Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Great Gifts: Xmas 2009

Karst, a great guy at the park, passed by my desk on Christmas Eve morning. He was singing some words that my ears could hardly believe he would know:


They wouldn't let Jack Johnson on board
They said this ship don't haul no coal,
Sail away Titanic, sail away.


Words that I could hardly believe anyone I might come across these days would know, let alone someone walking just a couple feet away from me; for one thing, I would have thought Karst to be maybe 15 or 20 years too young to have had a chance to become familiar with the song.


"Oh my god," I said, "I heard that song on the radio just once and that was like back in 1970 ... I love that song!"


It was when I lived in Ann Arbor; it was a Saturday afternoon, and I was listening to Detroit's cool FM station.


I think Karst was was as tickled as I was that another guy knew "Legend of the U.S.S. Titanic." He said he was a DJ on his college's radio station and that he had "played the hell" out of the album the song is from: Jamie Brockett's "Remember the Wind and the Rain".


And while it's true I never did hear the 13 minutes and 28 seconds of that song again on the radio I did run right out and buy the album it was on. I still have it, and it's pictured below. But I haven't owned a turntable for about 20 years so hadn't heard it for a long long time.


I think Jamie Brockett is great. I don't know why he didn't become a big star; other songs on the album, besides "Legend of the U.S.S. Titanic" are great too; I've read that Jamie Brockett had problems with his record company. Way too bad.


When I was closing up shop on Christmas Eve there was an envelope on my desk. On it was written "George - Merry Xmas - Karst". I opened the envelope. I now owned a CD of "Remember the Wind and the Rain".


I've "played the hell" out of that CD since then. Great music ... great memories ... sweet nostalgia for an Ann Arbor Saturday afternoon.


And an even bigger appreciation for a guy named Karst. He's kind of new at the park ... I'm sure glad they hired him.



Another Christmas treat was that I got to see and have my picture taken with Melissa, Mark's niece, and one of my friends on Facebook. She's beautiful, and she fascinates me. She's wonderfully articulate and emotionally expressive, characteristics that I -- often socially clumsy and emotionally stunted -- admire and envy. I think some of the things she writes on Facebook could be worked up to become powerful poems. She doesn't imagine herself becoming a poet. I do though.

Friday, December 25, 2009

Happy Birthday to Jesus

He is depicted below in a work of art that, of all pieces of art the world over, I'd most like to see (but don't know where it is):

And cheers to everyone else!

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Happy Birthday to My Sister Sheila



I hated Father Reddington, the pastor of our parish, Sacred Heart, long before he was unfair to my sister.  He'd become our priest when I was about twelve, replacing the wonderful and kind Father Mannion, who was retiring.

Sheila and I attended high school catechism class together in Warsaw, one night a week, twelve miles from our home.  Towards the end of the course, Father Reddington passed out a mimeographed set of questions with the answers.  We were to learn the answers by heart exactly.

In order to show off his teaching I guess, the parents would be invited to come to the final class and watch a round-robin contest as we spouted off the useless knowledge we'd gained.  A wrong answer and you were sent from the front rows of students to the back of the room where the parents were sitting.  The last one standing would be the champion.

If the question, for instance, was "Why did God create us?" and the mimeographed answer was "To know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him" and you happened to answer "To know, love, and serve Him" -- WRONG!  GO SIT WITH THE PARENTS WHOM YOU HAVE EMBARRASSED!

Sheila and I had all the answers down pat, but we also knew that one of the answers was wrong.  We decided the best thing would be to recite the wrong answer, figuring that we'd be eliminated if we didn't answer what the bull-headed and dim-witted Father Reddington thought was the answer.

On the big night, when it came to be Sheila's turn at a question, it just happened to be the question with the incorrect answer.  Sheila answered it exactly as it had been given us on the mimeographed sheet.

"Wrong!" Father Reddington shot out.

Sheila protested that, yes it was wrong, but it was his fault -- it was the answer he'd given us.

Father Reddington claimed that after he'd passed out the mimeographed sheets the week before he'd issued a verbal correction early in the week, and he had made sure that everyone got it, and so and so was supposed to telephone us.

Oh, great!  We had no telephone.

So Sheila and I had not got word of the correction ... only the kids who lived in Warsaw had gotten it, but Father Unfair would brook no plea for fairness.  Sheila was eliminated.  That was that, and Father Unfair swished on to the next question.

Later, inasmuch as there were only perhaps sixteen students and twenty questions, and four or five of us were getting every answer right, our inquisitor had to go back to the beginning and start the questions again.  Eventually, inevitably, I happened to get that very same question that Sheila had answered "incorrectly".  I, having already heard it answered at least a couple of times by the Warsaw students, and knowing what the correct answer was anyhow, answered it exactly as they had.

So now -- jesus, was he dumb -- Father Reddington looked to Sheila in the back and said, "See, your own brother got the correction so that proves that you got it too."

Eventually, once it became boringly clear that none of the four or five of us left standing were going to answer any question incorrectly -- we'd all by now had a turn at every question -- Father Unfair declared us co-champions. 

Sheila was furious at the unfairness.  I've no doubt she wanted to give him a fat lip.

I knew her to be capable of landing a good punch.

She'd once landed a good one on me when I had been teasing her about someone being her boyfriend who wasn't her boyfriend.

Her fist left my lip swollen, split, bleeding.  I was so embarrassed that I didn't go to school the next day.
 
I'm sure I didn't appreciate her toughness while I was nursing my ego and nursing my lip, but bygones become bygones, and I had actually forgotten this incident until another sister reminded me of it recently.

Whatever ... these days I like having a tough sister!

She and her husband Tom gave me two wonderful nieces and a wonderful nephew, and did a great job of raising them.  I was proud when Sheila and Tom had invited me to be the godfather of their first child, Mary Anne.  Then they made me doubly proud when they asked me to be godfather to their second daughter, Elizabeth Anne.  When, at both of their weddings, I was listed on the program as "Godfather of the Bride" my pride rose anew.

Over these many years (Sheila has four grandchildren now, the oldest is a high school Senior) I've had tons of fun and table games and laughs and basketball and good food at Sheila's house.

Thanks, Sheila!  Love you!

(I do sort of regret that Father Unfair didn't get the punch he deserved; some bygones just can't be conveniently forgotten.)

Friday, December 18, 2009

Xmas Cards/Greatest Hits #10

From Mink Stole, actress extraordinaire, early eighties.

Monday, December 14, 2009

Front Street Part I (Scrapbook Nostalgia)

Two of the crowd I hung out with in Provincetown, Howard Gruber & Edmund DiStasi, opened Front Street in ... I forget ... 1975 or so. They took over an already existing restaurant that had specialized in hamburgers; in order to get some extra money coming in Howard & Eddie stayed open after the bars closed at 1 a.m. Just before the drunks would begin stumbling in, a sign was posted outside the door NO ASSHOLES ALLOWED.


Front Street did well; it soon became the place for the finest dining in Provincetown, the place to see and to be seen, and Howard & Edmund no longer needed to stay open late to serve omelettes to drunks.


I was a waiter at an extremely busy restaurant across the street; it was geared to tourists, large numbers of them, an "eat it and beat it" sort of place. The owner, Joy, added a second dining room, to which guests had to be led down a rather drab corridor. When Edmund came across the street to see the new room, Joy led him to it. As he stepped into the corridor he remarked rather snootily, "You're going to lead them down this?"


"Yes ... all three hundred of them," Joy retorted. Even Edmund, who would have been pleased with forty or fifty diners a night, could not help but appreciate this perfect and perfectly snappy response to his haughtiness.

(While making a sharp right turn into the drab hall a waiter named Alex un-balanced the round tray he was holding aloft; the hot fudge sundae on the tray, in its thick-glassed classical cone-shaped dish, toppled; it landed smack-dab and upside down on the head of a woman sitting at a four-top snuggled up to the hall's entrance ... creating, with rivulets of hot fudge streaming down her face, what could have become a new fashion in millinery).


In 1982 I had my first-night (of the season) table companions autograph the menu. Fourteen bucks each for four courses. I can still remember particular tastes of some of Howard's magnificent dishes, and my mind smiles when I recall the flair with which Edmund DiStasi ushered guests to tables.


Below, Freres Fitzgerald, lunching at Front Street in the late seventies.

Sunday, December 6, 2009

Sylvia Plath - Part VI "The Poet on the Hill"

It is in the spring of 2002 that I rent a car at Manchester Airport and drive east towards Yorkshire. The road is narrow. The steering wheel and I are on the wrong side of the car, and I am driving along the wrong side of the dangerously busy road. Still I feel a need to hurry as I must reach the village of Hebden Bridge while there's still some light ... frankly, in whatever time zone I'm in, I have no good idea of when darkness will fall ... and so I must hurry to reduce the risk of driving around in the dark looking for a B&B.


The village, finally reached, lies in a narrow steep-walled valley. Its roads and houses, terraced up the south side of the valley, are retained by deep sloping stone walls. These walls, marvels of engineering, seem like the hands of some mythically powerful god who is preventing Hebden Bridge from tumbling in the Calder River.


I drive around town, up and then down the steep narrow roads. I cross handsome, gracefully arched stone bridges. The town is immediately enchanting. I have a sudden feeling that this valley feels like what home should feel like; it encloses me better than any place on earth that I've been to has ever enclosed me; it feels as if I was meant to have been born here, as if having been born in Indiana was a terrible mistake.


I day-dreamingly credit this new strange feeling to genetics, wondering if my Irish ancestors, having built untold miles of stone walls, created an affinity for stone building in their descendants.



I pass a Bed & Breakfast called Myrtle Grove. I turn around and pull the car to the side in front of it. A set of stone stairs leads from the road up to the stone house. The roof is made of a purplish slate. I knock at the door. I'm invited in.


Immediately upon entering I have an overwhelmingly keen realization that not only was I suppose to have been born in Hebden Bridge, but I was suppose to have lived my life in this particular house, in these very rooms; Myrtle Grove has within a moment struck me as the perfect dwelling. The floors are huge slabs of stone. The fireplace's sides and mantel are each one single slab of stone. Every window in the place is of unusual dimensions and oddly placed.

The substantiality of granite warms me. I am drawn to its solid safeness, the relative eternal of it. Stone is supremely sensible.

The proprietress, an attractive woman of perhaps fifty, her face warm and welcoming, offers her hand. "I'm Maureen," she says, as she leads me toward the stairs to look at the room. "And you are ....?"

"I'm George."

"And what brings you to Hebden Bridge?"

We're headed up the stairs.

"I've come to pay homage at the nearby grave of an American poet named Sylvia Plath."

By the time of my last word, she has reached a landing. She halts. "Look!" she says. She presents, with a sweep of her hand, a window, and then steps aside to give me room to approach it. I look out upon the valley's opposite wall. Atop it there are black silhouettes of a village.

"What you see there is the hamlet of Heptonstall," Maureen says. "And see that church tower above the tree line?"

Yes, I see.

"She's buried in the yard next to that church."

A line for a poem falls into my brain. I give the poem a title: "The Poet on the Hill". Inasmuch as the world, at this very moment, seems capable of perfection, it makes sense to suppose that this poem will appear in The New Yorker. I can see it spread on a page. I can see it in that particular font The New Yorker assigns to poems. I am thrilled! My name in lights, so to speak, and so near Broadway! I also know that it is very unlikely that I'll ever write that particular poem; I prefer just giving titles to poems to actually writing poems.

I recognize in Maureen a kindred soul. She is so pleased with her presentation. My spirit is mingling with hers. I implore fate to let us become friends, to show me a way to insinuate myself into her heart. I want to embrace her. I want to embrace the village of Hebden Bridge. I want to embrace the entire Calder Valley.

The room is beyond suitable. I settle myself in and then walk down the steep hill to the center of town. I have dinner in the restaurant of the town's single hotel.

When I return to Myrtle Grove, Maureen and her husband, John, are sitting at a small table in the kitchen, finishing up their dinner. After all my hurry up along the road from Manchester, it is still daylight. She invites me to have tea with them.

We three sit outside at a table in the yard. We talk about books and writers. I admire, in John and Maureen's garden, various flowers of kinds I've never seen before.

"I'll mail you some seeds," she says.

The evening turns chilly. I go up to my room. I am warm and snug beneath a sheet and a duvet. There is a good selection of books on a shelf, lots of poetry. I pick a collection of poems by W.B. Yeats. I will read myself to sleep.

There's a tap-tap at the door.

"Come in!"

Maureen enters. She's carrying a tray with nips of Irish whiskey on it. She sits on the bed. We talk and talk. She reaches for a Norton anthology of poems from a shelf; we talk about favorite poems.

After second nips of the whiskey, Maureen goes downstairs.

Happily coddled, I sleep the sleep of the happy. I am one of the children in Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse: I am definitely going to the lighthouse tomorrow; the day will be fine!

In the morning I have breakfast with John and Maureen. After John heads off for work Maureen and I linger over another cup of coffee. Finally I go up to fetch my suitcase. Maureen and I embrace. I feel imbued with potential, a potential that doesn't really exist; potential which died years ago, died before I was born. I walk out of the house that I should never have to leave. I head across the narrow valley, across one of the beautifully arched bridges, and up the other side.
I park in the lot of Heptonstall's elementary school. I walk through the hamlet toward the church without coming upon any shops, without encountering another human being. Heptonstall seems like a ghost town, giving me the same feeling I'd once had in a French town called Illiers-Combray, where Proust lived as a child, a feeling that I am being peered at from behind the lace curtained-windows of the gray homes that snuggle right up to the edge of the road.

I arrive at the rear of the church and walk along the side to the front.
In the yard of the church are ancient tombstones; across the way is a graveyard.

A man in a far corner tends a roaring brushfire. I approach him. He is perhaps fifty; he is thin. He seems contented with the company of his fire, totally concentrated on it. Who could not be contented with a great brush fire? I surprise him from behind. I say "Hi" and he, seemingly startled slightly, turns around. He composes himself immediately and says, "Good morning to you!"

"I wonder if you could show me where Sylvia Plath is buried?"

"Come," he beckons softly. Holding his rake out front with his right hand, like the major of a parade holding a baton, he leads me along the side of the graveyard. Turning his face to me, he says, "You like her poems then, do you?"

"Yes. Very much. They're great!"

"It's nice how people show up ... from all over the world they'll come."

He stops now and gestures with his free arm. "Here we are ... you'll find it down the way then ... close to the end."

"Much obliged!" That's how my Irish father would say thank you.

"Not a'tall."

He heads back to his fire.


The grave is well tended. It is bordered and decorated with large stones, the size of two and more fists. Amongst these stones, Alpine plants have been set. Maureen had mentioned a local greenhouse whose proprietor was an expert when it came to Alpine plants.

The granite marker is relatively new, yet another replacement of those which were desecrated over the years by fierce feminists whose hearts burned with animosity toward a man who they believed represented much that was awful in his gender. Over the years, they have descended ... like witches of the night someone said ... upon Heptonstall to chisel away at the letters H-U-G-H-E-S on the gravestone so that it would read simply Sylvia Plath.

I, feeling like a Christian close to touching the hem of the garment, know that the hem ... as it has been for over forty years now ... is still ... close as I am ... out of reach. There is no reaching it. There's also nothing to say, but I say the nothing anyway. "I wish I could have helped you, Sylvia. I am too late. I am sorry. I wish you could have kept going. I wish you could have lived to write more poems."

I turn away. My heart ... aching already with the melancholy of an old and lingering separation ... bleeds now with a fresh severance.

***

Back in the states, I eventually piled atop this sadness ... this sadness that is like the prevailing wind of sadnesses ... I pile atop it the fact that I never did receive seeds from Maureen. Wanting to feel that she had become fond of me as I had so quickly become fond of her, not wanting to think that she had forgotten me, I'm certain that she must have prepared a little packet, and my heart determines that the blame for me not receiving it must lay with the United States Customs.

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Look At What I Got!

Sometimes when I'm done with my expensive New York Times I pass it on to a co-worker. She appreciates it. Her husband is a potter. She gave me this cup/vase/glass he made. (For some reason the colors in the photo are not true at all, but both versions are beautiful.) I love it! You can see other great pottery at http://www.narrowlandpottery.com/.