Ruminations – Page 5 – 19 Cent Notebook

ONCE UPON A CHILDHOOD…

Schnectady Union-Star, November 23, 1954:

Mrs. C. D. Livingston, 952 Wendell Ave., entertained Saturday afternoon in honor of the ninth birthday of her daughter Diane.

Tommy Atkins entertained with puppets “Magic” and her two ventriloquial friends, “Cookie and Oogle.”

Guests were Marnie Morris, Kathy Vinick, Emmy Tischler, Ceil Cummings, Donna Cole, Peggy MacAndrew, Maxine Dehncke, Enid Hart, Eileen Casell, Betty Lou Ragland, Elain Cramer, Elaine Fifield, Anne Gates and Diane Durante.

The two-story brick house at 952 Wendell Avenue stands occupied but freyed from the urban life that has circled and gnawed away at it for seventy years. As a brick dwelling, it has done better than many. It has two spacious front porches with nice railings.

Schenectady, New York is a hard scrabble box of memories — The Electric City for its General Electric association. G.E. and its steam turbine division have dwindled to an iconic brick building and a sprawling, mostly empty parking lot.

Tiime rushing in a torrent along the Mohawk River.

I’ve driven by that house on Wendell Avenue in sunlight and shadow, in all seasons — Diane has pointed it out to me — driven up the gentle hill that is that sidestreet toward a main street — the street and neighborhood having slowly gone to seed.

Diane Livingston became Diane Harrison in 1963, pregnant at 17, mother ultimately of four children by David Harrison. The other little girls…she knows the fate of some, not of others. Not of Tommy Atkins.

There are home movies of that November day, shadowy, puppeteer Tommy Atkins? It is a woman, an elegant woman, the puppets floppy, silly and delightful, talking. Tommy’s lips move barely perceptibly. The movies are silent, the girls delighted, their small voices only imagined, shy before the camera, all dressed up by their mothers.

Mrs. C.D. Livingston died in 1999.

One of the girls, Marnie, became a ballarina in New York City.

The sweet, aching dance of time.

Out of Childhood.

Away from Innocence.

Diane turned nine on November 26, 1954

I turned eight the next day.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

-F.C. Fitzgerald, 1925

UNANSWERED “NEWS” TIP

This is about a letter from a man ‘alleging to have information,’ as the saying goes. It was an unknown man –likely an old man. The man, forever nameless, the moment, forever lost, have been on my mind lately — for some unknown reason.

It goes back to a letter I received one day in the mid-Seventies. I was the Norwood Bureau reporter for the fledgling Daily Transcript suburban Boston newspaper. It, too, has been lost. About fifteen years ago, it vanished. It began in the early 1970s by collapsing four suburban weekies into one daily newspaper. Having never totally caught on with the reading public, struggling along lamely for years, it finally was converted into a weekly serving a far smaller area – and may, for all I know, have vanished altogether by now. Newspapers, in our time, regularly shrink or die. So it goes.

As the newest daily in the Boston area, the Transcript didn’t get a lot of attention. The residents of those four towns had resented the loss of their beloved weekly newspapers with their exclusive focus on their towns’ news. And their local news was thinned out in order to squeeze in the news of neighboring towns about which they cared little or not at all.

The towns were Dedham, Norwood, Westwood and Needham, all in southwest suburban Boston.

Back to that letter:

I forget if it was addressed exclusively to me. It would have been nice to know some reader was paying attention exclusively to my by-line.

But–it was more likely addressed to the Bureau office on Washington Street.

I think it came from one of the town’s nursing homes. This might automatically prompt some editors to dismiss it, suspecing it came from some soul suffereing dementia. The writer was, indeed, a resident in that nursing facility. The letter is lost but, as I recall, its author wrote, in longhand, something like this:

Dear Editor (or Reporter), I have some information I believe is newsworthy and that you might find very interesting. Please excuse my handwriting — I’ve got a touch of arthritis. But you can reach me at (was there a phone number? Just an address? Just his name ( forgotten) along with the name of the nursing home? Don’t remember.

I just know that I somehow felt, way back then, that I should “check this out,” as they say. I just had — a sense. It might have been sympathy for the hopelessly obscure of all “senior” facilities languishing away — and w riting unasnwered letters to editors.

Nonetheless, I felt I should check it out for two reasons: first, the writer, whom I believe was a male, might actually have something newsworthy to tell me. There was always that possibility, though the multitude of news tips go nowhere, r egardless of their source. Second: it’s not nice to ignore an elderly person looking for attention and maybe just a little company.

But also, how many times in my career as a reporter did I or other reporters or editors fail to follow up on a request for coverage of something or other–that turned out to be legitimate and important? Innumerable times, no doubt, during the busy course of multitudes of spinning news cycles in the history of the busy earth!

In truth, I suspected it wasn’t a “news” tip, as such, at all. I wondered if it was just one of those fabulous stories of the kind the elderly stand ready to pass on about their participation or involvement in some epical moment in Massachusetts, America, World, or just Personal History.

Everybody has a story.

If one lets one’s imagination range, the possibilities are infinite….

Perhaps this fellow was present when they exploded the Atom Bomb and saw some terrible flaw in the design andplanning that would one day, if left uncorrected, end civilization. Maybe he was a shadow Oppenheimer.

Perhaps he knew the identity of the men behind the deadly 1920 payroll robbery that got Sacco and Venzetti — innocent and, in the minds of millions across the globe, falsely accused — sent to the electric chair.

Perhaps he was a retired doctor who’d been a personal physician to H0ward Hughes.

Perhaps he WAS Howard Hughes.

Perhaps he was the doctor who delivered Elvis.

Perhaps he had good informtation about the whereabouts of Amelia Earhart and her plane.

Perhaps he had secret information about the Kennedy assassination. (Who doesn’t?)

Perhaps he knew the location of illegal uranium deposits and other nuclear waste buried under a nearby residential neighborhood.

Perhaps he was the grandson of a Scotland Yard Detective and had irrefutable, long hidden DNA evidence about the identity of Jack the Ripper.

Perhaps he played football with Jim Thorpe

Perhaps he’d once been a drummer for The Rolling Stones.

Perhaps he was a scientist whose theories about the causes of cancer had been unjustly supressed by a major medical institute.

Perhaps he was just an old man with nothing special for me, but who would have been delightful by a visit — from anyone! Especially a reporter.

Considering that, about that same period of time, I managed to respond to a call from excited Norwood parents who insisted their little daughters, currently trading off bouncing a ball in their backyard, were bound and determined to break the Guinness Book of Records for the number of hours spent bouncing a ball. Consider the absurd fact that I actually found time to write a dumb story about that utterly quixotic, silly parentallly-generated endeavor ( I don’t recall if the bouncing continued even past sundown).

Certainly, considering this, I could have found time to visit this poor man even if just pretending to check out his tip. I could have brought him an ice cream.

But I didn’t. The moment, the man, my reporter’s career, and whatever this guy had to tell me and whatever his human needs — are all long gone.

But, I’ll probably always wonder — if I should happen to hear of the collapse of a generations-old Norwood building with a long-ignored construction flaw, or the long-standing, long concealed poisoning of a Norwood water source due to the action of 1970s engineers, or the investigation and prosecution of individuals behind a decades-long suburban nursing home scam — or (why not?) the discovery that the illigitimate son of a member of the British Royal family lived out his last days in a Norwood nursing home — yes, I’ll always wonder…..

The moral:

Never as a reporter totally ignore even the most dubious news tip.

More importantly, never ignore the elderly and their stories.

And whoever you were, Mister I’ve-Got-Something-That-May-Interest-You, please forgive me. Your story probably died with you.

Or maybe, after being ignored, you simply wrote instead to the Patriot Ledger, the Boston Globe, The Boston Herald — or even the New York Times….and you had a huge story.! Huge!

No, not likely.

Whatever.

Wherever you are, whoever you were, these dozens of words are in your memory.

NIGHTHAWKS

Sunday night, 10:20, The Last Mile Lounge. Tash Silva’s at the bar. Deano’s night off. Tash is keeping an eye on Jimmy Jammin, a chronic tipler. But Jimmy’s not drinking tonight. I heard him tell Tash he hasn’t had a drink in three months. No alcohol. He’s drinking ginger ale. He’s here for the company. He’s talking to Bill Kirner, a regular. Kenny Foy is here with a guy I haven’t seen before, sitting at a table near the front door. Two guys at the end of the bar, strangers, are playing Keno. We’re all kind of strangers tonight. There are only three booths, only one of them in occupied — by two women. I’ve seen them before. They work at concessions at the airport and stop in after work. They have beers. Athena, the real estate agent from Lowell is here. Strange, on a Sunday night. She’s drinking a Manhattan. I can see the brown water and the cherry. She’s with a guy, probably a date. I’ll bet they stopped in on their way back from a movie in Boston. She does that, comes here at odd times, likes it here for some reason, though not a big drinker. She had that little revelation several months back. Seemed to change her. (I wish I could change.) She suddenly lost her depression, which might be why she comes back here, the scene of the loss of something bad, like somebody flipped a switch in her head.

The juke box is working again. But tonight, it’s silence. Nobody’s touched it. Everybody is silent, no laughter, you can barely hear anybody talking. The TV over the bar is off.

Knox, the artist who lives upstairs is at a table in the middle of the room, drawing something on sheets of paper.

There are seven tables. But, as you know, this is a small place, the Last Mile.

I’m alone at a table by the side door. I’m not sure why I came by tonight. I’m drinking a cup of hot green tea. Yeah, I know. Strange. Tash made it for me. I’d been drinking ice water, believe it or not. I tip Tash, no matter what I drink. He says to me, handing me the cup, “good night for tea.”

The light is soft. They made that change in this place. No harsh lighting.

And I’m thinking. I’m meditating, really. I’ve stepped out the side door, looking down the street toward the beach. I hear the wind. The jet goes over headed for Logan. I hear a siren, then – silence.

I need this silence. I need a moment to look at the windows of houses, soft rectangles of light, some dark. The street wet. There has been savage weather in the nation but here along the coast –just a damp, shining street.

And I’m thinking, meditating, trying to think. Getting a little chilly, I go back inside. My jacket is over the chair. No one will join me. Everybody wants to be unjoined tonight, except maybe Jim and Bill at the bar — and they aren’t talking anymore. Tash is reading a magazine, leaning up against the wall behind the bar.

Knox, the artist, looks up for a second, looks at me, smiles. We talk from time to time. He looks around then. I wonder — is he drawing this scene? Will he paint it later? Make it permanent.

The wet, shining, empty street. He can paint that if he looks out there…but in here, this is the painting. Paint the silence. Paint the light, the people…but make us see the silence.

I hear a breeze out there. A wind off the ocean. It grips the place.

I am full of fear, worry, why? Nothing to worry about. Or — so much to worry about but, why worry?

I look at my watch. It is now 10:37 p.m. And then I remember: The old clock over the old phone booth in the corner stopped at 10:37, either a.m or p.m., on some lost day in some lost month many lost years ago here at The Last Mile.

I stare at it, at stopped time, which is now exactly this time — stopped. I hear the damp wind.

The old bar glass of ice water is still on the table before me with the tea cup. The ice is mostly melted. It’s just a still, clear, half-full beeker of chrystal brightness now. I sip the hot green tea.

A Sunday night in silence. The tea is still steaming.

In stopped time. Steam and still water and memories —

before and all about me.

I half dream. For a full minute, I am fully — at peace.

THE GREAT SCATTERING

Why, oh why this bizarre reign of what we’ve come to call “identity politics”?

Damned if I know, if, that is, I confine my thoughts to those thoughts I can just peel off the top of my agitated head. Go deeper, like one diving with full oxygen into a murky lagoon, and –why, there you find a tangled subaqueous plethora of reasons why a reasonable race of bipods such as we are should find ourselves so messed up.

I’m helped –after being launched upon — this deep dive by writer Mary Eberstadt whose 2019 book Primal Screams (plural) explores our penchant for dividing along racial lines and other related common contemporary phenomena such as the insane excesses of modern political correctness, frequent compus demonstrations over every perceived injustice and what has been called the “cancel culture” in which, at the whim of some influencer, you or I can be discredited and banished from public discourse. Throw in radical feminism, gender-bending ideology, the excesses of the Me Too movement and all manner of unhinged activism.

I confess that Eberstadt’s book is on a heap of unread books on my library wish list. I just happened to stumble upon an old review. Therefore, I’ve read excerpts in that review that assure me the author’s analysis is free of rancor or any diatribe against “cultural Marxism.” It feels like a good book for the times.

She maintians our current state of affairs is not all about “power” — a charge I often level against the activists. She claims all such contemporary social-justice rebellions, now so tiresome to so many of us, amount to a “survival strategy” for the alienated. (Come to think of it, I, too, in my vigorous push-back against it all might also be engaging in such a strategy. I’m feeling alienated, too.)

“Such phenomena are indeed bizarre,” she writes, “if we examine them with the instruments of Aristotelian logic. But if instead we understand them against the existential reality of today –one in which the human family has imploded, and in which many people, no matter how privileged otherwise, have been deprived of the most elementary human connections –we can grasp in full why identity politics is the headline that just won’t go away.”

Eberstadt calls this process “the Great Scattering.” Because so many people below a certain age no longer enjoy a traditional family. They are, indeed, scattered.

Her first salient point: there has been a breakdown of family and familial bonds — our “natural habitat.” What is the connection between blood and personal identity? Haven’t we all become disoriented in search of intimacy — and personal identity? The human animal is now a flock of sheep without a shepherd. We now place more emphasis than did our ancestors on voluntary associations rather than on our once far more solid family environment. Feel free to challenge all these assertions. By themselves, they can feel gratuitious.

That’s why we should read books not reviews. But Eberstadt’s conclusions were there for me to ponder, such as that a healthy sense of self, and our moral maturation, among other essential developmental stages, have not only been delayed; they have, in many cases, been entirely stunted in the individual. I encounter a fair number of colleg-age students who seem to be crying out for protection from, rather than exposure to life.

So, we must ask, who are we? Who are people who will protect us? What is our “family”?

Eberstadt goes further, and here no doubt she rankles modern sensibilities with a thesis that is truly politically incorrect: she blames the sexual revolution for the advent of identity politics.

How? Why?

Well, ask yourself what has been the impact of the sexual revolution on marriage, family life, romance as reflected in everything from modern anthropology to popular culture? She does not write or speak here in religious terms. This is not an evangelical screed. Not, at least, so far as I can tell from the aggregate of quoted passages, though I know Mary Eberstadt to be Christian religious and so her thinking on all matters will doubtless reflect that, however subtly.

Nonetheless, consider how the pervasive use of artificial contraception, so essential, as is abortion, to the sexual revolution, has released us from consequences, led to mutual objectification between the sexes. A popular series such as “Sex in the City” reflects that, not without an entertaining level of self-analysis. I only chanced to watch one episode in which one comically sex-obessed female character blurts out, “I hate religion. It f**ks up your sex life.”

And nowadays, one wonders if it isn’t only the religious — and specifically the Catholic religious — who abstain from the dartificial regulation of birth. And far from all of them, or even, maybe, most of them. I guess that’s what’s called Modern Love.

But….

Biology once pushed us toward marriage and family life, even if it was a less than perfect family life. Traditional sexual mores imposed restraints. And we have viewed the casting off of those restraints as liberating. We were free! But — free of what? And for what? Chronic anxiety, crushing loneliness — at least in some cases. Or so Eberstadt believes, as do I. I see it in Generations X, Y and Z –and, to some extention, in us Baby Boomers who first cast off the yoke of convention in the 60s.

We’ve come to place a high priority on individual freedom and autonomy over against the maintaining of the integrity of the traditonal family in an ordered social whole.

And (laughing) I say, Yow!!…

I’ve suddenly begun to think of those Progressive Insurance TV commercials — so funny I make a point of watching them — dramatizing mock classes in which youngish people are instructed how not to turn into their parents. Yes, very funny. Of course, those amounts to only gentle raillery against superficial life habits –and, of course, insurance-buying practices — of superanuated adults; not to those deeper, more serious ways in which we might profitably emulate those who nurtured and raised us.

But I’ll challenge my own thesis here — and wonder if it isn’t, in our modern world, far more appropriate for children to explore their own talents and interests, search on their own terms for a spouse and occupation and a social situation suitable to them personally.

I’ll also ask if that can lead to true human flourishing unlinked from deep families ties and identities.

As for the impact on personal identities, destinies, attitudes and human outcomes of the sexual revolution — I know the Genie is not going back in the bottle. But I will always maintain that this particular revolt against our biology and ( I believe) human emotional reality has set us on a dark, unknown moral and spiritual path that may one day erupt in an entirely unforseen counter-revolution short of a reversion to Puritanism. The Genie will climb voluntarily back in the bottle. The so-called hook-up cultural, among other negative outcomes, unquestionably led to the course correction of the Me Too movement.

Perhaps human intimate and familial relations will ever hence exist suspended in a kind of utilitarian, humanistic malaise altered only by these new non-family, racial associations and identities –until the end of time.

Whatever.

Meanwhiile, you might want to explore these question, no matter where you fall on the political spectrum. You might even want to read this book, even if you disagree with its conclusions — just for the vital questions it raises.

DISILLUSIONMENT

How shall I define disillusionment?

With an anecdote. A memory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s disillusionment.

AN OUTERMOST WINTER MOMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The postman departs, and he write…

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

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

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

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

HOPES AND FEARS AGAIN

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

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

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

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

He thinks, he fears…

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

And the man thinks, I cannot think that way.

The dog is waiting….

THE CROWS OF JANUARY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that’s good. Love is good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is how he knows this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time present and time past

Are both present in time future…

And

In my beginning is my end…

And

I don’t know much about gods…

And

Midwinter spring is its own season

Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,

Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just the same, her burger came with cheese.

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

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

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

And tomorrow. Tomorrow he will go to the dentist.

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

They wonder what this year will bring.

They will look and listen for crows.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The seer at the back table said:

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

Wher had I heard that?

He said:

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

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

He said:

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

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

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

He said:

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

Then he said:

“Happy New Year!”

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

A cold rain was falling outside.

Yeah, happy new year….

SORT OF ORANGE

This will be short (or was meant to be short); just long enough ( too long) to clear out the sunny remains of a week (a long week.). Not too many actual memories, just the moods, and the colors.

I’ve been north. I’m back south again. Long drive, back and forth, up and down, bridges and mountains and white-knuckled (speaking of color) moments racing along the Interstate among trucks and other steel rapters, some obviously under the control of people who loosely value their own and other people’s lives.

While driving, I got to have my nerves chewed upon by another little beast that popped up on my dashboard, i.e., a warning light that my coolant was low. A car has to get cooled.

This introduced me to the kindness of strangers at a big, busy Pilot truck stop plaza in Virginia where I just happened to stop, sensing an emergency, and where a young clerk offered to fill my coolant reservoir (which was down to the minimum) with some of her own coolant from a container she kept in her jeep.

“What color is it?” she asked (meaning the coolant), trying to determine if she had a right kind for my car.

“Sort of orange,” I said.

“I’ve got some,” she said. She came out to my car and filled the clear plastic orb of a reservoir for free, helped out by a male manager who did the actual pouring under the hood. I was so relieved. They wouldn’t take any money, just wished me a safe trip to Florida. I fueled up and moved on. Yes, happier, and believing again in humanity.

I’m going to write their bosses, the local Chamber of Commerce, everybody I can think of. I’ll tell them about the wonderful young folks who helped me. Too bad I got neither of their names. I just see them, though dressed darkly, as bright colors. Smiles and good wishes.

Had I stopped at the previous exit, or waited until the next one, would my circumstances have been so blessedly altered? The odds would have been uncertain, 50-50 at best — or, to name a color, gray. Color the encounter at Pilot in Toms Brook, Virginia as bright gold, several shades above orange, and precious. (And if there’s an actual Tom’s Brook, I hope it’s silver clear in an age of murky waters.)

Speaking (again) of color — colors that are sort of orange or sort of bright….My whole trip now, in some manner (almost suggesting a state of synesthesia), lives in memory as colors. As does all of life, in some sense, right?

That’s how I see the seasons, too — as do many. As colors. White for winter, of course, but also bare earth tones with gray skies. All the colors of spring flowers for Spring. Brown and gold for fall….(the leaves, you know), it makes sense to our senses which store such tones in memory. It’s inescapable, this “colors of the day” Judy Collins thing. Even for the color blind, inner colors must draw inside the lines of the bare white outlines in the blank pages of our mental and emotional coloring books.

But, I guess I’m getting colorfully carried away — but, frankly, feeling sort of blue this Florida Sunday afternoon. Dark blue. Couldn’t tell you why except in a thousand gray, imprecise words. So, never mind….

But there was a white external moment recently…. memorable…..

I ran into a little snow in Vermont, just a squall. But as the road covered over, leaving only tire tracks in whiteness, I got nervous. There were steep hills ahead. Were these going to be my driving conditions all the way to my next stop, which was a friend’s house, many miles off, in Rotterdam Junction, New York? White felt like black, or whatever color fear is. Night for day.

But the snow stopped. A plow truck came out. The sky afterwards was a swirling, misty mix of gray, white and blue. The journey continued, and, ultimately, all I had left, besides occasionally the radio and a view of the Green Mountains, was my green thoughts turning a rich deep, melancholy undefinable shade, as if they were absorting the late fall landscape in transition. Sort of orange. (Fear can be that color too, if orange fluid is running low and your car might overheat, and your inner emotional fluid is running low as well.)

On the bright side up there in Vermont, I had stopped being worried long enough to remember how snow’s whiteness transforms trees. It was beautiful. The white wouldn’t last, not this time. But it was lovely. It was so white. Pure white on the branches for a beatific moment.

I wrote here recently of longing for an autumn festival in a small town in Vermont. And here I was, passing through small towns in Vermont — and with no time to stop, really. And, after all, the OctoberFests were over. November was coming. November is darkening brown, deepening gold, the color of downed leaves, ready for burning, or those Thanksgiving greetings, of which I intend to mail a few this year. I love November, and I love Thanksgiving. I was born the day before Thanksgiving. I wish, as I think I’ve already said somewhere, that it was not so quickly buried under Black Friday.

My nothern memories — I cling to them, even as complex as they are….

After the Christmas lights (mostly red and green –and white and occasionally blue ond gold) vanish, the grime and the grim skies and salt-streaked windshields frigid moments holding cold steel in gloves under harsh gas station lighting, filthy snowbanks sealing souls in place for the long march toward March, then April, then Spring….Winter. …

But it’s life, this alternating palette of colors. You have to love it. There has to be a winter.

Back to Vermont, to that Vermont driving moment… as somber but bittersweet as the lingering Vermont foliage, dulled down from bright reds and golds to russett, no less beautiful, and perfect for my mood during that driving moment. October was passing. Another October. (I once did a TV essay on September. What color is September? Let me think about that.)

So now, November is here. Enough. Time to pull this half-baked loaf out of the oven. Time for that Coda that ends these rambling Sunday seasonal ruminations.

But I’ll add…

I seem to write a great deal about the seasons here; too much, perhaps. But then, in Florida, it is your mood rather than the perpetually green sub-tropical landscape (at least in South Florida) that more than anything marks the seasons, and the solar cycles and the subtle turning of the earth, the earlier sunsets, the longer, darker mornings, the Gulf, when you are fortunate enough to glimpse it, a perpetual blue-green.

But driving in Vermont, I could tell November was coming. And when the trees are bare up north, there are shadows, long, sinewy shadows across lawns and walls and roads. November shadows. And it is the month on the Christian calendar when we remember the dead. Our thoughts are draped fondly — in black.

There might even be another entry here called, “November Shadows.”

But for now, I’ll end just recalling the mood that was…sort of orange.