Poem Page

I

n October of 1962 there appeared in the Halloween issue of The Star a short poem in honor of the season. It read (more or less):

     A Halloween Poem. Copyright 1961

You’re looking at a post
When suddenly a ghost
Jumps out and gives a very frightful BOO!
A witch goes riding by
Away up in the sky
And suddenly a black cat howls at you.

The goblins have begun
To have a lot of fun
And then you think “Good grief! It’s Halloween!”

The Star was a short-lived periodical put out by a couple of grade-school kids (me and a friend, actually) from late 1961 to mid-1963 with a brief revival in early 1965. There were perhaps a dozen issues, with no more than fifteen or twenty copies made of each. We sold them to friends, family, and classmates. Only a handful of scattered copies survive.

The poem was mine (I say with reservations), and I wrote it in fifth grade—for what purpose I’m not sure. I wrote stuff like this constantly, often takeoffs and imitations. (I burlesqued Sara Coleridge’s “The Months” for one, by featuring the drawbacks of each month; and I transformed Jane Taylor’s “The Star” into a celebration of artificial satellites.) Most of it had no purpose except to entertain my friends and family, and to some extent to relieve the frustrations of school.

Fifth grade was particularly irritating, what with having a teacher who began the day with prayer and fire-and-brimstone preaching, before launching into a program of rote learning and copying paragraphs off the blackboard or out of books to be handed in and never seen again. (Mrs. Allen didn’t believe in creative writing or returning papers.) Definitions had to be memorized exactly; deviate from the text as handed down by Mrs. Allen by as much as a single word and that answer was wrong. None of this new-fangled nonsense about the idea being the important thing for her; no, memorization was the key whether you understood it or not.

It was in Mrs. Allen’s class that I wrote a poem about Halloween, a poem that my friends at least found amusing enough to hear, recite—and in at least one case, remember. It was not quite the poem as given above, however. You may have noticed something off about the second verse—it is half as long as the first, and is missing a rhyme for the word “Halloween.” As originally written it was a full verse, and there was a rhyme-word—but I have no copy of it from that time, and have to rely on my aging memory. The missing first three lines should have read:

From somewhere up the street
You hear a “trick or treat,”
And a yellow jack o’ lantern can be seen.

In spite of the lapse of time I’m actually quite certain of these lines, although I suppose it could have been down the street rather than up it. At least when I turned this paper up a few years back the other lines were all as I’d remembered them. But even with that the story is a little more complicated.

As I said, I don’t know why I wrote this—but I must have intended it for something, because I gave it to my mother to edit, which I normally did only for something I was submitting to somebody somewhere—a teacher, an editor, whatever. It wouldn’t have been for my teacher; Mrs. Allen had no tolerance for creative efforts by children. (Her light reading, she told us repeatedly, consisted of the Bible and Emerson’s essays.) We didn’t have any sort of literary magazine at the school, as far as I can recall. I might have planned to submit it to a contest or something—but if so that detail now escapes me.

It might have been intended for the first issue of The Star. I was definitely working on it in late October 1961, and I might have planned on including it. I probably didn’t, since the issue actually came out in early November (the last item I added, which I had to make room for, was the death of James Thurber on the 2nd), but that might have been my plan. As far as I know no copy of that issue survives; there were only three of them (since I did it with typewriter and carbonless paper) and I sold them all. But anyway, if I was planning on including it that might explain why I submitted it to my mother.

And that’s where I ran into a problem. You see, the final three lines originally noted that what with things looking as peculiar as they do, you exclaim Good God—maybe it’s Halloween. My mother said that the piece was fine as it stood except for one thing—the expression “Good God” had to go. She suggested “Good grief” as a replacement.

That was all very well and good, but as originally written God was my rhyme-word at the end of the fifth line, probably rhyming with odd at the end of the fourth. (I remember the sense of the thing, but not the exact wording.) Changing God to grief necessitated rewriting the fourth line as well. And, although the original lines had come easily to me, now I couldn’t think of anything that worked.

Abruptly a couplet—the one about goblins given above—popped into my mind and I threw it out at my mother. That’s fine, she said, but how are you going to finish it now? Well, it was easy enough. I didn’t like it, but I truncated the original line about it maybe being Halloween to a sudden realization in half a line, and the verse was done. And my friends seemed to like it as well as the original, so I just let it lie. And a year went by.

During that time my best friend took over as publisher and general manager of The Star (so the surviving issues say) while I held the position of editor. Other friends and relatives are listed as artists, reporters, and so on. We were now using a hectograph (or rather two hectographs) as our printing press. And I seem to have been losing interest in the thing. The Halloween issue of 1962 appears to be almost entirely my friend’s work. Page 3, the poem page, begins with the piece as noted, defective second verse and all.

You see, my friend had memorized the poem—but had forgotten part of it. (Years later he reprinted it in the same defective form for a school paper—also from memory.) It was flattering, I suppose, but I would have been a lot happier if he had managed to remember the whole damn thing—or better yet given me a chance to fix it.

Well, sic transit I guess. Time has passed on, and so has the publisher of The Star, and its chief reporter as well. But I survive, and even if I don’t give a damn now, I feel as if I owe something to the kid I once was. So here, as an act of belated justice to the ten-year-old who would have liked to see his poem published the way he wrote it, I will give it as best I can, allowing for the limitations of my sources and my memory:

You’re looking at a post
When suddenly a ghost
    Jumps out and gives a very frightful BOO!
A witch goes riding by
Away up in the sky
    And suddenly a black cat howls at you.

From somewhere up the street
You hear a “Trick or treat”
    And a yellow jack o’ lantern can be seen.
Since things are looking odd,
You stop and say, “Good God!
    I think perhaps it might be Halloween!”

Terror

Okay, look, here’s what’s going on. I can’t write, I’m about a month and a half from being homeless, and I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Phantoms of future terrors are ripping the words from my mind and leaving me speechless. I can’t blame my inability to write on this, really—I’ve had entries I intended to make for the last two years, but nothing seems to work when I try to type the words on my keyboard. I’ve even tried writing on paper again, but the problem isn’t with the physical method; it’s with the part that happens behind the eyes.

Like on Sunday

Sitting here, in front of my computer, I feel a sudden jolt of sadness shake me. And then it crosses my mind—it’s sunday. Sunday evening. Hello darkness my old friend; LoS is back. Like on Sunday. A sense of sorrow, of regret, that all good things were coming to an end and there was nothing left to look forward to. In my journal, after trying to explain it a couple of times, I started just saying that I feel “like on sunday”, and then just abbreviating it LoS.

Originally, of course, it was about the weekend—a time that had been so bright with promise friday night reduced to ashes of might-have-beens on sunday. A time when the consequences of procrastination had to be faced and that massive assignment given two weeks ago actually had to be done in a handful of hours. A time when the demons danced and the forces of hell rejoiced.

But for most of my life sunday evening has meant no more than any other time; my schedule is as likely to involve me doing something on the weekend as doing something on weekdays. And yet, still the feeling comes. There is something basic, primeval, in this rhythm of despair. The number of times I’ve had the sense of LoS wash over me on a sunday night cannot be counted.

And therein lies the rub. Cherry-picking, confirmation bias, all that sort of thing. Does LoS really happen on schedule, appearing on the summons of a long-ago school schedule? Being more than usually self-obsessed I’ve actually kept records of this feeling, along with other irrational shafts of displeasure, and—at least while I was actually keeping the record—discovered that LoS was no more likely to happen on a sunday evening than at any other time. Nor was I particularly prone to it on a sunday. I just notice it more, apparently, when it does come then.

And yet—and yet it feels to me as if it does. Many times, like the bolt from the blues just now, I have felt the familiar stroke of a minor chord across the strings of my spirit and believed myself to be participating in a long-dead ritual set in the stones of my childhood and mindlessly perpetuated by some sort of cosmic clock. But it probably isn’t. Far more likely it is nothing more than the consequence of a choice of label given when groping for a shorthand to describe a nameless impression a long time ago.

Messing with the Clocks

Many thousands of years ago, when I was in fifth grade, my insane fundamentalist teacher said something I have never forgotten—What business does the government have to tell us how to set our clocks? If people want to get up an hour earlier, they should just do it. (Or words to that effect.) And then a good many years later, in high school, we had a reading in one of our books where some nineteenth-century writer was complaining about the government adopting railroad time. If we don’t watch out, he warned, we’ll be getting up, dining, and going to bed on railroad time, instead of God’s own time as regulated by the sun.

Well that guy, whoever he was, turned out to be a sort of prophet, since the time zones we live by were a direct outgrowth of the railroads’ need for some sort of conformity. It’s one thing for every little town and hamlet to have its own time when the Pony Express represents the last word in speed, but as things speed up conformity is in order. And arguments about whose time, exactly, should prevail, are going to have to be settled ultimately by some sort of civil authority. It’s a natural government function, really.

Personally I don’t think that time zones go far enough. I’d opt for some sort of greater uniformity. If it were up to me, the whole world would be on Universal Time, and here on the Pacific Coast of North America we'd be getting up around 15:00 and sacking out around 6:00 on the day following. If the whole world were on one time we could simply dump the inconvenience of time table conversions and the like. I’d develop that theme a bit, except that I’ve noticed that people generally change the subject and edge away when I bring the concept up. The world isn’t ready, maybe.

On the other hand, one of the few things I do agree with my fifth grade teacher on is this business of messing with the clocks. It does seem a bit much that every few months some government bureaucrat is telling me to change my clock an hour ahead, or an hour back, or something. What about splitting the difference? Maybe next October we could just turn the clock a half-hour back and leave it there. It’s just a thought. Always assuming, of course, that that Universal Time thing is out of the question.

If Anybody’s Wondering

December’s been eaten up with a host of small annoyances, mostly involving diseases of one kind or another. One household resident has gastroenteritis, another had a nasty cold, one of the resident cats appears to be engaged in dying (she is sixteen years old, so it’s not unreasonable, though sad), and I’ve come down with some sort of energy-draining virus which is giving me the shakes and makes it impossible for me to stay upright for more than minutes at a time. I have some entries started, but as most of them were intended to be holiday-related, they probably will end up stillborn. Can’t be helped, I guess.

I hope to be back soon.

Possible Paranoia #341

Regular readers (and shallow acquaintances) may well be aware that I have a paranoid side, and as I have a blog, I'm going to indulge it here. Today (Saturday, 17 September 2011) from about 4:30 to say 5:20 in the afternoon there was a white car parked directly in front of my house whose driver was acting in a suspicious manner. He appeared to have just pulled in when I went to sit on my porch, but instead of getting out of the car, he just sat there for over half an hour, apparently playing with something that (viewed through his heavily tinted window) resembled a feather duster. He kept looking over at the house as though waiting for something to happen; my cat was indifferent but my dog didn't care for his being there. I finally went inside to get my camera, and when I came back out he had rolled his window down and was brandishing something (I couldn't tell what it was) in the direction of the house. I took two pictures of his car, at which point he abruptly hightailed it out of there.

As a precaution I noted down a few salient facts about the vehicle. It was a white car, with an EcoPro logo on its side. The name Paul Wells was prominent. I took down the license plate number as well; I have it written on a piece of paper on my desk.

I'm sure there has to be some innocent explanation for all this, but I can't think of one, and my mind leaps quickly to the thought of being murdered in my bed by some maniac carjacker with an indescribable torture device that resembles a feather-duster in silhouette. I kind of hope not--but just in case.... EOP.

Still Alive

Bad things continue to happen here, as the wheels of injustice grind on. Although our lawyer says things are under control and negotiations are continuing, somebody or other is attaching threatening messages to the side of our house, ordering us out post hoc, and our new resident boarder has flipped out, saying that he has no intention of staying in a house where such shenanigans are permitted, or rather that he has no intention of paying money to stay in such a house. I thought that might mean he was leaving, but, no, apparently it means that he will send snide e-mails and hole up in his room, complaining about his fellow-boarders (namely us). Focus is not where it's at today.

Another Day Without Blogging

It’s overcast and the yuccas are blooming out front, and for whatever reason I’m feeling groggy and out of it. I slept most of the day. Sunday night my nephew and I made a night-excursion out to buy groceries thanks to a small but sudden influx of money; we headed out on the last train Sunday night, bought groceries, and returned on the first train Monday morning. Thanks to a variety of mostly uninteresting setbacks (getting out at the wrong stop, for one, and running into some kind of malfunction with the store’s card-reading system, for another) our time was largely eaten up with trivia, so the four-hour gap between trains was as nothing, and we got home safe and sound with our kill. The internet facilitated trip planning, and cell phone technology meant that we could get help lugging our supplies back to camp. And without light rail we would have been back in the dark ages of strange interconnecting busses. Life in the twenty-first century, I guess.

Holding Entry

Okay, I blew this entry. So instead, here's a picture of my great-grandfather using his homemade barber chair at his barbershop in Steamboat Springs, nearly a century ago now. With any luck blogging will resume shortly.

Vinyl Memories: The Baroque Beatles Book

Many years ago, in some high-school class or other—World History, maybe—we had a guest presentation by an art teacher of four centuries or so of Western Art—slides and music, as I recall, depicting painting and sculpture while accompanied by examples of music from the various eras—Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and so on.

One bit that cracked me up was a piece selected for the Baroque section. Although it sounded as if it ought to be something by (say) Bach, it was actually a sort of orchestral fanfare version of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” I asked the guest presenter about it when the question-and-answer session came, and he said it was from something called The Baroque Beatles Book by Joshua Rifkin. I didn’t say this, but I thought it was kind of a clever idea, using a familiar tune to illustrate the peculiarities of the era’s music, but that illusion was immediately shattered when a girl in my class raised her hand to ask what on earth did that piece have to do with the Beatles or “I Want to Hold Your Hand”? as she at least saw no similarity between them. Several others appeared to agree with that assessment, and the class went on.

This is an example of what I would have called a “travesty” at the time—though my Latin teacher said there was no such literary genre, pointed out that travesty and transvestite were from the same roots, and traced the components back to reconstructed Proto-Indo-European. But I digress. “Travesty”—a change of clothes—dressing one subject in the style of another. It’s an old sport. It can be done for humorous effect, as with the eighteenth-century Hamlet Travestie (which took aim as much at contemporary Shakespeare scholarship as at Shakespeare himself), or seriously, as with the Duke Ellington versions of suites by Tchaikovsky and Grieg. Rifkin’s effort was somewhere in between, as indicated by his own notes: “We were absolutely crazy about this music,” he observed, meaning the Lennon-McCartney compositions. “Even if we had fun with it, it was fun with it in a way that was taking it seriously, giving it its due.”

I recently dug up my old copy of the record and listened to it again. My current system (essentially my computer) sucks, but it was still enjoyable. The liner notes, supposedly written by a Baroque musician looking for patronage, are at least mildly amusing:

I have also written, for your splendid court festivities—to which your unworthy servant hopes that he may be invited—a festive cantata, beginning with the words and melody of Please Please Me (your Lordship will remember how you sang it to me with a most melodious voice while we played croquet that afternoon, I still limp from the broken leg I suffered when you, justly displeased with my insolent correction of the way you sang the second half of the melody—how like an upstart of me to suggest to you that it was in the major mode—properly struck me).

About the same time I heard three Indian musicians do a version of “Greensleeves” featuring a sarod. That was memorable too, but it wasn’t recorded, and I can’t revisit it

Hobbling Down Memory Lane

One artifact I own is an old walking-stick. When my knee abruptly gave out a year or so back and I was hobbling about my nephew found it somewhere and brought it to me to help me get around. I don’t ordinarily use it; there’s a crack running through it, and I can’t trust it to bear my weight, but it worked for that moment. It belonged to my great-grandfather G. F. Weaver who, in the 1930s, left it behind when he went for his final walk on the land where he’d found gold, just after signing over all his rights in it to his partners. His body was found a couple of days later at the bottom of a ravine where he’d apparently fallen, and his walking-stick was among the meager effects sent to his family.

He was an interesting guy, to judge from the contradictory accounts that have come down about him, a preacher, an inventor, a visionary, a horse-doctor, a man who abandoned his family (first absconding with the money from the sale of their crops) to seek a golden fortune out west, a man who traded the rights to an invention for land in Kentucky that didn’t exist, and according to his own story witnessed the assassination of the governor-elect there when trying to seek redress for his wrongs. To this day he has his partisans and detractors in the family. Me, I’m agnostic. Whatever he was, he was.

He was the youngest (and favorite) son of a farmer, James I. Weaver, a man whose entire life is encompassed in the fading script of the family Bible that sits in front of me as I write these words. Born in Kentucky in 1818, the son of a preacher, he married the daughter of a preacher in 1844 and died in Texas in 1888. If he had a life outside of farming, I’ve failed to find it. Tradition has it that he and his wife Rhoda wanted their son to be a preacher like their fathers, and G. F. was, at least briefly. He performed at least one marriage in Texas, before giving it up. Did I mention that G. F. was also a barber and a Bible-salesman?

Anyway, James’ father David (1791-1854) was a preacher, one of the mainstays of a Baptist church in the wilderness of Kentucky. “His labors extended over Laurel, Knox, Whitley and Clay counties,” Elder J. W. Moran wrote of him, “and few men have sacrificed more for the cause of Christ than he. He so ordered his life that the most hardened in wickedness could bring no charge against him. His voice was clear and musical, and his manner was very pleasing. He was greatly beloved by the people to whom he preached.” Blind in his latter years, he had to be carried to church to preach.

His father Samuel (1755-1842) was (thank God) not a preacher, Baptist or otherwise, though he was the progenitor of a large tribe of Weavers. He was a giant of a man—over seven feet tall according to family tradition—and lived at various times in his long life (he was almost 87 when he died) in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Kentucky. His name turns up in numerous land, tax, and census records, though as there were other Samuel Weavers abroad in the land it is difficult to be sure which belong to him, and which to others. As far as those records show his life was uneventful, spent in farming and raising a numerous brood of children with his wife—supposedly a descendent of Gutenberg, of printing-press fame.

In the 1830s he applied for a pension from the government on the basis of his participation in the Revolutionary War, and to that end narrated his experiences. About eighty at the time, his memory was none too good, and the accounts (there are two) filled with phrases like “he does not now recollect” and “neither does he remember”. Still, the story he tells runs something like this:

Somewhere around March in the year 1780, while living in Surry county, North Carolina, he was drafted to serve in the Continental Army. His company commander was Captain Jacob Camplin, who took the outfit south to Charleston, then under siege by the British. Before they got there “a call was made for men to stay and guard baggage wagons and he was one of these, he supposed about thirty, but for what cause the baggage was kept there at the time he can not say, but supposes it was in Consequence of the Siege…” For this reason he missed the siege of Charleston, which fell on 12 May of that year. Captain Camplin returned from the siege with a knee injury, according to Samuel Weaver, and he was delegated to look after him on his way back home, “which he did, tho under much difficulty and trouble, the wound being very severe.”

No sooner than he got home he was discharged, his three months being up, and he returned to his family home, where he walked into a domestic drama. It seems his father had just been drafted, and his mother was in considerable “distress of mind” at the idea of parting with him. So Samuel “resolved to go himself … if the officers would receive him, he told this to his father and Mother … but his father was preparing for the trip and said nothing in reply.” Carrying out this plan Samuel talked to the officer in charge, who “seemed to be much gratified” at the switch, and immediately discharged his father. Samuel soon found himself on his way back to Virginia where they joined troops also on their way south.

Samuel doesn’t say what troops they were, but the time and place suggests they could have been Maryland troops under De Kalb headed south to try to break the British stranglehold there. These troops were combined with others and the whole put under the command of Horatio Gates, who then led them to mass slaughter in a vain attempt to take Camden, South Carolina, on 16 August. Once again, however, Samuel Weaver missed the battle; he (along with others) joined Francis Marion. Presumably this was when the Swamp Fox and a few picked men were detached to cut off the expected retreat of the British after they were defeated at Camden.

In reality the British were not defeated, and Marion ended up lurking in the swamp, carrying out occasional raids against the Tories. Samuel Weaver vaguely remembered taking part in several night actions, and one day skirmish, but the one thing that stuck out in his mind about this chapter in his life was this:

During the time he was with Genl. Marion, a British Officer as he was told came into Camp, but for what he does not know, he was roasting & bakeing Sweet Potatoes on the Coles—Genl. Marion Steped up with the British Officer and remarked he believed he would take Breakfast, he felt proud at the request, puled out his potatoes, wiped the ashes off with a dirty handkerchief, placed them on a pine log (which was all the provision they had) and Genl. Marion and the British Officer partook of them. He has been told by some that this has been recorded in the life of the Genl. as a dinner, but this was a breakfast.

So, apparently, Samuel Weaver was the very soldier who took part in this famous episode, first revealed to the public by Mason Weems, of George Washington and the cherry tree fame. It’s a sobering thought.

After about a month with Marion Samuel Weaver ended up on hospital duty, was discharged, and returned home. This wasn’t the last of his adventures in the war—the next year he again volunteered and headed off to do battle at Guilford. Again he missed the battle; the volunteers stayed to help bury the dead and then went back home. And even then, according to his narrative, he enrolled as a minute man, and continued to be called up as needed for brief skirmishes.

Now, it’s Memorial Day, and I don’t want to cast aspersions on the memory of the old guy, but there are problems with this narrative. (I’m sure you already guessed that, if you’ve spent any time here.) First, Jacob Camplin, the captain whose knee was injured during the siege of Charleston? Okay, there really was a Jacob Camplin, seemingly, and he really did injure his knee—but not at the siege of Charleston. He injured it a year earlier, at the Battle of Stono Ferry, 20 June 1779. Near Charleston, true, but not at that time and place. Further, an account by a fellow named John Melugin (and this is not my research) seems quite similar to Samuel’s—Melugin left Surry County (like Samuel Weaver) under Captain Jacob Camplin headed for Charleston. During the events there he was assigned to drive a wagon and as a result missed the battle at Stono Ferry where Captain Camplin was injured. He then (like Samuel Weaver) went home.

Okay, so what? So the old guy was a year off, got the Siege of Charleston mixed up with the Battle of Stono Ferry—what of it? Well, the thing is, it’s not that simple. You see, Jacob Camplin didn’t come back from that battle to be helped home by Samuel Weaver or any other soldier—he was taken prisoner by the British, and not released for over a year. So that whole part of his story, the “difficulty and trouble” of getting the captain home with his severe injury, kind of drops out. And further, if the Stono Ferry redating be accepted, then there’s no way he could have been one of Marion’s guerillas, as Marion didn’t take up his career as the Swamp Fox until the next year. Samuel Weaver’s narrative is quite tight here—he gets home after nursemaiding Captain Camplin to find that his father has been drafted, and he sets out immediately to replace him, at this time joining up with Francis Marion. Poke at it anywhere and the story kind of unravels and falls apart.

One more thing—that sweet potato story. It was pretty well known in the 1830s, when Samuel Weaver was applying for his pension. Now I hadn’t originally planned on going into this, but as J. L. Bell is doing a nice job deconstructing this legend at Boston 1775, I’ve got to at least point people in his direction. There is considerable doubt as to whether this event even occurred, let alone that Samuel Weaver took the part he assigns to himself in it. I can’t help but wonder whether, perhaps, his own memories of events being shaky, he didn’t appropriate bits and pieces of stories around him to fill out an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

That he took some part in the Revolution doesn’t seem to be in question—too many people were willing to swear to it on his behalf. It doesn’t look like sheer fantasy, in the manner of William Drannan. But the specifics he recalls, when they can be checked on, are iffy. If he went out with Captain Camplin on the occasion when the captain’s knee was injured, it must have been in 1779, and the battle must have been Stono Ferry. If he escorted a wounded officer back from either Stono Ferry or the Siege of Charleston it can’t have been Captain Camplin, who was a prisoner of war at the time. If he was in the swamps with Francis Marion it is unlikely that he took part in a dinner (or breakfast as he insists) that nobody recalled until Mason Weems used it to pad out a heavily-fictionalized biography. It’s frustrating, but there it is. Like the crack running through my great-grandfather's walking-stick, there are cracks running through his great-grandfather's war stories. The old man’s memory can’t be trusted.

I doubt very much that he’s romancing; the stories are too mundane. (Again, take a look at William Drannan to see what happens when fantasy replaces memory.) But events have somehow become jumbled and are mixed with things that never were.

I’m reminded of another time, when a much more recent ancestor of mine—my father, actually—lay dying in a Portland hospital. A veteran of World War II, he kept returning to scenes long past, his once-sharp mind dulled with drugs and delusions. Convinced for some reason he was in a war zone, he would ask about the enemy—how close they were, and whether we were going to be evacuated. “How long was your father in Vietnam?” one of the attendants asked. It was a tough question. I didn’t know where the Vietnam thing was coming from. He’d been on a hospital ship in the Pacific, he’d been in occupied Japan, but Vietnam? He was in Portland that whole time, to my personal knowledge, working as an engineer at a radio station. I smiled weakly, and somebody said—I don’t remember who—“He must be having somebody else’s flashbacks.”

Maybe Samuel Weaver was having somebody else’s flashbacks.

Springtide for Himmler

Not feeling well, here. I don’t know why; there’s probably some good reason for it. Blame it on old age, maybe—my sixtieth birthday is fast approaching, but I don’t really think that’s it. The weather is uncertain and changeable, alternately threatening and inviting, and that could be darkening my emotional landscape too, but again, I don’t really think that’s it. Life here is imploding fast as well; the foreclosure grinds on, with no end in sight, taking its emotional toll, my one brother is rapidly approaching the end of his financial rope, and taken as a whole things continue rapidly to deteriorate. This isn’t even van-by-the-river time; my van’s in the shop, and everything looks chancy and uncertain.

Which makes it hard to concentrate on anything. I spent some time today organizing books, mainly getting stray volumes back on the shelves where they belong, which has something of the deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic feel to it, truth to tell. The thing is, nothing is that urgent, probably. Resolution on the house is likely to be months away, as I understand it, and my family is generally resourceful; even if we crash and burn, we’ll probably do it with a certain degree of dignity. And I’ve had other birthdays. I’ve never had a sixtieth before, but then, I never had a twenty-seventh, or a forty-second, until I actually had one. Honestly, I never really thought I’d get past thirty-three.

And so springtide cometh, where the days are more nearly equal to the nights than not, and flowers start blooming and the grass becomes ragged and in need of a mowing. A chancy, uncertain time of year at best. Storm clouds are as likely as sunshine, and sometimes both come at once. The news abroad fits with the season—gloomy and indecisive. I read how some Army commander found fifty thousand dollars and change to host a third-class hillbilly revival on government facilities with his full endorsement, but could only spare a tiny venue and no financial wherewithal to bring Richard Dawkins and an all-star lineup to the same base. I can’t say I’m disappointed; I expected no less from the customarily two-faced US military. And chaos reigns in Wisconsin, where a venal governor is determined to cut the pay for public employees, forbid future union negotiations over work conditions and benefits, apparently in order to pay off his financial backers. (My hope is that this will prove a pyrrhic victory, as the American people wake from their long slumber to fight back against the mad tea-partiers and other business-as-usual crazies—but the American people seem to be perfectly capable of long-time survival despite having their heads firmly in the sand. Or rather up their collective rectums.) Elsewhere Alan Abel wannabe James O’Keefe is promoting is latest hoax, this time aimed at PBS, though why anybody is still paying him any attention beats me. How many times are the mainstream media (Fox in particular) going to cash this guy’s bad checks? Once bitten and all that, right? Middle-East meltdown goes on. Afghanistan deteriorates. Gaddafi threatens to jump ship (jump, baby, jump!). Some guy in Portland calls 911 to report himself as a house-breaker—seems the owners have returned and he’s afraid they might be armed. None of it makes much sense—but then that’s what one would expect in this chaotic and uncertain universe.

Classic mindscum—I started with nothing in particular to say, and I ended up nowhere in particular. Pile up enough words together and sense emerges—sometimes. I don’t think this was one of them. Put it down to the weather. Maybe I’ll feel better in a day or two.

Staggering through Sheol

Yeah, it’s that time of year. Sheol. The pits. Cold, nasty, empty and bleak. There’s something about the light, I think. The days are cut to fall-length, but they have a hollow slant not shared by the October sun. They’re getting longer, and that’s the hope of it all, but the sunlight is cold and barren, and new buds are as likely to be stillborn by frost as to reach full bloom.

It’s been a nasty and unpleasant day in some respects, with more notices fastened to our door by unseen lurkers, harbingers of some vague and nameless doom. There’s nothing to do, apparently, but fax them to our lawyer, and hope that he knows what he’s doing. But the threats upset me, as they are intended to do, and another day’s work goes down the drain. If I could put a face to the faceless—well, let’s just say that that person would find him- or her-self faceless in a way very different from that comfortable anonymity that allows a corporate functionary to steal the effort of a lifetime from a real person with lies and false promises.

I’m not interested in excuses. There’re a lot of people out there who are only doing their jobs. And like the people who were just following orders, they should not be surprised when reality turns and bites them. To paraphrase Pseudo-Burke, the hottest fires in hell are reserved for those who were only doing their jobs.

To distract myself from all this I’ve been burying myself in an old project, my New Testament translation. I’ve tried to eschew all fanciful translations—none of this “he ascended into heaven” stuff when the Greek says “he went up into the sky.” Some words defy translation—baptism, spirit/wind/breath, kingdom, and the like—reflections of a world categorized in such a different fashion from current understandings that any modern translation inevitably falsifies the meaning. Do I turn “slave” into “servant” like the KJV, or render it as “employee” or the like? It seems to me that a modern corporation has a lot more in common with the hierarchical “kingdom of heaven” envisioned by the NT writers—a sort of vast ante-bellum plantation with Yahweh as the nearly absent slaveowner—than any governmental structure familiar to modern Americans. Decisions, decisions.

Well, anyway, it’s late, and the old Rational Ranter’s got to get up tomorrow and start packing. No point leaving things to the last minute, right? And I can always unpack if the storm clouds lift.

(See How the) Good Times Roll (Away)

Like ice in a drink
Invisible ink
Or dreams in the cold light of day
The children of rock ‘n’ roll
Never grow old
They just fade away.

Ron Nasty

My word-genie seems to have deserted me; I have virtually nothing to say, and I’ve lost whatever ability I have to say it. Still, that’s never stopped me before. Plenty of other things have, but not that.

Strange news arrives from the coast. Some armed and dangerous character is supposed to be hiding out somewhere in my mother’s neighborhood—seems he shot a cop during a routine traffic stop, got chased up highway 101, abandoned his car, took a pot-shot at another fellow out crabbing, and is now lurking somewhere among the stunted evergreenery of the sandy Oregon shoreline. That’s just perfect. My mother couldn’t get out the other day for a routine medical appointment—well, actually getting out wasn’t the problem. It’s just if she left the authorities would have let her back in, and that would have been kind of a problem.

And elsewhere clueless politician Michele Bachmann babbles about how amazing it is that all who came to America were treated alike regardless of the color of their skins, what languages they spoke, how rich or poor they were. “Once you got here, we were all the same. Isn’t that remarkable?” Yeaaaah…that’s right. Everybody came over in chains, was sold into slavery, was immediately put to work in the cotton-fields—in short, everybody who came to America was treated like crap. Is that your point? Apparently slavery didn’t count, according to Bachmann—it seems that the Founders “worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.” Who knew? Apparently Bachmann has her own private sources of history.

And riot-police crack down on mass demonstrations in Tunis, Cairo, and Alexandria. Are the forces of democracy winning? Or are they losing? And which would be a good thing? Did it really make sense for Egypt to privatize public utilities? Are the new wealthy elites really better at running things than the old bureaucrats? And what about Naomi?

Bombs in Moscow, Lahore, Karachi. Parliament opens in Kabul after a week-long stand-off with the president. President Obama delivers a State-of-the-Union address to a Congress still subdued by the recent shooting of one of their own. It is reported that troop deaths from IEDs in Afghanistan rose by sixty percent last year. Violence, craziness. No foundation.

Discouragement and depression sit beside me as I type. Emotions flicker fitfully like a defective fluorescent tube. Something my father once said comes back to me: “As you get older, things make less sense.” It’s probably neither true nor relevant, but it fits my feelings this 26th day of January in the twelve thousand eleventh year of the Holocene Era.

This is the old Rational Ranter, reporting from Sheol.

Things Are Getting Bad Here

Obviously I’m hoping for the best, but I’ve never been much good at hope. Dark ominous clouds are more my speed than silver linings. Tomorrow comes a meeting with a lawyer which may determine our future—whether we can continue on here as a household, or whether we lose our family home in what appears to me to be plain theft on the part of the bank holding our mortgage and Fannie Mae. I’m dispirited and depressed and things look very black to me at the moment. They may look better to me in the morning, but they may equally well look much worse.

The thing is, we followed the bank’s instructions exactly—and yet somehow we appear to have lost our home, all without going through any of the steps supposedly required by law. I can’t deal with this right now, but the stress is one reason I haven’t been keeping up, even in my usual feeble manner, entries in this blog. I have pieces in the hopper (either for here or Fake History) on Benjamin Rush’s prophetic dream, of an unknown life of Jesus discovered over a century ago in a Tibetan monastery, of a new and even more degenerate form of “Forsaken Roots,” on my preparations for blogging about Mark Twain’s Autobiography when the first volume is finally released in November, an update on the fake Washington quotation about governing without God and the Bible, a fuller account of the fake Madison “ten commandments” quotation that may given some indication of how a brief phrase in the Federalist Papers about the nature of American institutions turned into a paean to Mosaic law, on some oddities of the New Testament text, and so on and so forth. It’s just my heart isn’t in any of this right now, what with the van by the river future I’ve always dreaded closing in on me and all.

Letter Thanking a Friend for a Pleasant Visit

Dear Myrtle,

You don’t know what the past few days have meant to me. The climate, the beautiful island, all the wonderful, wonderful people—your friends—are a page of my life that I shall never forget.

And your father was wonderful about the dent I put in his car. Please tell your mother that when I get to China, I shall find her another Ming vase to replace the one I broke.

In short, this week-end was wonderful.

With love,
[signature here]

[From a collection of model letters found in a 1949 college notebook]

Autumntide, or, Faux Summer

And now we have entered the season I like to call Autumntide, the eighth of the year centered on the autumnal equinox. Faux Summer. Back-To-School-A-Thon. Not a favorite time of mine, but that’s only from ancient bad memories. It has a back to work feel to it, even now. The heat is gone, as it were, and there is a new, well, something anyway, to look forward to.

The weather is playing along with all this, having dropped from blazing sun to a damp cooler vibe, suitable for the new beginning. Oh, yeah, I know for all of you who started school on a quarter system this is still summer, but I never did. K-high school, Reed and Pitzer, the new school year’s always started right at the beginning of September. I should be over it, really, what with all the years that have gone by since the last time I set foot in a school, but the old rhythms remain.

Maybe I should move.

Stan Freberg Presents...

When I was growing up my family was always ahead of the crowd, or else way behind it. We were one of the first in our neighborhood to get an automatic dishwasher, for example, and we were among the last to get a television. (I don’t think my father actually believed in television till he became chief engineer for a Portland television station in the eighties.) For many years we were the only family I knew (outside the radio business) to have a tape recorder in the house, and we were definitely the only family I knew where the children were allowed to play with it. Friends would come by to record their voices and hear them played back at them so they could giggle hysterically at the result. (As a matter of fact my whole second-grade class made a field trip to our house just to be recorded and listen to the playback.) When I started a band in imitation of Spike Jones around fifth grade or so we often recorded the ongoing mayhem for our own entertainment.

To save wear and tear on our records, as well as to create anthologies of favorite pieces, my father used to make tapes bearing typed labels like “Mostly Eddie Lawrence” or “KOS and chipmunks.” One of them was titled simply “Mostly Stan Freberg.” This one was a collection of comedy singles by the great satirist, Stan Freberg, interspersed with songs—I think. It’s been a long time. I’m pretty sure it had Freberg’s version of “Yellow Rose of Texas” (lampooning Mitch Miller), “The Great Pretender” (targeting the Platters), and “Rock Island Line” (aimed at Lonnie Donegan). Oh, and I’m quite sure it contained the Lawrence Welk takeoff as well.

Now I have to say that as a kid I didn’t necessarily know the originals of the people Freberg targeted, but I still found the situations funny. Lawrence Welk patiently explaining to Larry Hooper why he couldn’t perform the same song that the Lennon sisters had just sung for example (“I’m sorry, that number has been taken”) and receiving the resentful reply, “Well, I’ll sing ‘The Funny Old Hills,’ then.” Harry Belafonte desperately trying to placate his over-sensitive bongo drummer by leaving the room to do his calypso shouts. Ben Franklin trying to avoid Thomas Jefferson, who wants him to sign some kind of declaration of independence—“Too late—he’s seen you. We’ll have to let him in.” Lonnie Donegan explaining to a skeptical A&R man why the recitation is so important—“Well, it makes a difference to the sheep.” A witch replying to a protest by another character that the piece had to have a happy ending: “Why? This isn’t the Shirley Temple Storybook.”

At his worst Freberg could be clichéd (“The Lone Analyst”), obvious (“Which is the Girl and Which is the Boy”), or preachy (“Yulenet”) but at his best (interviewing the abominable snowman about his choice of footwear, say, in a devastating satire on celebrity interviews, or discoursing on the unreasonable demands of wives as Hermann van Horne, Hi-Fi expert, who will deny their husbands new speakers to buy shoes for the children or perhaps a second dress) no-one can touch him. Few even come close. George Washington clashing with Betsy Ross over the design of the American flag (“Stars? With Stripes? … I deliberately said polka dots”), Johnnie Ray coming apart during the performance of the parody “Try” (where the single word “more” manages to stretch itself out over a full two measures), Freberg offering to show the door to a sleazy record promoter (played by the inimitable Jesse White) and receiving the reply, “No, I’ll just slide out under it”—so many unforgettable moments.

Thanks, Stan—and, oh, by the way, happy birthday.

Insomniac Dreams

I’m awake now, when I should be asleep. Irrelevant images run through my head—an uncaring doctor scrawling the wrong dosage on a clipboard, Spiderman taking on the Vulture with a broken arm, a small white dog running excitedly around in the back yard. I’d like to bury these images in the darkness of unconsciousness, to not think and not worry. But I’m worrying about my little dog, and I’m also worrying about how in hell I’m going to pay for her surgery. Nothing is ever simple, it seems.

Earlier this week Zephyr, our miniature American Eskimo dog, started losing energy and stopped eating. It was really noticeable Tuesday, when I hand-carried our ballots to the drop box, a longish walk but nothing out of the ordinary for Zephyr and me. We weren’t even half the way there when Zephyr began hanging back and refusing to continue; I was beginning to think I might have to carry her. (Where is Spiderman when you need him?) At one point some North Portland denizen stopped to ask, “You all right, man?” I was—it was my dog that was the problem.

By Thursday it was obvious that she was in some sort of difficulty, though she was still enthusiastic about going on walks and willing to eat special treats. She was just getting tired too easily and not eating her regular food. Not eating her regular food isn’t totally surprising—she’s learned that people will give her treats or scraps of food for doing tricks, and there are a lot of people in the house, so many opportunities for begging. Honestly, I just figured she was pigging out on treats and I’d need to watch her more closely. But her slowing down—well, she is approaching eleven (next month), people pointed out, and maybe she’s just beginning to feel her age.

But damn it, old age doesn’t normally creep in between say Thursday (when she was running ahead of me, tugging on the leash, chasing squirrels, generally excited), and say Tuesday (when she was dragging behind me, wanting to go back home, ignoring other dogs, and generally listless). That’s comic-book country, where Dr. Doom invents some sort of aging ray to incapacitate our hero. I had the same sort of argument—and with the medical authorities at that—when my father was dying. “He’s just old,” one alleged physician told me when I wanted to know why he suddenly couldn’t get around, couldn’t remember things, couldn’t function. Well, he hadn’t been “old” two weeks before when he was working on the KOBP transmitter, tools in hand, sharp as ever. You don’t get old overnight, damn it. (Although it feels like it sometimes.)

So Friday we got an appointment with our veterinarian (whom we haven’t been seeing as regularly, damn it, since the money got tight) and managed to get her there, my grandnephew and I, thanks to my brother (his grandfather). And that’s when things turned nightmarish.

My little dog had a condition called pyometra, which apparently is essentially an infection of the uterus. It is, it seems, extremely dangerous, and the treatment of choice is immediate removal of the organ—rather like appendicitis, I guess. (It is, of course, obvious that I am not a physician—actually, I barely remember what little anatomy I learned in school.) But it’s Friday night, and I have sixty dollars in my pocket and my credit union is closed till Monday, and I can’t get hold of anybody who might be able to help.

So emergency treatment was out of the question. Even though my grandnephew’s parents had now arrived and taken over, neither of them had resources available for the task, and we all bombed on the credit-rating front. (I apparently have no credit rating of any sort, as I’ve never bought anything on payments. Go figure.) Our own veterinarian could handle it, but not that night, so we ended up scheduling surgery for the next day and then went home to spend the night sleeping fitfully in the music-room while sort of taking turns watching the dog to make sure that nothing ruptured during the night.

Well, she seemed fine—if I hadn’t seen the x-rays I would never have guessed that she was in serious trouble. Zephyr seemed fairly pleased with all the attention, and when I put my shoes on to head out in the morning she got excited, figuring that we were going for a walk or ride. She was happy with the trip there, and only mildly concerned when I handed her over to go off for her operation. She watched me to make sure I thought it was all right, and I attempted to be reassuring. My niece and grandnephew and I had originally planned to hang around till the operation was done, but once we’d put Zephyr into their hands all the tiredness seemed to catch up with us, and we broke for home and sacked out, did laundry, and tried to catch up with other activities that had abruptly come to a halt. The basement drain backed up—well, actually it’s the main outflow for the entire north side of the house, but it shows up as the bathroom drain backing up—and my nephew and I snaked it out.

Somewhere in there we got the call that the operation had been successful, that the uterus was greatly enlarged (it weighed four pounds—this from a twenty-four pound dog), and that it had come out cleanly and successfully. We could pick Zephyr up in the afternoon.

We did. We were actually waiting for her in the same place we’d handed her over, and Zephyr seemed unsurprised to see us—she actually seems to be taking the things that are happening to her in stride a lot better than I am, though of course she’s on drugs. We’d had an earlier discussion on how to handle Zephyr’s recovery, and we’d decided that my grandnephew’s father should look after her for the moment, his house not having stairs, other pets, and suchlike hazards. We were hoping to get Zephyr to urinate before we took her anywhere, but once outside she walked determinedly over to a car—not ours as it happened—and indicated that she wanted to go home now. We took her to our car, where my niece’s cat River was waiting (Zephyr and River for some reason seem to be fond of one another); River was obviously pleased to see Zephyr, and Zephyr clearly recognized River, though once she was in the car she seemed mainly to want to rest.

When we got home Zephyr seemed to acquire a sudden burst of energy and would have leaped down if my grandnephew hadn’t caught her and gently lifted her to the driveway. Zephyr sniffed the lawn with interest, picked a place, and finally peed—which was reassuring, in a way. She then lay down in the grass, so I gathered her up in my arms and carried her onto the porch. She lay quietly in my lap, but was very interested in the people that passed by periodically along the sidewalk, and the household residents that came out to check on her. She wanted off my lap after a bit, and alternated between standing up on the porch, and lying back down again. I think she wanted to be up and about, but her exhausted body wouldn’t bend to her will, strong though it is.

We hung around there waiting while my niece got stuff ready for the drive and my grandnephew decided between finishing his weekend here or staying with Zephyr. (He decided to stay with Zephyr, which meant cutting short his stay, but also that there is somebody else to keep an eye on the dog during her recovery.) Both their pet cats (River and Tiberius) remain here in my care. River is surly—she likes rides, Zephyr, and my niece—but it’s probably for the best. River went outside with me for a walk in the evening, but she spent it jumping into mud-puddles and getting wet and muddy. Once I got her back inside and she’d dried off she came downstairs and tried tapping the keys on my keyboard with her paw while watching the screen; I don’t know why unless she was trying to figure out what I find so interesting about the activity. She kept tapping the F1 key, which brings up a help screen—it looked purposeful, but was no doubt coincidence.

Anyway, after looking after the pets that are here, I sacked out, visions of hospitals and waiting-rooms dancing through my head. I slept well—at least till I woke abruptly and the day’s worries returned. I really ought to be asleep now—well, I suppose I’d be waking up fairly soon at this point—but I’m worried about my puppy. And I’m worried about the goddamn bill for this operation. It would be something if Spiderman and Iron Man and the rest really could come to our rescue. A pipe-dream perhaps, but—I can’t help wondering if maybe those silver-age comics I have stashed away are worth something.

Pete Tchaikovsky’s Blues

P. I. Tchaikovsky came up here one day
With something he called the “Swan Lake Ballet.”
Man, what a drag! It was real bad news,
Till we changed it to “Pete Tchaikovsky’s Blues.”

Allen Sherman, Peter and the Commissar

When I was young I used to celebrate—well, observe, anyway—my heroes’ birthdays. 15 February was Galileo’s birthday, for example, and I usually made a point of observing something celestial with a telescope, even if it was only the girl next door. (Okay, we didn’t actually have a girl next door—on the one side we had a vacant lot with an abandoned or burnt-down house, depending on the year, and on the other a gravel pit.) For some reason it always seemed to be overcast on Galileo’s birthday. It didn’t stop me from dragging out my telescope and trying to observe something, though. 7 May was Tchaikovsky’s birthday, and at least one year my mother baked him a cake and we threw him a party—though I think that was also partly because it was the last day of our extracurricular Spanish class. Anyway, whatever the reason, I have a photograph of me and my friends gathered around Tchaikovsky’s birthday cake to prove it. Or prove something anyway.

I don’t know when I first discovered Tchaikovsky—it seems like I’ve known his music all my life. The first piano concerto, the sixth symphony, Romeo and Juliet, even the Nutcracker—these were the soundtrack to my life at one time. I was listening to the Nutcracker when the Columbus Day Storm knocked our power out. (My memory tells me that I was doing homework at the time, but as it was a Friday, I’m very much inclined to doubt that.) I was blown away by the (reconstructed) seventh symphony in the early hours of the morning when it was played on KPFM’s all-request Music Out of the Night. The third movement of the sixth symphony inspired me to an act—well, anyway, I have many memories associated with the Russian composer’s music.

One of the curious things about the library at John Rogers school (K-6) is that it actually had interesting books in it. It had at least two books about Tchaikovsky, one of which was the story of his relationship with his long-time patron, Madame von Meck. At least one of them, maybe both, were open about the composer’s homosexuality, a subject that usually didn’t come up in the 1960s, at least not when children (such as myself) were present. I learned that Tchaikovsky suffered from horrendous bouts of depression, that he had irrational fears, that he was downright neurotic in many ways, if not actually psychotic. Artistic temperament is one thing, but a story that stuck in my mind over the years is the one about his first attempt to conduct a piece in public. As he faced the orchestra he became overwhelmed with the belief that his head was about to fall off and rolling down into the string section, something that would no doubt cause considerable alarm and confusion among the musicians. To prevent that eventuality, he grasped his head firmly with one hand, while with the other he gestured with the baton to direct the orchestra. It worked; at least he managed to keep his head and get through the piece without mishap, but his unusual conducting style became the subject of some comment. It wasn’t until decades later, when reading a review of his performance in the New York Herald, that he began to think he might not be utterly incompetent as a conductor. The reviewer noted his self-effacing manner, but added that he was a changed man when he took the baton and showed his entire mastery of the orchestra and control over the piece. It was only then that he began to think that he was not as bad as he’d always thought he was.

Okay, I probably have it all wrong—this is stuff I read as a child filtered through many years of memory fog and dust. But I felt affection for the guy who created the music that moved me then, and I enjoyed celebrating—or at least remembering—the day of his birth. “How old is Tchaikovsky?” my father asked one 7 May long ago as we sat at the table for breakfast.

“I don’t know,” I answered, not having figured it out.

“Well, what year was he born?” asked dear old Dad.

I always knew the dates of everything; my memory was sticky like that, but put on the spot I couldn’t remember that particular information at that particular moment. I knew Tchaikovsky was a younger contemporary of Lewis Carroll (1832) and Mark Twain (1835), but the year of his birth escaped me. Then something came to me—the number thirteen. You see, I’d learned a trick for testing divisibility by three and had been randomly checking out numbers that came to my attention—

“I don’t remember the actual date,” I answered cautiously, “but I do remember one thing. When you add the digits of the date together they total thirteen.”

My father stared at me. “Okay,” he said, “I always thought that kind of thing was so implausible when it came up in one of those mathematical puzzles in Scientific American. It’s so obviously a device—people don’t talk like that in real life. That’s not how people’s minds work. It’s one thing coming from Martin Gardner; I don’t expect it from my own family.”

Since then I’ve never forgotten the year of Tchaikovsky’s birth. He’s 170 today. Happy birthday, Pyotr Ilyich.