gwayland

ELEGY IN JULY

July 1st.

It is raining, a tropical-seeming rain in a dank and sprawling latitude — subtropical, actually, and often sunny but not now– where clouds are heaped up high against the blue to the west. The sun is getting through over there.

Actually, the sun is very far away. But it will get through, then go away. Or, to be precise, WE will go away from IT. It happens every night.

Clouds full of water. Big white and gray clouds. They are drifting about, and that’s fine. You can love rain. I love rain right now. You can love clouds. But I’m anxious from the emptiness all around. I will go for a walk if the rain stops, or even if it doesn’t. Or will I? Well, I’ll be anxious if I don’t. Or even if I do.

That’s my problem.

Right now there is a cloud or two overhead. It will drift off, sadly, go where clouds go.

Rain is in this one little place. That’s what I’ve got right now. A little place in a little rain.

In fact, I think it has stopped. I miss it already. There is only a little sun. Like soft gray paint.

It is stiflingly sultry and gray. That’s okay. That’s life. This is a small universe where, nearby me, souls are together, uneasily. Two, to be exact — the two that I see through my window. I see everything, hear everything. No glass, no walls. Is it a dream?

For them, there is nothing to look forward to, or so it seems from here. So they dream a future. Of course, that’s foolish. A foolish way to deal with the damp and gray.

Rain is okay. It cleans things. It has been rainy a great deal in this little place. Fiercely rainy. There is a large puddle outback, slowly draining. The air is soaked. The grass is soaked, bog-like. That’s okay. That’s life.

Sometimes you think you’re dreaming. Like the man I see next door. Leaning against his inner wall, and dreaming.

It is now what is known as The Month of July, hours into it. A summer month. Mid-summer; almost already there. Mid-summer, that is. It will be hot, like all Julys.

Thursday. 2:21 p.m.. July 1st. The man out my window whom we’ll call “A” feels everything slipping away just as the month of June slipped away. I can tell that from here as I look at him. Well, he’d better wake up, grab something. Not just lean and dream.

Now he’s outside, in the gray, warm open air. From the patch of coarse grass that is his particular backyard, he searches for dog feces to clean up. He glimpses the postman pulling up in his truck out front. I see him glance that way, poor solitary soul. He will check that mailbox. It will be empty. That’s alright. Mailboxes are always empty these day, except for bills. Emptiness can be good. Or not. Make of emptiness what you will. I, for one, am having trouble with the emptiness.

Was not June just yesterday? Shouldn’t it still be June?That’s how it feels for “A”. So he must be remembering July 1st last year, which seems like just yesterday. Which was June 30. June has become July which will become August. Then September. Maybe fear, almost a kind of paralysis, has taken control of “A”‘s life. I know how he feels.

What does he feel? He feels everything slipping away, into the warm, wet gray, just the way June slipped away.

Stop time, please. That’s what he must be saying in the sanctuary of his little house and the open retreat of his back yard. Can you do that? Stop time? Of course not. Who’d want to. He really doesn’t want to, I’ll bet. But someone once wrote that time past and time present are both present in time future. Stretching before and after, they wrote. They wrote: in my beginning is my end. They wrote of “the soundless wailing.” They wrote of “the intersection of the timeless moment….’

The woman, “A”‘s companion, named “B”, has gone to buy frozen dinners. She wanted “A” to go with her. I know this, not because I am spying, though I have been watching (the emptiness drew me there), but because he has come to the backyard fence to tell me this. I tell him, confess, actually, that I’ve been seeing him through his window. He says he doesn’t mind. I only now notice that windows, walls, fences have vanished. We are on a darkling plain. I’m kind of company for him in this dark place, and he for me, even if I’m just watching. We must watch for one another, we humans.

But I read today, in this summer when so many have gone beneath the waves, that we must never enter the water to rescue a drowning man. They will pull you under. “A” warns me: “I might pull you under.”

“A” hates driving around this part of the world where he and “B” find themselves– unless the trip is absolutely necessary. Sun-blanched roads full of steel auto bodies, engineered beasts, speeding. Deadly, potentially.

It is raining again. “A” is feeling far away someplace, but he still wants to live. He has hope.

So “B” has gone alone for those frozen dinners. “A” is guilty for not going with her. Perhaps she just wanted company. Perhaps she would have felt safer around all those speeding steel bodies. Why don’t these two separate, or why don’t they get married, or why don’t they dream up some way to be “together” — connected and out of the rain — that does not cause such pain. That does not have them clinging and therefore drowning together.

A frozen meal, bedtime. They will awake again on July 2nd — and drown again.

There are money issues, “A” tells me. He brought up those issues to “B”. (It is increasingly clear that there is no formal bond between them. Is there a need for formal, legal bonds anymore? Have we not all just fallen together in the same deep shell hole? Did not something crash into this earth and leave a very big hole?

“A” wants to be bonded at any cost, even the cost of drowning, and everything that comes with bonds, meaning joined-ness.

It dawns on”A”. His Aunt “C” died on this day. A peaceful death on a July 1st. Is he right? Did he not suspect that “C” actually died before midnight that July 1st and therefore it was still a June day in a far-off land after he and “B” visited her? They were taking a trip together, trying to get out of the hole.

Days like that, away from the rainy gray details of one’s personal geography, can revive the soul, if there is a soul.

“A” has been anxious in a world in which he is not what he seems. So he tell me. He says “A” and “B” are both not what they seem. Time rushes. And they, always and forever, are not who or what they appear. It will be the same tomorrow.

They have dogs. The dogs make “A” sad. But they are bonded to the dogs. “A” and”B”. Bonds =joinedness. Responsibility. The dogs use the back yard and, happy for them, have no responsibility. But “A” has the responsibility of cleaning up after them. You do that for things you love.

Aunt “C” was what she seemed, love, home, the familiar, gone now in this land of unlikeness. It’s good that “A” thought of her. He sees her, in a dream. It is a good dream.

It’s something, a memory, to build on….at the beginning of another July for “A” and “B”.

Again:

Memories can be good or bad. But it’s good to have them.

“B” tells “A” after she arrives back to their little place and after she has put the frozen dinners in the freezer, that she has stowed the teabags in a round tin in the cabinet.

Maybe, “A” thinks, he’ll have a nice cup of tea someday. Ward off this emptiness.

I go back inside my place. It has stopped raining. I wish it would rain. Now, it is just another July 1st. Dry, dank and hot.

I, too, think I’ll have a cup of tea.

Perhaps “A” And “B” will join me.

Away from the emptiness.

ONE DAY IN STOCKBRIDGE

Moments. They flock to mind, come and go. There is no reason on this late June Night (have I said “time flies” lately?) that I should be thinking of this particular moment. It’s worth only a few words; or maybe a paragraph or two.

It’ll get far more than that f rom me.

In the Seventies, I worked at a little daily suburban Boston newspaper with a guy named Bill Greville. I liked him. We were both reporters. We joined up for a couple of excursions — one time to the Cape (Cape Cod), another time out to Western Massachusetts. He was a Williams College grad. On this westward trip, we stopped into a dark little backstreet bar in downtown Stockbridge, Mass. It was afternoon. There wasn’t another soul in the place besides the bartender and us. The bartender was a Korean War vet, a solemn yet genial sort of guy, if that makes any sense — just friendly enough to be sincere; no fake charm. Since I’d served in Korea in the Army (twenty years after the war), I seem to remember this common theme giving him and me something to talk about.

But at some point, both Bill and I were talking to him– name long forgotten, if, indeed, we ever asked it — about the rambling, famous Arlo Guthrie ballad, “Alice’s Restaurant” which is set in Stockbridge. In fact that’s exactly what we’d been talking about for some time when another guy walked into the bar and sat down next to us– whereupon the bartender said, “gentlemen, meet Ray Brock….”

Ray Brock was the husband of Alice Brock — of “Alice’s Restaurant” fame. The song became an Arthur Penn-directed movie of the same name, released in April, 1969 at the ragged end of the decade it more or less celebrates, lending it yet another small measure of storybook cache, as if any more was needed . That ballad was –and the movie with it — a Sixties culture time capsule making much of meager material. Both song and movie relate a crazy narrative about a trip by Arlo Guthrie to Western Mass some few years before Arlo plays himself, rather badly, in the movie and does the voice-over narratioin. At the core of the story is a trip to see Arlo’s friend Alice Brock at Thanksgiving time. The song/movie is, more than anything, about the post-Thanksgiving dinner illegal dumpingof garbage, leading to Arlo’s comical arrest. The movie depicts his subsequent, comical, only tangentially related trip to the draft board (at a time of large-scale Vietnam-era military draft avoidance) and how that illegal dumping arrest helps save him from the conscription and, presumably, the Vietnam War. (Environmentally conscious moviegoers, and there were probably not a few of them back in 1969, could not have been happy about the denigration of the environment through the illegal dumping of unsorted garbage down a Berkshire roadside embankment. That action is at the heart of both Arlo’s ballad and Arthur Penn’s movie. Not to mention the failure to recycle. And, not to be too fussy about it, I personally think it incidentally underscores the wanton carelessness and occasionally hypocracy of the Sixties counter-culture. You may recall images of the rubbish-strewn aftermath of the sprawling Woodstock concert venue of that same year.)

All in all, the movie is a so-so counter-culture/anti-Vietnam War/ anti-regimentation, anti-military celebration of communal hedonism — at least in my distant, square & sober adult hindsighted estimate. I did go see it upon its release, and before my own trip to the draft board and military induction. ( I’ll always recall the day I was being pushed roughly nd unhappily through training, possibly bayonet training, at New Jersey’s Fort Dix after my October, 1969 induction and seeing, close by, the big marquee on the base movie theater. It was advertising, in huge letters, the current feature film — Alice’s Restaurant. I’ll bet a lot of trainees, on their rare, unregimented free time, found some deliverance in the dark at that theatre before moping back to their barracks to resume their regimented basic training nightmare that doubtless ended for many of them in an assignment in Vietnam. For my part, I saw no reason to see the movie twice. It would have depressed me.)

The people Arlo sang about were real and the incidents were real — though significant liberties were taken and serious dramatic augmentation was necessary to achieve a script for a feature-length film, with Alice and Ray Brock at the center of it all , played well, it must be said, by B-list actors Patricia Quinn and James Broderick.

So — that day in Stockbridge, all of a sudden, as BillGreville and I were on our second beers, we found ourselves sitting in the presence of the real Ray Brock ( I have no reason, based on our conversation, to doubt for a minute that that was exactly who he was). I recall he had an earring and short hair. He struck me as a blue collar working guy, which in fact he was — he taught “shop” for a while at a local high school. I recall he was a ambiable, open, and, I sensed, no stranger to barstools. Neither was I in those days. I recall him saying a publisher had approached him — or he had approached them — about writing a book about his “thoughts.” This would have followed on questions about how he felt about being portrayed in a movie. I can’t for the life of me recall whether he liked the movie ( or even if I asked ) but suspect he did, since it gave his ordinary life a soupcon of respectability and fame — although it was not an entirely positive portrayal of a man or of his then-ex-wife who was depicted in the film as being on the promiscuous side — which, by the way, is why the real Alice Brock reportedly had serious objections to the movie. But the soul next to us on the barstool that day seemed an otherwise anonymous and ordinary denizen of Stockbridge. He might have found the H ollywood trade-offs tolerable, as did the local cop known as Officer Opie. Both gained a little immortality from the movie — Opie by playing himself. (The story goes that when he heard they were making a movie, based on the song, based on his “illegal dumping” arrest of Arlo, he insisted on playing the part himself. “If anybody’s going to make a fool of me,” he reportedly said, “it might as well be me.”

Thereafter, young movie-goers were known to cruise by and greet him as he directed traffic in the center of town.

Too bad Bill and I didn’t meet Officer Opie that day.

Anyway, I Googled ole Ray tonight and found out that he died in 1979, cause of death unstated. That would have been only a few years after this encounter. He looked perfectly healthy when we met him.

Rest in Peace, Ray.

Bill and I, after a decent, garrulous interval of fellowship that day, drained off our beers , rose from our stools and went on our way, leaving Ray with that anonymous friendly/ war veteran bartender for whom I suspect Ray was apparently something of a regular. If I recall, we were bound for Lenox and Tanglewood. High culture! I forget what we heard — or even if we made it into the concert.

I hoped I’d remember that, having remembered the barroom.

POSTSCRIPT I:

It often seems as if, throughout the Seventies, one was encountering the flotsam and jetsam of Sixties culture — consisting of quirky people, places and things — before they sank out of sight and and into memory. This was such an encounter. Sometime these are barely-worth-remembering memories and “moments”.

In retrospect, I think there was something tragic about Ray Brock. I believe he and Alice were long divorced. They were –based on semi-reliable sources — married in Greenwich Village and first lived in a desacralized little white Stockbridge church. How delightfully counter-cultural! How Sixties!

Alice owned a series of restaurants after the one where Arlo visited her. She was, according to Wickepedia, born in 1941. I find no record of her death. She’d be 90.

File this ramble under one man’s (meaning my) life’s trivia.

For purposes of this blog, I’ll file this memory under — “moments.”

POSTSCRIPT II:

I’ve tried to find Bill Greville recently. A long, deep internet search suggests he left public relations (which came after newspapering) and did some acting around New York City. I think the very last time I saw him was at the Williams College Alumni Club in Manhattan — many years ago. I’ve made phone calls and sent emails trying to reach him. No luck.

If you read this, Bill (unlikely), know that I’m looking for you. We can talk about some of those “moments.” Or maybe you’d just as soon forget them — and have forgotten me.

Life moves on. Ask Alice.

WITH THE HUNTER GRACCHUS IN AN UNKNOWN PLACE….

First I come upon The Hall of Mirrors. I am able to go wandering among the mirrors, the walls the the ticket-taker’s kiosk and the doors all collapsed, shattered, only the mirrors in tact. Animals have been here, and vandals. I smell their urine. I see their graffiti.

I wander among more abandoned seaside pavilions past pools of dark black rain water, some like mirrors. It might rain again. There is a breeze off the ocean and tall gray clouds.

What is this place? Where am I?

Then, before long, I am walking with the famous eternally itinerant Hunter Gracchus who has come ashore again, this time to this strange place where I find myself….I was delighted to meet him as I rounded a corner near a rusting, broken carrousel, its colorful horses long ago ripped off their pedestals and carried away. Two men who had borne Gracchus ashore on his bier wait by their barque which is pulled up on the water’s edge. They have folded the sails. Gracchus had obviously risen up and decided to walk in this strange, disturbingly anonymous place where I find myself. He wishes to explore it a little. I guess it’s his kind of place.

But then, his fate and direction in this life is, like the barque bearing him from place to place is — rudderless. I know that from my previous encounter with him, which has always come at times when I am feeling, as it were, rudderless. He goes where he goes. Simple as that. Simple and strange.

I recall reading of his previous landing in a seaside place called Riva, in an unknown time, but long ago. The account of that episode begins:

Two boys were sitting on the harbor wall playing dice. A man was reading a newspaper on the steps of the monument, resting in the shadow of a hero who was flourishing his sward on high. A girl was filling her bucket at the fountain….A barque was making silently for the harbor as if borne by invisible means over the water….

That was old Gracchus’s barque. Gracchus came ashore to that place not unlike this place, though there are no monuments here, none that I’ve encountered yet, anyway. After hoisting off his barque by two men bearing his bier waited for him, as they wait now, like pallbearers. I see they are tall and sturdy fellow, and patient, for they do not know how long they must wait for their charge. They sit on the edge of the barque. ( Do I see one of them smoking? Can’t blame them. It’s been a long, tedious — and endless — voyage.) And Gracchus, seemingly dead, is walking, as if somnambulant. We’ve got to talk.

Now, please, do not see him as a zombie, not the walking dead of b-movie legend. He is walking as you or I might slowly, inquisitively walk, eyes brightly, but serenely open, if we were, like h im, on such a mystical journey. Yes, it might seem like sleepwalking. But it is wide awake-walking. That’s what I’ll call it. His demeanor, his stride, commands attention among the few who might witness it. He bestows peace with his demeanor, but, again, mystery as well. He IS mystery itself. Walking mystery.

The town’s burgomaster in that former long-ago place of debarkation named Riva, upon meeting Gracchus, asked:

Is it true, Hunter Gracchus, that you have been cruising about in this old boat for hundreds of years?

And I ask, this century or more later, the same question. I get a simple nod of affirmation.

I speak, seeking help with memories:

“Gracchus,” I say, getting his attention as we walk in a light breeze in which he regards all the ruins before him but most impassively as if nothing interests him or perhaps everything interests him. It is hard to tell. “I have found a cyber memory that enfolds a paper memory,” I tell him. “And it has sent me into an infinite, mirrored regression of memories of lost correspondences, flimsier than paper, and it has introduced me to even more lost memories — all on this twenty-fourth day of this sixth month two days after the longest day of the year, in this twenty-first years into this twenty-first century in which I am making new memories all the time; thin and soiled like candy wrapper litter discarded by the former merrymakers in this once-cheery abandoned venue we are exploring, collecting at my feet and about my head, as if blown about in a gale.

“Some are pleasant, many are disturbing or unwanted. But I want time to stop much as it seems to have stopped for you — only can we, you and I, cease to wander? For though you endure your fate without agitation, I, among the living and hungry for more life, wish otherwise for myself. I want time past and time present to all be present in time future. Help me with this. Will these memories keep surfacing, blowing and circling about in a vortex, only to be lost, found, then blown about, lost again, then carried off in a sea breeze such as buffets us now? Then lost forever? Or must I always be proceeding backwards in search of them, like a man running across that vast, cracked and empty parking lot over there, chasing scraps of memory? Won’t those memories ultimately be blown out across some nameless sea such as the one we see here from this unknown seaside place of lost diversions? And without memories, be they pleasant or unpleasant, what are we, any of us?

“But we all long for what seems to elude both of us at this moment, the trumpet sounding as the great happy choruses of joyous trumpets and hurdy-gurdies and children’s laughter and squeals of joy and celebration once rose up from this place, only we seek, indeed, we long for the the dead to rise incorruptible, all those who are now only memories that once joined us in this life, and for us to be changed, no longer in need of memories, eternally situated in God’s presence, the God Who loves us….”

So I spoke to Gracchus. I should tell you, as I told Gracchus, that my multilayered, conch-shell-like memory — that being memory wrapped within a memory within a memory — was a paltry thing evoking memories of people far from those central to my life over many decades. Not my father, mother, sister — no, just average but fond acquaintances in average times. But isn’t memory like that? We are pleased to recall those we’ve known in this life, then, suddenly, our memories are primed and the water flow and we go on thinking, as in a reverie, about those we could never have lived without. Was there not once a story of a man who bit into a madeleine cake and, under the spell of the memories that then flowed forth, written three long volumes in search of lost time?

Here is what primed my memories pump, Gracchus. A letter from a specific, not long-ago time….

July 29, 2012

Dr. Clark(former college professor),

From out of the musty, depressingly cluttered depths of my basement comes a yellowing sheet of memory — Oct. 22, 1969 edition, Suffolk Journal( a student newspaper).

You’re there. Who’s the blond? I recognize the beguiling Harriet Allebach(another professor) .

It was all about war, those old newspapers. Everything seemed to be about war in those days. I’d already graduated and had driven to California the month before. I would be inducted into the Army in Boston on Oct. 29, so I might have returned to Boston by this time. Don’t know how I happened to have this edition of the paper. Not at all sure why I saved it and am convinced I must slay the packrat in me. But I’m sadly incapable of simply hoisting and tossing wads of probably useless paper — for fear it might have something like this in it, for whatever it is worth.

I specifically recall how, in 1969, the FUTURE was this dark road ahead. Now, it’s the dark road behind. I went swimming on a secluded rocky beach in Rhode Island today and, up to my neck in the ocean under gray skies — I swear my mind was doing a “Dover Beach” number. I was melancholy. As usual.

Back to the basement — I found a few old editions of the Journal from ‘69 and discarded them after being depressed by the puerile writing, the callow preoccupations of that moment, such as a new Beatles album, Abbey Road, reviewed in this edition by my late friend and Suffolk ( and Woodstock) alumnus Bob Jahn who deemed it to be so good as to “staggers the imagination”. Oh, my!

Troving about, sorting and digging through papery mounds, I felt the need somehow to find and embrace permanent, enduring things.…

“That is how it ends, Gracchus. It trails off. Can you believe that I don’t know that I ever even mailed this? That no one but I and now you ever knew of it? Doctor Clark is dead these three years. Bob Jahn, an old friend, ( the newspaper reviewer) is dead these twelve years. Beguiling Harriet Allebach, who knows where she is, dead or alive? The house with that basement, is long gone to other owners, occupied by them now with their memories. Those old newspapers? Buried again somewhere. So fragile.

“And just today, while I’m thinking about things lost or surrendered, I let a table and some chairs go to strangers for forty dollars from this place where I live now. They had carried with them, memories, however recent and brief. The room where they stood is horribly empty. But there are memories in it. Don’t we, as we vacate a place we live, wander through the empty rooms recovering — memories? And I so regret leaving the last place I abandoned on a street named for a blue heron. What is it, what restlessness, drives us forth from places where we ought to stay and find our peace; find, as Pascal suggested, the strength and wisdom that comes from staying in once place in our one little room?

“But we mortals are known to let things go for various reasons, wise or unwise, of space and time — and money. But then, that emptiness….

“So, I am sharing this with you, Gracchus. I’ll walk you to your bark, for you seem anxious to depart again. Take this compound memory of mine with you, please.

“Will I see you again? If I can get back there, might I see you off the coast from that Rhode Island rocky beach on your bier aboard this bark? Or might I see you out on the blue-green waters of the Gulf of Mexico where it approaches land near where I once spent time writing? Can you help me get back there?

“I don’t know the name of this place where we are walking, or how I got here, but — can you reconsider and stay? Help me get oriented? Or perhaps I might come aboard your bark with you in the hope that it might help me get back to where I came from?

“Can we have coffee somewhere, search for another soul with whom to share — our memories?

But he answered….

I think not. I am here, more than that I do not know, further than that I cannot go. My ship has no rudder, and it is driven by the wind that blows in the undermost regions of death.

“Well, that’s pretty heavy. But do as you must. “

So, reader, I’ll just see him off, then search alone for that coffee in these “regions of death.” There must be a place here, a pleasant cafe with pleasant faces. A Burger King, a Seven/Eleven with coffee, good or bad, and maybe those little pods of International Creamers, though I like my coffee — black.

There must be Regions of Life, however tawdry, but might they all, at their hearts, like this squalid, broken, abandoned once-happy place, be empty? Perhaps a friendly clerk might alter my mood of forlorn disorientation. Perhaps there are the beginnings of memories here, wherever I am, if I can hold on to them….if they are worth anything.

Gracchus, for his part, insisted he was going. He lay back down on his bier, the bark drew away, the two silent men with him, clearly not any kind of company for either of us, casting off in that rudderless vessel, being borne far, far off toward the horizon until I could see that old boat no more.

I waved. What else could I do?

PRE-SOLSTICE DREAM OF A SUMMER YET TO BE….

I always feel like I’m missing summer. It’s my own fault. I want to catch it, like a wave.

I write this as a thunder storm is sweeping over Tampa Bay, my home at the moment. I welcome those storms — as a dramatic sign of a Florida summer. But I miss the seasons, ultimately. Or, at least, spring and summer.

I see that a female former colleague — a joie de vivre kind of soul, cancer survivor, attractive, single, still working in television at 61, free spirit, frequent Facebook flyer — has posted a picture of herself out in a bight, rocky, open patch of nature, arms flung up in the air, wearing a light pastel shift, tanned, blond head flung back as in some bacchanalian sun worshiping ritual. And her caption says something like, “I’m welcoming summer!!!” …

…as are many up north, especially after the draconian pandemic lockdown that has gently been eased. And it will fly, summer. All time is flying. Or, perhaps, it is, like the distant mountains, never really moving. Never really “past.”

But anyway…

I think of how I’ve abstained, or been too lazy to undertake, summer after summer, the outdoors stuff — the good solitary, watery seasonal things. I’ve already posted things on this blog over recent weeks about summer in the Sierra, etc.. Life lived in the rear-view mirror. But even then never did I fully, boldly partake of any canoe trips, mountain hikes, sailing, golfing. Not in a steady, summer-submersed manner or spirit. Now and then, yes, And never alone. I enjoy being alone.,

Life is short. I hike, sail and golf — that you really shouldn’t do alone — only in my imagination. Timorous and lazy soul that I am — and far from youth — I’ve gone on squandering the hours. Seize the day! Seize the seasons! Seize summer!

Let me be alone for these occasions when you can sink into life. Note that my former colleague was doing her sun-basking ritual — alone. (I suspect she set a camera up to catch it, no photographer necessary. She is, by trade, a photographer. But, it should be noted, she shared herself with the Facebook world. I’d be alone without cameras, out of sight of Facebook. Only in sight of God’s face. In God’s holy season.)

By the way, I’ve NEVER golfed. So expensive! I’ve never skied either, not really. Not past the bunny slope.

Skating ( if I might speak for a moment of that other season, winter) was part of my life in the late 1950s. Then the folks sold the camp on the lake and the skates came off – and stayed off. And skis and skates are not to be taken up after a certain age. I think I’m at that age. So it goes.

If I can make it to heaven, who knows what sports are available in that hoped-for destination? (Odd and weird and yet consoling to think in such trusting, child-like terms of what comes after this life. Oh, well. We mortals take our consolation wherever we can find it. At least this mortal does.)

The summer solstice, the astronomical start of the season that for the rest of us started on Memorial Day, is soon to be upon us. It’s summer with an exclamation point. The longest day. I think I’ll plan a summer trip for myself. Maybe I’ll finally take up golf, hang the expense….

My father died on Memorial Day, 1964 at 54 years old. Dead at the brink of only the fifty-fifth summer of his life. I see him putting on skates at the Foxborough camp and, in car coat and work-a-day hat, stepping out on the ice and, after a brief, unsteady lurch, confidently resuming the skill he’d acquired during the Dorchester boyhood on lakes and ponds and flooded playgrounds, skating smoothly up and down. I see him at the beach in summer, sailor cap inverted into a cone to crown his balding head. I see him seated by a small outboard motor steering the small boat that came with the Foxborough camp on Neponset Lake. These were the summers of ’57 and ’58. There were droughts and downpours and sultry or scalding hot July and August days. There was sorrow that always seemed just around the bend. Dad rarely seemed totally happy. Neither, especially, did mom. Can’t or don’t want to get more specific than that. Those nameless sorrows, that darkness, that anxiety.

But I want to welcome and experience and live a bright summer of the kind envisioned in the color pictures of all those home and garden and travel magazines.

If I don’t — well, it’s my own damn fault. I’ll just have to look at the pictures.

Joie de vivre!! Summer’s here! May it linger!

Or, maybe we’ve never truly known summer, not any of us. Maybe only in magazines.

Maybe we just dream of summer….just as we dream in winter of a White Christmas “where treetops glisten and children listen to hear sleigh bells in the snow…”

So we beat on, with Gatsby, boats against the current

Dreaming of summer. Oh, God, bring me summer!

A LOST ISLAND FRIENDSHIP

I have only his Christmas cards now, the message on each beginning, “Dear Wayland!”

He was Chung. I was Wayland.

I remember well the night his pocket was picked by a “slickie boy” pretending to peddle cigarettes in the dark, noisy Seoul night club called OB Cabins. (OB stood for Oriental Breweries, which was a Korean beer.) I’d been to that venuye during previous forays into Seoul and heard a Korean band do a creditable cover of Iron Butterfly’s signature song, “In A Gadda Da Vida, ” drum solo and all.

In lifting his wallet that night, the thief also robbed Chung of his intention to re-pay me for my companionship.

Our friendship began one leisurely summer Sunday on Kanghwa Island, Korea in 1970. I was a Military Policeman assigned to the Army Security Agency (ASA) and further assigned to the ASA operations company on Kanghwa, which sits on Korea’s west coast, carved off from the Republic’s mainland by a narrow channel – a river estuary– and from Communist North Korea by the Han River on its final approach to the Yellow Sea. I and two other G.I.s – fellow M.P.s Jim Barnes from California and Larry Donahue from Boston, if memory serves me – set out to explore the island by jeep. Our duties usually kept us on our small compound and divorced from the real world of our host country. We knew the 116 square mile island was worth exploring, with its temples and farmland.

We stumbled upon the tiny seaside village of We Po-ri at the far northwestern edge of the island. A Republic of Korea (ROK) naval ensign moved us from a restricted area, then chatted us up congenially. We’d stumbled upon a small ROK naval detachment. (The island, being so close to the hostile north was protected on its waterfront by Republic of Korea (ROK) Marines. This Naval detachment patrolled near the smalleer, surrounding islands, always on guard against infiltrators.

The young ensign was the commanding officer. His name – Jin Myung Chung.

I felt the need to know Chung better. Somehow, we hit it off. I’d made no Korean friends to that point in my tour.

Chung was single, well-educated, about two years my senior. I made many overnight trips to his home in Seoul, met his parents and brother, helped them with their English grammar and pronunciation, shared dinner, slept in a spare room. Chung guided me around Seoul, visiting tea rooms, having long talks about life, family, politics, my native Boston, Korea’s future prospects. He planned to marry and have children.

It seemed his best intentions for me were always being thwarted. He invited me to a soccer match. We missed our rendezvous. He planned to motor me up Inchon River aboard a ROK Navy vessel. The boat was out of commission.

Finally, though I knew he had little money and no taste for Seoul nightlife, he insisted on treating me to that outing to OB Cabins, hearing Korean bands cover the Beatles and Iron Butterfly. Then his pocket got picked. He sat patting his pockets frantically.

“Tonight, I am very unlucky,” he said, distressed and humiliated, as I picked up the tab.

I don’t recall our goodbyes. I wrote him after Army discharge. He apparentkly didn’t trust his English for a letter but his Christmas cards contained long notes: “How is your life recently? …Much regret not to write you, wondering if this card will reach you as you may change address since then.” I was, in fact, moving around, state to state. But the cards always found me.

He’d become general manager of maintenance and repair for Honam Tanker Company, a subsidiary of Texaco. He’d married, had a family. He once asked: “Do you have any schedule to visit Korea?” I didn’t.

The Christmas cards stopped. Then, around 2012 came the surprise – an early morning phone call to my Clinton, Mass home. It was Chung. Stunned, delighted to hear his voice, but in the middle of breakfast, facing a long commute to my television reporter job, we chatted barely a minute

Why didn’t I call him back? It was a busy time. But, why?

Now I have a bunch of old home and business addresses. I wrote some. No reply. I want to find him. Is he still alive?

“I can’t think of my military service time without thinking of you,” he wrote in an undated Christmas card.

Same here, Chung. I pray I find you again. I’ll even let you pick up the tab.

SUMMER’S ADVENT

I can hear those voices again, distant, at the YMCA camp across the lake. It is Lake Sequoia in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, Home of the Giants, i.e., the giant Sequoia Redwoods. I was working as night janitor at the Visitor’s Center at Grant Grove in King’s Canyon National Park. It was summer, 1967. To the west ,on the coast, in San Francisco, they were calling it “The Summer of Love.”

Wear a flower in your hair…

My brother Doug, aide to a California congressman, had gotten me this wonderful job. Thank you, Doug.

Now and then, in my Sears Roebuck boots bought expressly for that summer in the mountains, I would, in a leisure moment, follow a winding, descending trail from the Grove area — consisting of gift shop, campground and Visitor Center at the edge of a huge stands of Sequoias– down to the lake, probably only three-quarters of a mile away, through thick pine forest and past small, shaded running streams and waterfalls. It was a very nice walk.

Then I would arrive at a border of trees at the edge of the lake. The camp was on the far side opposite.

It has been fifty-four years, and yet I still hear those young voices of people perhaps just a little younger than I, who was twenty-years-old that summer. And, perhaps, if I’m not imaging it or mingling it unconsciously with lake memories of a lifetime, I also hear oarlocks rattling in row boats being pushed off from the camp pier out into the cold blue waters.

Yes, I hear those voices this half century later. Just sounds, not words, echoing as voices do on a lake. I’m sure, scattered about the San Josquin Valley far below that lake, or in towns in every direction around California or, in our mobile times, around the whole nation, there are aging adults, many of them probably grandparents by now, who recall that summer of ’67 on Lake Sequoia. I hope it was memorable and magical for them.

I must say that I mostly only heard the voices, and barely recall, at the distance of perhaps a quarter mile, seeing a soul or the rustic camp buildings over there. However visible, however distance, I know I’d seen movement. I would listen and watch for a spell while also looking down at the clear lake waters lapping against the bank where I stood. I’d spend a peaceful interval before heading back up the trail for my night shift job – certainly one of the best, if not THE best job, I ever had. I never, ever met another person during those walks, which was fine by me. I was seeking solitude and always found it.

Sitting here in Florida on May 23, 2021, I see the weather maps, hear the national forecasts, learn of the sudden heat in New England, perceive the advent of summer as we slowly, steadily, hopefully emerge from the astringency of the historic national pandemic lockdowns and the severely compounded isolation of the brooding winters of northern climes, and pass beyond the welcomed but too-short springtime with its flowers in bloom.

I feel this love for summer, even if, for now, I am living where it always seems to be summer; where it simply deepens by gradations from spring into the almost unbearably dank, feverish prolonged subtropical stasis of Florida’s “hot months” that so often linger well into the fall months in which nothing much really “falls.”

That mountain summer was dry and temperate, occasionally hot, never, in my memory, humid. There was always the scent of pine or, sometimes, that coffee bean-like odor of the manzanita undergrowth.

In Florida summers, late nights and early mornings — the dark hours — are the dankest. That is among my memories of this state, about to be repeated. Bugs and humidity in darkness.

But there is also consistency and drama in the Florida summers, as the beautiful afternoon clouds build up into mountains and the thunder rolls and the showers come (reminding me, actually, of Sierra Nevada thunderstorms so severe that, in the summer of ’67, a torrent of lightening ignited smoldering fires among the Sequoias and I, technically a member of the grounds crew, was dispatched with hoe and rake to “babysit” overnight a smoldering cedar, making certain the sparks from scorched, falling branches didn’t ignite the thick blanket of pine needles on the forest floor. Such memorable duty! So wonderful! And, yes, I and others wound up battling flames from one undetected fallen ember that suddenly, to our surprise, flared up.)

In this here-and-now, somewhere, I’m sure, Florida children and teenagers are at camp, making memories, hopefully, free of pandemic masks. But that, too, can become a cherished memory of childhood or teenage strictures during the brighter days we hope lie ahead for them and for all of us.

But for now, on this sunny May day, I hear those long-ago voices across Lake Sequoia, laughing and faint. I hear them, as Yeats might say, “in the deep heart’s core.” And they were, on the few occasions I heard them, female voices. Perhaps on those days of my observance, it was the girls’ turn at camp. I loved those female voices. I wanted to meet those girls. I imagined all California girls to be beautiful. Many were. I imagined them over there; wished they could see me. They are gone now — the voices, the girls — dispersed, passed, hopefully happily, into marriage, motherhood or wherever they wanted to go. Or perhaps into some rebellious, feminist state of animadversion if that’s what they wished coming out of those turbulent times known as The Sixties. Some doubtless have passed away altogether….It was a long time ago. Summer of Love in San Francisco. Summer of War in Vietnam. Some of those girls might have become lifelong friends. For them, then, it WAS — the Summer of Love.

Boy! I can go on when I get to remembering. Nostalgia has a way of painting everything a soft, sentimental patina.

Then, sure as hell, I lapse into damn poetry, perhaps foolishly inapt. Like this:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future

T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”

Listen to me! Spouting words — mine and the poet’s — while insistently restless, anxious and dissatisfied and, as such, ungrateful, for I am a blessed soul who, yes, can’t do anything about the squandered time since those lakeside moments but must remember that I was fortunate enough to have a wonderful between-the-semesters college summer job — far, far from all that was overly familiar back in Boston.

Somehow, didn’t I know I’d squander some of the time ahead? Don’t we all know there will be “chronicles of wasted time” in our lives?

But hope is present, and, as it happens, both past and present — if we’re wise, courageous, prayerful and attentive to the right voices — will direct us all, those of us of a certain age, during the days of our diminishing future. If we can stay healthy in mind and body….stave off anxiety and despair, etc..

But back to those simple moments: hearing lake voices by a mountain lake; hearing my contemporaries, those young women on the distant lake shore.

I’ll bet there are new voices to be heard along that shore now….

Summer will arrive at the solstice, less than a month off….

This, then, is summer’s advent for young and old.

Let’s enjoy it.

IT WAS 2:00 A.M. WHEN I FINISHED THIS…

A sleepless interlude.

“Here we do not conceded one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion…” – Anthony Esolen

I’ve met Esolen, follow him, admire him. It is the middle of the night and I’ve opened commercial mail in which his is among the blurbs promoting a prescription to a particular Christian magazine (Touchstone)

I don’t need anymore magazines. But I do need to read statements like that, defining the rancid culture — in which sentimentality and brutality reign conterminously — in which we now live and breath and will wind up having to have our beings if we don’t fight ourselves free of the muck.

It is 1:44 a.m. as I begin this, May 19. The month is speeding past, the windchime is tinkling in the carport, for we are experiencing, these days, very strong breezes that are part of a weather system warding off the inevitable Florida humidity.

May. Mary’s month. Spring. But in Florida, it is just another month happening to begin with “M” in this seamless place of hot traffic.

My car was damaged trying to squeak by the moving truck that partially blocked my driveway as a new person moved in next door. She is a nice person who wound up locking herself out, twice, through no fault of her own but due to a faulty lock. I sat with her while she waited for the locksmith.

All this happened day before yesterday. My car probably sustained thousands of dollars in damage in the blink of an eye. I can’t afford to fix it.

It is an interlude. I’m in turmoil. Why? Why not? Failing to appreciate life, which is a sin.

It ain’t about the car. It’s about being in prison.

Chose not to go to the Wednesday “meeting” — stayed up in Palm Harbo at a friends, having dinner and reading my magazines.

I shouldn’t have missed that meeting. Grace is happening there.

As the 20th Century was drawing to a close, novelist, philosopher literary hero Walker Percy, from his Louisiana literary duck blind, evaluated that last century as follows:

“It is the most scientifically advanced, savage, democratic, inhuman, sentimental, murderous century in human history.”

It was the gateway to THIS century, now well-advanced, in which the savagery, some semblance of democracy, inhumanity, sentimentality and murder continue.

I wait for the deliverance of sleep. I ask God’s forgiveness for my angry, lazy, savage inhumanity.

These fragments I shore against my ruins…………

Come, Holy Spirit, fill the heart (and mind) of this faithless one.

It’s Thursday

ONE SHADE OF GRAY…

No, this has nothing to do with soft porn pulp, thank you.

This is about what seems to be missing — or been cancelled — from much that I read these days. I’m giving vent to a prejudice here. I admit it. I don’t like writing out of literary prejudice. Further, I distain and would join any chorus speaking out against any form of racial or ethnic prejudice, in print or in society. And many are doing so.

I simply might say I’m being stampeded into deep suspicion, and strictly “literary” prejudice, by “woke” culture — defined as the loud and insistent and pervasive claims of a cultural elite on the subject of human motivation and matters of race.

Here’s how one hero of “unwoke” culture put it before he passed from our midst, which was before he or any of us were using the term “woke” (except as the past tense of the active verb “wake”):

Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

To which American teacher, writer, cultural critic and editor Gregory Wolfe adds the following observation:

Great literature lives along that ambiguous fault line, as willing to self-incriminate as to castigate the sins and follies of others.

This is why I am suspicious of that celebrated variety of “woke” contemporary fiction that, based on my reading of it, seems to double down for the hundredth time on the sins of those we have acknowledged to be history’s oppressors while seeming to paper over the all-too-human follies of the oppressed, once they manage to slip the yoke of oppression, their fiction writer authors or screenwriters insisting they are still oppressed and that virtually nothing can free them or repair their shattered heritage and their rightful claims to a place high up on the American table (fine, be my guest, take my place), all the time insisting on a right to unbridled acts of violent recrimination, even domination over the rest of us . Not to mention financial reparations. Or so it seems. Their angry narrative emerges often in contemporary literature, at least, again, from what I’ve seen, and read. It is an act of separation and segregation.

I could be very wrong, but….

I observe the critical — or uncritical — reception accorded Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and wonder if I’d get the same satisfaction reading it as I would the nuanced, complex but no less powerful racial testimonial contained in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Since I haven’t read the former, I must reserve judgement before I invidiously comparing it to the latter.

So, why bother casting this cold eye on “woke” story lines n print or on the big and little screens?

Well…. because I detect, nestled deep or not so deep within them, traces of that “critical race theory” now so much in the air. It is the thesis that the cure for racism is a kind of reverse racism. I know many will challenge that characteerization.

In short, there seems to be a great deal of moralistic, didactic fulminating going on in print. It’s unregenerate whether it comes from the literary left, right or middle. Literary works should, in a sense, be circular, or cyclical, with characters passing through a life cycle — through that emotional spectrum which, in synesthetic terms might, indeed, be rendered in colors — black, white, gray. It’s what all of us experience. It’s our shared humanity.

Ralph Ellison himself in a Paris Review interview, asked about all the reversals of his hero’s fate in his novel, said his “hero’s invisibility is not a matter of being seen, but a refusal to run the risk of his own humanity, which involves guilt. This is not an attack on white society! It is what the hero refuses to do in each section which leads to further action. He must assert and achieve his own humanity; he cannot run with the pack and do this ( solely assign guilt to white society)– this is the reason for all the reversals.”

Elsewhere in the same interview, he says “it’s a novel about innocence and human error, a struggle through illusion to reality” but, I must assert, he never denies that his race and racial prejudice plays a role — a central role — in his suffering and disorientation, nor does he entirely exonerate white society.

Perhaps Colson Whitehead offers us an equally complex fictive journey for his escaped slave protagonist. I hope so. And I would never suggest that any African-American’s life journey is not tangled up, to some degree, with his racial identity. But our blended journey — and I pray it blends rather than further separates — is decidedly gray, for life is like that for all of us. And we must, all of us, travel the American road together, in life and in literature.

AN EMPTY OFFICE

Today is the feast day of St. Mathias. If he seems obscure to you, save anytime you’ve seen his name assigned to a Catholic church, it is because he is the apostle chosen to replace Judas after his betrayal of Christ.

Mathias was chosen by lot over a second “candidate”, namely Joseph called Barsabbas, who must also have been a very good man, a very good candidate, if you will, among the 120 disciples who had been called together for this solemn “election.” But there is no suggestion that his was merely a matter of chance, of what we think of as a common lottery. Peter, the leader, prayed, “You, Lord, who know the hearts of all, show which one of these two you have chosen.”

Then, they “gave lots” to the 120 and “he lot fell on Matthias.” I am not exactly sure how the process worked here, but plainly it was a prayerful one and, in some respects, tragic that it should have been necessary — tragic for all mankind for all ages.

Yet, it was foretold “through the mouth of David, concerning Judas…” Here again, I do not know scripture well enough to know of that prophesy, nor am I able to understand easily — or, perhaps, ever in this life — how Judas did by his own free will something that set the Passion of Christ in motion, something Christ said he would have to undergo, knew he would undergo for our sakes, a necessary step, as such, in the salvation of the world — at the same time that we must believe Judas acted freely, the agent of this consummation of the human rebellion and lawlessness against grace that was set in motion by Adam. Suppose Judas had failed to carry out his betrayal? A mystery worthy of exploring, as we search our own hearts in the dark realization that a bit of Judas dwells in us all. Here, of course, I really speak only for myself.

It is the mystery of iniquity. Of evil.

And Judas was remorseful, was rebuked by the very people who hired him, threw the 30 pieces of silver in the temple and, tragically, hanged himself. He despaired of God’s mercy — yet another sin — while Peter, having betrayed Christ, repented — and entered the world as chief among those who would spread the Good Word, even to the point of martyrdom.

Mathias quietly slipped from sight, went quietly about doing the work Judas was meant to do. Tradition tells us he evangelized Ethiopia and also died a martyr.

Did Christ forgive Judas? God is mercy, after all. It is widely assumed that Judas went to hell — because he despaired rather than repented. In hell, he would be beyond intervening for us who often sin in imitation of him; who recognize evil when we see it yet nonetheless sin with abandon. Nor can we intercede with our prayers for him in his eternal misery. It is a hard teaching — teaching us that, not only must we avoid sin but must not despair of God’s mercy when, with our broken wills, we do. I will go on wondering about Judas’s standing in eternity but cannot dwell on it.

But I cannot help thinking — well, he WAS remorseful, at least. How many evil characters have we known who, so far as WE know, died entirely unrepentant. They are legion.

What we know of the post-Resurrection period, we know from that wonderful human record known as The Acts of the Apostles. I’ve only late in life learned to read it, pray over it, be inspired by it, the story of ordinary humans relentlessly moved to serve God, even to the point of death. I feel like a real slacker, reading it.

Of Judas, all that is written of his legacy after the terrible events of Good Friday only deepens his tragedy. Acts 1:15 quotes the Book of Psalms regarding Judas “who was numbered among us and was allotted a share in this ministry.”

Let his encampment become desolate,

and may no one dwell in it.

May another take his office.

An empty office.

Picture that: lights off, yellow tape across the door.

Perhaps a sign: CRIME SCENE

Let us avoid that space, more toxic than if it were infected with Covid.

Pray to avoid evil. Amen.

THAT INCURABLE THIRST…

Herein, an odd elision of seemingly distant fields of meditation on this Mother’s Day morning — and seeming to have nothing to do with Mother’s Day…save that hunger (and thirst) for love and home that, in even the least sublime hearts, has left strong but mortally wounded soldiers crying for home and their mothers on the battlefield….

Somehow, randomly, I am choosing to make this about poetry, or a particular epoch of poetry, being the Victorian, which, in its turn, often borrowed from ancient forms of poetry.

The essayists, art and literary critic Walter Pater wrote circa 1868 of “aesthetic poetry” (and I’m here suggesting that all that is aesthetic, i.e., all that concerns beauty or the love and appreciation of beauty, should bring us, heart and soul, around to thinking of the feminine and, for Mother’s Day, the maternal):

“(A)esthetic” poetry is neither a mere reproduction of Greek or medieval poetry, nor only an idealization of modern life and sentiment. The atmosphere on which its effects depends belongs to no simple form of poetry, no actual form of life….The secret of the enjoyment of it is that inversion of homesickness known to some, that incurable thirst for the sense of escape, which no actual form of life satisfies, no poetry, even, if it be merely simple and spontaneous.

Homesickness. That can relate to that.

Walter Horatio Pater (1839-1894) was born in the East End of London in 1839. (My note: his neighborhood, a century later, would know the horrors of The Blitz. I wonder if his old “home” survived?) His father who was a physician died when he was five, and perhaps — some literary scholars have surmised — some of (his) aloofness from the world of practical action and his delicate sense of distinctions of feelings may be traced to the feminine influence of three women (mother, aunt, and grandmother) who brought him up.

Interesting: my father, who knew little of poetry and loved it less, was born in Boston sixteen years after Pater’s death and was also principally raised by his mother, an aunt and a grandmother, owing to the tragic separation of his parents when he was only about three years old. His work as a coal and oil salesman immersed him much of his short 54-year-long life in “the world of practical action.” He was devoutly Catholic, as were his mother, aunt and grandmother. The feminine influence also often gives us our religion.

In the current appalling universal atmosphere of “wokeness” being enforced by the powerful secular mavens of what passes for “culture” these days, the suggestion that it is primarily the influence of women that gifts the world with a vital effeminacy of spirit would be dismissed, if not banned. And, of course, fathers can be mothers, too. And women, men. And vice versa.

To which I say, with a Victorian elan, “humbug.” Or, with modern incredulity, “really?”

Now, Walter Pater was a skeptic in matters of religion and, perhaps, an aesthete in some ways less admirable, in keeping with his decadent epoch that gave us saints and sinners — and sinners who almost became saints (Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson). He wondered out loud whether any set of beliefs could be more stable or true than any other, especially given the bewildering variety of beliefs held and abandoned in the past. Yet he was known to have been impressed from his earliest years by the beauty of Canterbury Cathedral. He must have wondered about the source of the depth of spirit that had compelled its construction. Too bad he didn’t go on wondering….

I offer this meditation to him this morning, a terribly simple hymn they are singing today the world over at the May crowning of Mary, Mother of God.

Oh Mary we crown you with flowers today,

Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May….

Mary, Mother of God, pray for us.

Happy Mother’s Day to mothers everywhere.

And thank you, Walter, for those wonderful words. Praying you, your mom, auntie and grand mom, have found eternal rest while your words, however obscure, live on. I found them this morning. And I’m so glad I did.