Monday, September 28, 2009

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

South Wellfleet Cemetery

It's unkempt -- and there's no blame meant in that -- but it was a great and historical place in which to wander about this past Sunday afternoon. My primary goal was to find the gravesite of one John Taylor who was a "Life Guard" -- that is, a mounted bodyguard -- for General George Washington during the Revolutionary War. His wife, Lydia, owned a tavern in Fresh Brook, which was a settlement some 3 or 4 miles south of South Wellfleet; there is nothing left of Fresh Brook except some indentations in the earth where once there were cellars; the place is not easily found without good advice from wonderful local historians like Russell and Verna Moore.



The most beautiful and touching stone I came across was the one below: "Our Mother"


In the approximate center of the cemetery the South Wellfleet Congregational Church once stood; a plaque commemorates this:



When the community of South Wellfleet could no longer support the church the building was moved to the center of Wellfleet and became the Town Hall. Though this building burned in 1960, it was re-built to resemble as closely as possible that which fire had destroyed. Pictured on the left is Town Hall today, where, before the last election, I registered to vote, and where Jodie became the 171st officially registered Wellfleetian dog in the year of 2009.

(Thanks to my friend Kathy for kindling my interest in John Taylor; thanks to Russell and Verna for charming lessons in local history.)

Saturday, September 19, 2009

Center Methodist Cemetery - Truro, Massachusetts


Smallpox was a horrifying disease; painful boils erupted all over the victim's body, even in the mouth and throat. It was contagious. Many died. When smallpox killed Richard Atwood of Truro at the age of 27 on Christmas Day of 1872, his parents had to apply for special permission for him to be buried in the cemetery of their congregation. According to a 1995 newspaper column called "Looking Back" written by Clive Driver, a local historian, "Initially they were turned down; upon reconsideration the trustees of the church voted 4-3 to allow the burial, but only if the grave was to be in the farthest corner of the cemetery; the top of the coffin was to be not less than five and a half feet below the surface of the ground; the coffin was to be completely encased in cement; and a fence was to be constructed around the grave, presumably to prevent contamination to anyone who might walk over it."

Wanting to contemplate such an example of misfortune, I visited Richard Atwood's gravestone Sunday before last. It's extremely weather-damaged. The prophylactic fence is still there. The inscription on the stone reads "Richard F. Atwood, Died Dec. 25, 1872. Ae. 27 Yrs 5 mo's & 8 D's. My husband."

"The young widow," Driver wrote, "after this shabby and inhumane treatment, then disappeared from Truro without a trace. We do not even know her name."

On the rear of the stone is inscribed: "Son of Temsin & Richard Atwood".

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Sylvia Plath - Part IV

In a New Yorker from December of 2006, Tad Friend wrote of his interestingly eccentric mother: "As a sophomore at Smith, she came in second to Sylvia Plath in a poetry contest judged by W.H. Auden. 'Just as well I didn't win,' she'd say, 'Head in the oven, and so forth.'"

(This claim may have been an exaggeration on her part ... I've never read of any contest Auden judged at Smith -- he did, a few years after Plath left Smith, judge at least one of the annual Yale Series of Younger Poets contests which Plath entered and in which she was a finalist ... but even if exaggerated, Tad Friend's mother's witticism is priceless.)

Monday, September 14, 2009

Naming - Part II

After the Army I came to spend most of my time up in Michigan. Despite the three years of being called George in the Army I had not yet come to like my name. Since I was now making new friends, I saw an opportunity to choose a name that I could like, and could become known by. At the time I was reading Francoise Sagan's third novel, Those Without Shadows; there was a character in it whom I liked. His name, Alain, I liked even more. I wanted to become Alain Fitzgerald but I knew better as I had no talent with languages and wasn't even sure I could pronounce Alain correctly. I settled on Alan, recalling that my mother had wanted me to be --well, not Alan, but Allen -- close enough.

I liked it when I'd read about other people changing their names, such as when Lucy Johnson called a press conference to say that from thereon she was Luci.

Then there was the now little-known Russian-born but British-raised novelist, William Gerhardi. He was one of England's most darling writers of the 1920's, the one to whom no less than Evelyn Waugh said, "I have talent, but you have genius." But Gerhardi's fame didn't last. Publishers stopped publishing him; he became impoverished.

By the mid-sixties esteemed writers like Graham Greene, Anthony Powell, C.P. Snow, and others, according to an article in Time magazine, "called for his rediscovery." Gerhardi "emerged briefly in the London press at 71 when he changed his name from Gerhardi to Gerhardie, explaining to a puzzled reporter that Dante, Shakespeare, Racine, Blake and Goethe all had a final "e" -- 'and who am I not to have an 'e'?' He has further explained," the article went on, "that the first syllable of his name is pronounced with a soft 'G,' but bowing to persistent error has decreed that it may be pronounced with a hard 'G' on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays."

As for me I found that changing my name came with problems. My colleagues at work knew me as George. My friends called me Alan. Eventually some of my colleagues and some of my friends became part of the same mix, or a friend from Indiana would show up and wonder why someone was calling me Alan. I explained that my name was George Alan Fitzgerald and, fair enough, I preferred to use my middle name. So much for Vincent, my real middle name, dug up by my mother or dad from god knows where.

Then, all of a sudden, when I was about 28, I decided that I liked the name George after all. I felt that I had somehow grown into it, had earned its classicism. I moved to Ann Arbor and liked telling everyone I met that my name was George.

I still get a couple or three Christmas cards each year addressed to George Alan Fitzgerald.

And these days I just love my mail carrier at work, Francesca; she's originally from Italy. On special occasions I might get a hug from her, a kiss on the cheek. One day she brought a piece of mail addressed to George Vincent Fitzgerald. She was thrilled that I had what she called an Italian middle name, and said I must learn to pronounce it Veen-chen-zo (or something close to that).

Now, because Francesca likes my middle name, and because I like Francesca so much, I'm all set. I like my first (and it has, like Dante, Shakespeare, Racine, Blake, Goethe, and Gerhardie, a final 'e'). And I like my middle. And I've always loved my last.

It's good to have it finally settled.


Thursday, September 10, 2009

Naming - Part I

The January third issue of a weekly newspaper in northern Indiana reported that "Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Fitzgerald are the proud parents of the first baby born in Kosciusko County in 1940. The little chap arrived at 1:15 a.m. at the McDonald Hospital. He weighs seven pounds. He has not been named at this time."


My dad wanted to name me Patrick or Michael. My mother wanted to name me after her Uncle Allen. Neither could accept what the other wanted. They compromised; I became George.


But my father preferred to call me Butch. He liked to say:


Butch Butch the baker's man

Baked his cake in a frying pan

Combed his hair with the leg of a chair ....


There was another line but I can't remember it.

Or maybe he'd say:

Butch, Butch, the piper's son,

Stole a pig and away he run.

The pig got loose

and killed a goose

and Butch got put in the calaboose.


Everyone called me Butch. Even the teachers in school called me Butch. When at high school graduation my turn came to walk across the stage to take my diploma the Superintendent of Schools called "Butch Fitzgerald."


In the Army I became, to my buddies, George. That took some getting used to. To the Drill Sargeants in Basic Training I was, sneeringly and scathingly and sometimes threateningly, merely "Hey Private!" or "Fitzgerald". My aim quickly became to try to be invisible to them, to not make eye contact, and to covet knowing that each rotten day had to end ... the 100 push-ups done, the 50 pull-ups (3 times daily in the chow line) done, the 10-mile hikes on dusty Missouri backroads ( carrying a 50-pound pack) accomplished, all the bullshit training gotten through, getting a marksman's badge on the rifle range (even with a bent sight on my M-16 ... yes, knowing that the moment would come when I could collapse onto my cot and have a few moments of peace before I fell asleep was what got me through it all.


I loved my cot.


Sometimes now I wake stiff and sore and think I need a new mattress. Then I think: No, I need an Army cot.

Monday, September 7, 2009

Words That I Love/Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard's a wonderfully precise, excellently descriptive writer.  It's amazing how much she can see in even just a square inch of earth.  In a notebook from 1990 I copied out a passage from her An American Childhood.  Dillard, born in 1945, was about five, growing up in Pittsburgh, when:

In the leafy distance up Edgerton I could see a black phalanx.
It blocked the sidewalk; it rolled footlessly forward like a tank.
The nuns were coming.  They had no bodies, and imitation
faces.  I quitted the swing and banged through the back door
and ran to Mother in the kitchen.

I didn't know the nuns taught the children; the Catholic children
certainly avoided them on the streets, almost as much as I did.
The nuns seemed to be kept in St. Bede's as in a prison, where
their faces rotted away -- or they lived eyeless in the dark by
choice, like bats.  Parts of them were manufactured.  Other 
parts were made of mushrooms.

In the kitchen, Mother said it was time I got over this.  She took
me by the hand and hauled me back outside; we crossed the
street and caught up with the nuns.  "Excuse me," Mother said
to the black phalanx.  It wheeled around.  "Would you please
just say hello to my daughter here?  If you could just let her see
your faces."

I saw the white, conical billboards they had as mock-up heads;
I couldn't avoid seeing them, those white boards like pillories
with circles cut out and some bunched human flesh pressed like
raw pie crust into the holes.  Like mushrooms and engines, they
didn't have hands.  There was only that disconnected saucerful
of whitened human flesh at their tops.  The rest, concealed by a
chassis of soft cloth over hard cloth, was cylinders, drive shafts,
clean wiring, and wheels.

"Why, hello," some of the top parts said distinctly.  They teeter-
ed toward me.  I was delivered to my enemies, and had no place
to hide; I could only wail for my young life so unpityingly
snuffed.

Friday, September 4, 2009

Happy Birthday To My Brother Gerald

In the mid-fifties he owned a 1939 four-cylinder Indian. How's that for cool? Then he had a 1947 salmon-colored Ford convertible. How's that for cool? When I was 14 or 15 he let me drive it on the highway north of town. I was smoking. I dropped my cigarette. Taking my eyes off the road I leaned left beside the steering wheel and reached to the floorboard to get it. When I straightened up I was in the ditch. The right fender was smashed into a telephone pole. Gerald didn't even get mad. He didn't think it was the end of the world. And just a couple weeks ago he considered buying me a new tire for my bike -- then he re-thought and decided I should be able to afford it myself. Happy birthday to a great brother!

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

The Quotable Kafka

I think I have in my notebooks more quotes from Kafka than from anyone else.  I wish I could remember every one of them every minute of every day.

When my friends' teen-aged son, who was not one to read a book, was being sullen and silent, I got so say, "Perhaps he, like Kafka, believes 'that conversation deprives everything of its significance, its seriousness, and its truth.'"

When Kafka's girlfriend suggested that she thought it was time that they stopped seeing one another, he lamented, "I, too, would be glad to avoid myself."  I love that.  

Someone (I neglected attribution) said:  "Kafka is something more than a neurotic artist; he is also an artist of neurosis."