Saturday, January 29, 2011

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Tip-Off Classic

Abby and I loved going to the Tip-Off Classic every year, seeing College Basketball's best teams, and visiting uno numero amigos in Northampton.  Then Tip-Off Classic was cancelled.  Now I've learned they started it up again this past November. I don't know where my tickets for 1989, 1990, and 1998 are, but we were there.  I'll run across them later and do this all again.

Saturday, January 22, 2011

Pebbles on Gravestones

Saint Francis Xavier Cemetery; Centerville, Mass.

When Sargent Shriver died this week I, having an idle moment and an idle mind, searched the Internet for a picture of his wife's gravesite. The pebbles atop her stone reminded me of how much I like the Jewish tradition of leaving a marker of your visit. The custom has been adopted by many gentiles, including me.*  I wondered: what is the meaning of the gesture? ... when did it begin?


No one knows, there's only speculation:


1. Burying someone is an act of kindness and respect. Erecting a tombstone is mitzvah, a commandment or charitable act. By adding to the marker we participate in mitzvah.


2. The earliest reference to the practice is in an ancient Jewish midrash (an explanation of, generally, Biblical passages)which tells of each of Jacob's sons carrying a stone to put on Rachel's grave.


3. In a book titled The Reasons for the Customs Ithak Sperling says simply, "We put grass and pebbles on the grave to show that the visitor was at the grave. It is sort of a calling card ...."


4. Before the onset of the manufacture of gravestones, each mourner brought a small stone; the many were formed into a heap, a cairn, to mark the spot.
------
*I practice the custom, that is, when I remember -- on my last visit to France I packed a handful of pebbles I had gathered on the beaches here.  Back home, having totally forgotten them, I came across them when I unpacked. 

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Anton Webern - Part III (Correction)

The photo I posted on January 12 of what I thought to be Anton Webern's grave marker is most likely a commemorative plaque instead.  A subsequent Google search by another reader has led to a picture of what is surely Webern's grave in Mittersill, Austria.  Now I need to write the mayor of Mittersill to ask if she/he knows if the plaque is perhaps affixed to Webern's home.

Friday, January 14, 2011

Happy Birthday to my niece Liz - One Day Late


You can't beat having Liz as a niece. Here's what it can be like ... you get up early and drive to Hyannis where you wait to get on a bus; at the nearby Burger King you have a scrambled egg on a croissant; this is served with nuggets of potato that are frightfully delicious and you know they have nothing to do with nutrition; in Boston you eat some more crap from a fast-food stand while you wait to get on a plane; airborne you eat some chemically-laced pretzels served with a glass of ginger ale (the latter being something they haven't yet learned how to ruin); in Indianapolis you wait to rent a car. Then, craving a breaded tenderloin sandwich (a Hoosier specialty), you drive north for two hours in the brilliant eye-wearying sun. You finally arrive at your sister's and are sitting across the room from one of that sister's daughters.  That would be, in this narrative, Liz. You're so tired you could flop over asleep the minute you hit the chair. You feel crappy from having eaten the plastic potatoes at Burger King and then the airport's and the airplane's "food". Despite Liz's having been awakened from a nap by your arrival, she immediately begins a really funny story about a time when she, rather than her husband who was loaded down with bags, went to the rental car counter at an airport. The encounter at the counter is presented as an anecdote of disaster. It's hilarious. You're not tired anymore. You're energized. You're laughing so much it's starting to hurt.

And then she and her husband Tony later take you and your sister out for a breaded tenderloin. The slab of pork is approximately the size of a dinner plate!

Happy one-day-belated birthday, Liz!  

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Anton Webern - Part II

The amazing Internet: On December 3, 2010, I blogged a piece about Austrian composer Anton Webern, and lamented that I could not find a picture of his gravestone.  A kind man in the Philippines has emailed me a photo. 

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Thomas Stearns Eliot - Sept. 26, 1888 - Jan, 4, 1965

I've kept the above paperback by my bed for many years.  I read in it often.  I think I've  had it at least thirty if not forty years. It is so well-made -- thanks Harcourt Brack Jovanovich -- that it shows hardly any wear.


Very few people have put words together in ways never done before to make beautiful lines for stunning poems.  Eliot did.  His poems were and are stupendous blasts of originality.  Here's the opening of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Profrock":


          Let us go then, you and I,
          When the evening is spread out against the sky
          Like a patient etherized upon a table;
          Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
          The muttering retreats
          Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
          And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
          Streets that follow like a tedious argument
          Of insidious intent
          To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
          Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
          Let us go and make our visit.


Eliot was born in St. Louis but went to England after graduating from Harvard; he made England his home.  "My mind may be American but my heart is British," he said.


Elliot's ashes are interred in St. Michael's Church in East Coker, an English village from which his paternal ancestor, Andrew Eliot, left to come to America in the 17th century.  A plaque in the church commemorates one of the 20th century's most amazing poets:




Sunday, January 2, 2011

Great Birthday Card


In 1962 I bought a brand new Rambler just like this, and Rod remembers it well!

1st Prize - Holiday Cards 2010

From friends Jim Rann & Peter McDonough in Provincetown; thanks for lots of exes and lots of o's!

Front



Inside

Saturday, January 1, 2011

Great Birthday Cards #1

Created by one of my favorite artists thirty years ago.  Click on images to enlarge.



"This is Not a Poem"

This Is Not A Poem 

I

On New Year’s Day, nineteen forty-nine,
at somewhere around nine a.m.
my dad and I walked up to his office.
I don’t know why; I guess he needed something from there.
It was above the bank in our little Indiana town.
There’d been an ice storm during the night;
the sidewalks and streets couldn't have been slicker.
At Main Street a car was coming.  Dad took my hand --
this was not like him -- and the car passed.
Hand in hand, we crossed.
It was my birthday! I was nine! 
Too big, I thought, to be holding my dad’s hand.
Later, after what was to transpire had transpired,
I was to wonder if he’d taken my hand protectively,
as an adult customarily would take a child’s hand,
or if it was rather to steady himself;
wondered if this was an early sign of the illness
that soon was to overcome him, be the death of him.
For it was on a morning not long after that New Year’s Day
that I overheard my mother say
(directing her words to my oldest brother)
“Dad says he doesn’t feel good.
He can’t get up this morning.”
Her hands, in a gesture of worry,
were clasped before her waist, her fingers entwined.
So, yes, Dad could not get up that day ...
nor the next day ... nor, indeed, ever again.
He went into the hospital.  He grew thin and sallow.
When there was, as the doctors said,
nothing they could do, they brought him home ...
better to die in his own bed.
Sent him home to lie in a narrow iron-framed bed.
It set against the west wall of the living room,
close to the chimney.
Later a hospital bed was acquired.
It was placed in the southeast corner of the living room.
There, except for slow, labored breathing, 
he lay sick and silent.  Sometimes we were told to go outside to play.
“You’re making  too much noise.”
On a Saturday evening in July I happened to be crossing
the living room, headed upstairs when I noticed my mother
was leaning over Dad’s bed;  my ears perked; I heard her say,
“Do you feel better, Tom?”  Ah, I thought, he can get better?
His response wasn’t easy, it was slow in coming, but he finally said,
“No.”  And then, after a pause, “Worse.”
The next morning us kids ... well, we kids, as I’ve learned I should say ...
eight of us, we packed ourselves into the thirty-six Chevrolet
with its horsehair seats; we made our twelve-mile way
to Warsaw for the Low Mass at Sacred Heart.
Returning home, back in Mentone, we turned off State Road Twenty-Five
onto State Road Nineteen -- a point from which we could now see
the corner above our house.  There stood a neighborly gathering --
Isabella Lantz, Beuthene Smythe, Fawn Janke ... maybe another one or two ...
I don’t remember.
“Everybody’s standin’ on the corner,” my sister Martha Rose said.
And, having the situation sized-up immediately, she added,
“Somethin’ must-a happened to Dad.”
We turned left onto Jackson Street , where our house set at three-o-eight west,
just in time to witness, at the opposite end of that three hundred block,
Bob Reed’s heavy black hearse slowly turning left onto Walnut Street.
In the house Mother stood in the middle of the living room.
Her freshly widowed hands were clasped anew in front of her waist,
and again her eyes were aimed at those of her oldest son
(as if. in deadly serious moments,
we younger ones could have only the remnants of her attention).
“Dad died while you were at church this morning,” she said.

II

I fell into a silence. I could think of nothing to say that day,
nor the next, nor the next, nor the next, and so on.
I did not know how I was supposed to act,
I just tried to stay out of the way.
I came to feel enclosed within myself,
reverted to the quietness of my father’s illness.
Thoughts banged around in my brain, but went nowhere.
Once I wondered if maybe Dad hadn’t really died while we were at Mass,
as Mother had said, but had, rather, passed during the night --
had lain there in the living room, already dead;
fatally undisturbed by the commotion of
eight kids needing to get up and dressed,
rushing up and down the stairs, tromping here and there
through the living room, in and out of the adjacent bathroom,
banging doors, hearing hurry up and get in the car’
We couldn’t be late because four of us were acolytes;
Father Mannion -- a good man, my dad’s friend -- 
Father Mannion wouldn't put up with late.
Accustomed to paying scant attention
to the man lying so long, lying so quietly,
over in the corner, we wouldn’t necessarily
have noticed that, while we'd slept, life had become death.

III

I didn’t miss Dad for a long time.
I forgot him, or set him aside, put him out of mind.
Then, at some point -- four, five, six years later --
I began missing him.  I wanted to see him. I wanted to know him.
I wanted him to tell me what to do and show me how to do.
The idea of him obsessed me.
And then, when I couldn’t imagine him enough -- when it just wasn’t working --
I came across the desperately deranged idea of digging him up;
I could see if he was really real or was nothing but an imagined figment.
And then again, I managed to put him out of mind.

IV

There was one excellent photograph of him;
I coveted it; I claimed it; I used it as a bookmark.
Then, in nineteen sixty-two, I left it tucked in Seven Pillars of Wisdom
in the bath of a hotel room in Elwood, Indiana.
For that dumb deed, among many other dumb deeds,
I have never been able to forgive myself.

V

Dad was seventy-one when he died.
Today it is again my birthday -- my seventy-first!
That this has come to be is an astonishment  --
it’s a matter of, I suppose, relativity,
but I'm no Einstein, so don't really know.
Anyhow, I’m not really seventy-one.
I'm clinging to a beloved and unbecoming immaturity.
I coddle it.  I fondle it.   
I dandle my faux-youth on my knee.

VI

The street is free of ice today,
and this is not a poem.

VII

Or it is a poem.
I’m frozen in time.
It's nineteen forty-nine.
The street is glazed with ice.
His hand is warm.