5.25.2022 – time of shame, sorrow

time of shame, sorrow
some senseless act of bloodshed,
yet it goes on … why?

Back on April 5, 1968, then Senator Bobby Kennedy said in a speech at the Cleveland Club:

This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity to speak briefly to you about this mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.

It is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one – no matter where he lives or what he does – can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on.

Then the Senator asked a question.

Why?

He then asked, “What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? “

Whenever any American’s life is taken by another American unnecessarily – whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence – whenever we tear at the fabric of life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.

Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire weapons and ammunition they desire.

Two months later on June 6, 1968, Senator Kennedy was gunned down in Los Angeles.

Whenever we tear at the fabric of life the whole nation is degraded.

It would be great to think that since we created this mess, we can fix this mess.

Too many people with too many guns.

I am reminded of the story of the founding of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

In the 1870’s, as the Canadian Pacific Railroad was being built, the folks who ran Canada were aware of the colorful stories of the lawless American west.

Dodge City and Tombstone.

Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickcock.

Billy the Kid and Jesse James.

The folks saw the possibility of such an environment taking root as the the Canadian West began to be populated once the CPR was in service.

Their answer was to beat lawlessness with the law and the RCMP was created and in place once the railroad was completed.

When the trains started to run and the desperadoes showed up to rob the trains and the banks and fight in the barrooms, they found that in the trains and in the banks and in the barrooms the Mounties were already there.

For us?

No one – no matter where he lives or what he does – can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed.

Why?

Too many people with too many guns and it is too late.

That train left some time ago.


5.24.2022 – caring deeply and

caring deeply and
passionately, really, has
gone out of our lives

Roger Angell has died.

Born in 1920 and the son of Katherine Angell White (which made him the step son of EB White), Roger Angell wrote about baseball for the New Yorker Magazine for as long as I can remember.

To say, though, that Roger Angell wrote about baseball is much like saying Michelangelo painted ceilings.

There was so much more than that to what Mr. Angell wrote.

The focus, the reason for the writing was baseball, but the words were brought together in ways that were magical and poetry.

It was after the 1975 World Series, the famous game six that was won by the Red Sox on a home run in the bottom of the 12th inning, late, late at night in Fenway Park, that Mr. Angell wrote:

What I do know is that this belonging and caring is what our games are all about: this is what we come for.

It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look — I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable.

Almost.

What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives.

And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved.

Naïveté — the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball — seems a small price to pay for such a gift.

Mr. Angell was a not so much a sports reporter but a baseball commentator.

Each year, it seems to me now, he would write an essay that previewed the upcoming season, then an essay or too on the season so far and then an essay recapping the season just finished.

These 4 or 5 essays over the course of a year all appeared in the New Yorker Magazine.

Written a leisure with thoughtfulness beyond anything but appreciation, Mr. Angell could bring each and every game he covered to life though it had been over for some time.

I was 8 years old when the Detroit Tigers won the World Series in 1968.

It wasn’t until years later that I was able to understand and appreciate what when on in that World Series, the dual between Denny McCain and Bob Gibson and the slow turtle-and-the-hare story Mickey Lolich pitching his way to 3 World Series wins, and I got those stories from reading Roger Angell’s account in an essay titled, “A LITTLE NOISE AT TWILIGHT.”

But like the Persian Rug with the missing knot so it wouldn’t be perfect, Mr. Angell did make mistakes.

I always felt somehow privileged that I caught one.

But to this day, I am not sure if the error was Mr. White’s or his editor.

Here is the passage in question?

Can you find the mistake?

The scene is late in Game 7 of the ’68 Series between the Cardinals and Tigers.

The game is in St. Louis and the series is tied 3-3.

Mr. White wrote: Still no score. Summer and the Series were running out. Gibson had permitted only one base-runner in the game, and here were the Tigers down to their last seventh inning of the year. Gibson fanned Stanley, for his thirty-fourth strikeout of the Series, and Kaline grounded out. At three and two, Cash singled to right. Horton hit to the left side, and the ball went through for a single. Northrup lined the first pitch high and deep, but straight to center, where Curt Flood started in, reversed abruptly, and then stumbled, kicking up a divot of grass. He recovered in an instant and raced toward the fence, but the ball bounced beyond him, a good four hundred feet out; Northrup had a triple, and two runs were in. Freehan doubled past Brock in left, for the third.

It is right there in plain sight.

For me, it made Mr. Angell more human and that much more great.

Roger Angell has died.

This is when I quote John O`Hara on the death of George Gershwin.

I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.

5.23.2022 – the sky and the sea

the sky and the sea
put on a show, every day
they put on a show

Adapted from Carl Sandburg’s, Thimble Islands, which was published in “Good morning, America” by New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928.

In searching for the full text of this poem to copy and paste into this essay, I came across a 269 page document from the Office of Education in Washington, DC that had been written by the University of Oregon, titled The Whole Poem Teacher.

The document was identified as a Poetry: Literature Curriculum – Teacher’s Guide.

Printed in 1971, the first two paragraphs of the introduction state:

In the lessons preceding this one, your class has concentrated on various poetic techniques, isolating them more or less from the total fabric of the poem for the purposes of examination and identification. Such a process is necessary, but it is a rather sterile exercise if it stops there. For the goal of all this investigation has been not the ability to identify poetic devices, but to enjoy more fully the experience of reading a poem. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to “put back” all the isolated elements into the whole poem.

To borrow a useful distinction made by the poet:-critic John Ciardi, we want our students to be able to answer not only the question, “What does this poem mean?” but also the question, “How does this poem mean?” Answering the first question only leads to bad paraphrase and moral- abstracting. Answering the first question in terms of the second, on the other hand, leads to close and intelligent reading, to appreciation of the internal dynamics of the poem, and consequently to a far more sensitive perception of the poem’s “meaning.” For in poetry the way something is said is part of what is being said.

Wanting to avoid the introduction tearing out scene of Dead Poets Society, I think this is rather good as it does not impose a scale but plays on the readers interpretation.

“How does this poem mean?” and “… in poetry the way something is said is part of what is being said.” is good even as it brackets that oh so ponderous statement, “leads to close and intelligent reading, to appreciation of the internal dynamics of the poem, and consequently to a far more sensitive perception of the poem’s ‘meaning.‘”

The document was part of the Oregon Elementary English Project and according to the first line of the abstract, This curriculum guide is intended to introduce fifth and sixth grade children to the study of poetry.

Fifth and sixth grade children?

All I can say about that is to paraphrase the Book of Psalms, Lord Byron and Stephen Vincent Benét (all at the same time!), By the rivers of Babylon, There I sat down and wept, When I remembered Zion.

Here is the Sandburg poem:

THIMBLE ISLANDS

The sky and the sea put on a show
Every day they put on a show
There are dawn dress rehearsals
There are sweet monotonous evening monologues
The acrobatic lights of sunsets dwindle and darken
The stars step out one by one with a bimbo, bimbo.

The red ball of the sun hung a balloon in the west.
And there was half a balloon, then no balloon at all,
And ten stars marched out and ten thousand more,
And the fathoms of the sky far over met the fathoms of the sea far
under, among the thimble islands

In the clear green water of dawn came a float of silver filaments, feelers
circling a pink polyp’s mouth.
The feelers ran out, opened and closed, opened and closed, hungry and
searching, soft and incessant, floating the salt sea inlets sucking the
green sea water as land roses suck the land air

Frozen rock humps, smooth fire-rock humps –
Thimbles on the thumbs of the wives of prostrate sunken
giants –
God only knows how many sleep in the slack of the
seven seas

There in those places
under the sun balloons,
and fathoms, filaments, feelers –

The wind and the rain
sew the years
stitching one year into another

5.22.2022 – our shared values

our shared values
fairness and opportunity
kindness those in need

I am, of course, referring to the self-proclaimed ‘Greatest Country on Earth.’

Australia!

After winning the recent election, new Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that as leader he would respect all Australians, including those who had not voted for him, saying he would “seek to get your vote next time”.

Mr. Albanese also said:

“We are the greatest country on Earth, but we can have an even better future if we seize the opportunities that are right there in front of us,” Albanese said.

“I want to seek our common purpose and promote unity and not fear. Optimism, not fear and division.

“It is what I have sought to do throughout my political life and what I will bring to the leadership of our country.

“I want to find that common ground where together we can plant our dreams, to unite around our shared love of this country, our shared faith in Australia’s future, our shared values of fairness and opportunity and hard work, and kindness to those in need.”

There was a time …

Mr. Lincoln, back in 1855, wrote in a letter to Mr. George Robertson:

On the question of liberty, as a principle, we are not what we have been.

When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that “all men are created equal” a self evident truth;

but now when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the same maxim “a self evident lie.”

5.21.2022 – appreciative

appreciative
of the good things in life, kind,
has intelligence

If it’s Saturday (and for me it is) and if someone is reading this (and they must be to read this) and they have read these posts in the past (which they might have) it will not come as a surprise that today’s haiku is based on the weekly feature in the Guardian titled, “Blind Date.”

Two people agree to meet in a London Restaurant and answer questions about the evening.

Often it is just the restaurant and its menu that brings out the comments in my fingers as they type on the keyboard and the restaurant today, Ottolenghi Spitalfield, could be a part of a Saturday morning creative process and but another day.

That being said, I find it hard to accept that I could call my wife and say, “Made reservations at Ottolenghi Spitalfield’s” and she would not have reservations of her own.

(UPDATE – further research shows that the place was Ottolengi’s IN Spitalfield but I am not sure that helps)

Also, I have to mention that a menu that list’s a Butter bean mash, burnt lemon and coriander salsa, pine nuts, Aleppo chilli for £11 or Lamb kebab, tzatziki and ladopita for £17 deserves some further attention, but I digress.

In the Blind Date today, the participants where asked the question, Best thing about …?

One of today’s blind dater’s responded: He seems kind, appreciative of the good things in life and has emotional as well as practical intelligence.

Which, I would think, anyone would be happy to have as someone’s first impression of themselves.

But it got me to thinking.

What are the good things in life?

I got to making a list of things.

I was smart enough in making my list that these ‘good things in life’ are of course those things that are free or cheap.

Right?

I mean I started my list with sunshine.

Maybe you have had to grow up in West Michigan, notably the 2nd most overcast piece of real estate in the Western Hemisphere, after the Pacific Northwest and Seattle, to understand how good a sunny day can make you feel.

Then I went the other way and made a list of the good things that aren’t free.

Not wanting to brag, by my wife and I can pick out the best bottle of wine available at the nearby gas station with our eyes closed.

Well, maybe not closed, as we do have to make sure that it is the cheapest.

This has got a little more complicated since the local gas station started keeping the Cabernet and the Merlot in the cooler for our conveince.

As a tip, the $6 gas station bottle is far superior to the $4 Kroger bottle.

(BTW, my latest book, “After the Third Sip, It All Tastes the Same” is number 3 in Germany this week)

But then I kicked myself and said, gee whiz stupid, get with the program and come up with the good things of life.

Then I looked at the phrase again, appreciative of the good things in life.

It came to me that there is no definitive list of ‘the good things.’

Everyone’s list is different.

It is the appreciative part that is the key.

Much like how Alice Walker wrote in the Color Purple, “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.”

I am reminded of Carl Sandburg’s poem, Happiness:

I ASKED the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell
me what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of
thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though
I was trying to fool with them
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along
the Desplaines river
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with
their women and children and a keg of beer and an
accordion.

There are a lot of people in this world.

God put a lot of good things in this world.

I hope I can appreciate it.

Or as the wonderful Nora York sang, Thank you for my breath, my breathing.