Current Events – Page 2 – 19 Cent Notebook

CROWS, GULLS, AND AN EVENTFUL MAY UPON US…

The crows, maybe one needy crow, comes and stands on The lights stanchion by the carport. Caws that rhyrmic vocal tattoo, his message: I’m here, time to feed me.

And so the ceremic plate hoisted its three-foot stand gets filled with cat food kibble and grapes, an apparent crow delectation. (The cats, too, come around for the kibble that, I supposed, is rightly theirs. And the rats.

They crows come, they take. This one crow — my friend Diane believes it is always the same crow, her friend — comes, dips, takes a grape or some kibble, flies off.

It is said crows will bring you a gift. So far, there has only been a chicken bone. a treasure from one of these black-winged carnivor.

The poet Ted Huges meditated on the crow’s blackness:

Black the brain with its tombed visions

A black rainbow bends its empitness over emptiness.

Dark. Very dark.

Brighter and so white are the gulls that sat, days ago, high up on the tiled roof of the Sistine Chapel nearby the tin stove pipe that would eventually emit the white smoke and announced the choice of a new Catholic pontiff.

White fellows from the sea that can be found wherever offal or discarded protein can be found. They now and then tilted their heads sharply back, as they will do, and screeched their keow or cow-cow-cow.

Long live the Pope!

But how long will those gulls, so amusingly unaware they were being seen by billions of mortals, gathering, as birds will gather, on the ancient chapel roof for unknown reasons (probably hoping someone in the multitude in the wide square below would drop a pizza crust.) — how long will they live? How long pursue their career foraging in Roman garbage?

Who, coming upon one of those seabirds down an alley or devouring their cast-off cafe table scraps along the Via Venito , will realize that there is a worldwide celebrity under their table, a guardian of the pipe that was soon to spew its portentious white cloud announcing a new chapter in Christendom’s history?

Where and when will their airborne journey end — for those crows in Largo? Those gulls in Rome?

Remember Jonathan Livingston Seagull? Literary hero of the distant Seventies? Steeped in personal reflection far exceeding the likely capacity of the average bird’s brain. That’s fantasy for you.

But those are real birds in Rome, real crows in Largo. But now just beeks in the avian crowd.

But somebody should paint them, from memory, of course. They’ll never pose.

I don’t know how Audubon did it.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE

Time was, long, long ago, when it was bad form –as well as rare –to see anyone wearing a hat while dining publicly. That time is far distant now — and I’ll add that the ettiquette is rightly suspended in the case of veterans –especially war veterans.

And thus it was that ….

Morning sunlight was spilling into The Golden Bear breakfast place this morning when I spotted a black cap on an old head. That cafe is in a little strip center on Starkey Road. I’d had my one egg (suddenly a little more expensive), sausage links, grits, toast and coffee and was on my way to the cashier when I saw, in the second booth by the front windows, a decidedly elderly man wearing –yes –one of those black veteran’s caps — a real nice one, too. It seemed newer and more regal to my eyes than most such caps, perched tall on this vet’s otherwise humble, white-haired head.

Here was the special part — the cap was emblazoned with WWII VETERAN. You see that disignation only rarely now and therefore are more inclined to take more serious note of it and the person under it. The WWII on this particular cap struck me as unusually big and bold. But that might just have been the big, bold impression it made on me. Yes, it was a nice cap. Very nice.

As I passed his booth, I could not fail to offer the accustomed saluation (thank you for your service)– especially to a soul so modest in appearance yet so rightly proud of having lived long enough to realize that, as his and his fellow WWII veterans’ days dwindle down, there is nothing immodest about celebrating one’s role in America’s last clearly victorious, least politically frought, dubious, and inconclusive military adventure.

I laid my hand gently on his frail shoulder as I greeted him with the accustomed saluation. He smiled but seemed startled, perhaps, too, uncomprehending, not hearing me right, perhaps wondering, do I know this person? ( I think I saw a hearing aid). I glanced toward his white-haired wife sitting across him. She’d heard me right and was smiling gratefully. There were two clear, thin plastic oxygen tubes running to her nose.

I then held my hand out, the vet grasped and shook it, looking up at me through glasses. I doubt I was the first person to accept his black cap’s invitation to honor him with a hello.

I was abidingly curious and thought it appropriate to ask only one question: “What outfit were you with?”

He didn’t get that. I should have said, ‘what branch?’But I was looking for something specific, like 25th Infantry Division or 1st Marines. That would have told me what action he might have seen.

I asked again, louder, maybe changing “outfit” to “what company?” — which was even less clear or precise.

But he said, quetly, “Navy”

And that was that. Mutual smiles, another warm glance toward his misses and the encounter was over.

But, out in sunlight, my head was awash in –the Pacific, the Coral Sea, The Philippines, Linguyen Gulf, Layte, Guadalcanal, Guam, Saipan, Tinian, Sarabachi Bay, The Battle of the Atlantic — Pearl Harbor.

So I wish I’d had time to ask him –where were you, what ship or submarine? Which campaigns?

Of course, he might have spent his time at a desk in Newport, or Pearl, or like the poor sailors in that WWII saga Mr Roberts, have been unhappily stranded far from the action while their beloved commander finally broke free of the boredom and all the shipboard military nonsence and finally been dispatched to the action, only to be quickly killed in action. (That’s a designation you see so often where war veterans, especially decorated ones, are concerned: K.I.A..

But it doesn’t matter where our vet was. No, it really doesn’t. Our veteran at breakfast on this March morning had been there in some fashion, been part of it, was proud of it, and was still with us.

Yet still, I say to our breakfast vet — and his equally frail wife (who’ve gone back to their home by now), be proud, be at peace and, for as long as possible, be in good health. You answered the call. From some vantage point, you witnessed and outlived that horror. I wish we’d had more time to talk.

Thank you for your service.

BROOM THE STRIP?

Sounds like ethnic cleansing. Or perhaps just a jolting, immodest proposal by a professional jolter.

Asking people to give up their land, however savagely broken it has been by war….

Say wasn’t there a song about “the land?”

Yeah, of course, “this land is your land/ this land is my land….”

No,no — another song about the land which suggests that the people who occupy that land, however rich or barron that land may be in the eyes of outsiders, love it without reserve; call it home, have put down roots in its soil, absorbed its good and bad memories, no matter how dusty or unregenerate.

It was the Jews who , according to ancient testimonials, were infamously forced from their land. It was the Palestinians who were subsequently forced from THEIR land. The same land. And round and round it goes.

The Jews, in our time, have told– and lamentingly sung –of their embrace of the land they once lost – we heard it notably in one period in popular lore and melody.

None other than Pat Boone sang that popular anthem. Leon Uris wrote the book that inspired it — and Otto Preminger made the movie. It was called EXODUS.

But it was really about arrival, and an embrace of the land….(and exodus from being scattered or enslaved in other lands and then returning.

And once upon a time, it seems like everyone was humming along …

This land is mine, God gave this land to me
This brave, this ancient land to me
And when the morning sun reveals her hills and plain
Then I see a land where children can run free

So take my hand and walk this land with me
And walk this lovely land with me
Though I am just a man when you are by my side
With the help of God I know I can be strong

So take my hand and walk this land with me
And walk this golden land with me
Though I am just a man when you are by my side
With the help of God I know I can be strong

To make this land our home
If I must fight, I’ll fight to make this land our own
Until I die this land is mine

It spilled out of juke boxes in the early Sixties. Not great poetry; bad, actually. Not even a great lyric. The melody was better.

But it is the Palestinians who are returning now. This is their Exodus, their Return.

It is cruel and preposterous to assume they can ever be forced to leave — forced into another Exodus.Into Exile. Banished to Nowhere.

OF A JANUARY PLACE IN OUR MIND IN THE MONTH’S DYING MOMENTS

…of cold, sudden death minutes from the airborne journey’s end. The often horrifying mystery of life. But we go on, searching, we the living; searching for the dead, and for ourselves.

That was yesterday. Though, really, it’s every day. The cold shallow river still holds its terrible burden.

I go to Orlando tomorrow. I don’t want to go. (It’s morning. I go today.)

Another month in the subtropics while the country above me devolves in various weather through history. The river flows.

I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m tired.

Tragedy. Young skaters, their gift, their grace, their future gone in the ice cold shallows of the famous river in history–American history’s river. A current President who, no matter how solemn the occasion, manages to be rude, embarringlyly, infuriatingly, (disappointingly?) inappropriate, egoistic, partisan, uncharitable, self-congratulatory, self-involved….

Master of Puppets. Hope of those who’d be rescued from the Other Puppet Masters and their crazy ventriloquists.

We are, in our derelict, unreflective moments, all puppets delivered to the hands of life’s monsters, and life’s “petty pace…tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…”

But we were all, in a moment two millenia ago, rescued from death. And from all that is rude, inappropriate, egoistic, etc. etc. It’s urgent that we believe it. That death was conquered.

As the old priest said from the Brookline pulpit years ago: you live–forever!

It was years ago, but it might as well have been yesterday. Or tomorrow. (I’m writing some of this in what was ‘tomorrow’ when I began it yesterday..)

Meanwhile….

America the Beautiful. America the Deeply Troubled. America the Divided. America of Terrible Accidents. America of Storms. America of Fires.

And, meanwhile….

No one read about my artist friend Knox, the artist in my last blog. Lonely old Knox and his post-Christmas apocalyptic visions. And the Devil chasing him, chasing me, chasing us. So what?

I’m sure he’s given up his “ghosts” and gone back to being just old crazy Knox, living forever (in my imagination.)

So be it.

Had to write something here tonight (today).

The New Year, the Yuletide might as well have been a hundred years ago. But, I always say, Christmas must be every day. And Easter too.

Goodbye, January. We march on toward spring, though, generally speaking, there is no spring in the clime where I now roost. Save an occasional chill and occasional gray sky, the climate is seamless, except in summer when it is blazes, turns, turns steamy and uncomfortable, seemingly without end — until the thunder rolls in at the end of days.

So be it. In exile. Everywhere is nowhere.

(Pray. For the Living and the Dead.)

Good night.

THE CAVE

It’s the Yuletide again. Good time, amid all the red and green festivities, to ask some pertinent questions.

Who was this person who was, Christians believe, both human and divine– God, second person of a mysterious Trinity and known as Jesus Christ?

Who, again I ask, was He?

There IS significant evidence that a man named Jesus Christ exited, a carpenter’s son who himself became a carpenter. But it is a fact that no ancient historian, at least for a very long time, took great note of the purportedly earth-shattering events surrounding his birth, his life as a healer, or execution at age thirty-three (to summerize: birth in Bethlehem, early, mostly hidden life in the backwater Nazareth, execution and death in Jerusalem. And Christians believe he rose from the dead — all this in the first century A.D. — or even prior to that, because certain anomolies in counting up the years suggest Christ was actually born around 6 B.C..)

Let’s stick with his birth, since this is that season. The Resurrection story can wait until Easter.

There are a number of false, pious gospels — called apochrypha — that add spectacle and power to the nativity events. But we’ve come to celebrate, instead, the extremely humble nature of the birth of the God/man regarded by millions to have been –and remain –the Massiah. The ancient Jewish world had been waiting for a messiah for centuries — someone who would right every wrong done to that race of people. There had seemingly been someone claiming to be a messiah on virtually every corner for much of the millenia before that quiet, paradoxical dirt-poor birth among beasts, dung and hay just outside the village of Bethlehem in the Judean hills.

His family — earthly mother and father-were required to travel to Bethlehem because history and scripture record that a decree had gone out from the Emporor Caesar Augustus ordering everyone to respond to a census being taken over the vast Roman Empire , also requiring every citizen to return to their ancestral homes to be counted. That was Bethlehem in the case of the couple named Joseph and Mary. (There was also an ancient prophesy that a future ruler of Israel would be born in Bethlehem. So, as one writer puts it, “external obligation and divine design” were intersecting, acccording to the Christian nativity story.)

Now, wait a minute!

Why a bloody, damn census? Upending everybody’s life, putting them on the roads of the vast continental Empire? Well, for tax purposes, among other things (what else?), and so the powers in Rome could know where to go to fill in the ranks of the Roman Legions. Empires need armies. Fresh young bodies.

(With all those people traveling at the whim of the Roman boss, small wonder there was no room at the inn.)

So far, so good. But –something that’s always intrigued me: where exactly was that famous stable/birthplace? Do we really know?

Multiple spiritual writers and modern scriptural historians, not to mention archiologists, give us the following information:

There is, among other sources, testimonial evidence in the writings of the saint known as Justin Martyr that there was, for a very long time , a site in or around the town of Bethlehem where Jesus Christ was believe to have been born — “a certain cave”.

I don’t just want to take a Catholic saint’s word for anything, but Justin’s evidence is interesting and credible because he was local and nearly a contemporary.

The saint tells us locals venerated that cave from a very early date and apparently preserved it in order to preserve the memory of the nativity. That cave, we’re told, was greatly talked about, even among enemies of the faith. (It is, presumably, the site that now sits under the grand Basilica of the Nativity located in the middle of a Middle Eastern zone of perpetual combat and which itself was beseiged in the year 2002. So much for Peace of Earth in that neck of the woods! But there’s always hope. Christmas is supposed to be all about hope.)

Actually, it must be noted that little of the touching simplicity of the nativity story would seem to have been preserved from that time of the building of that magnificent edifice. I have not had the privilege of visiting it, but I’ve read that you approach it as if it were a fortress. There is a gigantic encircling wall breached by a massive tower. It is Byzantine in the way it conveys a powerful impression of majesty. And, as noted above, it has been the scene of warfare, contemporary as well as in the deep past. Indeed, in 1873 it was the scene of a physical assault by the supporters of the Ordhodox Church on the Catholics. Such virulent divisions among Christians presumably professing faith in the same God are disheartening, and never-ending.

And that cave noted by the saint/witness is now said to be the sacred sight reached by a long and narrow subterranean crypt.

Oh, how , passing down that crypt, I would long for that former, simple cave! But then, they don’t build houses of worship over, say, Paul Revere’s house. This is just the way of religions.

St. Justin speaks not just of “a cave” but of “this cave.” He had in mind a certain cave. Justin himself was born around AD 100 to a pagan family in Flavia Neapolis (today called Nablus), some forty miles north of Bethlehem. ( I told you he was local.) He knew the area and the people quite well. Apparently, a century after that stable birth, the cave was still known and being preserved.

The Church of the Nativity was built over it –presumably they had the right cave — in 326 A.D., at the order of Constantine, the first Christian emporer and, according to some accounts, at the urging of his mother Helena, a devout Christian who obviously had considerable influence on her son.

Some anti-Christians, and also what I would call anti-Christian Christians, like to say Constantine “founded” Christianity. That’s another kind of warfare that gets waged over the body of Christ: historical/theological revisionism.

And for the ancient early Christian apologist and scriptural scholar named Origen, as well as for the evangelists before him, there is a verifiable particularity about the facts of Jesus’s conception and birth in that cave, and His subsequent infancy.

All this, they say, happened, not “once upon a time,” (as in a fable), but “in the days of Herod, King of Judea,” when “a decree went out from Caesar Augustus,” the emporer. The big guy in Rome. (Luke 1:5,2:1).

Herod was the local authority around Bethlehem, Judea — and, from all accounts, an utter monster. He’s part of a Christmas story –a negative part. But the story needed every part, good and bad, to seem true to life. We’ll skip over Herod for now. It suffices to say that you didn’t want to cross him.

So -it all began, in earthly terms, with taxes, the Roman bureacracy, a vile local Roman functionary, and a noisome government decree. It began “upon a midnight clear” and persists and summons our souls and imaginations to this day.

As for all the messy circumstances leading up to — and away — from it: sounds like real life as we know it.

Whatever the case, we know that a pregnant young woman and her spouse, with their donkey, sparse belongings and weary ( ultimately, many believe, saintly and, in Christ’s case, divine) bodies and souls, wound up spending the chilly Judean night among the hay and dung and livestock of a cave — reviled, rejected, alone.

I guess that cave is also the birthplace of what for much of the world remains a supreme, incredible earthly irony: the most important soul in history — according to the beliefs of billions –was born in a cave.

Also born that night: endless wonder. And there was something about a star, too. And shepherds, and choirs of angels.

And Magi. (We’ll talk about them later.)

MOUNTAIN ELEGY

I once lived in the mountains of western North Carolina.

I have this from the North Carolina State Climate Office:

Torrential rainfall from remnants of Hurricane Helene capped off three days of extreme, unrelenting precipitation, which left catastrophic flooding and unimaginable damage in our Mountains and southern Foothills.

The Blue Ridge are hurting. I’m hearing — we are all hearing –of the horrible travail there — so much and so many nearly drowned in violent, brown, debris-bearing storm floods. Seems odd to many, I suppose, that a hurricane could climb a mountain and dump all its water there — and cause its considerable river waters to rampage and overflow so catastrophically.

It can, other storms have done so before, it did last week. But never to this degree. 150 plus dead. The toll will likely grow.

An utter and historic horror, according to the State Climate Office.

It was close to a worst-case scenario for western North Carolina as seemingly limitless tropical moisture, enhanced by interactions with the high terrain, yielded some of the highest rainfall totals – followed by some of the highest river levels, and the most severe flooding – ever observed across the region.

I came and went too soon from that beautiful region where North Carolina, Virginia and Tennesee come together. The time frame was fall to spring, 1997 into 1998. I probably never intended to stay there permanently and — oh, I might as well tell you — left sooner than I wanted largely because I couldn’t make a living there. This was because it was, to a great degree, a resort area. I couldn’t earn money comparble to the cost of living — that being the bane of long-time locals who for generations have grown Christmas trees, worked trades, worked in factories, did what they could, got by, called it home.

To many in New England or around the nation, those patches of the country near Thomas Wolfe’s native Ashville and the region where I once lived 153 miles to the east in little Banner Elk are unknown terrain. They may not have known there are North Carolina mountains.

I lived in a wood hillside chalet-style house next to rows of saplings and partially grown fraser firs destined to be Christmas trees, nurtured by scores of local nurserymen. They rose slowly up beside a steeply sloaping street called Cynthia Lane. That was my street. As I looked out at those trees, I imagined them one day festooned with colorful lights, reflected in the sparkling eyes of a child on Christmas morning. It was good on Christmas morning to see so many trees still standing for Christmases future. They are harvested every seven years.

I’m a New Englander and knew ultimately I would want to go all the way home from Florida where I’d been living– for a second time — from 1990 to 1997. (So, what am I doing back in Florida, five years and, once again, a thousand miles from home? Another long story. I guess some of us have restless hearts, or are capable of seeking the geographic cure.)

In truth, my mountain time, while pleasant, was sometimes, during the winter, trecherous among steep, icy inclines, mountain highways and trails, rocks and pines — always, at a radio station, hearing and being embraced by the antic and narrative and welcome strains of country music.

I don’t know that I was listening to anything the afternoon , heading downhill in traffic, bound for Banner Elk from Boone, when I gently slid right off the road in my old Volvo. I didn’t go far — about ten feet, and to rest, though a bit unnerved.

It all remains wrapped around a place deep in my mind. And on my mind now are the region’s suffering.

One evening walking along Beacon Street in Boston beside the Public Garden and across from the famous “Cheers” bar, the Bull&Finch Pub, a woman called out to me from her van as she was stuck in traffic. She’d seen my t-shirt for the Mast Store in Valle Crucis, near Banner Elk. She knew the region. “I love Blowing Rock,” she said — another of the charming towns in the area.

Yes indeed, she knew the area.

There is, to a limited degree, a ski resort industry there on Beech and Sugar Mountains that attracts non-locals. But they were always having to make snow for the ski trails. I seem to recall some crystals from the snow-making apparatus blowing toward my hillside home on some occasions. That’s quite possibly as much a reverie as a real memory. But, yes, I do recall that you could tell when they were “making snow” which does not always fall naturally in enough abundance in the Blue Ridge to support the skiing public.

But, again, they get by, those ski trail folks.

Beach Mountain. Sugar Mountain and Hawk’s Nest ski areas — they are all there. Hawk’s Nest is where my son, during his first-ever attempt at snowboarding, wiped out on the last run of the night (after they had prematurely taken down the orange plastic protective netting), slid headlong into a trench dug for a downhill pipe line, slammed into the pipe and ruptured his spleen, landing in Wautauga County Hospital in Boone for emergency surgery. It’s where the young members of the ski patrol were so good to him in the wake of his accident, coming to visit him. It’s where I spent a night half-watching Godzilla movies in a waiting room, barely sleeping, waiting for his deeply upset mother to arrive from South Carolina, arriving near dawn. I had walked down a corridor, barely awake, as the elevator door opened and Renee stepped out and said, “where is he?” Poor Renee, she was probably mad at me, but, more than anything, worried about our son — who recovered just fine, thank God.

O yes, that is a memory. A mountain memory.

Currently, The Climate Office is recording that 16.67 inches of rain have fallen on Boone.

Memories are spilling out of me the way water is now still rushing down a mountainside.

Some great, proud and independent people live in Boone and the Banner Elk area. Tiny Lees-McCrea College is located in Banner Elk. Appalachian State University is in Boone. We’ve started to hear about its football program, but I mostly recall time spent in its fine library. I worked for little WECR-AM and FM radio in Newland, which, at that time (and perhaps now) had studios located in a triple-wide trailer down the road from the Great Eastern Divide. I worked the best I could, selling advertising — not my strength –to Boone auto dealers and merchants with Buddy Carpenter, a former Trailways Bus driver who had formerly been road manager for The Marshall Tucker Band. (I learned from Buddy that Marshall Tucker was a blind piano tuner in whose Spartenburg, NC storage area the band, in its formative years, practiced and developed their distinctive country rock repertoire.) Buddy also did the morning show. A young local woman who did the show with Buddy left to work at a local factory where I believe she was offered more money.

This was that kind of place –unglamorous, real, full of native-bred Scotch-Irish folks ekeing out a living around the city of Newland, way above sea level. Sadly I’ve forgotten that young woman’s name as, I’m sure, she’s forgotten mine, and forgotten me. It was, after all, twenty-seven years ago.

But I’m thinking of her and hoping Helene has not upended her life — hers and the lives of her family members. I’ll bet she has children by now and didn’t seem like the kind of person who would move away from native turf. As for Buddy Carpenter, sadly, I don’t even know if he’s still alive. I do hope you are well, Buddy. (Maybe the last remnants of the Marshall Tucker Band could locate him for me, tell me of his fate. Buddy once told me how founding band member Toy Caldwell was on board his bus during one tour, working out lyrics of the song, “Heard it in a Love Song” on a paper bag which he gave to Buddy and which Buddy planned to donate to the Rock&Roll Hall of Fame.)

During that North Carolina stay, I owned an old Zenith radio I’d picked up at a yard sale somewhere and I recall hearing that young woman who worked with Buddy speak my name out of it, referring to my reference, the former afternoon, to a program to adopt horses in need of permanent homes. ( The information was on a press release; I was filling time during a newscast in which I had few reliable sources of real news.) I’ll always remember her saying something like, “Yeah, Greg was talking about that program….” It was every bit, if not more special than seeing and hearing myself as a reporter on TV — hearing my name, spoken by a nice young moutain dwelling woman (was her name Karen? Sue? Mary?) and spilling out over the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Sounds crazy, I know. But every little thing during those mere nine months (or so) had meaning for me.

Now I’m hearing that all roads in Western NC should be considered closed…

And that what has happened there should be considered…

on par with eastern North Carolina’s worst hurricane from six years ago.

There were, in fact, a great deal of Florida license plates on cars that appeared during the summer months in the mountains. There are gated communities nestled in the mountain ridges where well-to-do Florida residents escape Florida’s summer heat. I was told locals had a mild disdain for these transient visitors because “they poke on the roads and complain about the food.”

Of course, the visitors always bring money to the areas they’re accused of despoiling. And many nice folks appear among seasonal visitors the world over.

For instance…

I worshiped at little St. Bernadette’s Church in the town of Linville, North Carolina where one Sunday I saw retired, legendary Miami Dolphins coach Don Shula coming up the aisle from communion. I couldn’t believe my eyes! And his former quarterback and Hall of Famer Bob Griese, who led the Dolphins to three consecutive Super Bowl appearances –winning two of them (the first of which capped off an undefeated, untied season, a feat that has not been duplicted in the NFL) also worshipped at St. Bernadettes.

Griese sat down with his wife in the pew in front of me one Sunday, turned and offered me, at the appropriate moment, the handshake that is called, “the kiss of peace” (which, in my role as a liturgical curmudgeon, I find superfluous and toucy-feely but which I could not wait to exchange that Sunday as Bob G. turned and grasped my hand. It was the hand that had thrown 192 touchdowns. And the legendary quarterback said, “God Bless Y ou.”

Blessed by Bob Griese! One day up in the mountains of western North Carolina.

From the Climate Office:

It’s no exaggeration to liken this to a Florence-level disaster for the Mountains, since the apparent rarity of the rainfall amounts and the impacts they produced – including large stretches of highways underwater and a plea from the NC Department of Transportation…

By a “Florence-level disaster”, I take the climate officials to be referring to the November, 1966 flooding of the raging Arno River which swamped and did horrible damage to the city of Florence and hundreds its art treasures. I had visited Florence — my one and only time so far — the summer before.

In the mountains, the masterpieces are all natural.

Beyond the glass behind the altar and tabernacle at St. Bernadettes is Grandfather Mountain, so named because, as you look at it, you see in the rocky outcroppings the enormous face of an old man turned up toward the sky. You can see God if you choose. You see him for miles as you approach the region.

Yes, for a brief, memorable time, I was part of that western North Carolina community. Coming and going so quickly, being easily identified by my lack of Southern accent as a damned Yankee. I’m sure no one there — and Bob Griese, wherever he is and whether or not he still comes to the region — remembers me. No matter, I’ve kept his blessing.

But I am praying for that region now, so utterly tormented by the rampaging, north-traveling remnants of a huge, millenial hurricane.

The North Carolina State Climate Office has concluded…

While the full extent of this event will take years to document – not to mention, to recover from – we can make an initial assessment of the factors that made for such extreme rainfall, the precipitation totals and other hazards, and how this storm compares with some of the worst for the mountains and for our state as a whole.

Have the young Christmas trees survived in Avery and Wautaga Counties?

It may be a bleak Christmas in the high country. I hope not. I spent a very nice Christmas there.

In fact, the greatest damage may be in neighboring counties and across the state line into Tennessee — death and destruction from raging water.

I pray for them as well.

May there be deliverance for the whole region by the time snow falls over the wide, welcoming beautiful face of that celestial mountain grandfather.

HARMONY AMID HORROR

Harmony, as it happens, is the name of a seriously topical musical of the same name. I wish I’d seen.

It came primarily from a seemingly unlikely source — Barry Minilow, who (though I was not aware of it) is Jewish and in the brilliant twilight of his career, though its most public manifestations were melodic juke box hits like “Copacabana.”

But Harmony is serious business about a seriously discordant period of modern human history.

Why am I writing this?

Because I just happened to stumble on a two-year-old review of the show. (It is my habit never to visit the bathroom, public or private, without something to read. Thus, before heading to the privvy, did I pick up a two-year-old magazine from one of my pack-rat-stacked piles of obscure journals (these admittedly being fire hazards which I insist on keeping around for the fire they ignite in my brain).

On this visit to that periodical, I turned to the “stage” section.

And there it was. Something old but still new on a subject that is, sadly, eternal — the undaunted human spirit amid state tyranny, bigotry and terror. And it was, further, a musically relevant offering from the world of show business that did not have its origin on The Voice or America’s Got Talent –and was not seeking to push some politically correct “message” into my ears and down my throat.

Harmony is about a six-member 1930s comedic German singing group with three Jewish members that gets caught in the raging Nazism of Weimer-era Berlin. It’s based on fact and set in the same milieu that is the setting for Cabaret, among the most celebrated stage and screen hallmarks of Seventies America. The group became so famous that they appeared in more than twenty films and toured internationally with the likes of Marlene Dietrich. Manilow and librettist/lyricist Bruce Sussman, according to the review, “tweaked” the show for a quarter century and “devised a cunning range of songs for both the boys’ cabaret act and to illustrate their off-stage drama.”

If Jersey Boys about the The Four Seasons can offer compelling drama in its contemporanious American context, I can only imagine how much off-stage drama can be drawn from the story of a mixed Jewish/Gentile troupe “stayin’ alive” and hiding in plain sight in the world of the Third Reich.

Again, from the review I learned that the show offers songs ” ranging from “snappy, sometimes slightly naughty comic numbers suitable for debauchery-seeking Weimer nightclub audiences to lush ballads such as the standout duet called Where You Go,’ which is sung by the wives of two of the singers.”

Of course, life on and off stage gets complicated for the group and their families, such as when a fan who also happens to be a Nazi officer informs the singers that they “project the image that Germany is amusing and non-threatening.” (Reminds me of how current Russian, Chinese, Iranian or North Korean shills now and then proffer similar, transparently false assurances that their dreadful societies are fun boxes of freedom and light-hearted amusement.)

Among the group’s edgy efforts while on tour to project the truth about their country’s growing agony — in this case, during a show in Copenhagen — is inclusion in the score of a “witty but chilling song” entitled “Come to the Fatherland” which concludes, Or we’ll come to you.

They survived during Germany’s twelve-year Nazi nightmare. In 1933, they came to Carnegie Hall and the NBC airwaves and were tempted to stay but reluctantly, probably wrongly, feared they would not be welcomed here (this according to this review which, by the way, was written by Kyle Smith for the journal New Criterion in June, 2022.)

The show’s narrator,apparently paralleling Joel Gray’s memorable role as Master of Ceremonies in Cabaret, is an amiable group member named Chip Zien. I get the sense that that was the name of one of the actual group members, the last of whom died in 1998. Some of his commentary, according to reviewer Smith, is “tense” and “regretful.” His “younger self” wishes it had made different choices than, perhaps, to have stayed home during such a dangerous, horrific time for all Europe and the world, thereby giving any measure of aid and comfort to Nazi oppressors.

The the show is also obviously a tribute to all long-suffering Jewry, to all who shielded and protected the singers, and to Holocaust victims. In fact, the 2022 performance took place at the National Yiddish Theatre in the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan.

Barry Manilow is on record saying Harmony is the career achievement of which he is proudest.

Rightly so.

But have there been any subsequent performances of Harmony over the last two years?

Manilow, Sussman and coreographer Warren Carlyle apparently staged the 2022 version on a very limited budget with minimal sets and scenery changes, relying heavily, according to Smith, on video and photoraphic images.

Some college, or even high school drama department or community theater somewhere should take note. A musical that finds a way to seriously yet entertainingly illuminate the problem of anti-semitism would be very timely indeed.

HURRICANE HELENE

It will be just a storm here. But as of 2:57 p.m., September 25, 2024, there is an ominous gray, a buiding steady ominous breeze, a silence, a realization that some neighbors have fled. Anxiety. The old Florida thing.

It is out there in the Gulf, freshly emerged from Cancun. It will get stronger over warmer waters. Stronger and stronger.

A widening, multi-colored, swirling electronic blob on the TV radar, embracing, it seems, everything and threatening everything and everybody with wind and water. A monster.

I pray. And I think of those quiet Gulf-front villages and roads of the Panhandle, constantly being reconfigured by these ancient, prowling, giant, all-devouring meteorological beasts. In some cases, nearly wiped off the map. Mexico City, for instance. Wiped out.

And they give these creatures names so that they almost have faces, arms, legs, lips. Female or male, they are androgenous bodies destined to dissolve into rain, fluttering and stirring branches on some northern sidestreets until the sun shines again, and all is still and all is memories and so much is broken in its wake.

I must leave my tin and vynl domicile for somewhat safer ground.

AMERICA’S SEARCH FOR MEANING, CIRCA 1975

It’s fun to look at the last chapter of old history text books to see how the authors chose to frame the long past “present moment” for the high school or college student of that hour.

Long ago, at a Tampa, Florida yard sale, I bought a thick (over 800 pages), impressively illustrated American history text book called, The American Nation by Columbia professor John A. Garrity. ( I recall how the working class, thirty-something guy selling it on his front lawn lamented his own failure as a student to value it more –at the very moment he was letting it go for a few dollars.)

The big old tome is notable, at least to me, for how heavily and not inappropriately it vividly emphasizes –right from the first chapter– the often previously neglected or underplayed history of America’s tragic interaction with the slave trade.

The American Nation was first published in 1966; my edition is from 1975. Hence, it ends speaking of Watergate and the fall of Richard Nixon. And, in between, of course, the troubled history of the Vietnam War gets extensive treatment.

But back to that last chapter.

It is portentiously titled, “A Search for Meaning.” Garrity evokes and somewhat demolishes what he calls nineteenth century American historian George Bancroft’s “naive assumption” that he was telling the story of God’s American Israel. Adding…

(F)or Americans had always assumed, and not entirely without reason, that their society represented man’s best hope, if not necessarily the Creator’s. The pride of the Puritans in their wilderness Zion, the Jeffersonians’ fondness for contrasting American democracy with European tyranny, what Tocqueville called the “garrulous patriotism” of the Jacksonians, even the paranoid rantings of the latter-day isolationists all reflected this underlying faith. Historians, immersed in the records of this belief, have inevitably been affected by it. Their doubts have risen from what the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called “the irony of American history”: the people of the United States have been beguiled by their real achievements and the relative superiority of their institutions into assuming that they are better than they are.

(I detect here early signs of the pendulous Obama-era liberal political and academic emphasis on America’s sins and resulting assaults on American confidence that has led to the equal and opposite cry to “make American great again.” But, whatever….)

Among other things, Garrity goes on to asks:

Has modern technology (and this is 1975) outstripped human intelligence?

Has our social development outstriped our emotional development?

Garrity concludes: No one one can currently answer these questions. Nevertheless, we may surely hope that with their growing maturity, their awareness of their own limitations as a political entity, the American people will grapple with them realistically yet with all their customary imagination and energy.

In othe words, he drew up short of any predictions, but gave a nice pat on the shoulder to 1975 Americans before we ran back into the game.

How have we done in fifty years — with our “customary imagination and energy”?

Historian Garrity died on December 19, 2007 at the age of 87. I wonder how he thinks we did on the path to national maturity and emotional development –and did he perceive, in his final years, the unexampled threat Artificial Intelligence added to fears human intelligence might be on the brink of being “outstripped”?

It’s interesting that Garrity invokes the evaluation of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr who is also credited with that prayerful evocation of divine trust and human limitations that has, in this increasingly and aggressively secular age, become a staple introductory prayer at meetings of many addiction recovery groups:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change

The courage to change the things I can

And the wisdom to know the difference.

Let me hear a big American –Amen!

WHAT I LEARNED AT THE PICNIC

Nothing like a bright, sunny day at the end of August to get you thinking about the environment. I want to save the environment. I like wind and sun. I doubt we can live by wind and sun alone.

But who am I to say so? ( My former colleague Tom Matteo in Massachusetts heats with solar and says he hasn’t had a power bill in three years.)

I’m sure he’s not alone among solar –or wind — boosters. In time, their individual testimonials may heat up the push toward reliance on sun power or turn the blade on wind.

There are skeptics, millions of them, and those whose life-long livlihoods and skill sets and knowledge of the pitfalls of wind and solar are generating abiding objections and warnings about the limitations of sun and wind power. Beyond that, they, like I, would warn against extremes and government coercion when those in power decide they will force us off reliance on fossil fuels.

A weekend ago, I attended a picinic of Local 7 of the United Association of Plumbers and Steamfitters in Upstate New York. There were hot dogs, ribs, wings, the works.

I wound up with a copy of the Association’s trade journal containing an editorial by its General Secretary-Treasurer, Derrick Kualapai.

Seems in our time, I’m not the only one warning against the extremes. Kualapai is the man issuing the warning here — against those who insist adamantly — and sometimes intolerantly –that alternative clean sources (ACS), must be limited to wind and solar. To insist on these sources solely – and I don’t doubt there are many in the environmental movement who do — is, in Kualapai’s words, to insist on “extremely narrow and unrealistic approaches” to the quest for a cleaner environment.

Of, course, Kualapai is a major stakeholder here.

One must always be suspicious of the motives of any writer — of those arguing any point of view — be the motive financial, ideological or what have you. So I invite everyone to be skeptical right along with me. The union for those who earn their living by traditional ways of doing anything might always have ulterior motives for their arguments. But, of course, that does not automtically make their point of view wrong.

Kualapie says his union supports policies that protect and preserve the environment. “Let me be clear at the outset,” he writes in the Journal ( of the United Association), ” we are not climate deniers.” He insists, with the same vigor as those who might attack the union on these grounds, that the union and its members “advocate fiercely for smarth, sensible, decorbonization strategies, including green hydrogen, bioenergy, geothermal and thermal energy networks, as well as advanced nuclear systems, including small modular reactors, and carbon capture utilization and storage.”

Sounds great to this layman, though I don’t know what “capture utilization and storage” is all about except maybe, as the awkward phrasing suggests, the capturing and re-use of carbon that the power industry has managed somehow to store? (Can you tell I was an English major?)

But I’m being told here that these are all options to a narrow focus on wind and solar as exclusive alternative clean sources of energy. Industry stakeholders actually like these alternatives. But I’m being told many in the environmental movement do not.

And Kualapai concludes, “while the UA recognizes the push for wind and solar energy, we’ve also learned that –even with maximum development –they will never solely provide enough power to ensure a sufficient supply of reliable energy for the future.”

“Never” is a challenging word. But that’s what he says, while I’m sure the Green Movement is insisting, ‘never say never” when it comes to wind and solar.

But I ‘m glad I went to the picnic. In the interest of balance, I guess I’ll have to watch for the next picnic held by the Green Lobby. After all, a hot dog is a hot dog, whether you heat it up using gas, wind or solar.

Charcoal briquettes are best.

And in all liklihood, at a Green Lobby event, I’m not likely to be eating meat.

A corn dog will do.