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

JULY 4: BANG BANG BANG BANG BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BANG

I wrote a nasty piece about all the whistling and thudding explosions going off around me this night on lawns and in backyards and in the sky, unnerving me and causing my little dog to tremble miserably, perplexed -as, to some degree, am I — by all the excessive noise and why mortals find this incendiary mindlessness so entertaining.

I’ll bet the folks hiding underground in Kiev these days don’t find the explosions overhead entertaining -or the sound of their homes being demolished (Mr. Trump would say “obliterated”) by Russian rockets.

A fierce thunder storm and torrents of rain briefly drove the mad neighborhood bombers indoors and filled the air with even louder, more terrifying flashes of lightening and bursts of thunder. I shrugged and decided man (humanity) and nature had conspired to kill my dog with a heart attack. (She survived, semi-sedated with pieces broken off CBD-laced peanut butter-flavored, bone-shaped treats. But I hate drugging a pet. I may have to do it again tonight.)

Each July 4th, my sister used to have to comfort a Lithuanian-born neighbor who, in her youth during World War II, heard the incessant explosions of ordinance as she and her family were caught between dueling warring Nazi and Soviet tyrannies, destined to see millions of her fellow Lithuanians die around her and be forced into exile.

Okay, I know. Lighten up. It’s all just a — celebration.

Happy Independence Day, everybody.

SUMMER AND THE SORROW WITH MANY NAMES : A REFLECTION

A reflection, meditation,perhaps. Just some words, not many, some sorrow mixed in. Sorrow, nostalgia, fear, frustration, a prayer, a longing. I could never, in short order, say everything I’m feeling, besides exhausted.

The old crowd gathered at The Last Mile in my last post. Okay, so there is no such place. But, then, there is, indeed – there always are such places in our mind — Middle Earth, Brigadoon — in our deepest imagining. Our fictions are like that; they become real. We escape into them, even if they are affectionately grubby little watering holes on the urban landscape, but nonetheless places, for some of us, capable of enchantment.

So…in real time, in real hot spaces…

I went through a great deal of stress today, June 16, 2025, as President of the St. Catherine of Siena Catholic Church, Clearwater, Florida conference of the St. Vincent dePaul Society. I, like almost anyone, am happy to help people in distress. That’s why I volunteered for the SVdPS here and up north. But often, you are trying to help people, God bless them, who jump from one of life’s lily pads to the next. (In some ways, I feel like that, and like that’s what I’ve been doing up to now– up and down from Florida, east and west in Massachusetts, down to Rhode Island to boot during a reporter’s career, and now in etirement, running -that other tired metaphor — pillar to post — no direction home.)

I was trying to help a grandmother with a daughter and three infant children. they’d gotten my personal number from a y oung woman and her 11-year-old daughter whom we’d helped get into a motel — the same motel this other family was thrown out of for want of money. I knew we –the Society — didn’t have the money to meaningfully help this woman and her family, but she called me repeatedly. I knew we didn’t have anywhere to put them — a woman, her daughteer and three children ages about eight down to four months! Shelter don’t take children. So began the expensive, time-consuming search for meaningless help — meaningless because temporary: three days. And expensive.

My rock and savior and help in all such SVdP-related adventures such as this is the Filipino-American woman named Imelda who is the institutonal memory of the St. Catherine’s Society, having been Treasurer for a very long time (a job I’m incompetent to do), and, before me, after the departure of the former President, Acting President. She has long, deep experience in dealing with these situations and is also very realistic. ( I became President by default: nobody else wanted the job.) She is generous and compassionate, hard-working but, again, realistic and recognizes the financial and human limits of compassion for needy people, many of whom will likely never alter their situation brought on by faulty life-habits and familiy dysfunction. You do what you can, even more than seems possible — but also know, again there must be a limit. Imelda is also a 74-year-old wife, mother and grandmother — and has been battling melanoma for twenty years, going in and out of remission — and currently on a new phase of medical treatment involving weekly infusions followed by a day of rest. Her energy and dedication has not abated, but she is having often painful side effects in her back. She did what she could to arrange a motel for this family until we ran into enormous bureacracy that would take more than a few hours to work out. She generally had warned me about getting into these “motel” messes.

And, after a period of exhausting effort on her part, I was mostly necessarily on my one on this ill-advised venture helping people with no car, no money and no place to go. I only knew that they claimed that in two days they would have a trailer available for them north of here. They only needed to bridge those two days. I set about trying to make this happen for them.

I won’t go into all the details — what I’ll offer is enough and I knew it was taking up an entire day I had needed for preparing to go on a trip to the northeast in two days.

I drove the grandmother, age estimate late fifties, early sixties, from the money advance chain Amscot, to which she apparently has frequent recourse and which, this time, she reached by getting loaned ( by someone) barely enough money for her to hire a thirteen dollar Uber ride. (She has no car and was getting around by bus!) She apparently also owed Amscot money and there are fees and so the $360 I gave her (the amount it was going to cost her for two nights in the Holiday Inn Express) was immediatelyi reduced to apx. $353 money to these people while depositing and instantly having drawn off a little of my Society’s donated $360. I thought she had some money in her bank account so she could check into the motel. But her credit card was rejected. It was back to another Amscot to WITHDRAW the money she’d just deposited so she could deposit in her checking account. Back at the motel, her card was rejected again. Thhe funds were still insufficient or not yet available. I finally wound up picking up the $360 on my personal credit card, which is already stretched too far. I just had to end this whole agony. It was the only alternative to simply saying to grandma, I can’t help you — you and your family will have to spend the night on the street and then go looking for someone else to help you.

The woman gave me a hug. I saw her daughter camping out with the three kids, the youngest four months, no husband or father in sight, the grandmother’s husband long dead from a liver damaged from booze — this family from Texas, the other homeless women and her daughter I’d placed in another motel at the end of last week was from Tennessee…These are wanderers.

Yes, the grandmother gave me a hug. I pray for her and all of them — and hope they don’t cause trouble at the motel or that my money doesn’t become involved….or that something doesn’t go wrong for them while they’re there.

No car, no money, maybe a temporary job at WaWa.

Much of the country lives this way, in utter dysfunction. We could give them money or a home…but they just don’t have much, and sometimes much good judgement or drive or talent or ambition to escape their circumstances. Often they grew up this way.

My whole day in the 90-degree heat trying to get them settled — for two days only. Then what? (The motel required paperwork we were willing to offer as a 501C tax-exempt charity. But they insisted we had to email it to them along with pictures….insisted it was not really that complicated, though it certainly was and time was of the essence and in our little office we lacked the uploading ability and had no idea how we’d load a picture — and they wouldn’t take cash.

Enough! Enough!

Life is difficult. Charity can be a challenge. Pray.

Epilogue: While I was in New Hampshire on my travels, the grandmother called repeatedly on my private phone to say that the daughter and she had had a falling out and that the daughter had thrown her out and she was on the street again. She called repeatedly, crying. I was able to get put in touch with a female police homeless liaison officer in the Florida area who, over the phone, assured me she had spoken to the woman, offered her alternative situations, but that nothing suited her — and counseled me that this woman was just one of those perennially distressed people who will only come around when they’ve had mental health counseling and/or after they’ve necessarily spent time on the street. I was not happy to hear this, but it was realistic counsel, and very much, ultimately, what I knew I’d need to hear — as I was also counseled by a woman close to me that you can help people, but you can’t always rescue them.

End of story.

SUMMER ARRIVES AT THE LAST MILE LOUNGE

There was a loose plan to have a spring gathering upon the arrival of the Vernal Equinox. But that never happened. Everybody got busy.

So, a plan sprang up, almost like a case of spontaneous generation, to welcome summer. The rattling sound of the air conditioner might have got Deano thinking about it. So it happened.

First, owner Joe Barren showed up from Florida. Jackie the Crow and Stickie Sammartino were there by 10 a.m. Kenny Foy had a Chinese girlfriend and and they were both there and joined Stickie and Jackie at the bar where Deano had been in place and at work since well before 10 a.m.. Jimmy Jammin, no longer tipling but hungry for company showed up about 11 a.m.. Deano offered him an ODoul’s but he said, no cranberry and soda was his drink now — and an occasional ginger ale. Since there would be outdoor activity and organizing, Tash DeSilva, Monday-Tuesday bartender came to help. Bill Kirner, who ran the book club at his apartment around the corner, came in about the same time as Bo Cherry Burkhrdt and her steady beaux Charlie Simonnetti.

Knox, the upstairs resident artist, was still working on his mural but set down the brush long enough to take his place over his Blushing Monk at the far corner of the bar. It was, however — because it was before noon — a non-alchoholic Monk Deano had concocted for him. (I’d like to try that! What on earth are the fruity or fizzy substitutes out of which you make a booze festival-in-a-class such as that?)

Willy Hartrey had been cleaning the place overnight, as was his job. He was there. Jerry Garagiola, who runs the body shop in Lynn and who is a neighbor but only rarely a customer — he was out behind the building with his wife helping set up the tables in that small dirt lot, scene of other gatherings.

Pippa Goldflower came unattached — up to the noon hour.

And, greatest surprise of all — Carl McClure, whom no one at the Mile ever expected to see again, came quietly down the side street and into the rear lot where, as noted, festivities were still in their formative stage. The time was about one p.m.

The summer gathering, Joe Barren’s first, was underway.

“Joe, tell me something, I said when I showed up. “Why didn’t you wait until the summer solstice? You know, the official, astronomical start of summer?”

“Too late in June,” Joe said. “I’m up from Florida, too hot down there. It’s summertime. So, we celebrate.”

And so, as the world burned, from Gaza to Tel Aviv, tanks rolled in a grand military display in Washington, protesters mobbed to the intersections convinced there is a self-involved, jingoistic egoist mounting an American throne, counter-protesters appeared on the other side of the intersections, politicians were assassinated in Minnesota and rioters tried to take the streets in L.A. , the steady patrons of The Last Mile Lounge on the Revere, Lynn line tried to dispel the darkness and make spirits bright.

But Deano had to tell Joe, “looks like rain, boss.”

“If it comes, we’ll just squeeze indoors,” he said.

That’s the spirit.

And so summer began for Joe Barron and guests a good week before the earth’s north pole was pointed toward the sun.