Friday, February 26, 2010

New York (Visit)

I went to New York City for a long weekend.  I stayed with my dear friend Ellen.  I love the Lower East Side, where Ellen lives, and where there's an interesting face or an interesting accent or an interesting outfit no matter which way you turn.  I also love Ellen's Jean-Michel Basquait poster.


One day we went to St. John the Divine, the world's largest Gothic cathedral, up around 106th Street.  Someone was practicing on the organ; the sound is astoundingly beautiful, soaking through me like a resurrection as I stood gazing at the altar.  The music stopped.  We walked the length of the nave to The Poets' Corner.  The inscription (not completely visible in the photo below) reads: "My heart is inditing a good matter; my tongue is the pen of a ready writer." I honestly did not bother to read that inscription while in the cathedral; I only noticed the word 'tongue' when, back home, I uploaded my snapshots.  I did some Google research to learn what the complete quote says.  Thus it was mere serendipity that I stuck my pen out in the picture and that my rude pose just happened to be appropriate to the quote.  (Or perhaps, depending on your appetite for decorum, inappropriately vulgar.)


We had breakfast three times on St. Mark's Place  at my favorite breakfast place.

One night we had dinner with Bronagh (the 8th of my Irish pen pal Flo's ten children) and her husband Justin at an upscale Greek taverna on 7th Street.  From there we went to an Irish bar, Lunasa, on 1st Avenue, where Ellen and I both had a good amount of Crown Royal.  Bronagh had a good amount of rum with coke.  Justin had a good amount of Jameson's.  We all had a great amount of laughter; we and the night and the oldies-but-goodies music, and the Olympics on a large TV fit perfectly together, so it was one of the best nights ever. I slept until 10:20AM the next morning; that must be the latest I've slept in since I don't know when ... sometime in the seventies maybe?


Tuesday night was very literary.  I like to say that to me authors are perhaps like movie stars are to most people; I doubt that I'd walk across the street to see any movie star, but I rode a bus for six hours to get to New York City primarily to see my favorite contemporary writer, Andre Aciman "in conversation" (as the announcement put it) with Paul LeClerc, the Director of the New York Public Library; the event took place in an auditorium at the main library.  Afterwards Andre Aciman sat at a table in a hallway outside the auditorium autographing copies of his just-published Eight White Nights, which I had read the previous weekend.  Once the line of people seeking an autograph had come to its end I stepped forward and had a few words with Andre Aciman about Proust and the art of translation ... I'll save writing about that for my next post.
  



Friday, February 19, 2010

Avignon Handout

I like the graphics.  The title intrigued me.  I didn't see the play.  

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Shelves Built; Books Placed

Actually shelves re-built; in the house in Yarmouth they were sixteen feet long; here in Eastham I needed to reduce the length by half.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Mini-Memoir: Sixth Grade Class

Miss June Aughinbaugh, our sixth grade teacher (standing almost right behind me in the picture above), was short, slightly stout, strict, and stern. First thing each Monday morning she acknowledged her Protestant version of Christ by seating herself at the upright that stood in a front corner of the classroom; I can see her smoothing out the pages of a hymnal, pushing her unframed glasses up her nose, and setting upon this or that hymn. Her shoulders would lean back and her ass would scoot forward on the bench as she stretched one and then the other of her short legs to reach any of the foot pedals, and those same shoulders would sway from side to side as her short arms strained to reach either end of the keyboard. She seemed to me not so much to play the piano as to assault it, banging out chords as if her faith was best demonstrated with a determined force.

After the hymn that inaugurated the week we each were expected to stand and recite a verse from the Bible. I loathed this; some of the words in my Douay Rheims Bible were different from those in the King James version; I didn't like being the embodiment of this difference. Once, urged to mild rebelliousness by an older brother or sister, I recited the shortest verse in my Bible: "And Jesus wept," knowing that the verse was even shorter by one word in Miss Aughinbaugh's King James Bible: "Jesus wept." On another Monday, on a dare from a pal, I gathered the nerve to recite, without knowing if it was an accurate quote (we Catholics were not big on Bible-reading): "Jesus tied his ass to a tree and fled to Jerusalem." There was some muffled snickering as Miss Aughinbaugh quickly named the person behind me to stand and take his or her turn.

But, yes, I despised this weekly exercise -- not because I was insulted by Miss Aughinbaugh's effrontery, not because it was an offense against public school secularity, but because -- as the lone Catholic in that sixth-grade class's sea of Protestantism -- I perceived that, just when I was trying to fit in with the guys I thought were cool, this exercise unnecessarily accentuated a difference in me.

I admit to having felt, in 1963, a touch of schadenfreude when, thanks to the infamous atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, such religiosity was banned in public schools. I had long left Mentone by then but when I read the news in The Detroit Free Press I smirkily wondered how Miss Aughinbaugh must have been offended by this Supreme Court-edicted comeuppance.

The comical image I kept of Miss Aughinbaugh eventually turned almost to affection. I recall how at Christmas-time and then again at Easter she brought for each member of her class a piece of her wonderful homemade fudge.

Then when, as an adult, I'd be back for a visit to my hometown, and I'd run into her at the Post Office, or see her eating a lonely meal in Teel's Restaurant, and she would ask to be reminded which of her former students I was, I would hope that she would not remember that I was one of those who hadn't paid attention to a damn thing she said.

Further, though I didn't appreciate it at the time, she was an excellent teacher, and I've wished I had paid attention to her, harboring regret that I reached adulthood without knowing proper grammar, without knowing when to punctuate (and with what), nor could I have diagrammed a sentence. I learned punctuation by studying Edna St. Vincent Millay's poems in an Army bunk in Germany; I learned some grammar by having my poor grammar pointed out to me (sometimes to my embarrassment), or by paying close attention to the sentences in the good literature for which I developed a taste.

Still, I don't feel confident today that I could explain what a split infinitive is, without thinking really hard, and I no doubt sometimes use 'lay' when I should use 'lie'.

Come to think of it, I've never known for sure if I'm getting anything right or not.

But I keep trying.

Friday, February 5, 2010

Charles Rupert Luckenbill - Feb. 5, 1909 - Sept. 9, 1973

Uncle Rupert, the oldest of my mother's four brothers, was the only one in his family to graduate from high school, which he did in 1927.  He was a talented, self-taught musician, playing mouth harp, accordion, and any sort of stringed instrument, including a "tater bug" mandolin (the nickname came from the maple/rosewood rib pattern of the body which resembled a potato beetle), and a fiddle which he constructed himself using a wooden cigar box; the fiddle's neck was silk-smooth and glistened, and at its end Rupert had carved a beautiful horse head.

His brother Gene played guitar, eventually owning a Gibson with mother-of-pearl inlay on the fret board.  Another brother, Bob, played harmonica, and had a beautiful bass voice.  Rupert and Gene were also good singers, and the three of them were great at harmonizing.  They would play and sing at PTA meetings, revivals ... anywhere they could.  The fourth brother, Albert, liked to say that the only thing he could play was the radio.

For a while Rupert worked for a traveling book-bindery, a workshop having been set up in the back of a truck.  It would go from town to town and repair peoples' books.  The business owner's son was a deaf-mute; Rupert learned sign language, which in those days was spelled out letter by letter, so he could help the boy communicate.  Rupert then taught the signs to my sister Joan who now, at nearly 83, can remember the signs for all the letters except, says she, "I can't for the life of me remember how to make an 'R'!"

Rupert was a good man and a hard worker.  When the book-bindery went to the Chicago World's Fair in 1933 he sent his youngest sister Juanita a red bracelet and his niece Joan a blue bracelet.  "I always wanted everything red," says Joan, "but Mom Luckenbill said I was too blonde to look good in red."

Rupert enlisted in the Army in 1942, at the age of 33, and spent the war years in London.

He never married.  As a young man he'd had a crush on a girl named Tootie, who was the sister of his brother Gene's wife, Altessa; both sisters were attractive.  Rupert carried Tootie's picture in his wallet for years.

One time a letter came from a man who was writing to accuse Rupert of having made his daughter pregnant.  Rupert didn't know the girl; it turned out that the letter should have been addressed to a man named Rupert Brakebill.  Whether this Rupert Brakebill was the father of the child or not, he later married another of Altessa Heilman's sisters, one named Donnabelle.

After the war Rupert became a truck driver.  He liked to get up at five a.m. and have a whoppingly huge bowl of cornflakes.  I like a whoppingly huge bowl of cornflakes myself.

He liked to tell half-raunchy jokes.  One such might go something like this:  "This guy told me he'd like to stick the cold end of a hot poker up (some certain somebody's) ass.  I asked him why he wanted to stick the cold end in and he said he wanted to watch the guy pull it out."  

Grandpa and Grandma Luckenbill had never owned a house until Rupert and Albert bought one on Third Street in North Manchester for them.  Sometime after Grandma's 1958 death a fire destroyed about half of that house.  Sadly, most of the contents were destroyed or ruined, including Grandma's collection of hundreds of sets of salt and pepper shakers, which she kept in a glass-doored cabinet, and quilts she had made, and perhaps even that home-made fiddle of Rupert's.  The part of the house that had not been destroyed, basically the living and dining rooms, was roughly re-built to a condition that was habitable, and Grandpa and Rupert lived on there until Grandpa's 1968 death and Rupert's death five years later.

I didn't know Rupert all that well, and thank my beloved sister Joan for sharing her memories of him -- as well as many other of her precious memories -- with me.  She talks; I make notes, and then make paragraphs of her stories.
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My brother Gerald remembers "a family gathering at Grandpa and Grandma's when Uncles Rupert, Bob & Gene sat on the front porch, played music and sang for at least an hour.  What a time!

"Rupert had his truck leased to Warsaw Trucking Company and hauled a lot of castings from Dalton Foundry to Peoria and Quincy, Ill.  During that time was when he would stop and have coffee with Mother and visit.  He once told of his time in England during the war when the Germans were sending the self-propelled bombs into the country, and the weird sound they made as they went over the post he was assigned to.  He worked in the Motor Pool at the post.  He was a very good mechanic and did all the work on his own truck  His truck was a 1938 or 39 International with a sleeper cab  One time he was parked at a truck stop in Illinois and the air leaked off of the brakes and his truck rolled down an embankment and the front was severely damaged.  He had it towed home and rebuilt with the hood and grill off of a 1947 International.  He called it his new old truck.  Uncle Rupert was just a good guy with a great sense of humor.  He told Jeanette [Gerald's wife] and me that he was so glad when he got dentures because when they ached he could put them up on the shelf and watch the damn things ache."

Thanks, Gerald!



Thursday, February 4, 2010

Gerald Durrell - "My Family and Other Animals"

I like old Penguin paperbacks, like this 1963 edition of Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, which I paid a quarter for at the library sale a while back.  And it's a great read!  Gerald Durrell's brother Lawrence is one of my favorite writers; I'm learning that Gerald is mighty good himself.

I think 3'6 in those days came out to about 80-cents.

Gerald Durrell