The People, Yes…

One of my amusements during the holiday season is people-watching.  Particularly in situations where crowds, lines and captive children are the norm, amusement is easy to find.

During a Wednesday-before-Thanksgiving swing through a local grocery, I landed behind a child and his mother in the checkout line.  The boy might have been three or four, and he was fussy.  Hanging on to his mother’s skirt, he circled around and around until he found safety, tucked between her and the cart.  Turning to look past us to the vibrant displays of merchandise across the aisle, he pointed to something, tugging on her skirt to gain attention.  Busy sorting through her purse, his mother ignored him – a mistake she would come to regret.

The boy began tugging with both hands, demanding her attention as “fussy” transformed itself into ”cantankerous”. Finally pushed over the edge by parental insensitivity, he began to wail with rage and frustration.  He was tired. He wanted to go home. He especially didn’t want to be waiting in line while his mother sorted through coupons and double checked lists. As his outraged protest grew louder and more high-pitched, his obviously embarassed and distraught mother tried her best to reason with her monosyllabic son.

“Do you want to ride in the cart?” she asked.   No, he did not want to ride in the cart.  “Do you want to look at your book?”   No, he did not.  “Do you want me to spank you?”  “No”.  “Do you want to go to your room when we get home?”  ”No.”

In desperation, his mother looked at the overflowing grocery cart and asked, “Do you want a cookie?”   “NO!’, he shouted.  Obviously startled by an unexpected response, his mother asked again, “Are you sure you don’t want a cookie?”  “NO!!!”  Suddenly, his mom stopped. Looking at her boy she asked, “Do you know what I just asked you?”   “NOOOO!!!” came the reply, as he re-buried his face into her skirt.

Funny as the little drama was for those of us who were watching, uncomfortable and embarassing as it obviously was for his mother, what made it most astonishing was the intensity of the child’s “No”.  Caught up in the sheer, perverse pleasure of negativity, his ”No” had become more important to him than even a cookie.

Unfortunately, the instinctive response of a child can become the habit of an adult.  Looking around, it isn’t hard to find the nay-sayers among us.  Petulant, obnoxious, pessimistic and filled with cynicism, their entire raison d‘être appears to be shouting “NO!” into the face of life.  Offered the hand of friendship, the challenges of collegiality, the possibility of intimacy, their response is to cling ever more tightly to their rejection of every overture, every gesture of conciliation.

Tiresome and exhausting in personal relationships, negativity becomes corrosive and even toxic on a social level.  When whole groups begin saying “no” to one another, more than feelings get hurt. Society becomes segmented. Fear begins to erode acceptance. Selfishness appears, together with its unhappy twin, power-hunger.  From urban alleyways to the halls of Congress, from boardrooms to lecture halls, we increasingly are confronted by the spectacle of enraged, petulant children shouting “No” – albeit ”children” who also possess adult strength and power.  These “Nos” can kill, or reshape lives without regard for consequence.

 

Knowing all this, and understanding full well the power of negativity to erode, consume and destroy, I prefer the folly of optimism – a willingness to believe, despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary, that humanity at heart is good, that joy is possible,  and that no matter how broken, trust can be rebuilt. To paraphrase Faulkner’s famous words, I chose  to believe humanity not only will endure the shouts of “no” we call history, but that it will prevail over that history by the “yes” of courageous human hearts.

Is such optimism naive?  Has faith in humanity become outdated?  Have the cruelty, ridicule and small-mindedness of the schoolyard made dignity, perseverance and grace irrelevant?  Faced with such questions, it becomes my turn to speak a “no”, to affirm human decency and the possibility of grace and to align myself once again with a poet of my roots.  Let the naysayers of the world rant on. Carl Sandburg knows the people, and he knows the people’s ‘Yes”. 

The people yes
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
    They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
    The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
    You can’t laugh off their capacity to take it…

The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,
is a vast huddle with many units saying:
    “I earn my living.
    I make enough to get by
    and it takes all my time.
    If I had more time
    I could do more for myself
    and maybe for others.
    I could read and study
    and talk things over
    and find out about things.
    It takes time.
    I wish I had the time.”…

Between the finite limitations of the five senses
and the endless yearnings of man for the beyond
the people hold to the humdrum bidding of work and food
while reaching out when it comes their way
for lights beyond the prison of the five senses,
for keepsakes lasting beyond any hunger or death.
    This reaching is alive.
The panderers and liars have violated and smutted it.
    Yet this reaching is alive yet
    for lights and keepsakes.

    The people know the salt of the sea
    and the strength of the winds
    lashing the corners of the earth.
    The people take the earth
    as a tomb of rest and a cradle of hope.
    Who else speaks for the Family of Man?
    They are in tune and step
    with constellations of universal law.
    The people is a polychrome,
    a spectrum and a prism
    held in a moving monolith,
    a console organ of changing themes,
    a clavilux of color poems
    wherein the sea offers fog
    and the fog moves off in rain
    and the labrador sunset shortens
    to a nocturne of clear stars
    serene over the shot spray
    of northern lights.

    The steel mill sky is alive.
    The fire breaks white and zigzag
    shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
    Man is a long time coming.
    Man will yet win.
    Brother may yet line up with brother:

This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
    There are men who can’t be bought.
    The fireborn are at home in fire.
    The stars make no noise,
    You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
    Time is a great teacher.
    Who can live without hope?

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
    the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
    “Where to? what next?” 

 

 

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Falling Acorns, Rattled Nerves

 

Flung across the  landscape by the rising winds of autumn,  acorns bounce and tumble toward their destiny, the sound of their fall exploding into the air like riffs of small arms fire or the percussive chatter of  firecrackers.  If you happen to be standing near a car when the first gust strikes and an acorn-laden oak decides to let her seed-crop fly, the noise created by the collision of nature’s irresistable force and a human’s immovable object is astounding.  If you open the car’s door, slide across the seat and close the door behind you, the amplified sound is deafening, the storm of green and brown pellets less destructive than hail but no less impressive.

I experienced my first acorn storm in the Texas hill country, an area of valleys and ridges threaded through with oak.  Live oak is the area’s signature tree, but red, pin, lacey, and bur also root in its soil and history.  Like the sudden swell of redbud in spring, the astonishment of the prickly pear’s extravagant yellow blossoms and the turning of Virginia creeper as it climbs toward true red,  every country event can be an adventure – unpredictable, unique and unexpected – and the acorn storms are no exception.

Saving Mr. Val

 

The sense of presence slid gently across the cluttered desktop, palpable as sunlight. Nudging past my elbow, it rippled up my spine and chilled my shoulders, staking its claim to my consciousness like a squatter moving into a deserted house.

Suddenly attentive though not yet uneasy I turned, expecting to see my calico scowl of a cat peering at me across the dining table, irritated with my absorption in my work, intent on drawing me away for a bit of play. But the cat was nowhere to be seen.  When her name and a gentle, trilling call brought no response, I stretched and looked, unwilling to move from my chair.  She wasn’t under the table, not hidden in the plumpness of sofa cushions.  No sleeping cat lay draped across the wooden chair, her paws kneading at the air where they rested between turned spindles.  

Perplexed by her absence as much as by the vague promptings that had unfocused my attention, I turned back to the computer, ready to dismiss my unease and settle back into my work.

Invention and Necessity

 

Finding a copy of The New Yorker magazine in the middle of the West African bush never was easy.  In Liberia in the 1970s, it nearly was impossible.  In those days, living 120 miles inland from the coast and being limited to markets and shops that specialized in canned mackerel, Russian toilet paper and beer preserved with glycerin, browsing the newsstand wasn’t an option.

Occasionally I cadged a copy of the culturati’s Weekly Reader from expatriates living in Monrovia who had connections to the embassies or international agencies.  Now and then a Peace Corps volunteer would  have an issue to share, and there always was the possibility someone would step off PanAm 1 at Roberts Field with a copy tucked under an arm.  But in the end, mail from the States was my most dependable source.  The fact that the ”latest” issues might be three months old wasn’t a problem.  A story is a story, after all, and even essays and columns develop a strange, timeless quality when read so utterly out of context.

A Different Kind of Horror

 

Halloween is the season of horror.  Goblins, ghoulies and ghosties skulk around the edges of consciousness.  Television movie channels pull from their graves the remains of plots that refuse to die ~ Psycho, Vertigo, Rebecca – while Hitchcock’s Birds wheel through the air.  The little ones may delight in dressing up as princesses, pirates or warlords, but blood drips and body parts pile up for the vampires, zombies and other assorted creatures of the night who seek to displace chainsaw-wielding psychopaths as the epitome of evil terror. 

Everyone understands ”there’s gold in them-thar dismemberments”, and across the country everything from neighborhood haunted houses to Universal Studios’ famous Halloween Horror Nights in Orlando is trying to take a bite out of the consumer.   We love to be entertained, and we love to be scared when we know it  doesn’t count.  With its witches’ brew of  Dia De Los Muertos skeletons, decorated graves, black cats,  and whacked-out pumpkins, Halloween is our perfect holiday.  All those sugar highs are lagniappe.

 

One of the most unlikely purveyors of horror might be the American poet, Carl Sandburg. He’s not much in favor these days. He’s too common, too plain-spoken.  He wasn’t considered “literary” in his day and today he’d be left out of most symposia and cocktail parties.  But he had vision, and he understood people. Like Whitman before him, he acknowledged his debt to the workers and builders, the families and businesses which knit this country together.

Back to the Scrap Heap

I love researching the pedigree of  blog awards.  It’s a grown-up, vntary version of the forced march our 6th grade Catechism class made through the book of Genesis.  Just as following those Biblical “begats” back through the generations carried us to wholly unrecognizable worlds, tracking the progress of blog awards can lead to strange and mysterious places, not to mention unusual or quirky companions.

When Andi of AndiLit graced me with the Honest Scrap Award, I did what I often do. I worked my way backward: through Courtney at Everything in Between to In the Mainstream, and then on to Allison Writes, where the easy trail grew difficult. No matter. I’ve never been able to make myself keep going on and on down the path toward the origin of an award, partly for fear I might end up somewhere I don’t care to be, like Armed Females of America, and partly because I fear capture by blogs capable of killing my every spare minute of time.  Stop by Neatorama and you’ll see what I mean.

Prowling and pawing around the Honest Scrap heap, one thing I did notice is that no one seems quite sure what the award means.  As Andi put it, “The Honest Scrap Award is – well, I don’t know what it’s for…”  That sentiment’s been echoed by innumerable bloggers who’ve received the award and it was my own first response to the honor.  My second response was curiosity,particularly since scraps have been an important, if unexamined, part of my life since childhood.

The Banned and the Beautiful

“Flophouse” made me giggle.  I’d never heard such a word, and when I pulled the slim yellow volume from my parents’ bookshelves, admiring the bold red print along the spine and the rough, burlap texture of  its cover, I wasn’t certain at first I’d read it correctly.  But there it was: “flophouse”.

Paging through the book I found it once, twice, and twice again.  I giggled every time I read it, and went running down the stairs to the Big People’s party.

“What’s a flophouse?” I asked my Dad.  “What are you reading now?” he asked in turn, not even bothering to look up from his cards.

What I was reading was John Steinbeck’s  Cannery Row. Unlike another of his classics, The Grapes of Wrath, the saga of Doc and Dora, Mack, Hazel and Eddie never was banned by any library or school board I know of, but in my parents’ household, banning would have been irrelevant. Books were written, and books were meant to be read. If the reader happened to be a third-grader who’d pulled a grown-up novel off the shelves because she was attracted by the cover, so be it. Their assumption was that I’d be interested, or not, and if a grown-up book piqued my interest there was plenty of time to look up unfamiliar words or talk about life in a flophouse.

The Aging of Aquarius

 

As William F. Buckley, Jr. told the story, five days before his mother, Aloise Steiner Buckley, died

one week (had) gone by without her having said anything, though she clutched the hands of her children and grandchildren as they came to visit, came to say good-bye. (When her) nurse brought her from the bathroom to the armchair and — inflexible rule — put on her lipstick, and the touch of rouge, and the pearls, suddenly, and for the first time since the terminal descent began a fortnight earlier, she reached out for her mirror. With effort she raised it in front of her face, and then said, a teasing smile on her face as she turned to the nurse, “Isn’t it amazing that anyone so old can be so beautiful?”

The answer, clearly, was, Yes.  It was amazing that anyone could be so beautiful.

Aloise Steiner Buckley was one of the lucky ones. Gazing into life’s mirror is not always a reminder that we have become old and beautiful.  Sometimes, we see  only that we are becoming old.  The same mirror that reflects the image of a full and well-lived life also may reveal traces of youthful hopes and dreams  turned to ashes by the fires of raging reality.

Whatever the nature of the reflection in the mirror, there never is an undoing of what has been. In an often misunderstood statement from his Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner put these words into the mouth of Gavin Stevens: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past”.  Faulkner’s point is uncomfortable as it is true.  The past never simply disappears. It continues to live and resonate, shaping and determining the present in unexpected and unpredictable ways.

Picking Up Mary Travers’ Hammer

 

Honored, recognized, hidden or charicatured, the death of celebrity fascinates us. As if amazed that wealth and fame  present no obstacle to the predations of time, we stand arrested, staring in puzzlement as the lives of those we imagined to be immortal begin to fade against the horizon of history. Sometimes we grieve. More often we become nostalgic or nervous, aware that the passing of this stranger is a marker of sorts, a memento mori, a reminder that our years, too, are passing and the fate of others is our own.

Now and then, the grief is more personal.  When I learned Mary Travers had died, I wasn’t surprised. Her struggles with leukemia have been well documented, and her death at a Danbury, Connecticut hospital at the age of 72 was the natural outcome of a long process.

When she joined Peter Yarrow and Paul Stookey in the early 1960s to begin making music in Greenwich Village, the trio caught on immediately, sweeping into our 1950s lives with an irresistable combination of intensity and cool. Herb Caen, celebrated columnist for the  San Francisco Chronicle, might have been envisioning the lanky blond and goateed guitarists when he coined his term “beatnik” in a  1958 column.

 

Their 1962 debut album, Peter, Paul & Mary, contained two of their biggest hits, Lemon Tree and the multiple Grammy Award-winning If I Had a Hammer. It was one of the first albums I purchased for myself, and within weeks I’d memorized each of its songs. Later generations might learn to moonwalk or play air guitar in their basements and bedrooms, but high schoolers of the ’60s learned to harmonize.

Raise High the Floor Beam, Islanders….

The very definition of ”heart-tugging”  is a toddler or young child standing in front of an adult, arms outstretched, begging to be picked up.  Confused, frightened or hungry for attention, they’ve already learned a key to unlocking the resistant adult heart: the single word, ”Up!?”   Spoken with authority or pathos, it’s a word that brings big, strong arms down to a child’s level, enfolding the needy little bundle of humanity into a blanket of security, raising it in a flash and ensuring its safety “up there”.

The urge to flee upward seems as instinctive as our impulse to run from danger.  On my third birthday, our neighbors decided I should have a pet.  Invited to share cake and ice cream, they appeared at the back door with a tiny black puppy in a box.  It may have been a cocker spaniel ~ I remember black, glistening curls of fur and long, floppy ears.  The pup wriggled in paroxysms of pleasure as Mr. Ramey rubbed its belly and scratched its ears.  I was entranced, until they put the puppy on the floor.  Turning a few quick circles, the creature produced a cascade of wild yips and headed straight for me.     

I don’t know what I was thinking, but what I did became the stuff of family legend.  In two bounds I was onto a dining room chair and up on top of my mother’s prized mahogany dining table, shoes and all.    Down below, the puppy tumbled and jumped, trying to follow.  I screamed in terror, refusing a chorus of entreaties to “be quiet”, ”come down” or “pat the nice puppy”.  Eventually, the well-meaning neighbors collected the pup and made their way home.  I came down from the tabletop after being promised more ice cream, and eventually received a turtle for my birthday.