Telegram
Sometimes all I do is put up frames with no pictures inside.
David on 01.31.04 @ 03:21 PM CST [link]
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Telegram |
| Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. |
Saturday, January 31st
Friday, January 30th
Pneuma
Love is the wind. It blows soft and gentle, hot and harsh, it rips through the winter night and makes it unbearably bitter, just as it stirs the summer afternoon it unbearably sweet. It has four temperaments, four humours, four directions, four tastes. We turn our sails to its breath, imagining that we can harness its power and go where we please, by its service; then the tempest comes and we go off course, dashed on the rocks of disaster, because we are its slave, not its master. Yet even that disastrous fate we prefer to the fate of being set adrift in the doldroms, when the wind withdraws and we stagnate, hopeless, all at sea. Love is the wind.
David on 01.30.04 @ 05:46 PM CST [link]
Thursday, January 29th
Churchmouse
He was first seen on Sunday. An elderly couple had brought a bag of groceries to the church, to be distributed to the needy. Two ministers were talking nearby and heard a rustling sound -- and then the mouse emerged, cautious, then panic-stricken. he went under the door of the secretary's office, into the pastor's study, and then into his closet. Then the next night, he dropped in on the deacon's meeting. According to one report he popped out of a settee and ran across a lady's lap. A five-year-old whose mother was at the meeting crawled all around under the card tables trying to catch him. She didn't get him, and he was spotted heading for the youth center. No further reports, two empty traps.
David on 01.29.04 @ 09:00 PM CST [link]
Wednesday, January 28th
Black Plastic With A Hole In The Middle
Most of my life I have been present to music through recordings; in particular I was a collector of LPs, in my teens and twenties. In my high school days I expressed my individuality by becoming a partisan of free jazz: it was so complex, harmonically, as to seem atonal to the casual listener, and maybe the casual listener was right. When i moved into the dormitory I already had several hundred records, and my exposure there to rock and country gave me several additional streams of music to buy from. After I graduated my collection grew more slowly, because I was broke; then the CD hit and records disappeared. I began rebuilding my collection, on cassette and on CD, but with less fervor. One day I gave most of my records away, and never missed them. The rest are in the closet, mostly, and I hardly ever think about them, except when they're in the way. Once I knew the difference between Booker Ervin and Booker Little, and cared, and had the evidence to prove that I knew and cared. I'd know better if I bothered to get out the records.
David on 01.28.04 @ 04:31 PM CST [link]
Tuesday, January 27th
Music: Performance
I was never a compulsive concert-goer. My parents took me to the Boston Pops a lot when I was a shrot, and I stood on my chair and conducted along with Arthur Fiedler. I went back to Symphony Hall for a music-appreciation series on Saturday mornings when I was in the seventh grade (the musicians must have loved that!), but that was pretty much that for me. I went to the concert series in college, but in the interim most of my live music experiences were jazz. The jazz festival moved to New York from Newport about the time we moved to New Jersey, and my older brother had to go. I went too, and was often by myself in New York City, hot summer nights, at the age of thirteen or so. Mingus fingus. It wasn't until I got to college that I discovered rock and roll, went to some Dead shows, and spent a lot of time bleeding from the ears at smoky nightclubs. it was a group thing and when the gang all went their separate ways I lost interest. Saw Costello a while back, probably ten years now, and haven't been to a ticketed performance like that ince. But the church has a respectable music program, and I am hearuing more live performances than ever before, and am acquainted with dozens of professional musicians, for the first time in my life. They're mostly quite nice.
David on 01.27.04 @ 04:21 PM CST [link]
Monday, January 26th
I Am A Dry Tree
What can you do? Sometimes it's not as easy as pulling the thorn out of the lion's paw; not that that was easy but at least there was a plain way to end the suffering. But we know in our hearts that suffering is wrong, it's unnatural, and it is therefore right, however possible, to cut off the source of this wrongness. The mystery is how to do it. And it seems shameful, somehow, to see another's suffering and admit one's impotence in the face of it, that it comes to seem more discreet to look away. But that's a failure of faith: the suffering of one is the concern of all, each wound can be tenderly cared for, and everyhting broken can be made whole. After the forest is scorched, the seeds will yet sprout. Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress.
David on 01.26.04 @ 06:02 PM CST [link]
Sunday, January 25th
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi
Fame is as transitory as any other treasure laid up on this earth. The profile may be on every coin in the empire, but time will efface the name and the memory been as the image remains. So, I was asked, are you related to the singer? No one thinks of him much any more, nor of the politician of the same name who was prominent in the same era. (Premier of Alberta! There's a way to be distinguished and obscure at the same time!) But, back in the late forties, my Dad and uncle embarked on a liner bound for England, where their parents lived. There was a tentative rap on the cabin door. A star-struck passenger had seen the famous name on the manifest, and she asked, was it true? Could she speak to him? My uncle presented himself to her: not the charismatic performer from the Metropolitan Opera, but a college kid with a gift for math. And now, fifty or so years later, he's as famous as any other John Brownlee.
David on 01.25.04 @ 06:31 PM CST [link]
Saturday, January 24th
Fragments
I am asked if I am related to the singer. I know who she means, and admit to a distant relationship (undocumented). I have a story about how someone sought out my uncle, thinking it might be Him, but I don't get a chance to tell it.
It gets bitterly cold, again. I go to the skating party.
I skate for a few minutes, sit inside and eat and talk with the rummage gang.
He and I were in the same class in high school. There isn't much to say about it.
There is just a sliver of moon in a deep blue, achingly clear sky.
David on 01.24.04 @ 08:04 PM CST [link]
Friday, January 23rd
Springtime in Alaska
I don't usually write about the news, but today I heard something that will affect all of us, in the northern hemisphere, anyway. The sun came up today in Barrow, Alaska, for the first time since November 18. The days here have been getting noticeably longer, and even the longest night was quite a bit shorter than theirs. Today is another Shakespeare day ("Blow, blow, thou winter wind") and I hear snow is on the way again, and we've got another funeral tomorrow, but hey, the sun's out in Barrow.
David on 01.23.04 @ 04:27 PM CST [link]
Thursday, January 22nd
Reckless Consumption
You have to be hipper than the clerks -- that's the rule at serious book and record stores. So I was a little surpirsed today when I was at Border's and wanted to buy something embarrassing. Nothing awful, really, just something I like and am a little ashamed to admit it. I never would have considered it if the music hadn't been playing on the in-store sound system; nice. good-time summery stuff from a popular artist's recently released greatest-hits package. The CD is in a nearby display of best-sellers, it's on sale, and I am sucker enough to be considering it. Can I actually take this pop pablum up to the register and buy it? I did steel myself and buy it, albeit under cover of a witheringly-cool Johnny Cash CD. So maybe maturity has won out over peer pressure. Maybe I'm too old to care any more. Maybe I'm so hip I'm bulletproof. Whatever. All I wanna do is have some fun.
David on 01.22.04 @ 05:41 PM CST [link]
Wednesday, January 21st
Beautiful Zelda
The funeral was over, the body was laid to rest, and the mourners were gathering at the reception to eat and get a word with the bereaved. It seemed like a good time to call her. I had some hot news, about the baby, so I had a fig leaf of an excuse. She was happy to hear from me, or she sounded that way, and we talked about snow, and babies, and rummage, and other good stuff. It was so sweet and uncomplicated and just what my heart needed. Next time it will be complicated again.
David on 01.21.04 @ 05:31 PM CST [link]
Tuesday, January 20th
Death Central
We went out into the snow yesterday to mark out the grave site. The cemetery was surveyed decades ago and marble markers were placed in the northeast corner of each plot, and each plot, consisting of eight graves, is twenty feet by eighteen. Under inches of snow, overgrown by grass, are the two-inch markers with plot numbers. Find one. Unreel tape measure to twenty feet. Poke around with a pitchfork, and hope that the frozen ground and random stones ring differently than the markers. One was under a bush, but eventually we found them all. Plot 96, grave 2. His wife died a few years ago, of ALS. He'd had pneumonia, but seemed to be doing fine, but then he sat down in his chair to rest, and the rest will be eternal.
David on 01.20.04 @ 05:47 PM CST [link]
Monday, January 19th
MLK
I think the murder of Dr. King must have changed us a lot. My parents were Nixon supporters in 1960, and by 1970 they were vehement opponents. In 1968 the only blacks ("Negroes", then) on my radar were George Scott and Reggie Smith, the two African-Americans on the Boston Red Sox. Yaz won another batting title that year, and Martin Luther King was killed. The Torreys and my parents were probably instrumental in trying to lead our church toward some kind of liberal activism, in the wake of that death, and half-assed and naive as that effort was, it was well-intentioned. We worshipped at a black church once or twice; it baffles me that there were enough black Presbyterians to form a church in Boston in those days, when there were hardly any white Presbyterians in the area then. I never understood why we were there, but it must have been some sort of gesture toward reconciliation and unity. Nothing much came of it, and shortly the repercussions of the whole thing drove my Dad out of church leadership and one week we found ourselves to be Episcopalians. The more I think of it, the more I realize that this life, which I didn't see touching myself while it was being lived, has continued to effect mine from the day it ended to now.
David on 01.19.04 @ 05:46 PM CST [link]
Sunday, January 18th
Brother's Keeper
I don't hear from my brother very often these days. (I never hear from my brother, either, but that's another story.) But it was him on the phone today. I should have known it was him; he has immpeccably bad timing when it comes to phone calls. I'm never doing anything important when he calls, I'm just watching TV, but today is a perfect example. It's almost the end of French Kiss, I'm committed to French Kiss, and the phone rings. It's stupid not to pick up, it's a movie I've seen before, but the call might be important. And it is important, I guess, but not in the way I'm expecting. Like most calls from him, it is long and has lots of awkward bits. We don't talk enough any more to have any conntinuity from conversation to conversation, and we don't have the interests in common we used to. So, we need "topics". Our topics for today: Christmas and gifts, the other brother, other family, music, Rainbow Bridge, One from the Heart, the Patriots game, the weather. As time spent, It was probably better than the end of French Kiss, and I am an utter failure as a call-screener. If the phone rings, and the machine gets it, I am too curious about it to concentrate on whatever it was that prompted me to let the machine pick up in the first place. Then, if it's a person, I feel so guilty I cal right back anyway, inconveniencing myself further, and openly revealing myself as a call-screener.
David on 01.18.04 @ 06:43 PM CST [link]
Saturday, January 17th
House of Style
Every day, I sit down here to write and, as I write, I become uncomfortably aware of the patterns that characterize my prose. Evrey rhetorical device, used too often, threatens to become a flaw, and I suspect I have a handful of tools I go to over again. Among them: the use of a colon as a fulcrum on which to balance a sentence.I can't say I'm happy with my use of the semicolon either; too often it takes what is already an overly complex sentence and makes it a string of endless verbiage ready to collapse under its own weight. Do strings collapse? wouldn't a more attentive writer come up with metaphors which are both coherent and imaginative? What's with the rhetorical questions? I like lists; short lists, long lists lists with three items. On the one hand I might introduce them with a colon; on the other hand I might use a semi-colon. Or I use the see-saw list: on the one side is one item; on the other a contrasting item. These are all technical tics and they may well bother me more than anyone else -- there aren't many readers out there to offend anyway, he dashed -- but too often the technique is the content. When the technique is the content you end up with porn instead of romance, and not very good porn, either.
David on 01.17.04 @ 05:06 PM CST [link]
Friday, January 16th
Snow Day
Today started so cold that the busses wouldn't start, and school was cancelled. The wind was rather bitter at times, but the worst appears to be over. Temperatures rose above twenty by the afternoon. The low, just below zero, was hit sometime after midnight. The after-school aides were available and looked after the youngsters displaced by the school closing, while the nursery school tried to function in the over-burdened space. With it so cold no one could use the playground. She looked exhausted at three o'clock. she's been a substitute quite a lot but today she was inside, with the big kids, all day. There's no doubt in my mind: day-care providers are professional athletes.
David on 01.16.04 @ 05:00 PM CST [link]
Thursday, January 15th
Kon Tiki
Today I am in open rebellion. I put on multiple layers, bound my feet in two pairs of socks and boots, found a pair of thermal denims, and over it all, my most garish Hawaiian shirt -- covered with green palm trees and pink hibiscus flowers. I will not let this bitter season claim my soul. I will whistle in the trenches while the battle rages around me.
David on 01.15.04 @ 03:26 PM CST [link]
Wednesday, January 14th
Viewer's Choice
I live alone and I get cable TV. This probably adds up to some startlingly accurate personality test, since, I can watch whatever I want to, and no one will know. I could watch Oprah or opera; I could watch wrestling or West Wing; I could watch Wheel of Fortune or Mr. Ed or The E! True Hollywood Story and no one would be the wiser. So with all this freedom, or license, and no one to answer to, what do I choose?
I like shows that meet both these conditions: a major amount of the action takes place at a school, and one of the students there is a title character. So: yes to The Secret World of Alex Mack, Clarissa Explains It All, The Adventures of Pete and Pete, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and, currently, Joan of Arcadia. No to Beverly Hills 90210, Boston Public, Head of the Class, or Mr. Peepers. Yes to Sabrina, when she was in high school, but no to Felicity, who never was. I liked Freaks and Geeks, which qualifies by a stretch.
School has become the one universal social setting; everyone understands how it works. The fundamental motivations are the same there as everywhere: love, success, acceptance, honor; the social classes and distinctions are plain and their results consequential; emotions are heightened and motivations less amibiguous than in "real" life. The prominent characters are lijke we remember ourselves to be, not too smart, not too popular, not too athletic, but only perceived misfits, not real misfits.
David on 01.14.04 @ 05:48 PM CST [link]
Tuesday, January 13th
Death, Death, Death
We had another death Monday morning; this makes seven since Thanksgiving. Late this morning i went out into the memorial garden to make yet another effort to break through the tundra: eighteen inches deep and six around, large enough for most crematory containers. The ground was frozen six inches down, the color and texture of milk chocolate. I thought about her while I dug; I never spoke to her much, it took me a while to learn that what I took for hostility was actually pain and exhaustion. She rang with the bell choir; she must have really loved it because it looked to me as though ringing the bells was difficult and painful, and muffling them against her robe even more so. but she didn't stop until she could no longer leave the house. She was in hospice care these last few months -- your rummage dollars -- and the junior highs went to her house caroling the Sunday before Christmas. Of what the world values. I don't think she got much; Of what is truly valuable, I can't say. Part of me pitied her, and still does; but she lived a life, and came to the same end as we all do.
David on 01.13.04 @ 05:41 PM CST [link]
Monday, January 12th
Tops
I started wearing hats as an affectation, and then it became a habit, and then it became a choice dictated by good sense. When I was a youth, I saw a cool leather hat in a clothing store not far from the house we rented at the New Jersey shore. All my money was disposable, so I could afford it; in it I imagined I looked like Gato Barbieri, the coolest man alive. I bought it and wore it and wore it and wore it again. It was a little tight on the noggin, eventually, a little careworn and decayed, but I found other hats and other personas. It was a necessary part of my garb, right up there with blue jeans in the days when shoes were optional ten months of the year. I wore fedoras, straws, cowboy hats and baseball caps. Then I realized they were keeping the rain off my glasses, the sun out of my eyes, and the UV off my increasingly exposed scalp. I have been introduced to such innovations as sunglasses, the umbrella, and the sun visor, but hats still work the best, most of the time. Heads off to hats!
David on 01.12.04 @ 05:17 PM CST [link]
Sunday, January 11th
Foreign Country
Maybe it is technology which has made us such a peculiarly nostalgic people. Even the parts of the past which we despise obsess us. But there is an unacknowledged dissonance between the past we remember and the past we see, in the endless artifacts of photographs, movies, television, video. It is the same past, but the details are blurred, then lost, in memory; but the artifact keeps them all. What are we to believe, the memory or the picture? The youths in my high school yearbook look as alien as Zulus to me, how is it we didn't think we looked strange at the time? If I imagine the past was a simpler, happier time, I have forgotten the horrific details; if I imagine that it was a depressing, repressive era, I have forgotten the reassuring repetitions which are daily life. I have had twenty thousand cups of coffee in my life and not a single one of them was memorable. But the time I spent drinking the first ones, more than twenty years ago, was just as full and real as the time I spend drinking them today. These journal pages are just more life turning into artifacts, in a sea full of them.
David on 01.11.04 @ 05:10 PM CST [link]
Saturday, January 10th
A
I finished the first book in the series I resolved to read, and I have already broken one of the rules I set for myself. I read The Allingham Minibus, by Marjorie Allingham, a collection of short works. she was renowned and popular in her time as an author of tales of detection, but I was unable to find one of her more characteristic novels, so I read this. As is to be expected in a posthumous miscellany, the stories were variable in maturity, somewhat repetitive in plotting, but not altogether a bad introduction to her work. The stories are well-written and atmospheric, more successful in plotting than characterization. The longest story in the book (Quarter of a Million) is the least successful, with too much plot, too many characters, and far-fetched action. It is the only story, though, which exhibits these qualities to any degree. Mostly pretty good.
David on 01.10.04 @ 05:39 PM CST [link]
Friday, January 9th
Outside
It has been the coldest day of the winter, so far. Everything seems taut with the cold, clenched against it: the trees, the buildings, and all the old bones. There was a death and we had to open a spot in the memorial garden. I measured out the grid and marked the location. The ground was so hard I had trouble getting into it with a screwdriver. We went and got along cast-iron probe and clanged away at the frozen ground. A few inches down it wasn't yet frozen, and was even soft with the moisture from our uncommon rains this winter. Walking back to the building after we'd finished, I saw a phalanx of birds flying in and out of the trees, the old pine trees and two overgrown hollies. They flew back and forth without ceasing. I think they were having fun.
David on 01.09.04 @ 05:34 PM CST [link]
Thursday, January 8th
Friendship
We had a very nice lunch together. I got over to their house about twelve, and we drove in the station wagon down to Watchung. Soup and salad bar. We talked about candle-making, we talked about rummage, we talked about the VNA office, we talked about J. I heard about trips to South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Zambia; about Trinidad, about Millington in 1962, about Indiana. She talked about her Dunkard forebears, and so did I. They thought backto the day they met me, five years ago, a t a church cleanup day. I told them about Brownlee place, and Torfoot, and Pretty Prairie. After we had finished lunch we went back to their house and talked for an hour more. She's been frail for a few years now, and I realized it was time or me to go. A very warm day, for January.
David on 01.08.04 @ 05:34 PM CST [link]
Wednesday, January 7th
Winter
It's time to hunker down. It got cold and the wind picked up, and it is cutting through everything. The forecast didn't sound so bad when I went out this morning, so I underdressed a bit -- my lightest quilted shirt, my leather jacket, no special ear gear. The flag was standing straight out, and that made the difference. This isn't an exceptionally cold part of the country, but comparative misery is, shall we say, cold comfort. Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky: I will endure well enough, but I'm not keen on waiting out the blast.
David on 01.07.04 @ 04:49 PM CST [link]
Tuesday, January 6th
Slush
It is disorganized snow, which has not yet reorganized itself into water. But its descent into chaos doesn't make it interesting; it is snow with all the fun and novelty worn off. Slush is the plodding, dreary side of winter: as snow-in-fall is its wonderful, magical side. snow is the weekend and slush is Monday morning, back to work and a long way till Friday rolls around again. It is not by accident that slush is cold and wet, like that dutiful yet repugnant humor, phlegm. A snowball is playful, a slushball is just cruel. Slush is transition, it is the adolescence of ice, a chrysalid that holds nothing of interest inside, it is part history, part potentiality, but in itself is just pure misery. Which is nothing but a privation. I'm tired of slush. Hush.
David on 01.06.04 @ 06:09 PM CST [link]
Monday, January 5th
Fable
The story goes that a drinking man left his favorite bar late one night. As he was fumbling to unlock the car door, he dropped the keys. Half an hour later his friend comes by, and finds him on hands and knees, meticulously searching the area under a lamppost up the block. the friend asks what's wrong; the man tells what I've told you. The friend asks, "Why are you looking for your keys here when you dropped them over there by your car?" The drinking man replies, "The light's better over here." Moral: When looking for the good things in life; love, meaning, happiness, joy, the first and last things; look first where they are likely to be found, not where the searching's easiest.
David on 01.05.04 @ 06:10 PM CST [link]
Sunday, January 4th
Random Thoughts
I really don't feel like writing today. Every idea that comes to mind seems too weighty or too flighty. Once I have a subject I have little difficulty in running it into the ground, in short order, thank goodness. Brevity is the main virtue of these pages. There's a lot occupying my mind but I'm not ready to put it down. I can't say, "put it down on paper," or, "write it down," since, technically speaking, this isn't writing and paper isn't involved. In Homer's time, there was nothing like paper in use; the reference to writing in him is obscure and problematic. My writing is nothing if not obscure and problematic. Even more obscure and problematic in written form; I abandoned cursive and write in sloppy semi-uncials. I admire the fragments that have come down rom the Pre-Socratics for their power and mystery; but they weren't stated, as fragments, to be powerful, mysterious, and opaque; but as parts of arguments which would be powerful, sound, and wise. What happened to Wisdom as an intellectual virtue?
David on 01.04.04 @ 06:22 PM CST [link]
Saturday, January 3rd
Gift
It came upon me gradually, who she was. I knew her, but it had been so long since I'd seen her, the memory of herself faded and the words of the name, the web of relationships, took her place. I knew her herself, not just as mother of this one, grandmother of those, friend of these. She played the piano at those little services, the healing services which are so special, so plain and full of meaning. She played for the children's choirs, the pageants, VBS, just a couple of years ago. She had the earnest competence of the small-town church musician. It wasn't until the day of her funeral that I found her again. It's too often like that.
David on 01.03.04 @ 05:14 PM CST [link]
Friday, January 2nd
Flock
They have vultures for neighbors. There are a couple of dozen of them, I suppose. The high school sits in a residential neighborhood on the southeast side of a hill; the oval of the track is just off the street and is overlooked by grandstands, facing south. The morning sun hits the hill, the track, the stands, and the vultures gather there and lazily spread their wings. As the thermals rise they can spiral off, to the nearby shopping center, where the dumpsters are full of refuse from the grocery store, Burger King, and Chinese restaurant. My friends live in the house adjacent to the school. I've heard them complain about traffic but never about carrion-eaters. Hard to tell them from the students, maybe.
David on 01.02.04 @ 06:28 PM CST [link]
Thursday, January 1st
About
This seems to be a good day upon which to anchor some exposition, easy to find and easy to remember.
Me. I live in central New Jersey, and I have lived in this town off and on since I was thirteen. I was born in Los Angeles, and spent my early years in the Boston area. I am the youngest of three sons, unmarried but open to possiblities (and finding few). I received a BA from Connecticut College in philiosophy and Classical Greek, minoring in alcohol and art.
The church. The place where I work, a mainline Protestant institution with about a thousand members, mostly prosperous white suburbanites. The church is on the liberal side of most questions confronting its denomination (with no sign of unanimity among the members). It is long on missions and short on evangelism, with a strong music program and an increasingly pompous liturgical style.
VNA. The Visiting Nurse Association of two counties here in central NJ, I have been associated with it for ten years now, the first five as a client and the next as a volunteer. After my mother's stroke, the VNA provided home health care, nursing and therapy, companionship and finally hospice care. She was disabled and housebound, but as comfortable and happy as I could make her, mainly due to the caring efforts of the staff and volunteers of VNA. After she died and I got involved with the church, a friend there providentially invited me to participate in a particular volunteer activity associated with VNA, namely:
Rummage. A twice-yearly fundraiser for VNA, it takes up all of my free time in April and september. It is reputed to be the largest rummage sale in the mid-Atlantic. All items we sell are donated and all labor is volunteered; we accept donations for three weeks at a local park, store them in huge tents and barns, sort and price everything and then hold a three-day sale, first weekend of May, first weekend of October. It's backbreaking work putting this together, but it raises a staggering amount of money for VNA. The volunteers who do this are the people about whom the word "awesome" was coined.
David on 01.01.04 @ 04:22 PM CST [link]
