LET’S BE CLEAR…

Baffled but overawed, we might now and then browse the work of some renowned contemporary philosopher or social theorist (plug in a name here) and, while finding their paragraphs impenetrable, nonetheless feel obliged to assume a great mind is spawning truly original ideas way over our humble, ill-educated heads. But we might also look down at those words and wonder….does this guy, this woman, this “great mind” really need to be so obscure? Can’t obfuscation hide pretention? I maintain that the superficial — and what I call “super feces” — often lie among the thickest patch of verbal weeds.

In other words, it could be that you’re reading a big load of crap.

In The Elements of Style, Shrunk and White’s slim, well-thumbed and endlessly famous handbook on verbal clarity, there is a chapter on The Elementary Principle of Composition. George Orwell is summoned to provide an example of strong writing being “deprived of its vigor.” Orwell took a passage from the Bible, where you find plenty of strong writing, and, in Strunk and White’s words, “drained it of its blood.”

So here’s the bloodless example:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must inevitably be taken into account.

What is missing, besides blood, is any concrete language. And now, from the King James Version of Ecclesiastes, courtesy of George Orwell, comes the Biblical verse that untangles that coil of verbiage and renders it into comprehensible, rhapsodic, very concrete verse for the ages.

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Clear? Yes, in a biblical way. Concrete? Solid!

You understand this, though it is essentially poetry, in a way you could never understand the other. The repetition seems to dance the words into your head. (Hey! Greg! Be “concrete” if you must, but must you keep messing with metaphors? Before you know it, you’ll be mixing metaphors like someone mixing a batch of concrete. There! Another metaphor! This, too, can be the enemy of clarity.)

Anyway, class, avoid the verbal “super feces” that lay hidden among the verbal weeds like cow plop. Yuk! (Does that make any sense? Metaphorical or other?)

Right about now, George Orwell can be heard groaning.

To be clear, the best writing is clear writing. Clear? Class dismissed.

JOY ON TAMPA WATERS

Tom Brady just wrapped up a joyous SuperBowl victory boat parade down the interlocking waterways of Tampa’s core. The celebration continues. Time was when wheeled Duck Boats carried Tom and fellow champions through the frozen gray heart of old Boston. The sun must be agreeing with Tom as he pilots his own boat, surrounded by family, Rob Gronkowski on somebody’s aft deck cavorting joyously and drunkenly, naked to the waist. Tampa and Tampa Bay are “new” in ways old New England isn’t. The Bay has won the hockey’s Stanley Cup and baseball’s American League Pennant.

Now that St. Petersburg has come into its own, I hope this sprawl of water and real estate and core cities can congeal into one cooperative urban base. People are fleeing the expense, weather and politics to the far north.

I guess I’m glad, though an unreconstructed Cod, to be here for this. And I’m glad Tom Brady actually grasped my hand once with that legendary right hand of his when I greeted him and he said, “Hi, Greg.” He didn’t and doesn’t know me, but I trotted behind him up and down the stairs of the Mass State House the day he, Drew Bledsoe and Troy Brown took a victory lap among legislative offices getting their “attaboys” for their combined win that began the Brady years. He was just a lanky unknown then. He belongs to sports history now.

And all this in plague times. (There were masks in evidence over in Tampa. I think it’s a city ordinance for the time being. But I saw no masks, lots of bare skin and plenty of booze onboard those boats.)

Through all this, there is that abiding reality about all our lives and our moments in the sun being brief — but it seems nothing is more evanescent than the career of an athlete. I just mentioned Drew Bledsoe and Troy Brown. Where are they now? Injuries, bodily limitations under the best of circumstances and the cold business realities of professional athletics necessarily mean that pro careers will, in most cases, be very brief. Small wonder they demand high salaries while the glory last and while they earn millions of dollars for their franchise overlords.

In this respect, Tom Brady has been blessed with an unusual long and brilliant career. It’s no accident. He works hard. He is not, from all accounts, the best at any one aspect of what he does — doesn’t throw the hardest, can’t really scramble, etc..But he is great in the combination of all he does. And he seems to be a master strategist, mentally tough, very competitive. I guess I’d like to take a leaf out of his golden playbook.

Enjoy the interval, Tom. I know you’re dying to get back to work.

THE DEATH OF A MOUNTAIN

For this winter’s early February night, as snow closes in again on my old home turf in New England and I sit in the surprisingly cold bluster of a Florida night that resembles a chill — if milder — winter night in the north…on this night, I say, I offer the Russian master Boris Pasternak’s recollections of his life, from a little volume I’ve been toting about in move after move for perhaps two decades. I finally read it and found within the poet/novelist’s account of the wake, if that is how they thought of it, for that mountain of a man that was Leo Tolstoy. He gave us, among many other things, War and Peace. What literate soul doesn’t aspire to read it? I read some version of it around high school age, probably an abridged version. I own an unabridged version and dip into it now and then. It remains a mountain I mean to climb. It defines that long, unread novel on every serious reader’s bookstore and library ‘to do’ list. It also continues to define epic literary greatness. Few have disagreed.

Yes, a mountain of a man and artist was Tolstoy — but Pasternak, in a room in a Russian trains station where Tolstoy’s body was taken before its journey home, writes…

“It was not…a mountain that lay in the corner of the room, but a little, wizened old man, one of the old men created by Tolstoy, one of those he had described and scattered over his pages by the dozen. Little Christmas trees stood all around the place. The setting sun cut across the room with four slanting shafts of light and formed a cross over the corner where the body was lying with the thick shadow of winter-bars and other little baby crosses with traceries of the young Christmas trees.

“The railway hamlet of Astapovo was transformed that day into a discordantly noisy encampment of world journalism.”

I guess some things never change: the media gaggle descending with all its collective feet. I used to be a member of that gaggle — and would love to have covered the wake and funeral of the Russian literary giant; the Russian “mountain.”

And, Pasternak writes on….

“The station buffet did a roaring trade, the waiters were run off their feet, too busy to carry out all the orders of their customers and serving underdone beefsteak at a run. Rivers of beer were consumed.”

Sounds like an Irish wake! We’ll call it a Russian wake. Well, it was fitting that the literary giant — the mountain — should be grandly observed and celebrated upon his passing.

Pasternak continues:

“To the chanting of a requiem, the students and the young people carried the coffin across the little yard and the garden of the stationmaster’s house to the railway platform and put it in the freight care, and to the accompaniment of the resumed singing, the train slowly moved of in the direction of Tula.”

Tolstoy had died at 82 of pneumonia. It was 1910. He was buried at his home estate, Yasnaya Polyana near Tula, Russia. The estate operates today as a Tolstoy museum and park the master’s unadorned grave can be found on the property.  

Russia is not a congenial place for many, especially merchants of truth, including artists. But it’s good to know the remains of Leo Tolstoy lie there peacefully in the country he loved and that his memory is treasured, even if disingenuously, by Russia’s indigenous enemies of a free society and free speech who, in bygone days, made life so difficult for that other Russian master and writer of epic novels, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Pasternak offers here his own assessment of Tolstoy as a man and and artist who “all his life and at any given moment… possessed the faculty of seeing things in the detached finality of each separate moment, in sharp relief, as we see things only on rare occasions, in childhood, or on the crest of an all-embracing happiness, or in the triumph of a great spiritual victory.

“To see things like that it is necessary that one’s eye should be directed by passion. For it is passion that by its flash illuminates an object, intensifying its appearance

“Such passion…Tolstoy constantly carried about within himself, ” Pasternak concludes.

The memoir from which I drew this recollection is called, simply, I Remember.

I’m glad the poet and author of the novel Dr. Zhivago recorded these moments, both solemn and festive. Indeed, how could he have forgotten being present the moment a “mountain” was borne away — into posterity.

THE END OF THE MODERN WORLD

It was about 1955 that Theologian Romano Guardini wrote his THIN volume entitled, The End of the Modern World. He was born in Verona in 1885, grew up in Mainz and became a Catholic priest and monsignor. He taught theology at the universities of Berlin, Tubingen and Munich. He was a brilliant teacher, wrote many books outside the classroom and was regarded to be a master of intuitive psychology and a deep thinker who nonetheless managed an extraordinary clarity of expression.

Most, though perhaps not all of his books have been translated for the English-speaking world.

Writing in and around the mid-fifties, he expressed fears that our culture would one day come to idolize technology, all the while doubting or outright dismissing the truth-claims of religion and, especially, of Revelation. He observed powerful forces in contemporary life working to de-Christianize society and cast doubt on all fundamental supernatural beliefs that had guided us and much of the planet, especially Europe and the West, for centuries.

“As an absolute standard claiming the right to measure the direction and conduct of human life, Revelation was enduring more and more vicious attacks,” he wrote of the temper of the times in the first half of the 20th Century. “The new culture taking shape in Europe bred an outlook which thrust into prominence the increasing opposition to the Church.”

This prophetic, somewhat chilling diagnosis — at least from the point of view of believers — gets fully fleshed out in The End of the Modern World.

But it is also given a peculiar and paradoxical twist.

Guardini writes (and I’ve compressed)….We know now that the modern world is coming to an end….at the same time, the unbeliever will emerge from the fogs of secularism. He will cease to reap benefit from values and forces developed by the very Revelation he denies…Loneliness in faith will be terrible. Love will disappear from the face of the public world, but the more precious will be that love which flows from one lonely person to another…the world to come will be filled with animosity and danger, but it will be a world open and clean.

Dangerous, lonely — yet open and clean. How strange. Is it perhaps true of this moment in the 21st Century? Is Guardini’s “world to come” upon us? Was he right?

He was writing this around 1955. He died at 70 in the darkly eventful year of 1968.

ON SERIOUS EARTH

What do the times seem to require? A resort to permanent, essential things and a retreat from dirty, miserable politics. This would be an important heart and soul realignment at a time when politics has become a religion for so many people. Why else would the world of politics have become so desperate, left and right, and even in the middle. The left is convinced the right is striving to deprive it of all its precious liberties. Funny. That’s just what they’re saying on the right. The middle feels pulled left and right and decides indifferance is the safest course. Even here, as left and right, there is a feeling one’s most deeply cherished principles are being challenged, negated, cancelled. Enough!

It is, as I write, a time of pandemic. Pity traditionally religious peoples in America and across the world. Here they are seeing cherished religious and spiritual principles and tenets constrained and devalued — along with their religious practices and observances — as legitimate pandemic-related health concerns get catapulted into extreme quasi-religious concerns and church-going and religion are viewed as less essential than commerce, entertainment and supermarket-going. It’s body vs. soul. Body wins in an increasingly, radically secular culture. A post-Christian culture, we were calling it — well before the pandemic. Religion is no longer viewed as something that keeps body and soul together.

This has led me to a decidedly secular, even probably atheistic or, at best, agnostic late British poet of some renown named Philip Larkin (1922-1985), an Oxford-educated librarian and scribe regarded to be among the spokesmen for the “angry young men” of Britain’s post-WWII generation. He wrote, among many other things, a poem called, “Church Going.”

From the beginning, as you read, you know church is not a natural place for Larkin to find himself. It was 1955. He was 33. England was still reeling economically and socially in the aftermath of war’s bombardment, privations and civilization-rattling concussions. There was the usual fevered political activity in the public square.

Larkin writes of being in church…

Once I am sure there’s nothing going on

I step inside, letting the door thud shut.

Another church: matting, seats, and stone,

And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut

For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff

Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;

A tense, musty, unignorable silence,

Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off

My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,

Move forward, run my hand around the font.

And so it goes on, for eight stanzas, as the poet explores this church. But I have to wonder what brought this “angry young man” into this particular space in the first place. I must read the poem again — and again — for a sense of that. It is a ruminative and enjoyable poem. It is far better sometimes to read what the non-religious, world-weary, agitated-in-mind and the cynical have to say about a church than what the pious and religiously convicted might earnestly pour forth. You can discern where the non-religious are hiding those natural spiritual impulses. Or, to put it another way, how the Holy Spirit is hiding himself.

And Larkin asks,

I wonder who

Will be the last, the very last, to seek

This place for what it was…

Some ruin-bibber*, randy for antique,

Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff

Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?

*bibber in this context means addict — and Larkin does make “antique” singular.

This might be called, far from a profession of faith, a cold profession of anti-faith. Larkin also asks, “for whom was built this special shell?” And though he wonders what it all might be worth in dollars ( or pounds), adds, “it pleases me to stand in silence here…” in “a serious house on serious earth.”

We are standing, pre-and-soon-to-be-post-inauguration, mid-turmoil “on serious earth” in America. I, for one, plan to stop into a church, though feeling more like Philip Larkin than any regular church-goer (which I am). I’ll be in a place, as Larkin choruses,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognized, and robed as destinies.

TRUMPOCALYPSE

It was ugly. Our nation’s Capitol under assault as historians tell us it has not been under seige since 1812….but this time by our fellow citizens.

Things like this happen in banana republic civil wars. But, softly, as comity and unity have eluded us, we have long been descending into a “soft” civil war in our nation.

Why, to mention just one point of vexation, must the president who thoroughly, unyieldingly, even if perhaps disingenuously, defended conscience rights for medical workers, merchants and religious citizens and the rights of the unborn and who also boldly addressed the conundrum of illegal immigration (though taking harsh measures that backfired and affronted millions) and who seemed prepared to address what Republican neo-cons have tragically fudged — namely, the national dissipation caused by foreign wars and unbalanced foreign trade and other engagements– why didn’t we see the apocalypse coming in which this rude beast revealed himself — and not for the first time — to be, among many other dark and terrible things, a philosophically unmoored narcissist? A man so absurdly and disturbingly self-deluded as to believe he won a national election “by a landslide” when, in fact, as the whole world knows and any sane person can see (despite some obvious, serious but ultimately minor polling irregularities or fraud) that he had lost soundly — and if not by a landslide, certainly by an indisputable margin. Surely his repudiation would have been overwhelmingly obvious to any human in their right mind; to any mortal with a particle of humility or the temperament of a statesman. Richard Nixon, after all — way back in 1960 — plainly realized his narrow defeat by John F. Kennedy might have been achieved through voter irregularities in Lyndon Johnson’s Texas and Richard Daley’s Chicago. But he went away quietly to fight another day.

Other politicians — maybe even many, if not most in our time — have displayed a measure of narcissism, egoism, self-delusion — Nixon among them. But here it was so nakedly obvious from the outset and so markedly extreme… but, what choice did we have if we were worried about the aforementioned issues? Republican primary voters winnowed the field of candidates and chose Donald J. Trump, leaving only two dubious choices, if, like me, you regarded Hillary Rodham Clinton to fairly drip with dubiety.

Yes, we knew Trump was all those bad things and none of those good things, didn’t we? And we knew he was woefully inarticulate and, therefore, unable to make a strong, coherent case even for the best things he championed. He exaggerated everything, too often invoked the adjective “incredible”, therefore rendering all that he said UN-credible.

How desperate was nearly half the nation that voted for him to avoid the fate of Hillary Clinton? Yet Trumps’s behavior in office has convinced half the nation to risk the fate that awaits us under a hollow-out, borderline senescent Democratic shill who will likely stumble his way through only one term, if that, leaving us thereafter to the vicious machinations of the jackals of the far Left and their allies, the wolves of the liberal media.

Yes, we will continue at war.

We could not help but see at every turn that Trump was a reality show star, a creature of the oversized malignant mass media his most fervid supporters disdain and resist and that he was likely to confuse reality with fantasy?

But then, the intersection of the electronic media and reality in every aspect of our lives might be on display at its purest in the NFL, where the camera-eye view determines so many outcomes. (Okay, not a good example. But, I submit, a good entry-level point of inquiry into just how the rules of every game, including the political game, and all that we call “reality” have been penetrated by the dragon-eyed media. In the case of professional football, at least, it helps us make hair-splitting distinctions between, for instance, a fumble and a non-fumble. Millions in wagers and attendant legitimate financial outcomes ride on the interpretation of multiple camera angles. I guess that’s progress for you. )

Oh, how very dangerous seems this moment in our history! Oh, how the political polarities have widened and, it seems, “the center cannot hold”– and the ghost of William Butler Yeats looms over us, reminding us of another ravaged time in history — European history in that case — when, as Yeats sang at that moment in 1920, ” the best lack all conviction while the worse are full of passionate intensity.”

But some of the best citizens I know are full of “passionate intensity” and voted for Trump. Those of us — the legions of us — who were witnessing the radicalization of the political party our families had embraced in our childhood and that we ourselves embraced when we were old enough to vote — we long ago felt forced into the arms of that other so-called Grand Old Party that had so long been demonized by our working class, blue-collar, immigrant parents and forebears. And how many of us periodically longed to be joined to a Third Way; to follow a Third Path, wishing such a path would be opened up for us — perhaps a third political party. Trump seemed a third alternative and precipitated a phenomenal third wave of enthusiasm among earnest, hard-working Americans. Now they hear masses of their opposite-minded fellow citizens — souls arguably in the grip of an extant and daemonic cultural and political Third Way — a decadent, superficial, desacralized miasma — insisting, not entirely without some good reason, that what millions of us opted for amounts to some semblance of The Third Reich?

And, let’s face it: Donald Trump is a product of that very same unmoored, secular-decadent, utterly superficial, desacralized culture so many of us have reviled — and rejected.

Another fact played into our choices. Congress was in deadlock and much of the nation was weary of traditional politicians and their slippery, disingenuous ways. They longed for a fixer, a manager — a non-politician. One good by-product of this debacle may be to restore us to a sense of what temporizing qualities come with the professional politician, as opposed to the CEO jump-when-I-say-jump manager. Perhaps we should learn to like politicians again.

But, in trying to come to terms with how we got here, I recall what Ben Domenech, publisher of the Federalist, said in February of 2016 — He said, “Trump’s rise bespeaks the utter failure of (the Left’s) program”, i.e., Barrack Obama’s and the Left’s likely faith that “once working and middle class voters received the government’s redistributive largesse, they would be invested in maintaining the Left in power.”

Uh-uh. No, they wouldn’t. Not that time around, anyway.

Hillary was beaten, however narrowly, by Trump — and Trump voters — not the insurrectionists or bedazzled cultic Trumpets leavening the center of the pie, but those millions at the edges –souls Domenech characterizes as “moderate, disaffected (and) with patriotic instincts” who ” feel disconnected from the GOP and other broken public institutions (and) left behind by a national political elite that no longer believes (they) matter.”

Hillary Clinton called the “a basket of deplorable.” The Left will call them racists. And race-hustling frauds with wide influence now abound.

As for those fervid Trump voters, I’ve seen such souls at huge park rallies and miles-long boat rallies here in Florida. They are middle class, mostly but not all white and full of a passion I have not heretofore witnessed during an American political campaign.

Meanwhile, the likely damage to their cause and every cause I and others hold dear may be lasting. Or — maybe not. The “average” person knows that the Capitol insurrection was an aberration, albeit a serious one, not the whole story of this new and probably unstoppable national resistance movement — resisting the Left. After all, the Left has repeatedly insisted that last summer’s massively destructive MLP riots were not the whole story of their movement. We currently, it seems, have many cases in the media of selective indignation.

But before, during and now after Trump’s reign, yes, collateral damage has mounted for those of a certain conservative mind. Traditional conservatives warned us against Trump for this very reason.

Michael Medved, conservative film critic and commentator said ( again, way back in 2016), “Trump’s brawling, blustery, mean-spirited public persona serves to associate conservatives with all the negative stereotypes that liberals have for decades attached to their opponents on the right.”

But Medved also predicted at the time that, “if Trump won the nomination, the GOP is sure to lose the election.”(February 15, 2016).

No. To the astonishment of millions, he won, first, the nomination and then the general election.

But the Grand Old Party DID lose at that moment — not the election, but so much more in the way of multiple political and cultural imponderables. You can imagine them — trust, credibility, a clear future, etc.. The same sort of stuff the Democrats began jettisoning in the minds of much of the nation when it started its trek leftward.

So — we are divided. And a house divided cannot stand. (Where have I heard that?) This big old Republic will keep plowing forward through troubled waters.. The fate of uncomprehending and hapless Captain Trump will become manifest and should include temporary or permanent political exile, if not — as so many wish — consignment to the brig. Perhaps he’ll come to his senses and belatedly acknowledge his sins. Perhaps he’ll repent and reform in a rare instance of a leopard changing its spots. One can only hope so, because so many are disappointed in him and how he trashed any semblance of a legacy. Jokes about what will constitute his Presidential Library will be making the rounds. (I hear the Smithsonian has been collecting rubble from the trashed Capitol building.)

The fact that, for the first time in our history, a defeated Presidential candidate will not attend the inauguration will set a dark precedent. But that’s alright. I don’t intend to attend (or watch) the inauguration, either. (I know; that’s different. Who cares if I watch? )

Finally….

David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth — as market-oriented a lobbying entity as one could imagine and not really my cup of tea — displayed a great deal of insight (again way back in February 2016) when he wrote, “both parties have failed to lead. Obama and congressional Democrats manipulate the levers of power to push America farther toward European socialism; Republicans promise free-market alternatives but end up caving in to pressure or carrying water for the GOP’s own big-government special interests.”

And so, here we are. Which way now, America?

ETERNITY’S CHILD

So we advance slowly and, to me, sadly and reluctantly out of the Christmas season. I dislike January for the letdown that always feels cold and bare, even in warm, florid Florida ( I apologize if it’s your birth month, because only a backward-looking nostalgic fool like me resists the biting cold reality of time marching on.)

I should paste the image of the magazine cover here, but I’ve reminded people on Facebook that in January, 1967, I — and everyone in the United States under the age of 25 — was TIME Magazine “Man of the Year.” (This was before the early wave of PC ruled the noun “man” exclusive and sexist.) We, the under 25 baby-boomer generation were, at that tender moment in American history, the majority of the country, hence worthy of note for our potential to change the world. We didn’t. Not really. And time and war quickly began depleting our ranks.

The magazine cover image shows a young, handsome white male — sort of an imagined composite of EVERYBOY — with a similarly generic girl (young woman), African-American male and Asian male arrayed sort of like a deck of cards. But the white guy is out front. This time period — 1966 into 1967 — would be the last time a white Caucasian male would be seen as representative of all of American youth .No white male is entirely representative of anything in America now — and that is as it should be. We aren’t that representative, and our generational and wholesale numbers are shrinking. (Put gray on all four of those TIME Magazine heads now.)

Too bad that , at this point in time, “identity politics” has commenced to divide that multi-cultural TIME image with every American of every race who came after 1967, being turned against one another.

But back to my main subject here — the passage of time.

(I’m reminded of a fellow television reporter who, in doing a story down here about homeless guys congregated with their beer coolers under a Tampa Bay bridge, offered the memorable — or slightly memorable — line, “they’re just passing their time, until their time passes.”

The other memorable thing about that story was the voice and image of a homeless guy lifting the lid of a cooler and proclaiming, “you just reach in and get ya a nice cold beer.”

I confess, at that moment, that guy’s life — a this was fleeting thought on my part, and a shameful one at that — didn’t seem like a bad way to pass the time or pass a whole life — as long as the supply of cold beer held out.

That was about 38 years ago. I’ll bet the beer’s gone. And I’ll bet that guy’s time passed.

Anyway, here we go again — into January, named somewhere back there for Janus, the Roman god of doorways, beginnings, the rising and the setting of the sun. We are going through that door again. Beginning a new year — still stalked by a pandemic, as by the grim reaper.

“The things of time are toys,” wrote Rev. M. Raymond, O.C.S.O. , which, in French, stands for Cistersien de la Stricte Observance. The English translation is easy — Cistercians of the Strict Observance. It refers to a cloistered order of Catholic monks known as the Trappists, named after La Trappe Abbey, one of their ancient spiritual redoubts.

Fr. Raymond goes on, “You are eternity’s child and your eternity has already begun! There is a compelling urgency to every day and every hour of the day. In it we are to witness to the truth — that God greeted and gifted us at Christmas.”

I tend to forget that.

This year, I pray I remember. And that my time goes on — and on….into a Baby Boomer’s bright morning. I’m not ready for sunset, much less the night.

And hold the beer.

REMEMBERING DORA

She died years ago – on New Year’s Eve. That’s probably why I’m thinking of Dora Ronca today (New Year’s Eve, 2020 as I write). She was the Gypsy Violinist, Vaudeville legend, “last rose of summer.” I believe I interviewed her in ‘76. The nation had turned 200. Dora, at 97, was nearly half as old – but slender, be-rouged, be-jeweled in flowing skirt, her aquiline face bordered by witchy strands of black-dyed hair. I was Norwood Bureau reporter for the Daily Transcript. A local merchant told me of the old lady with the great story who regularly wheeled her shopping cart up Dean Street, and lived in a modest Cape with her widowed niece.

She was an outrageous flirt, patting the narrow sofa space next to her by way of invitation. “I’ve had many beaus,” this nonagenarian told this twenty-something reporter, “but I never cared for any of them – until you.” Charmed , amused, adhering to future pandemic-era social distancing protocols, I smiled, reached over and accepted from her long tapered fingers a plastic sack of jumbled memories – news clips, photographs, reviews by hyperventilating early 20th Century show biz scribes describing “the handsomest girl in the extravaganza, a “stunning brunette with a wealth of black hair, large brown eyes and a fine figure” decked out in faux Gypsy regalia – head scarf, sleeves of red velvet edged with ball trimming, dress embroidered in white chrysanthemums as she performed “a crashing Hungerian melody” with “fire, abandon and verve” on her exquisite 1645 Stainer violin.

The gypsy persona was Vaudeville shtick. Dora was French Canadian, if anything (Roncoeur) One reviewer-wag thought her name, Dora Ronca, made her a cigar, but added, “her name is the worst that can be said about her.” The clips revealed that she’d shared the footlights with better known legends – Eddie Cantor, W.C. Fields, then just a “droll juggler.” Asked about them, she said, “yes I know them.” No past tense. To Dora they were still out there , still performing.

She’d played Boston, New York, Paterson, Seattle, Victoria, Vancouver, Paris…Newspapers ran obituary for her Boston Terrier. A Syracuse musical instrument dealer named violin strings in her honor. The plastic sack contained, among other mementos, a receipt for a meal in Monte Carlo.

Vaudeville faded, her career ended, the violin disappeared. The rest of her life’s drama was blank. The plastic sack contained an unopened letter returned from WWI-era France informing her that a soldier-correspondent had been killed in action. A lost beau (and I’ll be she did care for him). Her last husband – there had been many – had been military, so she had VA privileges. Months after my story ran, she fell ill and was admitted to the VA hospital in Providence. (New Year’s Eve.)Her niece told me Dora looked up at the hospital building as they wheeled her in and said, “I played here.”

At the funeral home viewing, I saw laid out before me a very old woman with cropped snow white hair – not the fiery, flirtatious rock star of yore.

It was at the Columbia Theater in Cincinnati, November 4, 1906 that she played her violin sweetly as the audience sang sadly, “Tis the last rose of summer, left blooming alone. All her lovely companions are faded and gone.”

Goodnight and Happy New Year, Dora. It was fun.

ONE DUMB ANNIVERSARY

This day, December 30th, is a peculiar “anniversary” for me ( the 57th by my count)– and it’s very peculiar that it sticks in my memory. It’s the day I (accidentally) set the Rubbish Room ablaze at the Elm Farm Supermarket on Morrissey Blvd. Yes, an accident. Dumb accident, though. My punishment was to clean up the mess.

I was a bundle ( or bag) boy at the time at that neighborhood market where my brother Doug had worked before me — and I really enjoyed the uncomplicated business of filling up a customer’s paper bundles (no plastic in those days), loading them into trunks and backseats, cadging the occasional tip. (Maybe I should have made a career of this. I’d been trained as a cashier but wanted no part of handling money and ultimately was granted my request for demotion. I’m not much of a capitalist.)

These were, as it happens, somewhat grim and traumatized times at home and in the world. My father was mortally ill with cancer. And the whole universe was still recovering from the shock of a Presidential assassination a little more than a month before. I guess I was finding a little gleeful escape in my after-school workaday chores — and especially when, periodically, I’d get assigned to burn rubbish in the Rubbish Room off the back loading dock.

Boy, did I love that! Solitary labor in a windowless cell of concrete walls, wildly stuffing cardboard into a huge furnace. I’d whirl and pivot as I hurled, jammed or otherwise stuffed collapsed shipping boxes and cartons of every dimension into the huge open maw of that raging steel beast. A supermarket generates tons of empty cardboard boxes, as you can well imagine.

Just so you don’t think I’m weird or a closet pyromaniac, I believe all my fellow bundle — or bag — boys enjoyed that occasional assignment of unsupervised work around a warm furnace — especially in winter — away from the cold managers, cranky customers and blustery external elements in which we were compelled to chase down shopping carts left at odd extremities of the parking lot. But they may not have thought of it, as I did, as a kind of ballet or ritual — or perhaps ever gotten as reckless as I did at about 4 p.m. on Dec. 30, 1963.)

I’d always loved the challenge of cramming as many boxes into the furnace as possible — to the point where you’d see no fire in the open furnace doorway. Then the flames would slowly gnaw away at the cardboard; slowly replace the brown cardboard with hot red fire — and then I’d push a button and the heavy steel door would groan shut, ending any danger that that hungry beast would breath fire out into the room full of tinder.

When the fire had died down, I’d push the “open” button. Up would go the steel door, in would go more junk.

It was Christmas time and all the waxed boxes from frozen Christmas turkeys were piled high around me. Boy did they burn! Occasionally, a bit of flaming debris would pop out into the room — and occasionally ignite more debris. No problem. I’d hastily pluck up all the burning matter and pop it into the furnace. Occasionally, more than one little fire got going. Again,no problem. I’d gingerly pick up ALL the burning stuff — I wore insulated gloves — and pop it all into the fire. I guess this added to this rote exercise a minor thrill of danger — the same sense some otherwise sensible citizens might relish at July Fourth backyard fireworks festivities.

But I wasn’t counting on any fireworks. And on this particular December afternoon, one fiery little bit of trash after another got going and my ballet suddenly turned into a fire dance. As the title of a currently popular novel says, there were “little fires everywhere.”

Up to that point, I’d reveled in the sense of “control” I’d always enjoyed while “playing” with that fire. But now, I was introduced to the sensation of facing a fire “out of control” from my own carelessness. And now there was smoke — lots of smoke. And now more fire. Then — everything seemed ablaze, and I was forced out onto the loading dock, looking back in at an inferno. Smoke was now belching out into the open air.

I went (calmly) into the adjacent meat department and (calmly, sheepishly and shamefacedly) announced to the guys in bloody white butcher coats, “ah, fellas, there’s a fire out there.”

What followed had a little air of comedy. The meat men urgently joined up a hose, hooked it to a big running sink and charged for the dock — but got jerked up short at the swinging doors. a Laurel&Hardy move.

Time for the real hoses.

Soon the air was full of the sirens. I guess it was BFD Engine 20 responding from down Neponset Avenue. It was, ultimately, a minor fire that took minor effort to extinguish Water was blasted into that little concrete room, leaving a charred sodden mess in its wake.

Lesson learned. Don’t play with fire, master Wayland.

And — don’t forget to recycle. It keeps cardboard away from the likes of me.

SLOW COUNT

Somewhere in The Man Who Was Thursday, G.K. Chesterton writes: “He felt he was in possession of some impossible good news, which made every other thing a triviality, but an adorable triviality.”

The year 2020, which is creeping to a close, contained very few adorable trivialities and one grand and damnable calamity — the pandemic — which opened like a sinkhole beneath us.

I must, as we slide down toward the socially distanced ceremonial finale in Time Square, get hold of Chesterton’s The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond, which, I’m told, contains this prophetic line: “Politicians do not understand much, but they understand politics. I mean they understand the immediate effect of mobs and movements.”

We’ve had mobs in 2020 and, for movements, the disingenuous rabble organized under the ameliorative and deceptive title, Black Lives Matter. Of course they matter! So does the nuclear family which BLM has targeted for disruption. You have to read down pretty far in the group’s manifesto before getting to the alleged reason for its founding, i.e. police violence against blacks. (As for the nuclear family, political commentator David Brooks wrote a protracted argument in favor of re-imagining the nuclear family in Harper’s. I read it. I was not convinced. Far from it.

Which reminds me of another Chestertonian bon mot someone turned up for me in G.K.’s collected essays: “Politicians will not make a land fit for heroes to live in. It is heroes who make a land fit for all the other poor people to live in; even such poor little people as the politicians.”

Touche’

Now, let’s imagine a socially distant mob in Time Square doing a very, very slow countdown….10…..9……8…..7…

Backwards! That was 2020 alright. And it looked so good, so promising last year — so balanced and symmetrical up there in lights and in the headlines. Not long after the lights faded, the ink dried on those headlines (on what few broadsheets remain on what newsstands remain) and the page refreshed on our laptops and iPads, 2020 turned into annus horribilis. We’re still dealing with the hangover.

But our hopes are young, even if we aren’t, in a decade that’s still young.

Happy New Year!