter for mailing. Henry was alone, but, like me, he liked to stay in touch with people.

The postman departs, and he write…

“My fire had gone out, the Fo’castle was raw and cold, but my wood was ready, and I soon had a fire crackling.”

Beston died on April 15, 1968 at the age of 80. The Fo’castle — The Outermost House — was washed into the sea during the Blizzard of 1978. I believe a replica stands in hits place.

The memory of the original house survives, as does Henry Beston’s most original ruminations about his year on what writer Robert Finch (a Beston booster) has described as “that great glacial scarp of Cape Cod’s outer beach.”

Finch has written an eloquent introduction to later editions of the book. If y ou love nature and nature-writing, you’ll want to read his and Beston’s words on a region of my home state that, however drearily and insistently it gets overdeveloped, retains an enduring beauty.

HOPES AND FEARS AGAIN

The man goes out in the yard with the dog. He has turned on the only light, a green flood light that illuminates the area darkly but adequately. The small, spotted dog, after urinating, then forages a bit, then stops under the bird feeders, listening. The man is listening, too. There are just the distant sounds of the light Sunday night traffic on the road beyond the PVC fence and the warehouses beyond. The fence is draped with Brazilian pepper bushes.

And the man is thinking: It is January. Will I finish things this year? Will I persevere, or will another year just pass with nothing really done?

The dog, after a while, goes in the open door to the shed and the Florida room and waits to be re-admitted to the house.

The man stands for a moment, still in the yard, alone. It has been cool. There is a breeze.

He thinks, he fears…

He will merely think about changing, about doing things. But he will do nothing. Just hope he has another January. But for what?

And the man thinks, I cannot think that way.

The dog is waiting….

THE CROWS OF JANUARY

(f you are reading this, I apologize. It must be edited. This man named John gave me too much, and repeated himself.)

A man named John, an acquaintance, told me of his day on THIS day, Jaunary 7th, 2024. This happened on the west coast of Florida. It’s life:

Crows gather. They gather over the Culver’s burger place, a wavering black cloud. They are migrating from the cold and snow of the north. John’s long-time companion (they’ve never married)named Rosemary, loves crows. She is like a child in her love for crows. John love that she loves crows.

Seeing crows might make her happen for today. She has not been happy, and John knows he can’t make her happy. He can, however, make her unhappy, usually without meaning to.

He’s come from a rare visit to a church – he chose one, randomly, went, period. And resolved to live by the things he heard there– but instantly, as always, almost unavoidably he is in conflict with Rosemary. That’s life — January life where there is sunlight and no snow, but plenty of life.

He thinks: how did this happen? That I have made Rosemary unhappy?

Well, Rosemary is not feeling well. But he has never made her feel well, on top of her not feeling well physically. She says he does, but he knows he doesn’t.

For some reason, comforting John at this poiint, is an imaginary view across tidal flats to a little fishing village. It’s only a vision, a dream. There is no such village. This is a northern village. But, being imaginary, it is nowhere, but some imaginary cold place, probably New England from which John, like the crows, has migrated more than once.

For some reason, also comforting him, is a recurring thought of the time he traveled through Puerto Rico, alone. Or Europe, alone. He knows he may never get back. He’s in Florida. This is Florida life where people come with visions.

In his Puerto Rico dream, a woman is smiling at him, no woman he has ever known. If she knew him, she wouldn’t be smiling, or so he believes. Some women smile at everyone. The waitress at I-Hop called him, ”love.” She calls everybody “love.”

In the imagined European travel encounter, there is a smiling woman as well. She stands among the pigeons and the rain soaked stones of the Piazza San Marco. She might be the I-Hope waitress, a lovely African-American woman. She calls him “love” — just him.

But that’s good. Love is good.

But it is January 7th. Three times on this date, John, at three different workplaces, had bosses call him in. Yes, believe it or not — same date, three different years, three different jobs, three different odious summons from bosses. They had bad news for him –suddenly didn’t like his work. It never felt just. There were trumped-up circumstances. It was the beginning of the end of his time at those jobs where he’d been happy.

Rosemary wants to drive way out to a Florida strip center that has a bird shop in it, between the supermarket and the Chinese restaurant. She wants to get bird seed (that might attract those Crows over Culver’s) and eat at a little restaurant there, not the Chinese one.

John has things he wants to do. He wanted to write a book, but no one took him seriously on that. Small wonder. Besides, he feels he should want to do what Rosemary wants to do and make her happy, even if just for a while. He knows later in the day, after being miserable for a few h ours, she will be talking happily on the ph one to someone, or giving a way furniture. He thinks he’s agreeing when he nods, “yes”, though he’s unhappy inside. But Rosemary says, “why are you giving me that look?” They’ve been through this before, the ‘look.’

Standing before her, he goes off to that little New England seaside village in his mind, There is a light snow falling on the lobster pots and the roofs of the boat houses. There is no one around He approaches a pile of lobster pots. He sits on one after brushing off the snow. He is alone, looking across the inlet at a lighthouse.

His imagined fishing village and the memory of Puerto Rico and Europe and the smiling women do not coalesce with the highway and shopping malls and traffic he would have to endure to make the thirty-mile trip to the bird store and realize Rosemary’s dream. “That’s my ’Happy Place,'” she says to him, angrily, when it is too late for him to take back the ‘look’ he didn’t know he was giving her. He suggests they get bird seed at the chain hardware store. The birds have eaten itbefore. They’ll come and eat it again —maybe even the crows.

He doesn’t know what will bring the crows — maybe peanuts. He’s already put some peanuts out.

Rosemary has a $5 off coupon for the hardware store. That helps soften things.

Rosemary has things she wants to do. She says the woman across the street is selling a queen-sized bed.Rosemary wants a queen-sized for herself. She knows John likes to sleep at the far end of their king-sized bed. She’s resigned to that, apparently. He doesn’t want her to think that, but doesn’t want to make any changes. He wants to sleep alone, ultimately, in guest room bed. He wants to be alone allo the time. But he thinks changes like that can wait until January 8, which is what he thought last January 8th.

This is how he knows this:

Last year on January 6th at 10:33 a.m., he wrote in his journal, “Trash out. What willl this year bring?”

Now he wonders, whatDID last year bring? He decides not to ask that question of himself anymore, that January New Year question. He’s tired of asking it. What’s the point?

It is Sunday. At the church he chose, they told him to pray. So, he’ll pray.

Last January on January 6 ( he made no entry for January 8th), he wrote, “Must take down the creche.” He and Rosemary are religious enough — or “spiritual” enough — to have put up a creche for Christmas. It’s tradition, after all. So, he could write again this year in his journal, if he were so inclined, ‘must take down creche.’ The child, Joseph, Mary, the shepherds, the newly arrived Magi from the East….

It was after he wrote “must take down the creche’ last year that he wrote, “what will this year bring?” Meaning the year just gone.

He admits to himself that he hoped he wouldn’t still be making Rosemary unhappy when he wrote that, a whole year ago. He wonders what he wrote the year before last year in January. They’ve been together more years than he cares to say. Or what did he write all those Januaries, all the way back to the turn of the century, and even before that. Early January is a rough time. The new beginning where nothing begins.

He reads poetry once in a while. He thinks of the poet who wrote….

Time present and time past

Are both present in time future…

And

In my beginning is my end…

And

I don’t know much about gods…

And

Midwinter spring is its own season

Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,

Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.

Midwinter spring: he loves the thought of that, a sodden early spring, somewhere.

But, more than that — he thinks of a season “suspended in time.” He knows it is snowing in the north today. But sometimes spring comes for a while in midwinter. And sometimes, there are those times when time seems — suspended. Tiime present, time past, time future. He stands, suspended, in that little fishing village, in the Piazza San Marco, in Puerto Rico, and at the drive-up window at Culver’s burger place, and in the bird shop, with all its stacks of seed and bird houses and artificial bird sounds and smiling, friendly, bird-loving saleswomen who can tell you just what birds eat in what season.

What would they eat in a sempiternal, sodden season between seasons, suspended in time? Are not migrating birds suspended in time? Are there crows over the fishing village? Are there crows among the pigeons on the Piazza San Marco? Surely, they are in Puerto Rico. But no, he has read that the Puerto Rican crow, Corvus pumilis, is exinct. How sad. Gone from time. Haven’t any American crows thought of flying over there to get warm. It’s not that far.

He looks overhead and is glad to see the crows, seeming suspended in time, but real, so real. He hears their caws. Rosemary loves to hear the caws.

But he is happier in that fishing village, alone. There are no fishermen, no one, just the gulls. The crows — no they are imaginary, those crows over thar village, like the village itself, for the real crows are over his head, in Florida.

But at a time like this, he’d like to see that little fishing village, walk among the little buildings, idle for winter, gulls overhead, perhaps some crows. He would walk, in peace, alone. The village would be on a little inlet, leading out to the harbor, and then to the open sea.

He knows another one of Rosemary’s “Happy Places” is a lake in the north where she has spent some of her childhood. He has seen the home movies of her there, in the water, among cousins and aunts and uncles, and alone, the sun flashing between the trees. When they have been near that lake, he has taken her there. She found the old cottage on the little rise among the trees among other cottages on the lake. She left a little note and her address for the current owners who were absent (this was in winter). She told those strangers how much that little cottage had meant to her. She hoped to hear from them.

She heard nothing. No one ever wrote to her. John was sad for her.

They may not get that queen bed today. Maybe John will watch football. Rosemary is already watching a movie in the other room. She watches a lot of movies

She was experiencing hypoglycemia on top of her aggrivation and despair and unhappiness, so they had gone quickly to that Culver’s window and both ordered single burgers, his with pickles, lettuce, tomato and ketchup, her the same, only with onions. They both repeatedly told the girl talking to them on the speaker in the drive-thru that they didn’t want cheese on either of the burgers.

Just the same, her burger came with cheese.

He can hear her movie in the other room. He will sleep at the edge of that king-sized bed tonight. Changes can wait until tomorrow, and tomorrow. Maybe until next January 7th, 2025. At least he’s not working and so can’t get any bad news from employers today.

He has put sunflower chips bought with the $5-off coupon at Ace Hardware in the birdfeeders. Soon, he will look out and hope to see crows. He can call Rosemary to the window from her movie, make her happy on this January 7th.

They will eat leftovers for dinner. Some chicken, some pork, some thawed out frozen peas.

And tomorrow. Tomorrow he will go to the dentist.

They will be happy today. It is Sunday, January 7th.

They wonder what this year will bring.

They will look and listen for crows.

I DROPPED THE BALL ON THE ‘BALL DROP.’ WE ROLL INTO JANUARY

No, I never said much about the passage into yet another new year. Hopes and fears and all that — or anything about the old year. Old years are old, that’s all I’ll say about that.

I just remember the little dog quivered and trembled as July 4th fireworks exploded outside the home in Rotterdam Junction where I went to escape the Florida heat for that hot month. I wanted to be on the lawn watching them and hearing them, in the distant sky and the lawn across the street — concussions and flaring, hissing spectacles, great and small. But I was inside, consoling a dog — the same dog who looked so unhappy and distressed at the thud, whistle, crash and boom of New Year’s Eve incendiaries all around us as midnight crept up and over the fence like time’s predator. The dog might have thought, ‘save me from that beast!’ Or, ‘existential man, making needless noises. No wonder there are wars.’

And what more can be said of new beginnings for those of us who are never finishing what we begin?

Somehow, I remember the guy who came into The Last Mile Lounge on January 2nd, 2017. That already seems like a long time ago. (It is, after all, already a mystical seven years ago.) Oddly enough, this guy was r emembering stuff from back in 2012. Crazy, he, too, was wondering, where’s the time go? Then, he was launched on a riff about time — and eternity.

A New Year. Time Square delirium already days gone. All the confetti swept up. But, in his mind, the observances continued.

And this guy in the shadowy corner of the lounge was saying to a few people at another table — all of them strangers who’d “dropped in” for a beer and a “ball.” Speaking of balls.

And then there was this guy. He seemed a seer; seemed to sense that life sweeps us down river. And he was speaking haikus, from what I could hear (I’d just dropped in, too. The bartender’s name was Cynthia; she works Thursdays and Fridays, still. Therefore this must have been a Thursday or Friday. She could hear the guy; everybody could.)

The seer at the back table said:

“We’re bug on a leaf, floating down stream. Singing.”

Wher had I heard that?

He said:

“I will arise now, and go to Innesfree…”

I knew where I’d heard that. Or read it. Or heard it, ‘in the deep heart’s core.’

He said:

“You shall tread upon the asp and the viper; you shall trample down the lion and the dragon.”

Everybody was listening now. Crazy. But where had we heard that? Snakes, dragons, lions.

He stood now. We were all listening, worried. Would we need to call the cops?

He said:

“Shall he who shaped the ear not hear, or he who formed the eye not see? The Lord knows the thoughts of men and that they are vain.”

Then he said:

“Happy New Year!”

Then he sat. He was drinking ice water. He never said another word.

A cold rain was falling outside.

Yeah, happy new year….