MACKERELS IN MOONLIGHT

I’ll take a rare, reluctant excursion into a topical area I most often avoid (contemporary politics), but I do so in the interest of the worthy topic of language, specifically words, their use and abuse.

I’ve read that during the presidential administration of Gerald Ford, Hollywood comic Don Penny was brought into the White House communications office to improve the president’s wooden delivery.

Now, Gerald Ford was a good man. His transitional tenure in the highest office in the land was marked, as I remember, by steady, mostly uncontroversial initiatives (if you rule out his pardon of Richard Nixon, for which even the liberals ultimately gave him an award and told him he did the right thing in declaring an end to “our long, national nightmare,” i.e., Watergate.

He said of himself, after assuming — in a most unassuming way –the Oval Office ( going from vice president to president in the wake of Nixon’s resignation) that he was “a Ford, not a Lincoln.” He was a humble man.

But it is true — his delivery of speeches put you in mind of another word — soporific (sleep enducing).

So it has been written that, after one trying session with Ford, Don Penny said, “Mr. President, these are words. They mean something.” It was a joke, meant to cure Gerald Ford’s inarticulacy.

But yes, we must all remember — words DO mean something.

The current president is part way through a second term in his broken tenure. His inarticulacy is well-known and, one might suppose, deliberate. He comes under enough fire from the Left without me repeating one wag’s suggestion that he functions with a fourth grade vocabulary. His supporters would say he is plain-spoken. You may notice that he repeats himself often, seemingly in a failed search to find a better. clearer way to say what he’d just said. One might also theorize that this is calculated to drive him point home — twice.

Nonetheless, in Donald Trump’s and all of our mouths, words DO mean something, whether you like them or not. Among the things for which he will be remembered is extreme rhetorical recklessness. This has been noted often by friend and foe alike, and it is clear he never intends to change, short of a divine rhetorical intervention –such as God having Lincoln, Gladstone, or even just Ted Sorensen appear to him in a dream to scold him like a Christmas ghost. “Mind your words, Donald!”

His most recent venture into rhetorical recklessness was to suggest that some members of Congress should be executed for, in an undeniably blatently political gesture, creating a video in which they remind military service members that they don’t have to obey illegal orders.

Well, this is true, if an order can objectively be judged to be illegal. That, of course, is not at all a clear, easily recognizable matter to determine. It could be decided after the inevitable courtmartial.

The subsequent furor among Democrats and the liberal media was a predictable — and partisan – tempest in a tea pot. But even Trump’s partisans were inclined to call it –reckless. Another in the inumerable instances of rhetorical recklessness on the part of Donald Trump. It does not serve him — or the nation — well.

This sort of thing is boundless in our society now dominated by the impulsive world of social media. Trump is our first truly social media president.

There is a way to discuss all matter — to object, affirm, criticize — that is powerful, creative, respectful, useful — if the president would only pay attention to the impact and value of his own words.

To which I’ll add, in despair, ‘ain’t never gonna happen.’ Trump is Trump –rude, crude, ineducable on this score. (How did he ever pass the verbal SATs to get into Yale??) And he is reckless. One prays his recklessness is a superficial calculation to shock on the surface while, again, one prays, he is actually more deliberative in private when he makes the decisions that affect our national and international fortunes. The jury is still out on that.

TRump is given to insulting people. I dislike that very much. That’s recklessness. Perhaps he could at least learn to be creative in his insults and denigrations, like John Randolph of Roanoke who, in describing the corrupt nature of another politician’s speech, famously said, “thy words stinketh like a mackerel in the moonlight.”

I guess that would be an improvement. Better still, Mr. President, how about you just stop hurling insults?) It stinketh!

IN THE WAKE OF MELISSA…

I don’t listen to a great deal of rock music since I stopped drinking thirty-eight years ago. Much of it heard with sober sensibilities, filtered through my brittle predispositon and frank prejudice seems merely visceral, hedonistic and superficial — mass enterainment at its most venal. But, that’s just me.

And here I go praising the work of a couple of late, inspired, long-haired souls who wandered about out there in the red clay and neon rain between Macon and L.A..

I refer to keyboardist and vocalist Gregg Allman who died on May 27, 2017 in Richmond Hill, Georgia. He and his slide-guitarist brother Duane (dead in a motorcycle wreck on October 29, 1971 at age 24) formed the core of the Allman Brothers Band and, with their many sidemen, made a real impact on recorded popular music. Their Filmore East recording of “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” is supurb improvisational, live rock, artful far beyond top 40 or studio-produced album rock fare. I’m only occasionally a fan of their blues/ rock genre but have often marveled at the craft, range, energy and improvisational near genius of these Georgia boys. I speak of “energy,” but that does not properly characterize the lolling Southern, half-staff stasis that was typical of a band, like most country or blues-rock bands, that seemed just to stand in the spotlight and play — and play and play. And that was and forever will be their glory. Just singing and playing. (Duane, by the way, was born exactly a week before me, Gregg the next year. I never knew this until I started to write this of a Sunday night.)

A guy who bought used vintage guitars and called himself a guitarcheologist, once showed me a picture of the stark, unlovely, chain-link-bordered suburban Macon, Georgia intersection where Duane, traveling at a high speed, collided with a flatbed truck and began his journey to death. There was nothing distinct or special about it — just roadside America. But this Allman Brothers fan and rock guitar afficianodo felt the need to photograph it. The band’s bassist Barry Oakley died close by, also on a motorcycle, a week later, drinking heavily and grieving. The world — it seems especially the world of rock music — seems to have its share of these dark, booze and drug-induced tragedies. I recall while in the Army reading of Janis Joplin’s and Jimi Hendrix’s substance-related deaths about a week apart.

Gregg Allman was married seven times, including to Cher ( who was also a serial spouse). It would seem then, that he had difficulty finding true and lasting love. He’s not alone, of course. But perhaps his best song was the love song “Melissa”. His brother Duane thought so. I happened to hear it recently as incidental music on a TV series in which a guy is saying goodbye to his girlfriend — who was not named Melissa. I’d heard it before, of course, but it struck me as sweetly, sadly fetching and so I made a point of calling it up on Youtube and listening to it — and to its elliptical, purposely ambiguous but evocative lyrics, which approach but are not real poetry. Just, as I say…evocative. Isn’t that what the best pop lyrics do? Evoke images and emotions? We don’t listen to most pop music for the chord structure.

And so, Gregg wrote and sang (I pluck phrases here), Crossroads, seem to come and go, yeah…There’s no blanket where he lies…In all his deepest dreams the Gypsy flies…With Sweet Melissa…”

No, not great poetry. Maybe not even a great lyric. Just evocative of some unseen, imagined and absence and longed-for “Sweet ” Melissa…

I’ve read that Gregg Allman wrote the song as early as 1967. He’d apparently tried and failed to write dozens of ballads, and “Melissa” was among the first that, by his measure, made the grade. It is written that the band was staying in a Pensacola motel and that Gregg picked up brother Duane’s guitar” which was tuned to open E and immediately felt inspired by the natural tuning.” The title’s love interest was almost called Delilah. Gregg allegedly settled on Melissa while in a grocery store late one night buying milk. That’s how he tells it in his memoir.

And that title made all the difference to a Youtube commentator writing three years ago under the handle of RoseandRichie. I don’t know if it’s Rose or Richie that says, This song is treaasured by my dad. My sister’s name was Melissa. She died at 26 Yr old. We often listen to it and cry together. Nothing unmanly about it. My dad is a war hero veteran and when he cries, we all cry.

So it is that songs touch us — evoke, remind.

For some on the long Youtube thread following the singing of the song, there are testimonials to its personal impact that seem hyperbolic, exceeding anything I personally could claim for any pop tune, such as when mariazimmerman8639 said five years ago, this song does things to me….brings me back to every wonderful thing in my life…the whole song is just mesmerizing…alweays will be.

You read that and think of Gregg Allman, himself now gone over the horizon into the unknown bourne, simply strumming in a motel room and on a late night errand to buy milk but summoning from within something that will move mariazimmerman years afterward –well, such it is that makes songs such a splendid, eternal form of human inter-communication.

hectorthewonderhalibut6331 (a person, based on his handle, with a playful streak) declares, or, you might say, prays…God I miss the times when this song first came out. Those days and those friends. Damn.

Yeah. Damn indeed. But southerngirl300 goes right over the hedges and declares, one of the greatest songs to ever be recorded in the last century.

Well, for some, probably so. Right up there with Frank Sinatra singing anything by Cole Porter. It’s all a matter of taste. Those cultural/ generational/aesthetic barriers do unavoidably divide usf

As for times when this song came out, it was the early 70s, when romantisizing nostalgia for the 60s was already kicking in. hectorthewonder is obviously a boomer. (And, by the way, the guitar work on the song sounds to me like the work of Duane Allman who would have been dead by the time the song was released, right? One account has “Melissa” being recorded in December of 71, another in February of 71. Duane’s fingers and spirit seems, to my ears, to be on the frets and strings in and between brother Gregg’s third-person choruses of lonely longing (Crossroads, will you ever let him go? No,no,no….I know that he won’t stay without Melissa.

The brothers are gone. Their band with its distinctive sound but a shadow of its former self, lingers on, still touring, even dropping into Madison Square Garden last April.

Meanwhile, maybe for all of this century, moonlighting balladeers in roadside saloons up and down America’s highways will likely be crooning about “sweet Melissa” to slow-dancing embracing couples in dimmed romantic lightiing. No doubt many babies born to Allman Brothers fans, like the lost but not forgotten sibling of Rose or Richie, might be among those shuffling about on the dance floor.

As for weddings and funerals where the bride or deceased happens to be named Melissa…those slow, sad, sweet strains will drift out over church and lawn.

Crossroads seem to come and go….with sweet Melissa.

THE LIGHT WE CANNOT DULL

“The word ‘gay’ has always rubbed me the wrong way,”  James Baldwin told the writer Richard Goldstein, who interviewed him for the Village Voice in 1984. “I never understood exactly what it meant by it.” Baldwin also thought that the word “homosexual” was not a noun. (By which I assume he meant it was just an adjective, modifying a noun or nouns. Now it’s a word, whether noun or adjective, that has basically been declared inoperative by “gay” advocates–for some reason.)

One of Baldwin’s first pieces, published in a journal called Zero in 1949, was an essay on homosexuality in the novel. Novelists, he argued, know that human beings are not reducible to such labels: “Once the novelist has created a human being he has shattered the label and, in transcending the subject matter, is able, for the first time, to tell us something about it and to reveal how profoundly all human being interlock.” (Emphasis added.)

There are a multitudes of ways we mortals have found to be unatural and disordered in these insane times that are disordered morally and emotionally. This has been true, from the evidence, from the dawn of time.

James Baldwin was a gifted, troubled soul who, as often happens with gifted souls and gifted artists, managed to shed some light in darkness, even as he -we, us — linger in darkness and insist on dulling the light.

It’s the human way.

 

JUST SOMETHING I DID, AND REMEMBER…

It might not seem worth remembering. It was a sad time, shortly after news of Diane Harrison’s mother’s death. I remember Diane’s mother well.

Diane’s mother Claire died near the end of the last century. I believe it was April, 1999. Their relationship was loving but difficult. But they loved each other. Somehow it happened that, sometime after the word of her death came, we drove to visit Claire’s sister, Diane’s aunt Joan and her many cousins, on the Jersey Shore. There would ultimately be a memorial service for Claire at St. Agnes Church in Atlantic Highlands. But at this point in time, it was just essential to get Diane to the Philadelphia Airport for a flight to Sarasota, Florida. I do not recall at all why Philadelphia, not Newark Airport.

But I drove her, with the help of directions from one of Diane’s Philadelphia-based cousins. I recall I parked my car in the airport garage and escorted her into the terminal, said goodbye — all these goodbye’s in life, temporary or permanent. I probably wasn’t making the trip to Sarasota because I was working back in Boston.

But this is what I’m recalling about that occassion — strange, I suppose. I recall, on my way back to the airport garage, deliberately finding one of those ground-level, glassed-in areas at the base of a stairwell. It had plastic seats mounted on a steel rod, rare as it might seem for anyone to find it necessary to pause there.

I did.

I purposely sat down in that secluded, little traveled place to try to ponder, to really dwell on that moment, far from the central bustle of the airport, sitting in a place where perhaps no one had paused to sit before, or maybe since. It was odd, as I say, to have seats there — this seldom traveled little nook in the airport, and I’m not sure how I happened to come upon it, doubted if anyone had found the need to sit there ever before or ever again — if that stairwll still exists, airports being places where buildings come and go. Airports are transitory places, unlike old brick train stations where the rails never move.

I thought of Diane alone on her way to see her aging father’s side. She hates to travel alone. I thought of her sorrow, how she must have been thinking about her times with her mother., now ended forever. Airports are full of people traveling to see loved ones in the wake of a death, or a birth.

I might have though about my few other times passing through that airport — one of them among other G.I.s being shipped to Georgia for further training.

I knew that afternoon, that I had a drive of some 700 miles ahead of me, probably into darkness — probably on the Jersey Turnpike or Garden State Parkway, then the Mass Pike. Back to the cozy little house on Acton Street in Carlisle, Mass — that, though old and dear and the antithesis of tranistory — has since been demolished and turned into a weedy, bare rise leading up to a big new house. I would be alone in that house with our little dog.

I was going to welcome some solitude. But then and now, with many changes, anxieties and obligations and difficulties and life passages ahead of me, pressing down on me, as it was that afternoon for millions. Some others at the Philadelphia Airport that day were probably on a mission of sorrow to some place in the country.

…I knew this wasn’t exactly Frost’s idyllic Winter Soltice pause by woods on a snowy evening. But I did have promises to keep, and miles to go before I could sleep.

I just wanted to sit for a moment in that obscure little corner without a soul around — just a minute, actually probably not more than sixty seconds, if that – and think about what was going on.

No one ever came along. I got up, got to my car, left for my journey. Perhaps I felt fooslish.

My heart gets heavy just thinking about it. But I’m grateful for that pause. Life would go on. Busy life.

Rest in peace, Claire. I probably, above all, entertained that thought — and thought of Claire’s and my relationship. She could be wise and funny, irascible, difficult. She was bright, smoked, drank, was never in perfect health in her later years.

I’d never intended to have these relationships. But did, and go on with relationships with the living and the dead.

Claire, in that moment in that stairwell, I probably loved you, prayed for you –and your daughter, in however a broken way.

Then it was time to get up from that seat, and go on.

We all go on.

EMPTY

It is September 27, 2025, a Saturday. I read yesterday a prayerbook marginal notation from 2009. The theme of the reading was, “The Time and the Moment,” which reads toward the end, “It is the present moment which can be offered to the Lord, none other.”

Having first read that chapter in 2009 for the 25th Weeek in Ordinary Time, I read it again in 2018 and 2023, skipping the years in between, including last year.

I struggle often to remain focused on faith, and, obviously, on the moment. The years turn to moments, and rush by.

In exactly two months, I will be 79 –on Thanksgiving Day. I must be grateful.

I rose at 5 a.m., unable to sleep further. I got up and tried to do some writing. At roughly 6:30 a.m., feeling suddenly sleepy, I decided I needed to go back to bed, but I found my little dog up and staring at me in the darkness of the living room, as if desiring to go out. I let her out to forage in the backyard’s darkness illuminated only by the green, motion-activated search light, all very dim, the air soggy. Suddenly there was a flash that, to my eyes, seemed confined to the space between mine and my neighbor’s house, very strange. But the flash had come from the sky, and thunder rolled slowly over the neighborhood. My dog , though her hearing is going, sensed the thunder and came running in distress toward the shed door to be let inside the shed and then into the kitchen. All she had been doing is licking grass. It is one of those days, still to this hour, when she is not eating.

I let her out again in daylight. She went licking grass again and did not even notice that it had begun to rain. Finally she came in.

Then ,after briefly trying to resume sleep, hoping for a nice dream but usually unable to recall dreams in much detail anymore and deciding daylight and life was calling, I got up — on a cloudy, intermittently rainy Saturday in which I have a charitable chore ahead. Long story, that.

It is 9:11. I am anxious. I must travel soon — this coming week. Airports, rental cars, highways, obligations my partner has that will make her happy, and so I must be happy to make her happy.

The bed, the dreams, they all beckon us away from life, don’t they? So does the laptop, so do words, but they have worth in life — for whatever they are worth for whoever will see them. Life beckons. The present moment.

As I dressed for the day, I saw a blue jay fly into the plastic feeder on the bedroom window– and immediately fly off.

I’m out of seed. The feeder is empty.

A SINGULAR SOUL IN SEPTEMBER

I saw someone today that I decided will be famous in some circles someday, small circles, unless she wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.

I say this, without a bit of sarcasm. We must all be aware that the voices of our national life that will turn up in small magazines, in poems, in novels of the future will be the product of the several generations of parents that were my contemporaries (though they are grandparents now) and by Generation X and the Millenials. Their experiences of life were different to some degree from us Boomers, but, of course, in many respects just the same. They have populated the planet with adolescents and teenagers who, in mind, soul, dress and demeanor, resemble this young woman. So I surmise — and imagine.

She is an individualists — though many young individualists seem to blend into a herd of expressive uniformity.

The young woman in question might be in high school — or she might have been in her late twenties. She had that universal ageless look about her. But — she had quite a look about her. Again –a solitary individual broken away from an army of individuals, and wearing the “uniform.”

She was checking the Large, Florida library screens seemingly in search of a book. Then I saw her wandering among the stacks in the second level — near the poetry and plays, but she might have been checking out the non-fiction areas, too. Or the theater.

She had clipped, short, blondish — blondish, almost boyish, seemingly natural — hair. She stood about five feet. She wore a gray top under a light gray hooded sweater — even on this Florida September day of typical humidity and heat. But — those who spend a great deal of time in library air conditioning might find their temperature dropping.

She was a study in blacks and grays.

She wore black high-top sneakers — and, in keeping with the expressive individually of our time that turns our bodies into tableaus, she had on one leg (and I did not notice this until my second glance) a thicket of black interlocking tattoos all the way up to the high-level top of her short. On the other leg, an equal tangle of vine-like tattoos only went up half way on her pale skin. Perhaps that leg is a work in progress.

She wore round glasses with clear rims. She had a bright orange sack slung over her shoulder. Her only dash of color.

She was, yes, a human study, and, I expect, rather studious in her own right.

She would soon blend back into the world external to the library, and not necessarily be easy to spot or single out for these enumerated physical attributes, for thought she caught my eye, she looks –as I’ve already said –like a major percentage of her generation looks these days — having made a conscious choice to express herself satorially and physically as an individual in that army of individuals.

Expressive Individualism! (Was it Robert Bellah who came up with that phrase?) Nothing all that unusual about trying to be unusual these days.

I will be left forever guessing –even should I chance to see her again and unless I make so bold as to approach and interview her, just what she thinks about life. I’d like to find out if such knowledge be obtained without offending her or rightly arrousing her suspicions or hostilities. (“Hi, I just think you’re interesting-looking and could I ask a few questions about, ah, your choice of dress or what’s on your mind….”)

Yeah, right. Someone call the cops.

But this future prospective Nobel Laureat or Poet Laureat or singer of ballads in New York or Amsterdam cafes– once she leaves home and becomes an ex-pat — this highly decorated, expressively individualistic soul nonethless is ( and do I repeat myself? Yes!) entirely typical of so many other late members of Generation Y, OR the ubiquitous members of Generaton Z. She just, as I’m saying here, caught my eye — and her understated, black and gray earth tones contrasted happily, to my eyes, with the splashy rainbow-colored conscientously eccentric types of her generation -like the “goth”s who must so deliberately put on a mask of primeval ugliness.Black on black.

And she seemed studious (as I said) and serene (perhaps I didn’t say that). I wonder what she keeps in that orange sack?

Let me say a very peternal thing: God go with her — to New York, Amsterdam, Stockholm — or just home to mom and dad and dinner tonight. And to her similarly decked-out bedroom. And to sleep.

May she find what has eluded so many who wished to make more than a ripple on life’s surface — including me.

Or, isn’t it far more likely she just wants to be alone? For, that was the other things about her — her solitude.

She is Young Miss Solitude. I like that, too. No jabbering of gossip, no noisy friends gathered around a table, challenging the library’s silence.

She was alone. A singular soul. On a September afternoon.

DARK CORRIDORS, SHINY FLOORS

When I was an eighth grader, then a high school freshman, I struggled mightily with mathematics. I was lucky to get into any high school, I was that bad. There was a wall there. I could not climb it. Perhaps I never tried hard enough.

But my poor father wanted to help this situation. He received advice, most probably from the Catholic nuns that were trying to teach me, that tutorial services were available from the retired teachers in the Women’s Home near the corners of Gallivan Boulevard and Washington Street in Boston’s Dorchester section. I forget if it was free or just available for a small fee to help the women support themselves. My mother somehow was led to believe that the women’s home was called “the home for incurables,” and she freely referred to it as that, though that struck even my adolescent mind as woefully bleak and uncharitable, regardless of the women’s conditions or circumstances. True, the women were all elderly and did have serious infirmities — mostly, it seemed, severe and disabling rheumatoid arthritis. I don’t believe any of them were ambulatory. They wheeled or were wheeled down those dark, polished, barren institutional corridors.

The Women’s Home is still there, though I don’t know who are currently its patients or residents or who operates it. (In older, less euphamistic times, I guess it was, in fact, called The Home for Incurables)It remains a brick, Victorian-looking structure at the end of a long drive across a spacious lawn. ( When I Google “Women’s Home,” nothing comes up. When I do a Google Earth search, I don’t see it where I know it to be. Many times on the job as a Boston TV reporter, I recall my photographer and I driving by the long, elevated wall and chain link fence and vegitation bordering Gallivan Boulevard, and bordering the home. But, for some reason, I can’t find it. I can only assure you that I am not imagining there was such a place.

I would arrive, getting a ride from some family member, and take an elevator (as I recall) to the second floor. My sense of the place is, again, of a place clean, but stark and unadorned. ( I can fix the time of my visitations in the summer of 1962, because I somehow recall that I learned of the death of William Faulkner while leaving the property one day (on the radio?) and that date was July 6, 1962. I don’t recall any pictures of paintings on the walls, but my memories might be limited to what an adolescent boy might be likely to take in. And though time may be denying me that memory, I still see in my mind a place where there was nothing of any color, nothing on display — no flowers or paintings. There was an equally bleak-seeming second floor lounge with a piano in the middle of it. A piano was a good thing. (The only person I ever heard playing the piano was yours truly, but that comes later.)

I will continue this memory another time; promise. But, for now, I’ll stop — or stall — here on one of memory’s darker back roads….

GRAY LIGHT AT PORT LUCIAN (in which Mercy Strange’s dark mood lifts and the world’s color and light are restored)

There are narrow winding lanes of tiny shops in the Port’s center. The chocolatier has a fan above his door that sends the aroma of freshly baked fudge out into the open air. He sells ice cream, too; homemade. From the other ceramic, dress and novelty shops, especially the quiet, sequestered ones along the winding lanes, away from the busy little main street (called Myrtle Avenue), there comes the scent of patchouli, citrus and lavender, often the piped strains of guitar or harp music. You might find a busker working away at his guitar or flute on one of the little alley turns over near the water’s edge. People stop to listen. It’s busy in summer. (I noted the license plates of distant visitors.)

And then immediately south of the short row of scollop and shrimp boat docks, there is the fresh sea scent blowing in off Lucian Inlet and the view of the open ocean beyond. There is a small park, a mere patch of greenery at the water’s edge with two sugar maples for shade and benches for the foot-weary tourists and those town residents who make a point of gathering here daily, like the women’s knitting circle and some men who bring a folding table for daily games of chess. There is a small garden and a monument statue of angels at the heart of the park and at the heart of a lovely fountain. For those sitting on the few nearby benches, looking out toward the sea, there is always the gentle sound of water plashing over stone and falling into the tiny pond below. People have tossed coins into the pool. A brass placque by the pond’s edge tell you the fountain was dedicated to a long departed benefactor in 1958. A wooden sign rising up from a stake thurst into the brown garden mulchtells you in Olde English lettering that the flowers are watered and the whole garden maintained by the Port Lucian Garden Club.

For forty years, Mercy Strange has had her little art gallery halfway down Periwinkle Lane in the Port shopping district. For years, she had worked in oils, acrylics and watercolors and still displays and sells those old legacy works in her cramped but cozy space. But, sometime early in this century, she switched to working in charcoal. She said it was the light in Port Lucian that made her make that shift — a peculiar change, no question, just to work exclusively in black and gray, drawing what in real life are colorful landscapes and seascapes and, now and then, she will generously draw portraits on-the-spot of some of the people who approach to watch her work at her easel those days she goes to the park.

It seems odd to be turning everything gray in such a colorful, charming world.

I asked her about the change. She said it was the light that she sees over everything — she insists the light at Port Lucian is gray. Now, everyone else saw sunlight, although there were certainly gray days when clouds rolled over the coastline beyond the bluffs, or when winter came and the occasional snow cover would turn gray –or slushy- icy silver– on the sidewalks and in the otherwise clean gutters, and on those especially frigid days when ice would form on the masts of the fishing fleet.

But to Mercy, the whole Port, where she has lived all here 69 years, had become gray in every season. It was a singular and curious evolution in her artistic vision. It baffled many of us.

Gray light at Port Lucian: That was the name of her last exhibit in February.

Gray had become Mercy’s color of choice.

She also said the village, indeed, the whole world (according to her gray vision) had become more and more gray, crass, mercenary and materialistic as the days and summers and every season, bright or gray — even Christmas, all red and green and draped with holly — came and went and came again in Port Lucian and in the universe.

She was not specifically speaking of famine or disease or pandemic or war are political termoil. She was speaking of –well, of death. Life and death, and all the gray in between.

Some of us thought she might have suffered an ocular, or specifically, a macular degeneration that was effecting her physical vision.. But she assured us that was not the case. In fact, unlike many of her age –she is 69 — she is still gifted with 20/20 eyesight. We know this because, sensing our suspicions regarding her health claims, she showed a few of us the results of her eye examination. Yes, she was 20/20.

I see Mercy on my frequent trips to The Port. Her world has been in deep charcoal gray going on fifteen years now. I’ve been wondering about that. About Mercy, and the Gray Light….What emotional or mental — or, still I wonder if it is not physical — factors have altered her view of the world. Surely, over that period, times have been good or bad. Good and bad can be rendered in color or in black and white — or gray. Gray is more somber, more ambiguous for certain. Many of life’s circumstances seem gray. Of course, when as many movies were in black and white as in color, we did not necessarily feel our mood dampened. Those were often the filmmaker’s economic decision. Often, but not always. There is a quality rendered by black and white which color cannot convey, not to mention what gray conveys.

Mercy reminded me that DaVinci worked extensively in charcoal, including in his famous study of hands. German artist Kathe Kollwitz used charcoal to express the struggles of the working class and the horrors of war.( It was to Kollwitz’s work that her growing body of work was most often compared.) John Singer Sargent certainly let earth tones prevail on his canvasses.


So, Mercy Strange is not unique. But it was still peculiar or (forgive me) strange that she so seemingly abruptly shifted from a colorful vision of the world to a gray one.

So most of us who consider ourselves friends, patrons and supporters of Mercy Strange had accepted her shift, invited the art media to highlight her growing body of gray and black (but mostly gray) work. I personally bought one of her charcoal drawings of crows gathered on a bare and dying oak tree on the bluff at the entrance to the inlet. She called it, in complete accuracy, “A Murder of Crows,” for that is how such a gathering is known in the avian lectionary.

All well and good. Meanwhile the quaint, colorful and charming life of the waterside village known as Port Lucian continued, the coffers of her merchants rising and falling as the national economy rose and fell,buffeted by seas of contemporary political overtures, advances and retreats.

But six months ago, the skies seemed to darken to the edge of her twelve-by-twelve mile borders. Yet there are no clouds overhead, but the sky nonetheless seemed a deep gray. It is as if clouds dissolve the second they drift into The Port’s airspace but the sky remains gray for no known atmospheric reason, or so those who beheld this phenomenon declared.

But was it just Mercy’s mood spreading — or do we all, from time to time, even for long periods, see nothing but gray? But Mercy above all seemedd to be seeing nothing else.

It was about then that people really began to take note of Mercy Strange sitting with her easel, and sometimes sitting without any easel or drawing implements — sitting among the rocks bordering the inlet.

She would sit there for hours on end. Finally one day, I made my way out there along the waterfront road, parking my car at the base of the rocks where there was a scattering of teenage grafitti defacing the pervasive beauty. (There is always a bit of blight scattered about the world — but, of course, the reality is — there is a whole lot of it.)

I found the path Mercy must have followed through a few scrub pine and then onto the rounded, bare, sometimes slippery rock surface until I saw Mercy sitting there…

She was sitting before her easel, but she was not drawing. Her hands were by her side. She was staring out to the open water. She’d apparently set up her easel out of habit. But her canvas was empty.

I approached….I don’t think she knew I was there. She was briefly startled when I said, “hello, Mercy.”

She looked at me, standing now on the precarious rock surface to her right. I smiled. She said, “sit here for a moment, rest, though, I’m sorry I do not have another chair.”

I sat down on the rock, drew my legs up. Her folding chair was low to the rock surface. “It’s coming soon,” she said.

“What — what’s coming soon?” I said.

“The cloud,” she said. “I don’t know, it’s sort of like …..I saw this film as a child. Perhaps you saw it, too. Husband and wife along on a boat on the open water, obviously unhappy in ways you or I would not yet understand as children. The wife goes below on the small boat, the husband suddenly notices a cloud approaching on the surface of the water.”

“I think I recall this movie,” I said, “from a Saturday matinee. It made me have my first bout of juvenile depression. At least that’s how it felt. As I recall, the cloud makes the man shrink away to nothing – in a black and white movie about a black and white…and gray…world.”

“But not,” Mercy reminded me,” before he falls victim to the family cat he’d once loved so much — and, escaping to the basement where he lives inside a match box but is attacked by a spider — a small spider that, in his new universe, is a giant, hideous monster…”

Thought the breeze on the rocks was gentle, I was getting a chill. “Yeah, you’re bringing it all back,” I said.

“And he shrinks and shrinks — to an atom, alone.”

“And his wife and everybody think he was eaten by the family cat.”

“Yes.”

“Enough,” Mercy. Have mercy…” and I chuckles.

And, from here on out reader — well….the revery, the vision, the revelation, the necessary human act of understanding, of comisseration, of vicarious participation in another’s invisible suffering…. the what-have-you…

for…Mercy suddenly said to me, with great urgency…

“Look,” and I looked out where she was pointing beyond what boats were visible on the water, including a tanker far out toward the horizon. It was a consoling, beautiful scene. But she was pointing to a low-lying cloud.

“Mercy,” I said. “That’s just a cloud.”

“Yes,” she said, but clouds have been coming ashore for months now, gray clouds. In my life, anyway. How about yours?”

“Well, I don’t know,” I started to say.

“And you haven’t seen the clouds gathering out there, getting ready to push ashore?”

“I listen to the weather forecast,” I said. “Clouds come and go…”

“No clouds in your forecast?” she said, looking at me again, then out to sea — toward whatever cloud she was seeing.

“I haven’t seen any,” I said, meaning clouds – or, at least, clouds or a cloud of the kind she seemed to be suggesing; an ominous cloud. The kind of cloud that could turn the world gray, change our climate, within and without. We’ve all known such clouds. “I’ve been here every weekend,” I said with redoubtable optimism,” and sometimes during the week. I love it in the Port, I come here often, as you know. We have had nothing but sunny skies…and the world here is — colorful.”

But then, I noticed the air suddenly growing hazy. I turned and looked toward the sea, but a fog –or was it a cloud — had suddenly, mysteriously, engulfed us. I could barely see Mercy right next to me. I was suddenly terrified. What was going on? I looked back toward the village. It, too had vanished from sight. The rocks were suddenly moist and slippery.

“Mercy,” I said. “Are you there? What is happening,” as if she would know. I put my hand out toward her, and touched — nothing, not her not her easel, nothing.

She was gone…

After a solid two minutes, paralyzed by my utter bafflement, I carefully rose, crawling first, then standing once I was sure I would not slip off the rocks into the bay. My heart was pounding, for I wondered, was this a dream? A very bad dream?

I made my way back down between the patches of green to where there was dry earth and pebbles underfoot. I fumbled out my car keys, but all the while wondering — had I left Mercy up there? Had SHE somehow slipped silently into the inlet’s waters? But, no, she was gone. I looked about for her small old Volvo, but then recalled that it hadn’t been there when I arrived. Mercy was known to walk all the way out to the point.

The haze was all about me now. Yet, it was nothing I could breath. It seemed somehow–artificial, as if my sight merely needed to adjust to the condition and it would vanish. I backed up and, careful that no cars were coming around the bend, started slowly through the haze back toward the village along the waterside road.

Then, as if things were not terrifyingly disorienting enough, I suddenly emerged from the fog and the villeage was spread out before me at less than a mile’s distance….but….in nothing but gray tones….gray, black and ghastly white.

And as I drew slowly closer to the town, the distant prospect of collected, charming cluster of roofs and windows of shops did not enlarge. The whole scene stayed as small as it might seem from a mile away….

And beyond anything I’d ever experienced before came the moment I arrived on the road that had shrunk to a black two-in line and I was driving on dirt and along the waterfront was a collect of dollhouse and toy boats where there had been a full village.

And no people, large or small. I was alone. No birds, no signs of life — just a former world diminished to a toy store’s display of a village by water, that was suddenly just a pond and continuing to shrink…I had not noticed that my car had disappeared from around me. It was at below, between my feet. I went to pick it up — and the ring fell off my finger. And I was……shrinking, and was, all at once, on a wide desert where all but the burning sands were vanished. But Mercy Strange was coming toward me, slowly -smiling wistfully.

And she said, in greeting, “You know now what I have been feeling. Do they call it depression? Whatever they call it, I’ve been trying to paint it, draw it — a world gray and shrinking until there is no place for me…..

And then I woke on a bench along the village’s Myrtle Street — all restored, color life, people all around and I sitting in the cool sunlight under a chestnut tree….and I could see Mercy Strange sitting in the break between the low, charming building….sitting in the park by the shrimp boats and the bay leading out to the sea, people and flowers all around her. She was drawing…no, she was painting in bright colors. That much I could see – the colors. I rose and at the first break in the mild summer traffic, I crossed and walked toward her.

Yes, Mercy, you are back, I thought. But I must tell you of my dark vision……that, for so many years had been your lonely, crushing vision….

The cloud has lifted. The Light is shining in