Tuesday, March 30, 2010

First Friend: Marion Boggs -March 30, 1939 - March 24, 1950

In the second grade, when it was winter, and it was time for recess, there was a lot of commotion when we thirty-two kids in Miss McFarren's class were finding and putting on our coats, hats, scarves maybe, mittens or gloves. Then one day a girl got the zany idea that it would be fun to trade coats with her friend; since this was a monkey-see monkey-do world, everyone-- boys as well as girls -- started trading coats. In the end there were two of us -- Marion Boggs and me -- left holding our own coats.


I was one of the smallest kids in class, and the youngest, but Marion was a bit smaller than me.


We looked at each other. He shrugged. I shrugged back. He offered himself to me with a smile. "Wanna trade?" he asked. I accepted his proposal. He handed his coat to me. I handed mine to him.


I was happy that he had smiled at me and that his smile had made me smile back. And I was relieved that I hadn't had to suffer the humiliation of being the only one wearing his own coat out on the playground. From that instant on, Marion and I were best friends.



Now that I was paying attention to him I saw that he was someone I liked to look at ... he was a little bit like a doll. I liked to play with dolls. This new doll had wavy brown hair and brown eyes. He had what the French call un grain de beaute nigh his right cheekbone. Later, on a couple of occasions, I was to witness adults swooning over him, saying how cute he was, how wavy his hair was.





For the first time I now looked forward to going to school; prior to this I had been withdrawn and timid and uneasy; indeed I had spent the entire first school year concentrating on not making eye contact with a certain kid named Jackie Smythe. He had failed the year before so was repeating the grade. He was a year and a half older than me and much bigger than me and I'd heard that he was really mean and I was afraid he'd beat me up if I looked at him.


But now that I had a friend I would get to school early enough that I'd be waiting out front when school bus #5, with its precious cargo, pulled up. I'd scan the long line of windows until I saw my doll's face searching for mine. Big smile ... big smile.


Eventually, once a week or so, I was allowed at the end of the school day to board the school bus with Marion and stay overnight on the Boggs Farm. It was six or seven miles east of town on Highway 25. My friend and I played in the barn, explored the woods and fields, did some chores, sneaked matches out of the house and smoked straw cigarettes. Then it'd come time to sit down to Dorothy Boggs' sumptuous suppers with Marion's two older brothers and his dad. It was always the best of times on the farm ... everything was new, everything was interesting, everything was fun; being six and seven and eight and nine and then ten years old was good.


After supper Dorothy Boggs listened to the news on the radio as she cleaned up the kitchen and put things away. Sometimes Old Man Boggs would reach for a deck of cards or the set of dominoes or the checkerboard. He'd banter away, telling stories, asking us questions, teasing us, and beating us at all the games.


Eventually Marion and I would be told that it was time to go upstairs and get into our pajamas and go to bed. The upstairs of the house was not heated and it was cold. We dove into the cold bedclothes. We shivered and talked softly and laughed and cuddled into one another's warmth. Country nights were dark and quiet. We felt good. We were happy.


***


On a December day when we had reached the fifth grade, Marion was not on the bus. One or the other of his older brothers spread the word that he was sick. Then the next day he was still absent, and the next day, and the next. When I looked over at his empty desk in the classroom the space took on the character of a hole. It was a hole whose bottom I could not see. His absence made the days spoiled and empty.


After several days of Marion's absence, two words rose in the chatter at recess. One word was brain. The other word was tumor.


Shortly after these words became familiar the teacher, Mr. Witham, came and told me that I was to leave class as someone wanted to speak to me. Old Man Boggs was waiting in the hallway. He said he had just come from talking to my mother and that it was okay with her for me to get on bus #5 after school to go visit Marion.


"But it's not going to be like before," Earl Boggs said. "Marion can't talk anymore. And he can't walk. He can only walk when he's helped. But I think he'd like to see you and I think it'll be good for him, and you could tell him what your class is learning. That way maybe he can keep up. I've got your pajamas in the car. I've told the bus driver you'll be getting on his bus. You know which one it is now, right?"


I shook my head yes.


I sat on the couch in the living room next to my stricken-silent friend. He stares at me impassively. I tell Marion what Mr. Witham had taught us that day. And I try really really hard to think of other things ... anything ... to say. It's hard. He doesn't take his eyes off me but he doesn't respond to anything I say; there is just the blank expression on his face.


It was decided that I would get on the bus one night a week to go and sit and talk to Marion. Week after week. His expression never changed. I told him that, as usual, I had won the weekly spelling bee which meant that I got a quarter from Mr. Witham to buy a strawberry malt down at Pete's Restaurant. I told him if we had had a letter from anyone, maybe from my oldest brother who'd gone off to college. I told him what we'd been studying in class. I told him everything I could think of but there simply was not a lot to tell; I had no imagination to turn myself into a storyteller. Sometimes I'd bring things to show him -- a marble, books with pictures, an arrowhead I'd found in the alley next to our house, any sort of thing to pass even just an additional minute or maybe two additional minutes. But, no matter what I said to him, no matter what I pulled from my pocket to show him, Marion just stared at me with the face that never indicated comprehension ... the face that did not indicate anything except perhaps that he liked to look at me ... the face that did not smile, did not frown, did not change. Minutes moved slowly. Then they moved painfully slowly. Frankly, it was tough.


Eventually I'd go upstairs to sleep. Marion now slept downstairs.


***


One evening I had money in my pocket -- a fifty-cent piece, two quarters, two dimes, and a nickel. It was money that the next day I was to give my teacher to pay for a week's worth of hot lunches in the school cafeteria. Five lunches for a buck and a quarter ... the special welfare rate you got if your dad was dead, as mine had been since the previous July.


I held up a dime for Marion to see. No response.


I held up a nickel. More empty stare.


I held up a quarter. Nothing.


I held up the half-dollar.


At this, amazingly, a great big happy smile lit up Marion's face! I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I put the coin back into my pocket. His smile went away. I pulled out the coin again and the big happy smile came back. It works! It works!


I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I called to Mrs. Boggs out in the kitchen to come and look. She stepped into the living room and I showed her my fifty-cents worth of miracle.


She smiled but she didn't seem as thrilled as I was that I'd found a way to make Marion smile. I don't know -- maybe, for her, a smile was not enough of the old Marion ... or maybe Marion sometimes smiled when I was not there, and it was nothing new to her ... or maybe the doctors had told her that nothing was going to bring all of him back -- or something like that -- and she knew about a hopelessness that I didn't know about. Whatever, it puzzled me for years when I'd recall that it hadn't thrilled her like it had thrilled me. She went back to her cooking.


That night, when I was lying in bed waiting for sleep, I wondered how I could get my hands on a silver dollar. If a fifty-cent piece could make Marion smile, who knew what a shiny silver-dollar might do?


I hadn't managed yet to get my hands on a silver-dollar when Marion died on March 24th, 1950.






***


The boy that I loved was dead. My lover was dead. It made no sense. Nor, except as feelings, did the words love and lover have any meaning to me; they were not words I would have thought of in thinking of another person.


***


They waked him in the living room. He was wearing a blue suit, white shirt, and red tie. He looked scrubbed and beautiful and serene. Banks of flowers covered the casket below the hinged-open half of its top. A wide blue ribbon, draped amongst the blossoms, was imprinted in fancy gold script: Son ... Brother ... Friend.


A Protestant church of some sort set at the gentle curve of the highway just a mile down from the Boggs farm. The funeral was there on a mild March day but the church was so crowded that it seemed like a hot summer's day. They'd dug a hole in the cemetery behind the church. They put Marion and his little coffin in it.


The blue banner that bore the gold scripted Son ... Brother ... Friend glistened in the forefront of my mind for weeks after the funeral. I didn't say much and I didn't know what I could do except just keep putting one foot in front of the other. Eventually the banner came less frequently to the front of my mind. Summer came. And then the sixth grade came. The banner hardly came to mind at all then ... but, still, 60 years later, it appears now and then.


Friday, March 26, 2010

Further Wit: Gertrude Stein


When T.S. Eliot said, "Can you tell me, Miss Stein, what authority you have for so frequently using the split infinitive?" Gertrude Stein replied, "Henry James."

I've found Gertrude Stein to be -- except for The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, -- difficult to read, but wonderfully quotable. 

The sculpture below -- Gertrude as Buddah -- is based on a model of the original done by Jo Davidson (who deserves her own blog post here, which I'll get to eventually), and it is in Bryant Park behind the New York City Library. 


Monday, March 22, 2010

Dorothy Parker - A Turner of Exquisite Phrases

She gets my award for best epitaph:  "Excuse my dust!"

In Constant Reader she wrote of a "Mrs. Smith [who] is so unmistakably the daughter of a hundred Elks.  Let them be dismissed by somebody's phrase (I wish to heaven it were mine) -- [as] 'the sort of people who buy their silver.'"

In a 1957 Esquire piece she wrote: "So I am growing old, a process that goes at gallop even as I sit here, for I find my heart turns tenderly to that yesterday when there were those two demure dashes between the first and fourth letters of the words used with telling infrequency."

In a story "Cousin Larry" she described: "The young woman in the crepe de Chine dress printed all over with little pagodas set amid giant cornflowers flung one knee atop the other and surveyed, with an enviable contentment, the tip of her scrolled green sandal.  Then, in a happy calm, she inspected her finger nails of so thick and glistening a red that it seemed as she but recently had completed tearing an ox apart with her naked hands."

Ms. Parker (born Aug 22, 1893; died June 7, 1967): a true master of phrase-turning.


Saturday, March 20, 2010

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Happy Birthday to my brother Tom!

Photographed here on Aug 9, 1952, and I don't suppose he'll see this post as he has no interest in using a computer.  Nice guy.  When my dad died and there were eight kids still at home he went into the Air Force and -- designated as one with dependents (his brothers and sisters), we got a monthly check from the Defense Department, some of which was taken out of his pay.  Thanks, Tom!

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Sylvia Plath - Part VII - Nicholas Hughes - Jan. 17, 1962 - March 16, 2009

Early on a cold February morning in 1963, the poet Sylvia Plath, living in an apartment in London, deeply depressed, separated from her husband Ted Hughes (who would later become Poet Laureate), put mugs of milk and plates of bread at the bedsides of her sleeping children.  She went back to the kitchen, got towels and tape, and sealed around the door of the room where her children slept.  Then, back in the kitchen, she turned on the jet of gas and lay her head in the oven.

Daughter Frieda was nearly three years old; son Nicholas just over a year.

Plath obsessives like myself -- "the dogs [who] are eating your mother" is how Ted Hughes described us in the title of one of his poems in Birthday Letters -- we could not, over all these years, help but wonder how Sylvia Plath's children had turned out.  Frieda became a known quantity -- she painted, wrote poetry, gave occasional interviews, made appearances at galleries and poetry festivals.

But precious little was known about Nicholas; he was reportedly a scientist working in Alaska.

One year ago today he hung himself.  It was shocking and sad for all who love Sylvia Plath.

Eleven days later a poet named David Trinidad finished a masterpiece:

"For Nicholas Hughes"

At last we know who
you were, beyond the baby
your mother woke and wrote to,
the baby crying while her body
lay, still warm, in the kitchen one
floor below; beyond the youth
sequestered among the moors,
silently fishing alongside his
famous father.  We now know
your "varied pursuits": stream ecology,
pottery, woodworking, boating,
bicycling, gardening, and cooking
"the perfect pecan pie." How like
both of them you were!  We now
know you would have nothing to
do with her, whose absence left
you hollow, and yet you found refuge
in the Golden Heart of Alaska in
her country, an ice fortress blazing
with Aurora's lights.  We know
that in the nine years since the death
of the Poet Laureate, that man of brick,
your foundation crumbled; know 
that two years ago, you gave up
your professorship to concentrate
on ceramics.  Is there no way out of
the mind?  One by one, the passage
doors shut, and locked behind you.
Still, in your depression you were able
to climb Scafell Pike, the tallest peak
in England.  We can see pictures
of you on the Internet now, Nicholas:
movie-star handsome, your stare refusing
us access, guarded against the acolytes
who would tear the very flesh from
your bones in order to possess her.
And now your death, we know that.
What is it, finally, but an image, the 
feet of a condemned man that fell from 
a poem -- first one of hers, then one of his.
As if their poems could ever console
you, or explain away the pain.  Death
was -- and is -- your legacy, we know
that now.  At last, Nicholas, we know.

---
A tip of my hat to Peter Steinberg, who consistently provides, at www.sylviaplath.info/index2.html, the most relevant, detailed, and fascinating information about Sylvia Plath.  Thanks too to David Trinidad for saying it is okay that I've put his poem into my post.  

Sunday, March 14, 2010

A Number of Musical Events


When I was in Ireland with 12 relatives and friends in 1999 some of us went to the Davern Tavern in Cashel on a Monday night because Irish music was advertised in the window, and . . . well, I've seen the Rolling stones four or five times, beginning back at the Royal Albert Hall in 1966, with Ike and Tina Turner opening for them; and I saw Patti Smith at The Boarding House in San Francisco; and I saw "Madame Butterfly" at the Paris Opera House in 1960, "La Boheme" in Venice in 1961, and "The Queen of Spades" at La Scala in Milano, also in 1961; at Cobo Hall in Detroit I saw Rod Stewart when he was just an opening act -- for Three Dog Night, for god's sake, and my all-too-cool friends and I walked out when Stewart was done and they came on; and I saw Merle Haggard at Buck Lake Ranch in Indiana; Tammy Wynette at The Melody Tent in Hyannis; I saw Andre Watts play with the Philharmonic in Berlin; I was at CBGB's in The Bowery when punk was happening; twice I saw John Mellancamp in Montreal; I saw John Lennon at Chrysler Arena in Ann Arbor; I saw Sinead O'Connor at The Hampton Beach Casino in New Hampshire; Jimi Hendrix in Detroit; The Byrds in Ann Arbor at Hill Auditorium; and, also at Hill Auditorium, Tina Turner again when she was still with Ike; I saw Gordon Lightfoot at Tanglewood; I saw Allen Ginsberg playing his little accordion thing-a-ma-jig and singing (?) to a packed coffee house in Ann Arbor . . . I could go on and on . . . I saw Skeeter Davis in concert in Lansing, Michigan, when I thought her cross-over hit "End of the World" was the most heartfelt beautiful-sad song I'd ever heard (was it the first song to be #1 on both the country and the pop charts?) and then I had dinner with Skeeter after the concert thanks to a good friend of mine being President of her Fan Club; I saw Emmylou Harris in Northampton and her voice was so pure and holy that the event seemed like a religious experience, and tears streamed down my cheeks when she sang "Goodbye" . . . I've seen a lot . . . but that night of Irish music in Davern's Tavern in Cashel was the best night of music in my life -- the songs, the musicians (led by a guitarist named Mick Mackey) and the atmosphere and the half-and-halfs, all a perfect blend.


Now, though, I'm all about The Celtic Woman ... I saw them again this last Wednesday night at the Providence Theater in Providence, Rhode Island, after seeing them in October at Mohegan Sun in Connecticut. That first time I got to go backstage to meet the fiddler, Mairead Nesbitt (she's a niece of Flo, my friend in Ireland), and Mairead seems like the most gifted person imaginable: beautiful, amazingly talented, sweet as can be.








Friday, March 12, 2010

Another Favorite Postcard (#5 in series)

Postmarked Apr. 12, 2006; from Eastern Maine; four gals having fun!

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Happy Birthday to my nephew, Thomas Fitzgerald

Pictured above in 1966 or 1967 with his sister, Mary-Suzanne, leaning against the first of three Bugs I owned (my fourth VW was a hippie van).  We'd either been to or were about to go to my favorite place in my hometown, Yellow Creek. The birthday-boy went to the city; these days Tommy covers politics for The Philadelphia Inquirer.