RIP: Emily Dickinson - Dec. 10, 1830 - May 15, 1886

I bought this book in 1959 at the little newsstand that stood against a wall just outside the Mess Hall at Camp Muenchweiler in Germany. At $1.25 it was high-end, but those Doubleday Anchor paperbacks were better built than the usual. I've read often from this particular one; I've marked it up; I was cruel to its spine; I glued poems written by a friend onto the blank pages at the end of it; I've carelessly tossed it on a table or dropped it on a floor. I stuffed it into box after box after box and moved it to a hundred cities. It has held up well.

I see that the cover was designed by Leonard Baskin, and the cover's typography by Edward Gorey. Neither of these names would have meant a thing to me in 1959. Later, around 1964, in Lansing, my friend Dennis Little, who must have been one of Gorey's earliest fans, turned me onto the fabulously twisted humor of Edward Gorey.  Dennis owned those early little Gorey books that Gorey was printing himself in editions of just a few hundred.

And Leonard Baskin, in the fifties, founded Gehenna Press, which published exquisite and limited editions, usually of his own woodcuts, and sometimes the writings of others with Baskin's woodcuts as illustrations. He eventually was teaching printmaking and sculpture at Smith College, where, in the late fifties, he met Sylvia Plath and her husband Ted Hughes. He provided many illustrations for Hughes' books from the early sixties up to the time of their deaths -- that of Hughes in 1998 and Baskin's in 2000.

(Gorey probably designed way more Anchor covers than Baskin; this is the only one I've seen by Baskin whereas I've noticed thirty or forty designed by Gorey.)

But, setting aside Baskin and Gorey, this is Emily's deathday! And of the 1800-or-so poems she wrote, below is one of my favorites, one that I long ago committed to memory. It's amazing how comfortable she is with death, how charmingly and casually she speaks of him (is seduced by him, some have posited).

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labour, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

When Richard Blanco was a little Cuban boy ....

I love this poem by Richard Blanco, the man who read at this year's inauguration ceremony.

Richard Blanco reciting at Inauguration: Jan. 21, 2013

When I Was a Little Cuban Boy

by Richard Blanco

O Jose can you see... that's how I sang it, when I was

a cubanito in Miami, and America was some country

in the glossy pages of my history book, someplace

way north, everyone white, cold, perfect. This Land

is my Land, so why didn't I live there, in a brick house

with a fireplace, a chimney with curlicues of smoke.

I wanted to wear breeches and stockings to my chins,

those black pilgrim shoes with shiny gold buckles.

I wanted to eat yams with the Indians, shake hands

with los negros, and dash through snow I'd never seen

in a one-horse hope-n-say? I wanted to speak in British,

say really smart stuff like fours core and seven years ago

or one country under God, in the visible. I wanted to see

that land with no palm trees, only the strange sounds

of flowers like petunias, peonies, impatience, waiting

to walk through a door someday, somewhere in God

Bless America and say, Lucy, I'm home, honey, I'm home. 

Blanco with Obama

RIP Mary Elizabeth Brock - Apr. 25, 1915 - May 27, 2009

Mary (in white) and some of the Lobster Pot lunch crew parade-watching.

Late afternoon, 1979. Walking on Commercial Street in Provincetown. Almost done with winter. I passed the Mayflower Restaurant and saw my buddy Rod sitting in a window-booth. He beckoned me in and introduced me to the woman sitting across the table from him. I’d seen this woman around town since I’d arrived there seven years earlier but didn’t know her. She was Mary Brock, Rod said. A native, born right up the street.  “Sit down,” she said, scooting over. “My neck’s gettin’ sore whipping back and forth ‘cause so many cute guys are walking by.”  She was sixty-five. I didn’t know it but I’d just met a woman who’d become as great a friend as anyone could wish for. Mary was, as they say, full of piss and vinegar.

Rod and Mary

We took to one another right away, thought of ourselves as faux-cousins even, for Mary’s mother was a Fitzgerald, born on the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland just down the road from where my father was born. I like stretching the truth, so sometimes I told people that Mary and I were cousins. And really there was no telling how much of a stretch it was -- maybe we were -- but surely  we weren’t. The other half of Mary, her father’s half, was Portuguese. “That’s the Port-a-gee in me,” she’d say, or, “That’s the Irish in me.”

In Mary's eyes I could almost do no wrong. She stood up for me even when I couldn’t be bothered to stand up for myself. It's a nice feeling to know that there's someone out there who will always have your back. 

I borrowed many wisdoms from Mary and thought of them as my own.

In summers we ate peach melbas at Cafe Blase. In winters we watched the Celtics. Her favorite Celtics were Larry Bird and Cedric Maxwell, but she did say once, "Isn't that Danny Ainge cunning?!" I'd never before heard anyone use that term to indicate cuteness.

*

When some friends and I – we’d worked at the Lobster Pot together and with Mary, who was hostess/cashier there – when we bought a restaurant in Vermont one of us thought to name the restaurant Mary B’s. She was thrilled when she flew up from Florida for the opening and saw her name on the sixteen-foot-long sign on our building. Eventually we got busy enough to have a full-time hostess, and that couldn’t be anyone but the restaurant’s namesake.

Meanwhile, one of the loyal customers keeping us busy was a two-star General who headed up the Vermont Air Guard. He was about six-five, a big handsome guy with a silvered crew-cut and admirable posture. He liked to wear his uniform with the usual splash of colorful medals on his chest. He and his girlfriend liked a certain table in a corner. Once Mary took on the hostess duties, had taken charge of what she called “the floor,” she was bound to eventually encounter The General at the door. When it happened he looked down at Mary and said, “We like to sit over there.” Mary, leaning her head way back to look up at him, said, “My job here is to seat people and you sit where I tell you to.” He was briefly taken aback but then he rather admired this sassy little old lady who’d dared speak to him in a manner he was not accustomed to, and he grew to love her.

Years after we’d sold that restaurant we took Mary along when we were visiting friends in Burlington. (Since she'd been in Vermont they'd passed a law that there was no smoking in restaurants; Mary was appalled.) Ahead on Church Street I saw The General coming toward us. I saw him recognize Mary B. Then I saw him running toward us to give her a hug.

12 Railroad Avenue; Essex Junction, Vermont

*

One time Mary crocheted me an afghan. “I’ll be over to get it,” I said, but I didn’t get over fast enough to please her.  “When are you gonna come and get your afghan?” she asked scoldingly. “Soon,” I said. I was working two jobs in those days, for crying out loud, plus another guy and I were building a house in our spare time. Mary lived at 100 Bradford Street, on the second floor. She had a big picture window that looked out on the street, flanked by smaller sash windows. One evening she saw me coming up Bradford on my bike. “Here’s your afghan,” she yelled, hanging out the window. I looked up and the brightly colored afghan was slowly wafting down, floating back and forth and in a spiral pattern.

*

Whenever Mary entered the bar at the Ritz-Carlton in Fernandina Beach,
Florida, the pianist, Chris, automatically segued into "Old Cape Cod"

*

Mary was a master of the snappy comeback. You didn't want to get into a spat with her because there was no way you were going to get the last word in. Even when she was well into her nineties I heard her and her son Bobby giving each other shit, sassin' back-n-forth, and neither one was going to let the other have the last word. Bobby was holding his own for about twenty rounds. He was doing great. He was almost as good as she was, but in the end he wasn't the one who got the last word in.

*

Mark and Mary in New Hampshire.

*

I saw Mary do things and I'd wonder how the hell she could get away with them. Ten or twelve times I watched as various young couples with young babies come into Mary B’s. Invariably the baby would start crying.  Mary would simply go to the table, tell the parents she’d take the baby so that they could enjoy their meal. They never challenged her! They (rightly) trusted her. She'd hold the baby in her arms, poke it in the chest and say, “No, we don’t do that in here ... we don't cry when we're in a restaurant!” And I swear ... no exaggeration here ... the baby would stop crying. While the parents had a peaceful dinner, Mary continued greeting and seating people, menus in one hand, the baby in the other. She'd take the baby into the kitchen to meet the staff back there, she'd wander from the dining room where you could smoke to the one where you couldn't, and you would not hear a peep from any of those babies as long as they were in her arms, as long as they were on the move. I could never figure out what this magic touch was ... something in her deep voice maybe, some baby-smart trust, I just didn't know. One time, though, I watched as one baby stared as if in astonishment at Mary's vividly red fingernails! Maybe it was nothing but the fascination of bright shiny red fingernail polish.

*

Mary in Bonita Springs, visiting us and Mark's parents.

*

Mark and I, business-wise, after the successful restaurant in Vermont, and a really successful convenience store with a large deli-lunch business in Keene, New Hampshire, ended up with a small cafe just off the Mid-Cape Highway in South Yarmouth. In the process of buying that business we were befriended by a realtor named Phyllis. She was great, showing us around, telling fabulous funny stories, inviting us to her family outings, and onto her boat for rides on Nantucket Sound, and even to see the Boston Pops. She was a bundle of energy; though she had fifteen years on me she could wear me out.

Soon after we were settled into that cafe it was time to invite Mary up from Florida where she then was living. We knew that Mary was not going to appreciate another lady of about the same age as she was having barged her way (as Mary would have put it) into our lives.  We belonged to her! Phyllis would be, to Mary, persona non grata, competition.

Mark and I dreaded the two of them meeting, fearing that somehow Mary would create sparks, but it was unavoidable: Mary hung out at the cafe from eleven to three, and Phyllis was dropping in three or four times some days (always, as I remember, with a little gift ... a vase, a flower, a picture, a yard-sale find ... something) and often would also drop over to our house in the evenings.

We decided that the easiest way to break them in to one another would be to take them to dinner on Mary's first night in town. We were barely seated at a place called The American Pub when Phyllis flipped over her placemat and began sketching on it a redesign of our cafe "for better customer flow." 

“The only thing they need is more tables,” Mary said, dismissive of Phyllis's ideas. (More tables was the last thing we wanted; we thought a small place was going to be cute and easy.)

“No!  No!  That’s not what they need!” Phyllis asserted in her gravelly voice.

To this woman she'd met barely a minute earlier, Mary hissed, “Then you don’t know a thing about the restaurant business, baby!”  With that she turned in her chair so as to have baby as much out of view as possible, rolled her eyes, shook her head sadly, and sighed.

Thankfully Phyllis was hip enough to have handled it all in great humor; the extreme-cafe-makeover subject was dropped; the remainder of our American Pub outing was peaceful.

But clearly Mary did not relish having to share us with Phyllis in the days ahead.  “She wants to be center stage,” Mary complained in the car on our way home.

On Mary's last Saturday with us on that visit we were rather busy at the cafe. In walked Phyllis, who brashly announced, for all to hear, “I’ve just come to make sure you’re getting rid of her tomorrow!”

Mary had been delivering food to the tables the two weeks of her visit and now Phyllis joined in to help.  Mary did not appreciate this. After Phyllis was gone Mary lamented, “She needs training bad if she’s gonna help in the cafe. I hope none of those customers thought that was the way the place is run all the time.”

“Phyllis is such a comedian,” I said to Mary.

“Not everybody likes a comedian!” she snapped.

Mary and me in a bar on the New York side of Lake Champlain.

Happy Birthday Sweetheart! I miss you every day.

Park View

Salt Pond/Nauset Marsh in Eastham; one of my favorite
views in Cape Cod National Seashore; I wish I would get
down there sometime when the sky is deep blue.

Farm to Feet

I wrote earlier about my good friends in Vermont, Bob and Sue, who raise alpacas on ten acres.  Alpacas are adorable and cute; one or another will on occasion eat out of a stranger's hand.

There were giant piles of uncarded fiber in the basement of Bob & Sue's house, sorted by color.  Eventually these piles became skeins of fiber.  I wanted two ... a tan and a rich rich brown.  I wanted them but didn't want to own them.  I put them on a shelf and I stared at them.  I got tired of staring at them.  I mailed them as a gift to my friend, Ellen, who lives on the Lower East Side (right across St. Marks's place from where W.H. Auden lived!).  "What do you want me to do with them?" she asked.  "Anything you want to do!" I said.  "Put each of your feet on a piece of paper and sketch around the edges," she said.  I had only 8-1/2X11 paper in the house and my feet are longer than the paper, but I did the best I could.  It was two years ago that I got those skeins.  On Friday a package was in the mailbox.  Ellen has made me the best socks anyone could ever want, alpaca-soft, alpaca-warm:

Left sock with valium, tweezer, Xmas glass, and piece of towel.

Right sock with valium, tweezer, Xmas glass, and piece of towel.

Both socks being soft and warming.

Thanks, Ellen!  (She told the people in her knitting club that the man she was making the socks for "even knows the names of each of the alpacas who provided this fiber.")

Happy Birthday, Emmylou Harris

Emmylou Harris

"Years ago," Emmylou Harris said, "I had the experience of sitting around in a living room with a bunch of people and singing and playing, and it was like a spiritual experience, it was wonderful. And I decided then that was what I was going to do with my life -- play music, do music. In the making of records, I think over the years we've all gotten a little too technical, a little too hung up on getting things perfect. We've lost the living room. The living room has gone out of the music, but today I feel like we got it back."

That's fine ... when you have a voice like hers the perfection is already present.  I saw her twice ... once in a lovely auditorium in Northampton, Mass. -- where I teared up and quietly sobbed throughout her version of Steve Earle's "Goodbye" -- and once in a sort-of-barn converted to a performance hall in Marlboro, Vermont.  She converts any building -- auditorium or a barn --into a cathedral.

She's said to have been "discovered" by Gram Parsons when he and the Flying Burrito Brothers were touring; on a night off, they went to a small club in Washington, D.C., and Emmylou was performing.  Parsons talked her into singing backup on some songs he was planning to record.  While they were listening to a playback of one particular song ... if I remember right it was towards the end of "Hickory Wind" -- Parsons said to her, "That note right there ... that note is going to make you famous."

She's recorded about forty albums since 1975.  Parsons never heard any of them; he died on Sept. 19 1973, in a motel room in Joshua Tree, California, of an accidental drug overdose.

The Pursuit of Trivia

On Oct. 1, 2011, I wrote in a post about Fernando Sor, "Until I came upon Fernando Sor's grave in Cimetiere Montmartre in Paris I don't think I'd ever heard the name."  I subsequently learned that he was a Barcelona-born classical guitarist and composer.  A Belgian musicologist/critic of the period called Sor "le Beethoven de la guitare"

I came across Sor's name recently in Oscar Hijuelos's excellent memoir Thoughts Without Cigarettes. He mentions that when, as a teenager, he was studying guitar, he learned of a neighbor who also "played the guitar, but in the classical style, with sheet music for studies by Tarrega, Fernando Sol, and others lying in stacks on a table by a stand in his living room."

(Hijuelos won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Mambo King Plays Songs of Love.)

I loved knowing who Fernando Sol was when I came across that line.  Not that I think a Jeopardy answer will ever be "Who was Fernando Sol?"  And, nor, do I ever think I'll be a contestant on Jeopardy.

I tried once.  It was the late eighties.  A call went out in Vermont: Come to such and such ballroom in Burlington to try out for Jeopardy.  About three hundred of us showed up.  At the time there was a large monitor on which Alex Trebek asked questions and we had some amount of time to write the answer on the paper with lines numbered one through fifty provided to us.  As it turned out, I knew the answers to 48 of the 50 questions but on question #12 (the answer to which was, if I remember, the name of one of the famous National Parks out west). I couldn't think of the right answer, but thought it would come to me later, but instead of leaving line #12 blank, I wrote the answer to #13 on line #12, and so on, right on through to #27, the answer to which was "who were Hugh Cronyn and Jessica Tandy" but which I also couldn't think of at the time, though I knew it.  I did remember to leave that line blank, and then realized my earlier error, but there wasn't enough time to go back and erase and re-write all the correct answers I'd written on incorrect lines.  And, anyhow, as I progressed through the test I wasn't positive that it was at line 12 I'd need to start correcting ... was it maybe 13?

I'm not sure that 48 correct answers out of 50 would have gotten me into the next round anyhow.  At the end, after our entries were checked, five people were called to another room for a second round of testing.  Out of some 300 people, if I could get 48 out of 50, I supposed that 5 out of 300 could get 50 out of 50.

Oh, well.  Maybe in the far distant future we'll get to live our lives over again, but with improvements.  And maybe there will be a TV show called Jeopardy and I'll get on it and win and win and win and then I'll be in the Tournament of Champions and for Final Jeopardy they'll ask us to name an 18-19th century guitarist who was called by a critic "le Beethoven de la guitare".
 

"Who was Fernando Sol?" I'll answer, and Alex will ask me what I'm going to do with all my money.
 

Or maybe in that other life I'll be a quick-as-a-flash and flashy point guard on Florida Gulf Coast University's basketball team and I'll be feeling like a million bucks on a day like today ... a member of the first 15th seeded team to get to the Sweet Sixteen!

Touches of the Orient in the Capital

I spent the first two nights with Liz and her family. She was
to go to one of the Inauguration Balls so had to be spiffed. We
started off at a nail salon in Silver Spring; then to the hairdresser,
then to a dozen different shops trying to find an exact color of
nail polish.

I indulged in a pedicure.  Once, back in the sixties, someone
told me I had beautiful ankles!  That odd remark has become a
running joke amongst my friends, so this is for you, Rodney,
and for you, Jim.  (I also have beautiful arches.)

The next two nights I spent at my friends Bill and Bill's place, and I
was going to die if I didn't get to see the exhibit of the work of the
Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei (pronounced, I'm told, I-Way-Way) at the Hirshhorn
Art Museum, so Bill and I (Billy had to work) spent post-InauguralDay museuming.  One
installation was of seven of 81 identical chests Weiwei made using rare quince wood. Four
holes, two on each side, are placed at eye-level and above. "Nevertheless," according to 
the exhibition catalog, "the upper and lower openings always align so that they 
create the effect of showing every phase of the moon ...." That's Bill standing,
at my request, amidst the 4th or 5th chest.  He got scolded by a guard.
I and my camera got off scot-free.

Standing in front of three giant photos of Ai Weiwei dropping an
urn dating from the Han Dynasty, "thus destroying," according to
the exhibit's catalog, "2000 years of cultural tradition and legacy
[and expressing] the notion that new ideas and values are
produced through iconoclasm."

Bill standing before an installation of steel rebars "recovered
from the rubble of collapsed schoolhouses in Sichuan following
the 2008 earthquake."

In one of Weiwei's photos, a large bird is being flipped at The White
House (there's a similar photo with the Chinese equivalent of The
White House).  Despite having gotten him scolded twice already by
the art-guards, I got Bill to flip the bird at the flipped bird. I dared
not use my flash, thus the crappy lack of detail in the photo ... well,
I promised Bill I wouldn't use the flash ... plus my camera's kind
of cheap, plus, sadly, I'm not much of a photographer.

So, though I am way way in love with Ai Weiwei, we moved on
to the Asian Art Museum, also part of the Smithsonian. The only photo
I took was of this beautiful Buddhist memorial stone.

We had lunch at Pret a Manger.  (I didn't understand exactly
what Bill was saying when he suggested this place so I didn't realize
until later that we had eaten at what is the very latest in chic!) "Now,"
said Bill, "I'll take you to the very best coffee place in the city. It's in
Chinatown." "You don't drink coffee, so how would you know where the
best coffee is?" I asked.  "Billy drinks coffee and, believe me, he knows
what is the best place for coffee.  Trust me ... Billy knows."  We passed
the above exotic edifice on our way to the city's best coffee.

There it was, around a corner, with a distinctively hung sign.

The barista was handsome and said it was
okay to take his picture.  Too bad it came out fuzzy.

He created this amazing frothed design on my latte.  

After coffee, my legs rested, we headed for the National Portrait
Gallery to see the exhibit called "Poetic Likeness - Modern American Poets" --
 something which, if I didn't also get to see, I was going to die twice in one day.
Here, standing before a photograph of Sylvia Plath, I'm trying to
express the puzzlement, even to myself, of having spent so much
of my life obsessed with her life and her poems.

And then I stood in homage before the portrait of Stanley Kunitz,
my new favorite poet, whom I admire and enjoy without obsessment,  And then
we got on the Metro, met Billy, and had dinner at a great Asian-Fusion
restaurant called Pauline's.  Then Bill & Billy drove me to Washington National
Airport. I got on the plane at 10PM, landed in Providence at 11PM, found
my pickup in Long Term Parking, scraped the ice off its windows, and
headed for Cape Cod.  I got home at 130AM.  I went to bed at 230AM,
got up at 630AM and went to work.  I'd had life in the fast lane for four days.
It was great.

RIP: Hugo Chavez - July 28, 1954 - March 5, 2013

Photo credit: Steve Pike in The New Yorker

Born into a poor family, he becomes an altar boy and he looks around.  He hates imperialism.  It must sting to notice that an outsider named Rockefeller owns three of the largest ranches in Venezuela.  He becomes a  revolutionary and eventually a leader.  He despised many of the foreign policies of my country.  His heart was in the right place even if he wasn't entirely successful at reaching good goals.  He loved the poor.  Perhaps he was better at ideas than the implementation of them -- not so great at governing.  Sometimes he opened his mouth before he engaged his brain; still I, for one, was tickled when at the podium of the United Nations in 2006, Hugo Chavez, referring to the fact that George W. Bush had stood in the same spot the day before, remarked, "The devil came right here ... and it still smells of sulfur today."

I don't know about the odor of sulfur but he was right about the evil impersonated in the unintelligent "is out children educated?" man who took the advice of really evil men and got my country into a mess which I don't feel confident we'll ever get out of. Decline and fall, and all of that.

(That United Nations incident gave me a thrill close to that I got when, in 1992, Sinead O'Connor tore up a picture of the pope on Saturday Night Live.  That incident, for its symbolism, made me jubilant!)

Here in Massachusetts there is a non-profit organization which provides heating oil to the needy at below-market prices.  This group asked all the major oil companies to help; the only one willing to participate was Citgo, a company nationalized by Chavez, and so owned by the people of Venezuela.

I have a soft spot in my heart for anyone who reaches out to help those who've been trodden down.  I'm glad, when my tank is close to empty, if there's a Citgo gas station ahead that I can pull into.

Weather Drama

In some parts of Massachusetts it's as if the "r" has been omitted from the alphabet. Tonight the wind is strong, and there are sounds of things rolling across the roof -- limbs, I suppose. But it is raining, whereas inland it is snowing. The powers-that-be dismissed us from work at noon, giving me extra time to pack for my Sunday flight for my week of off-the-job training at Gulf Islands National Seashore, just south of Pensacola Florida. However, instead of arranging clothes and such, I played tunes on YouTube and then fell asleep in the recliner.

(Credit: I stole this picture from "Crooks and Liars" blog; they got it from "Blue Gal" blog; and I forget who she got it from.)