7.17.2024 – will you still need me?

will you still need me?
feed me? Who could ask for more?
when I’m sixty-four

Not sure how this happened, which seems to be a common feeling, but I start my 64th year today.

Because of family history and often told family stories, I know that was I born around noon so as I write this, I still have 5 hours to go.

I know it was around noon because I was born on a Sunday and my Mom planned a family dinner after church and while I interrupted her day, my Aunt Marion came over and pulled the dinner together so all my brothers and sisters were sitting around the table when my Dad came home from the hospital to announce it was a boy.

All the boys cheered and my sisters all cried as it would have been a tie game had I been a girl.

I was 8th in what would be a family of 11 kids.

When I was 4, my Dad got a place on the shore of Lake Michigan just south of Grand Haven where we spent out summers so my birthday was almost always celebrated out at the lake.

In 1966, my Mom and Dad took me into Grand Haven to WT Grants and said I could pick out anything I wanted for my birthday.

In my mind the toy aisle stretched out sight to the left and right and towered over me.

I am not sure how long it took as my Father was generous but not real patient, a buyer not a shopper, and I selected an orange truck with a working steam shovel type crane that I could raise and lower and scoop up sand.

I am sure I had Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel in mind when I picked out as I always liked Mike as we shared a first name.

Which, as I am sure I have mentioned before, brings me to the topic of my name.

See, Mike had already been used as a first name in my family.

My brother Tim was born back in 1956 and was named Mike … for about 3 days.

Then my Dad said, ‘Nope, he doesn’t look like a Mike‘ and when the paper work was filled, he became Timothy John.

4 years later when I showed up, my Dad decided I did look like a Mike and Michael James Hoffman was listed on my paperwork.

Not sure what that says or means, but it had to have messed up paperwork in the global accounting of life somewhere.

The moment I got my truck home was captured on film by my Dad with his Nikon camera.

I posed with an army shovel and my new truck, ready to take on the world and all the dirt and sand I could find.

Scrapes and bruises that any 6 year old would have acquired over a summer and one shoe untied, that’s me.

Behind me in the picture are my three sisters, Mary, Lisa and Janet, who are plainly thrilled by my new truck and that it was my birthday.

That was 58 years ago and with the help of the photos, I can feel it, I can smell it.

As Jim Harrison writes in his book, Sundog, “So much of the emotional content of our lives seems to occur before we are nineteen or twenty … “

Now I am 64.

And by chance as I type this out at my desk near the ocean, the 3rd movement of Haydn’s Cello Concerto No. 2 starts playing on the radio and it is one of my favorites.

A piece of music impossible to listen to and not feel light and light hearted.

I will take it as a good omen for things yet to come.

It is my birthday.

What can I do but, and when will I ever get the chance again, to quote Sir Paul?

When I get older losing my hair
Many years from now
Will you still be sending me a Valentine
Birthday greetings bottle of wine

If I’d been out till quarter to three
Would you lock the door
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I’m sixty-four

You’ll be older too
And if you say the word
I could stay with you

I could be handy, mending a fuse
When your lights have gone
You can knit a sweater by the fireside
Sunday mornings go for a ride

Doing the garden, digging the weeds
Who could ask for more
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I’m sixty-four

Every summer we can rent a cottage
In the Isle of Wight, if it’s not too dear
We shall scrimp and save
Grandchildren on your knee
Vera, Chuck and Dave

Send me a postcard, drop me a line
Stating point of view
Indicate precisely what you mean to say
Yours sincerely, wasting away

Give me your answer, fill in a form
Mine for evermore
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I’m sixty-four

will you still need me?
feed me? Who could ask for more?
When I’m sixty-four

6.22.2024 – his uniform fit

his uniform fit
better than everybody
else’s uniform

“You would stay on the bench during batting practice simply to watch him — and just watching him walk, even that was special,” said Cleon Jones, who grew up in Alabama idolizing Mays and ended up sharing the outfield with him when the Giants traded Mays to the Mets in 1972.

“I’m telling you, even his uniform seemed to fit better than everybody else’s uniform,” Jones said. “The players held him with a reverence that felt almost spiritual.”

From the article, Remembering Willie Mays as Both Untouchable and Human by Kurt Streeter.

Not much to say but I think of Jim Harrison in his book The Road Home when his lead character meets Sioux Lakota warriors, veterans of the wars with Custer.

Mr. Harrison writes, ” … warriors with a lineage that owed nothing to the white man. We did not live upon the same earth that they did and we flatter ourselves when we think we understand them. To pity these men is to pity the gods.”

I also want to point out that Mr. Mays did not play in the Major Leagues until he was 20 years old.

Al Kaline and Robin Yount both started when there were 18.

I think of the record book with two more seasons added to it.

Mr. Streeter writes, “How great was he?

Six hundred sixty. That is how many home runs bolted off Mays’s bat during his career. When the Say Hey Kid retired at the end of the 1973 season, only Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron had more.

Mays ended 23 major league seasons with a total of 3,293 hits and held a .301 lifetime batting average, eye-popping for a player with such power. Twenty-four times, he was named to the All-Star team. Twelve times, he won the Gold Glove Award. Ten times, he drove in more than 100 runs.

He was named the National League’s most valuable player twice. If it were not for a need to spread the award among players, some experts say, he could have been the M.V.P. seven more times.

Numbers and accolades tell only part of his story. For it was how Mays played — the way he bent the confines of baseball to his will with his smarts, his speed, his style and his power — that set him apart as the most deeply beloved of stars.”

Mr. Mays also missed a season due to having to fulfill his military service.

And it should be pointed out I guess that Jackie Robinson was rookie of the year, his first year, …when he was 28.

The New York Times closes its Obituary with:

When he was selected for the Hall of Fame, Mays was asked to name the best ballplayer he had ever seen.

“I think I was the best ballplayer I’ve ever seen,” he replied. “I feel nobody in the world could do what I could do on a baseball field.”

Not too many could argue.

I mean, to quote Cleon Jones once more, “I’m telling you, even his uniform seemed to fit better than everybody else’s uniform.”

4.28.2024 – scarcely anyone …

scarcely anyone …
any time … can locate self
in meaningful sense

Adapted from the lines:

We achieve our dimensions for very specific reasons we ourselves ordain.

In other words, we already are, at any given moment, what we, in totality, wish to be.

Scarcely anyone at any given time can locate himself in a meaningful sense.

From the book, Sundog by Jim Harrison, Bantam Books, New York, 1985

4.17.2024 – sunrise ever on

sunrise ever on
this stage is acted God’s calm,
annual drama

Ever upon this stage,
Is acted God’s calm, annual drama,
Gorgeous processions, songs of birds,
Sunrise, that fullest feeds and freshens most the soul,
The heaving sea, the waves upon the shore, the musical, strong waves,
The woods, the stalwart trees, the slender, tapering trees,
The flowers, the grass, the lilliput, countless armies of the grass,
The heat, the showers, the measureless pasturages,
The scenery of the snows, the winds’ free orchestra,
The stretching, light-hung roof of clouds—the clear cerulean, and the bulging,
silvery
fringes,
The high dilating stars, the placid, beckoning stars,
The moving flocks and herds, the plains and emerald meadows,
The shows of all the varied lands, and all the growths and products.

From A Carol of Harvest for 1867 by Walt Whitman as published in The Galaxy, an American monthly magazine founded by William Conant Church and his brother Francis P. Church in 1866, according to Wikipedia.

Also according to Wikipedia, Whitman’s position as a Galaxy author was important to his personal fortunes and his literary reputation. The Galaxy was respectable, it was popular, and it paid generously. It also provided a venue where Whitman could join with other writers in exploring the meaning of literary nationalism and cultural democracy for the new era.

Paid generously may be the most important two words in the lives of too many poets, artists and writers through all of history.

As Jim Harrison said once, “Just like all the writers’ schools have created less variety—there’s a sameness. I said once that the lowa Writers School on a yearly basis outproduces the English romantic movement. It’s all a delusion. What are you going to do with four thousand M.F.A.’s? It’s ludicrous.”

But the sunrise’s everyday in the God’s annual drama

Gorgeous processions, songs of birds.

Sunrise, that fullest feeds and freshens most the soul.

Generous, too, God, is.

3.6.2024 – am confused distraught

confused and distraught
this will have to serve – face it
these loom large these days

Driving to work this morning, I was listening to a collection of articles by Jim Harrison in a book posthumously published titled, A really big lunch (New York : Grove Press 2017).

It is a collection of Mr. Harrison’s articles about food, cooking and eating,

In the introduction by Mario Batali, Mr. Batali wrote of Jim Harrison, “…and nothing makes a cook quite so happy as someone who exists entirely to eat — and when not eating, to talk about eating, to hunt and fish for things to eat, or to spend time after eating talking about what we just ate.”

Mr. Batali also wrote that Mr. Harrison was someone … “who wrote sentences that stretched beyond the wildest poetry of my imagination” and I could appreciate that.

Still these are essays about eating, hunting and fishing for things to eat, and talking about what Mr. Harrison just ate.

Maybe not the best thing to listen to first thing in the morning especially for someone who still gets by on just coffee please until I wake up enough around lunch time to think about putting food in my system.

I made it through Mr. Batali and then through the first essay titled, Eat Your Heart Out, a discussion of commercially available hot sauces (in 1981), the rain was pouring down, I couldn’t see and much as I enjoy Mr. Harrison’s prose, I said to myself, “… time for some music” and as the car eased off the bridge onto the island where I work, I reached over to switch from audio books to music.

In that second before the click registered on my handheld, the next essay (Food for Thought as published in Smoke Signals 1982) in the queue stated to play.

I heard the first two words of that essay before it stopped.

I heard, “Dear Mike ...”

And it went off.

Well, boy howdy but that kind of freaked me out.

I had to hear what Mr. Harrison was writing to me.

I switched my device back to audio books and hit play.

I heard the last bit the previous article that I had just heard and then once more I heard, “Dear Mike …”

“I am so confused and distraught …”

And I hit stop.

That’s all I needed to hear.

Confused and distraught.

Like Castor and Pollux, the twins of the Gemini, confused and distraught.

The full sentence, I later looked up is, I am so confused and distraught that this will have to serve as my food letter for the upcoming issue. Let’s face it, the twin specters of food and politics loom large these days.

Food I am not so much worried with.

But politics?

And of much else in life?

Confused and distraught.

Remember Potiphar in the Bible?

According to the Genesis 39:6. Potiphar … “did not concern himself with anything except the food he ate.“

Did not concern himself with anything … ANYTHING, except the food he ate.

Lucky guy!