Author: gwayland

AN AGEE MOMENT

We lay on our backs about two feet apart in silence, our eyes open, listening. The land that was under us lay down all around us and its continuance was enormous as if we were chips or matches floated, holding their own by their very minuteness, at a great distance out upon the surface of a tenderly laboring sea. The sky was even larger.

–James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

If you ever want to attempt to read a beautiful but prolonged and exasperatingly complex, minutely detailed, verbally rococo work of human sociology — poetically rendered — pick up the above-cited volume by a man who during his brief life was, indeed, a poet, novelist, screenwriter, movie critic and, briefly, a very unusual journalist. This particular book grew out of a Depression-era Fortune magazine assignment to write about poverty-stricken families of Alabama tenant farmers. Agee never really finished the assignment — or, perhaps finished it, but had it rejected by his editors though it would be preserved and enormously expanded by the author. The story of how it came to exist is doubtless told in two Agee biographies that I’ve been totting around and aspiring to read. Continue reading “AN AGEE MOMENT”

NECESSARY KOBE B. ADDENDUM:

I just wrote of the tragedy — wrote at length — and made passing referenced to the circa 2003-2005 rape accusation. I needed to remind myself that Kobe read a statement in court essentially acknowledging that the sex with the 19-year old who accused him of rape “may not have been consensual.”  As Tara Sullivan in the Globe is saying, finally, the star who could have been a great advocate against the rape culture missed that chance. Mindful, he was never convicted in a court of law and there was a civil settlement, which does not amount to a guilty conviction — and these sexual encounters, with the famous or non-famous can be complex he-said-she-said matters….nonetheless, it shouldn’t take a #MeToo movement to remind us that no means no. And that victim is still out there, a 34-year-old woman. What must be her thoughts?

And so, there. We are all sinners. The tragedy abides, as does all the good KB did, this father of four daughters, one of whom entered eternity with him.

A FLASH IN THE FOG

I believe I was somewhere in Florida’s interior when it happened — when Kobe Bryant, his daughter and several other souls were suddenly lost in a violent flash in the fog three thousand miles away on a north-of-LA hillside. I had probably just recently exited I-275, then exited I-10 and found my way to state road 301 west on my way back to what is currently home: Largo in the Tampa Bay area. And I know that for much of the drive I’d been thinking about my son and his new wife. I was just coming from their wedding in Mount Pleasant, SC, a seaside suburb of Charleston. And I was thinking about life’s frailty, its shooting star evanescence. ( Driving on any American highway at any hour of the day will induce such thoughts.) I’d been praying for God to keep the newlyweds safe — to keep us all safe, every soul. But life is both fragile and — though we should not dwell on it — full of dangers.  And the truth is that I had not, in the years prior to his wedding, bonded with my son as any father should — and should not now fail to do. The swell of emotion I was feeling during that wedding ceremony, tinged in equal measure with joy and remorse, was great. Every moment without love is a tragedy. Life is short. Love — well, it’s eternal. Cliche? Yeah. Sorry. Continue reading “A FLASH IN THE FOG”

GREAT MOMENT, BAD PANTS…

 

My son Barrett is getting married this Saturday in Charleston, SC. A beautiful couple, a great moment. I planned to wear my old blue pinstripe suit. But style-wise companions and associates convinced me that my suit is outdated and that it would make ME look outdated. So I bought a new up-to-date blue suit and had a nice seamstress at the mall take up the too-long pants. Trying the suit on later, I discovered that the pants still broke well over my shoes. Ugly! The old-guy-at-the racetrack look. I took them back to the seamstress She smiled and insisted they were fine, that if taken up any more, they’d be too short when I sat down. I did plan to sit down once in a while, so that made sense to me. But thereafter, it made no sense to all those style-conscious sartorial advisors of mine who, when consulted, told me my seamstress, God bless her, seemed oblivious to fashion advances in the pages of GQ and Esquire. The style, they said, is to be sleek and not too capacious (i.e., baggy) in the pants with the cuffs barely touching the tops of the shoes. All I can say is, they haven’t seen my shoes — black, bulbous things worthy only of Mickey Mouse. Perhaps it’s best if they get draped over like dead bodies. What this all comes down to is – I’m sadly out of date for such a cool guy. I must work on that. Meanwhile, my up-to-date, fashion-savvy handsome son – who was just a mere boy when I bought my antiquated formal wear – is having the biggest day of his still-young life and everybody will be looking at him and his lovely bride, not at the father of the groom. I’ll ask the photographer to crop me at the knees. And I’ll probably spend most of the wedding sitting down anyway. Apparently I have the right pants for that. And for the occasional dance number, I admit I’ll be a little self-conscious. So I’ll be dancing in the dark, while the new couple dances out into the light.

AS THE CROWS FLY…

It was a Florida warm day in which, in the mid-afternoon, I sat by a friend’s pool in the city of Palm Harbor. The sky was blue and cloudless, probably in deep contrast to the threatening storms of the north.

Suddenly, overhead, there were crows, a wide trail of them straggling, probably, over a mile or more, for just when I thought I might have seen the crow that was bringing up the rear there came another disordered strand of them, now and then a few circling away from the main body for some reason known only to God, nature and the minds of the birds involved. But ultimately, they, too, joined the movement (north?south? why, and where are they headed at mid-summer?)  and high, so very high overhead. Continue reading “AS THE CROWS FLY…”

CHEATERS

Observing the shame that has fallen on the Houston Astros and knowing that the Red Sox might soon be forced to submit to the same chastisement, I feel compelled to ask — what does it say about our society that seemingly upright public figures could so overtly and deliberately cheat on such a grand stage as a major league baseball championship? Perhaps I’m naive to ask the question — but I have to say I am shocked and fear it may say a great deal about our anxious morality and its precipitous state of decline. Perhaps I’m learning that, the bigger the stage, the higher the stakes, the larger and bolder the sin.

WHEELS (AND ROCKETS) OF FORTUNE

Rockets are scary and those wheels of fortune do grind slowly, but exceedingly fine.

I confess I watch Wheel of Fortune and recorded last night’s “episode”. (It  truly IS an “episode” and “adventure” for the souls who wait weeks, if not months, to try their puzzle-solving skills on national television after being duly vetted, interviewed and tested for sportsmanship so unflagging that they smile and applaud fellow contestants even after losing thousands of dollars and a trip to an exotic venue at the capricious click and bump of a stupid wheel).

But my recording of last night’s episode was abruptly pre-empted at the outset by a special network bulletin and I was soon looking at the face of CBS’s Nora O’Donnell — appearing to my eyes equal parts alarmed and indignant  — urgently informing us that Iranian rockets were raining down on a U.S. base in Iraq, ominously launched not by Iran’s terrorist surrogates but by — and from within —  Iran itself. Continue reading “WHEELS (AND ROCKETS) OF FORTUNE”

THE DARKEST EVENING OF THE YEAR…

…and it is raining where I am. But the Winter Solstice has always inspired in me a warm, cossetting sense that we have learned to value and comprehend the light only because we have, through life, come to know darkness, in every sense. Robert Frost comes to mind — his poem “Stopping by Woods” in which his narrator has stopped by woods to watch them fill with snow “on the darkest evening of the year…”  That wold be December 21st. We are farthest from the sun, but nonetheless, “the woods are lovely, dark and deep…

Then there is Frost’s poem, “Aquainted with the Night.”

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right
I have been one acquainted with the night.

I, too have walked out in rain and back in rain. I shall look for that watchman. There must, somewhere, be a  watchman. But I, too, will be unwilling to explain.

 

 

 

RUMINATIONS ON THE “CHRISTMAS SPRINT” AND OUR EXPENSIVE HELP

I’m casting a cold eye, down here in warm Florida, on two highlighted (essentially, therefore, “front page”) items in the on-line edition of a recent Globe.

Some families are being challenged by the new requirement that their au pairs must be paid minimum wage. Who hires these imported “nannies” but the reasonably well-to-do? Or, in fairness, parents both of whom work — but, again, usually fairly high-end parents. Tell me if you disagree. Therefore, does this signal the upper class’s secret discontent with one of the Democrat’s signature policy items, i.e., the endless push to keep hiking the minimum wage? Albeit, in this case, is was a federal requirement that merely forces families to pay au pairs the state’s current minimum wage. Nonetheless, is this, then, a story to file under irony-of-ironies, or the hoisting of many residents of Newton and Wellesley by their own mostly liberal Democrat petards??

Then the other item:
I was unaware — why, I don’t know except that as a reporteer I was never assigned to cover it, thank God  — that in this new millennium, Boston now features a pre-Christmas “Speedo Run” in which scantily clad men and women charge down fashionable Newbury Street in defiance of seasonably cold temperatures wearing only very skimpy bikinis or, for the men, skimpy Speedo-manufactured variations of St. Nick’s red and white. It’s all for charity, of course. ( I’m constitutionally skeptical of any alleged Christmas event that could not be replicated in Bethlehem on Christmas Eve, charity or no charity. If that doesn’t “suit” one’s secular sensibilities, then a Santa Clause look-alike Run could, I bet, raise as much money.)

Then I read that this Run actually originated under boozy circumstances at the old Sevens bar on Charles Street. I know the Sevens, and know it to be an innocuous, mostly serene place of dart-throwing, bibulous roustabouts; the kind of dim, cozy watering hole where boredom, once the booze has “lost its kick” (as it did in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Commeth), might give rise to a plot for various forms of public hijinks that, given some benevolent and charitable overtone, cold potentially meets with municipal approval.

So this, I guess, is a land-bound equivalent of a polar dip, but a little closer to a skinny dip. I guess the tide’s in on Newbury Street.

What nearly naked fools we mortals can be. But all for charity.