Scrapbook Cruising: Happy Anniversary to John & Kathleen Fitzgerald

Mr. and Mrs. James Fisher

and

Mr. and Mrs. John Fitzgerald Sr.

request the honour of your presence

at the marriage of their children

Kathleen Joy McNeal

and

John Dennis Fitzgerald Jr.

Friday, the thirty first of December

nineteen hundred and ninety-three

at seven o'clock

Saint Malachy's Church

595 East Ogden Avenue

Geneseo, Illinois*

They are splendid! Or, as the Irish might say, they are grand! Plus they both love to read! Plus they created two beautiful children. I'm lucky to have great people like John and Kathleen in my family.

John posts on Facebook first thing this morning: "Happy Anniversay to not only my best friend but the best person I know. Lords knows I would be lost without her and would have missed out on a lot of adventures over the last two decades. She loves a good party, can match wits with anyone in the room and heaven help anyone trying to debate her. Here’s to you Kathleen aka Spanky aka Neen aka Momma. She proves her mettle every day and we are all the benefactors. I love ya kid!"

And then Kathleen posts: "Happy anniversary John Fitzgerald! 17 years ago we threw the best party we've ever thrown, and I got to marry the best guy I know. Thanks for all the happy new years! I love you."

----

*The original invitation didn't scan well so I up and typed it up, which necessarily leaves out the nice embossment and the gold lines of the original; plus I filched the classic photograph above from my nephew's Facebook page.

Those The's

When John Ciardi (above left), a poet and a translator of Dante's Divine Comedy, was teaching a Composition class at Harvard in the late forties, one of his students, Frank O'Hara, (above right), was himself a poet aspiring to publication.  In one poem written for the class, O'Hara had a line "she wailed at bier" ... leaving out the article the which most readers would expect.  Ciardi marked on the paper that a the belonged before bier, saying that though the eminent poet W.H. Auden (above, center) sometimes omitted an article, "[to do so] still seems precious to me."

A few years later O'Hara, having achieved a modicum of poetic fame, and living in New York City, took up an opportunity to meet Auden; O'Hara arranged to show the master a batch of his poems, including "The Fattening Nymph" with its line "she wailed at bier".

When Auden came upon "she wailed at bier" he reprimanded O'Hara ever so gently and ever so wittily. "You've got to be an Auden to get away with lines like that," he said.

(I collected, and re-worked, this anecdote from the wonderful City Poet - The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara, by Brad Gooch, published in 1993.)

Seriously Agnostic and Seriously Instructive

C.H. Roman, buried in Graceland Cemetery in Sidney, Ohio, was seriously agnostic and wished to be instructive beyond death.  I like his Thomas Paine quote: "The world is my country and to do good is my religion."  


Thanks G & J for the photo.

Scrapbook Cruising: Happy Anniversary to Robert & Cathy

Happy 24th?  If I can still count.  But I can remember a beautiful wedding and a great time at the reception!

A Deal! It's Not Your Birthday. It's His. But You Get the Gifts.

 

It's his birthday celebration but almost everyone else gets the presents.  Cool.  Well, happy birthday anyway, Jesus.  As someone pasted on Facebook the other day, "He had no servants, yet they called him Master.  He had no degree, yet they called him Teacher.  He had no medicines, yet they called him Healer.  He had no army, yet kings feared him.  He won no military battles, yet he conquered the world.  He committed no crime, yet they crucified him.  He was buried in a tomb, yet he lives today."    Made quite an impression in his thirty-three years.  See previous post for some political Jesus.

If Jesus Ran For President...

Gustave Flaubert - Dec 12 1821 - May 8, 1880

Gustave Flaubert's bed in a museum in Rouen, France.

It was shocking to me when I learned that this man who wrote perfect novels and stories lived a wretchedly reckless sexual life; taking, as he travelled widely, both male and female prostitutes. He often described his encounters in his letters, lamenting the one after another venereal disease he'd contracted along the way.  The museum in Rouen is dedicated to him as well as to the hospital it is housed in, which was headed by his father.

Great Music

The Outer Cape Chorale does two programs a year ... one in the Christmas season and one in the spring. I wouldn't want to miss anything they do ... they're great.  I saw this presentation last night in Provincetown and then again today in Orleans.

Today I Just Believe in John ....

I was living on Pearl Street in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The TV was on. Breaking News. No! No! Disbelief. Then shock. I couldn't just stand there so I telephoned Dennis, my rock-n-roll buddy in Lansing, Michigan.  I could tell I'd awakened him. "Dennis, you gotta turn on your TV ... somebody shot John Lennon."

On the following Sunday Rodney and I were driving to Michigan. We pulled into a rest area to observe the ten minutes of silence in honor of someone we loved.

John Lennon said a lot of things for a lot of us, things we felt but could not have expressed so perfectly because we all could not be lyrical and rock geniuses.

"God is a concept by which we measure our pain. I'll say it again: God is a concept by which we measure our pain. I don't believe in magic. I don't believe in I-Ching. I don't believe in Bible. I don't believe in tarot. I don't believe in Hitler. I don't believe in Kennedys. I don't believe in Buddha. I don't believe in mantras. I don't believe in Gita. I don't believe in yoga. I don't believe in kings. I don't believe in Elvis. I don't believe in Zimmerman. I don't believe in Beatles. I just believe in me, Yoko and me, and that's reality. The dream is over. What can I say? The dream is over ... yesterday. I was the dreamweaver but now I'm reborn. I was the walrus but now I'm John. And so, dear friends, you'll just have to carry on.  The dream is over."

Special People - Merry Mary White

     When Mary White first came into Five Star Convenience Store in Keene -- probably the evening of the day Mark and I bought the place back in February of 1993 -- her appearance brought to mind a cruel description -- death warmed over.  I took her to be a bag lady; indeed, there were -- as there was always to be -- four or five handled bags dangling from each of her forearms.  She looked to be somewhere around seventy.  Her clothes were often threadbare.  Her face was pasty and puffy and pale.  Her thin hair was woefully arranged; it was blonde from some cheap low-shelved brand of blondness.  Her blue eyes were too pale to be striking.  She was pitifully skinny; her thin skin sagged from one bone to the next.  She seemed almost too frail to be standing, let alone ambulatory.  She was festooned with heavily-mascara-ed false eyelashes and cursorily-applied lipstick.  At times one of those false eyelashes would have become half unglued and, insect-like, stand half-straight out, leaving one wondering how she could not have noticed.


     As I got to know her I came to love Mary White.  Cheerfulness and friendliness and goodwill oozed from every pore of her being.


     She came to love me.  She came to love Mark.  She loved every single one of our "wonderfully kind" employees.  Anytime I mentioned a friend who lived away, Mary never forgot the names and characteristics of those friends, and would occasionally ask after "the adorable Abby" or "that rascally Rodney" or "the brilliant Liz".


     I suppose that Mary White stopped in at Five Star every single day of the six years we owned the store, stopping in usually on her way home from her custodial job at the hospital.  She'd generally buy, among whatever else, a "cute" six-pack of Budweiser and a pack or two of "delightful" or "charming" Cambridge cigarettes for her boyfriend Bob.  (I'm aiming to make it clear that Mary believed that everyone and everything deserved at least one complimentary adjective.)


      Mary herself didn't smoke anything or drink alcohol.  Bob, who did, was a friendly guy who seemed perfectly capable of working but for a good long time did not.  He might, a couple hours after Mary's daily appearance, show up for a second 6-pack and some scratch tickets.

Mary White and Bob LeFebvre

     One evening I noticed a man of about fifty do a double-take of Mary as she was leaving the store.


     "Did she used to be a school teacher?" he asked me, "I'd swear she was my teacher back in second grade."


     Piece by piece I learned various facets of Mary's background -- not from Mary, who was eminently self-effacing, but from this or that customer who would small-talk what he or she knew about Mary.


     She had been a school teacher.  And she'd been involved in local theater.  She once mentioned that one of her "fellow thespians" had been John Ciardi, who went on to literary fame for his translations of Dante; another was a young Maureen Stapleton.


     At some point the theater group decided that they would mount a production of "Lady Godiva".  To advertise it, a young Mary White, donned in a body stocking, mounted a white horse and rode the length of Main Street; her blonde wig, it was said, was long enough that it nearly dragged on the pavement.     I loved this image of Mary -- she loved theatricality, and Keene's Main Street is broad and handsome.  It ends at a nice circular park smack dab at the town's center.  Beyond this park, as you approach from the south, sets a white Congregational church whose white steeple soars high above the park's maples.  The scene makes downtown Keene pretty enough to be used as the setting of any movie, such as "Peyton Place", that calls for a typical-looking New England town.  (And it amuses me that, despite the park's being circular, the landmark is invariably referred to by natives as The Square, which often confused visitors asking for directions.)


     I like to imagine how happy Mary White must have been on that ride -- smiling, waving to bystanders, being an entertaining spectacle in what all too often must have seemed (and, indeed, is)a too staid, backwards, off-the-main-route town.


     For this merry display Mary White was deemed by the city fathers to be unfit to teach youngsters; she was fired from her job.


     About this time her mother went into the hospital for an operation.  There was no insurance; neither Mary nor her mother had money to pay the hospital bill.


     Mary asked if she could work as a custodian at the hospital to pay them off.  This she did, and she proved to be such a good worker that when the bill was paid she was asked to stay on as a regular employee.


     And so there she labored for many years, walking to and from her home, a mile and a half each way, and always with the several bags on each arm, and in all weathers, and always wearing those white tennis shoes that cost $2.99 at Walgreen's or $1.99 at one of the big box discount stores.


     Often she sort of jogged back and forth between home and hospital, even in the snow.  Various people told me that they'd stopped at one time or another to offer her a ride but she always declined, saying she enjoyed the exercise.  I wondered if sometimes in the cold months the jogging part wasn't part of trying to keep warm.


     Knowing that I was devoted to reading, a typical conversational opener from Mary to me might be, "Today one of our lovely patients and I were comparing the London of Thackeray with that of Dickens."  She quoted lines from poems she liked.  She spoke of "marvelous" and "fabulous" and "fantastic" shows she was "lucky enough" to have gotten tickets for at Keene's old and beautifully refurbished Colonial Theater. 


     I loved the incongruity -- the broad culture enclosed within the carapace of one who had initially struck me as being a bag lady.


     Another time she might simply comment on the quotidian:  "I see that the good Mayor Blastos has finally put a crew of strapping men on Washington Street to fill those irksome potholes!"


     Mary's gestures and facial expressions and speech were always theatrical.  Her oft-stated and oft-displayed devotion to the stage only made me fonder of her even if I didn't care that much about acting and theater myself, I loved Mary's theatrics; and, of course, I loved her colorful use of our language.


     It was said that she was especially good and kind to patients at the hospital.  One of those happened to be a woman named Julie Older.  On the day Julia was dismissed from the hospital she inscribed a copy of her latest book of poems, Higher Latitudes, to Mary.

     That evening Mary offered it to me to read.  I did so and wrote Mary a note of thanks and included some commentary on several of the poems and images in them which I'd especially liked.


     Mary promptly sent my note on to Julia.  Julia in turn wrote me a note of appreciation for my remarks.


     Eventually I met Julia when she did a reading in Keene; we took to one another right away, feeling kindred for being, if nothing else, fellow members of The Mary White Fan Club; Julia and I have carried on a correspondence ever since.  Julia's letters, always beautifully handwritten, are treasures -- the sort of items I'd gather and secure with a pretty ribbon if I were the sort to gather things and put them in pretty ribbon, rather than being the more mundane and anal sort who keeps them in a manila folder labeled "Older, Julia".


     Eventually Mary reached an age where she could collect a pension due her from the years she spent in the school system.  She signed it over to Bob, who was seven or eight years younger than she.  When, too, she'd been at the hospital long enough to have earned a pension from there, she signed that one over to Bob as well.



     Once a young man who'd grown up in town but who'd spent most of his still-young life in prison, escaped from the police in Concord as he was being transported to court.  He immediately became a subject of every conversation in Keene.  His reputation was, according to every person who spoke of him to me, that of a particularly mean person; it seemed like the entire town of Keene was on edge because it was assumed the escapee would make his way back to the area he'd grown up in.  While countless customers remarked as to what a fearsomely mean person he was, Mark said to me that he would bet that Mary would not say an unkind thing about him.  Sure enough, that evening Mary, looking at the guy's picture on the front page of the local newspaper remarked that in his childhood he could not have been "cuter or sweeter."


     I came to think of Mary White as the most saintly person I'd ever known.


     Mark's and my last day in Keene, May 14, 1999, happened to be Mary's birthday.  We wanted to take Mary and Bob out for lunch but Mary, due to "digestive problems," begged off, but did agree to meet us in "The Square".  From there we walked down Main Street to Brewbaker's Cafe.  Sitting at one of the sidewalk tables in the wonderfully warm sun we had cappuccinos and pastries.  It had so happened that from The Square to the cafe we had ran into four or five people Mark and I knew, and we needed to stop and chat with each of them.


     Soon thereafter a note of thanks from Mary arrived at our new home on Cape Cod.  It was on to-die-for stationery illustrated with a particularly beautiful picture of The Blessed Virgin ... something Mary'd probably purchased at some fundraiser at St. Bernard's.


     "The flowers on the square are still exquisite," she wrote, "and every time we walk through it we are reminded of my birthday when we four walked through it, and you two were like Rock Stars with fans following you, expressing their love and avid appreciation!"


     Over the years notes and cards arrived regularly from Mary; we returned our own notes and cards, and I was careful each spring to remember to send a special birthday letter to Mary.  I strained, as evidenced in the opening of my 2004 offering, to make these letters as beautiful as Mary herself:

          "My knack for typing out a letter has, like
          the  tulips and the forsythia, lain dormant
          all winter, but the warm weather and our
          warm birthday thoughts of you have brought
          about a timely resuscitation!"

  

At a party with Merry Mary

     Mary's note in response to my birthday letter in 2006 asked us to pray for Bob: spots had been discovered on his lungs.


     Then there was no Halloween card.


     And then there was no card at Thanksgiving.


     At Christmas-time I wrote in my card to Julia:


               I've become worried about Mary ... as I
               think I mentioned earlier, not a holiday
               has gone by without cheery words from her,
               until this past Halloween and Thanksgiving.
               I suspect she's excellent at spreading good
               cheer but probably not one to share travails.
               This may be a common trait in saints; I
               don't know.  I hesitate to telephone her,
               suspecting she likes privacy in some matters;
               I cannot remember Bob's daughter's name even
               though she worked for us in the store; and so
               I am about to phone Father LaMathe at St.
               Bernard's to see if he knows that Mary and
               Bob are okay.


     On Christmas day the dog and I were just about to leave to go to Mark's parents in Falmouth when Julia Older telephoned.  "I'm so sorry to let you know -- Mary is no longer with us."


     "Oh, no!"


               The stage abruptly dims to dark.  From left and right the
               heavy velvet curtains are yanked toward center stage.  In
               my mind the curtains are a rich burgundy, and have --
               perhaps a foot above the lower hems -- a rich decorative
               stripe of yellow-gold running across them.  The lower
               halves of the yanked curtains linger slightly on their path
               to the center; there is a bit of back and forth sway to them
               -- it's like the hectic sway of the skirt of a woman who is
               doing the tango -- and finally the curtain settles down.

     "Go ahead and cry, George.  I'll cry with you," Julia says.


     Mary had died back on June 14, 2006.  She was 81.  Bob lasted nearly eight months without her; he died, at 74, on Feb. 5th, 2007.


     I like to say, and it is true, that I am rich with friends.


     Along the way, one sometimes becomes poorer.

Anton Webern - December 3, 1883 – September 15, 1945

Anton Webern ... where did I ever run across him? ... I'm drawn to him because I'm drawn to tragedy like a moth is drawn to flame.  I listen to his compositions (always short, usually under ten minutes) on YouTube.  Schoenberg said of Webern, who was his disciple, "Think of the concision which expression in such brief form demands.  Every glance is a poem, every sigh a novel."

Webern lived in Vienna.  Though Catholic he was suspected of Jewishness and was required to prove that his blood was pure Aryan.  Still he was a supporter of the Nazi party, perhaps hoping this would keep him and his family safe; he certainly was not an anti-Semite.  Then, because his compositions were avante garde, Webern was deemed to be a degenerate artist; he was sacked from his conducting job.  His one son, a soldier, was killed on the Eastern front.  Some seven months later, the war over, Anton Webern, despite a curfew, stepped outside his home to smoke a cigar.  In a careless situation of mistaken identity, Webern was shot dead by an American soldier whose unit was investigating a case of black marketing.

It is reported that the soldier who shot Webern lived every moment afterwards with deep remorse; tragedy begetting tragedy, he died some ten years later from the effects of alcoholism. 

I've read that Webern, with his wife, is buried in the Mittsersill Kirchhof Cemetery in Mittersill, Austria, but am unable to find a picture of his stone.

Elizabeth Hardwick - 7/27/16 - 12/2/2007

I was living in Keene, New Hampshire, in 1996 when I learned that Joan Didion would be, on a Sunday afternoon, in the nearby town of Peterborough to accept the MacDowell Medal awarded by the MacDowell Art Colony.  I would drive over to Peterborough and gawk and swoon.  Then, doubling the thrill, it was revealed that the medal would be presented to Ms. Didion by Elizabeth Hardwick.  I loved the essays and novels of both Hardwick and Didion ... and it occurred to me that Hardwick herself was equally worthy of the medal.


I checked the records and learned that, no, Elizabeth Hardwick had never received it, though she had on two other occasions been the presenter of the medal -- in 1984 to Mary McCarthy, and in 1979, to John Cheever.  (If I'm not mistaken the honoree gets to choose whom he/she would like to have as the presenter.)  For Ms. Hardwick to present thrice and receive not once seemed like her being asked three times to be the bridesmaid but never the bride.


Hardwick, who grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, could hardly wait to finish school and move to New York  where, she said, she wanted to become a writer, an intellectual, and Jewish.  She accomplished admirably two of the three goals.


Here are some samples of Elizabeth Hardwick's thinking and prose; particularly brilliant passages which I copied onto index cards when reading various of her essays:


From "Domestic Manners": "Sex, sex -- what good does it do anyone to 'study' more and better orgams, to open forbidden orifices, to experiment, to put himself into the satisfaction laboratory, the intensive care ware of 'fulfillment.'  The body is a poor vessel for transcendence.  Satiety, in life, is quick and inevitable.  The return of anxiety, debts, bad luck, age, work, thought, interest in the passing scene, ambition, anger cannot be deferred by lovemaking.  The consolations of sex are fixed and just what they have always been."


From "Militant Nudes": "The nature of sexuality is repetition.  Phallic compulsiveness is an exaltation of repetition and yet a reduction to routine of the most drastic kind.  Still, novelty and challenge never lose their hold on the imagination and in the phallic hell the center of interest will be reserved for the refusing, even for the impotent."


From, again "Domestic Manners":  "... one phenomenon of the seventies -- the demonic acceleration of investments in gurus, encounters, magical healings, diets, transcendencies and transformations that compete, like varieties of aspirin, for the remission of aches of the mind and psyche."


And, finally, in "Thomas Mann at 100," a precise and wonderful appreciation of Mann's genius:  "The description of the young boy Tadzio in "Death in Venice" surpasses in tenderness and lyricism anything in Mann's work.  'No scissors had been put to the lovely hair that ... curled about his brows, above his ears, longer still at the neck.  He wore an English sailor suit, with quilted sleeves that narrowed round the delicate wrists of his long and slender though still childish hands.  His facial tint was ivory-white against the golden darkness of his  cluttering locks.'  When Tadzio smiles, Aschenbach, the aging writer, in a seizure of intense misery and feeling, falls onto a bench in the garden and whispers the 'ridiculous enough, yet sacred too ... "I love you!"'  The catastrophic onset of love is the same damage to the soul that disease is to the body."


And so, on that extremely hot summer day in Peterborough I got to hear Elizabeth Hardwick make a wonderful speech praising Joan Didion, and I snapped a blurry black and white photo of Hardwick while she spoke; and then, after the ceremony, a friend took a picture of Joan Didion autographing my copy of The White Album.


Elizabeth Hardwick died three years ago today.