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Conversation With Emily

Neal, a man in his late forties, is walking barefoot on a vast beach with his sixteen-year-old daughter Emily, who is barefoot, too. The day is sunny and warm, the ocean barely audible in the distance.

Neal: Could there be a more beautiful day?

Emily: A few feathery white clouds in the sky would be nice. Break up the monotony of the blue.

Neal: Ah yes. Celestial art drifting across the cerulean.

Emily: Hey Papa?

Neal: Yes, my darling daughter?

Emily: Do you ever miss Mama?

Neal: I did for a time, and then one day I realized I didn’t miss her anymore. I still think about her, but I don’t miss her. Do you?

Emily: I’m sometimes keenly aware she isn’t here, but I wouldn’t say I still miss her.

Neal: Why did you ask?

Emily: I wonder why you don’t find a new partner. I thought maybe it was because you still felt wedded to Mama.

Neal: I don’t think so. I think I don’t find a new partner because I’ve never looked for a partner. Your mother, as you know, pursued me, and I think something like that would probably have to happen again. Someone else initiating the proceedings. I’m formidably shy.

Emily: I know. (muses) I wish I could marry you and never have to leave when I get older.

Neal: You can live with me as long as you want, and you don’t have to marry me.

Emily: We are kind of married already. We just don’t sleep together.

Neal: We’re best friends.

Emily: True, but just so you know… I have kind of fallen in love with someone at school. Two someones actually. A boy and a girl. Well… he’s really a young man and she’s really a young woman.

Neal: And are they also kind of in love with each other?

Emily: No. They don’t know each other. But they’re both kind of in love with me.

Neal: Well that’s nice.

Emily: You would be okay with me being in a relationship with a woman?

Neal: Sure. I want you to be happy. Just so long as she isn’t a mass murderer or a Republican.

Emily: In some ways it’s much easier being in love with a woman. For one thing, we don’t have to worry about getting pregnant.

Neal: Oh. Are you…

Emily: Not yet. But we’re talking about it.

Neal: You and the young woman?

Emily: And the young man. We’re all sixteen. It’s what sixteen-year-olds obsess about, among other things. It’s what all the songs we listen to are about, all the books we read, movies we see, etcetera. I don’t know if that was true when you were sixteen, but it’s true now.

Neal: And you’re up to speed on the whole getting-pregnant not-getting-pregnant… system?

Emily: Yes, I’m well up to speed on that system.

Neal: Good. So… let me know if you need money for supplies or…

Emily: (laughs) Supplies? You make it sound like I’m going on an expedition.

Neal: You know what I mean. If you want to consult a doctor about birth control. I’m happy to help in any way I can.

Emily: I was thinking of getting an implant. No fuss no muss. No worry about forgetting to take the pill. Etcetera.

Neal: Well okay. Shall I make you an appointment?

Emily: I kind of already did.

Neal: Kind of?

Emily: Did.

Neal: With Dr. Ornstein?

Emily: No, at the women’s health clinic.

Neal: Great. And I really do appreciate you telling me about this.

Emily: Isn’t that why you brought me here today? To talk about this?

Neal: No. Not… specifically.

Emily: Specifically? That’s… perplexing. And by the way, are we going somewhere or just meandering?

Neal: (laughs) One of the great philosophical questions. Along with: What are we doing here? What is our purpose? Is there any meaning to life? And is there meandering after death?

Emily: At my age I’m more interested in being in love and being loved and stuff like that. So if you didn’t bring me here today to review the facts of life, why did you bring me here today?

Neal: What do you mean? We come to the beach all the time. Why does this feel like I brought you here for some special purpose? Maybe we came here because… we came here.

Emily: Papa, you are so transparent to me. I always know when you have something important you want to talk about.

Neal: Well I don’t know if it’s that important, but it is something I’ve wanted to tell you for a very long time.

Emily: (stops walking) What?

Neal: How we chose your name?

Emily: Mama already told me. I’m named after her favorite poet Emily Dickinson.

Neal: Actually that’s not who you’re named after.

Emily: (taken aback) Seriously? You waited until I was sixteen to tell me I wasn’t named after Emily Dickinson, after I’ve told everyone I’ve ever known I’m named after her?

Neal: Your mother asked me not to tell you, but after she was gone I decided I would. And I was just about to tell you when you bought not one but two Emily Dickinson sweatshirts and spent months on that big school project writing fifty poems in the style of Emily Dickinson, and you dressed up as Emily Dickinson, and you did your hair like Emily Dickinson, and you made those videos of you being Emily Dickinson reading her poems, and so… I just let it go.

Emily: This is upsetting, Papa. Why are you telling me now?

Neal: I’m not sure. Maybe I sensed you were becoming a sexual being and… I don’t know. I just wanted to set the record straight before any more time passed. And I might not have said anything about it today if you hadn’t brought up the whole meandering issue.

Emily: (sits down on the sand) So tell me.

Neal takes a piece of paper out of his back pocket.

Emily: You wrote a speech?

Neal: I copied something out of a book to read to you.

Emily: Is this book the source of my name? The true source?

Neal: Yes.

Emily: What’s the book?

Neal: Larousse Gastronomique.

Emily: That big fat cookbook?

Neal: Larousse Gastronomique is far more than a cookbook. It is an encyclopedia of the history of cuisine, specifically French cuisine.

Emily: I’m named after a French Emily?

Neal: Yes.

Emily: Well that’s not so bad. Unless she was some horrible queen or countess, and even that would be kind of cool.

Neal: I don’t actually know what she was.

Emily: Oh great. I’m named after somebody you know nothing about?

Neal: I know you’re named after somebody who happens to have the same first name as Emily Dickinson.

Emily: Read the cookbook excerpt.

Neal: But first I want to set the scene.

Emily: Which scene?

Neal: The moment when we chose your name.

Emily: Fine. Set the scene.

Neal: So your mother and I had been married for five months. She was eight months pregnant with you.

Emily: She got pregnant before you got married? No one ever told me that either. How do you know I’m yours?

Neal: You have my nose.

Emily: (laughs) I certainly do. Go on.

Neal: So we were sitting on the sofa together one evening and your mother was having cocoa and I was reading aloud to her from Larousse Gastronomique.

Emily: How romantic.

Neal: It was, actually. Food is a very sensual subject.

Emily: Did you do this a lot? Read to her from the big fat cookbook?

Neal: We read aloud to each other every item in Larousse from A to Z. It took us three years. We finished when you were two and a half. You liked to sit at your little table and draw with your crayons while we read aloud from the book.

Emily: That’s so sweet. I guess it is kind of romantic. So read the thing you brought.

Neal: Well we had gotten to the Cs on that fateful night, and I came upon the entry for conversation.

Emily: You mean like what we’re having now? People talking to each other?

Neal: Yes and no. So… (reads) conversation a small pastry with an almond filling. According to the Dictionnaire de l’Academie des gastronomes, they were created at the end of the 18th century, taking their name from the title of a popular work, Les Conversations d’Emilie, by Mm d’Epinay (1774) They consist of covered puff pastry tartlets filled with a rum-flavoured frangipane or with almond cream and topped by a layer of royal icing. The tartlets are decorated with thin bands of pastries crisscrossed over the top.

Emily: I’m named after a tartlet?

Neal: You’re named after Emilie from the popular work Les Conversations d’Emilie. Your mother heard that title and said, “Oh honey, if we have a girl, let’s name her Emily. I love that name.”

Emily: (gets up) And she loves that name because she loved Emily Dickinson’s poetry, so really the title of that ancient novel or whatever it was just reminded her of how much she liked the name. So I’m not really named after that particular Emilie but after all Emilys including Emily Dickinson.

Neal: Except not really.

Emily: Why not really?

Neal: Your mother… (hesitates)

Emily: Tell me.

Neal: Didn’t love Emily Dickinson’s poems.

Emily: But she told me she did.

Neal: She told you she loved Emily Dickinson. She identified with her as an unrecognized poet, as Dickinson was unrecognized until after her death. But your mother didn’t like Dickinson’s poems. They were too rhymey for her.

Emily: Rhyming was the style of the time when Emily Dickinson was alive.

Neal: I know.

Emily: So whose poems did Mama love?

Neal: Denise Levertov. Philip Whalen. Sylvia Plath. e.e. Cummings.

Emily: Maybe I’ll change my name to Denise Cummings or e.e. Plath.

Neal: Emily is a lovely name.

Emily: I appreciate your telling me the truth, Papa. I like the truth. And I have no regrets about my Emily Dickinson phase. I was only eleven and it was a way of staying connected to Mama even if Mama found Emily Dickinson too rhymey, which is not even a real word.

Neal: Ryhmish?

Emily: You’re an ass. Make it up to me somehow.

Neal: Shall we go to Chico’s for fish & chips?

Emily: Yes, and then I will forgive you for not telling me sooner.

Neal: I don’t think you were ready until now. Or I wasn’t ready. Or something.

They set off together across the sand.

Emily: I think it was more about you not being ready than me not being ready.

Neal: I think you’re right.

Emily: You don’t have to agree with everything I say. I won’t bite you.

Neal: So tell me about these people you’re in love with.

Emily: I’m not quite ready to tell you about them. I’m waiting to see if the infatuation lasts more than a couple weeks.

Neal: I remember.

Emily: What do you remember?

Neal: The fleeting nature of infatuation when I was sixteen.

Emily: It’s disconcerting how fleeting it can be. One day I’m insanely in love with someone, the next day I find them repulsive.

Neal: Shall we make a rhyming poem about that?

Emily: Good idea. Shall I start or you?

Neal: You start.

Emily: Oh it’s oh so disconcerting…

Neal: How fleeting love can be.

Emily: How fast the tide can rise and fall.

Neal: How changeable the sea.

Emily: Oh it oh so disconcerting…

Neal: When love becomes disgust.

Emily: And dreams of happy smooching

Neal: Are trampled into dust.

Emily: Oh will there ever come a time

Neal: When love is here to stay?

Emily: And dreams of happy smooching

Neal: Never fade away?

Emily: Some questions have no answers

Neal: Until one day they do.

Emily: And dreams of happy smooching…

Neal: Those dreams they all come true.

 fin

Simple Song (Shy)

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We Might Be Friends

end of something

Volume of Greenstreet photo by Todd

Paul Windsor, late fifties, bespectacled, his longish gray hair turning white, is sitting at his customary corner table in Mona’s, the one and only bakery/café in Carmeline Creek, a small town on the far north coast of California.

Something causes him to look up from reading Kate Greenstreet’s The End of Something, and his eyes are drawn to the woman with silvery hair who just took her place at the end of the short line of customers. He wonders what made him look up from the poem he was reading. Was it the words I thought we might be friends or something about this woman at the end of the line? Or both.

Paul’s wife Elisha, her long reddish brown hair in a ponytail, and Alexandra, Paul and Elisha’s seventeen-year-old daughter, her shoulder-length reddish brown hair tinted with purple, are working behind the counter, both of them wearing white dress shirts and black jeans; and this woman at the end of the line is wearing a long gray skirt and a peach-colored sweater.

He can only see the woman’s backside, but her posture and shape are familiar to him, and when she looks to her right and he glimpses her profile, he realizes this is Maureen, his first wife whom he hasn’t seen or heard from in thirty-two years.

His immediate impulse is to sneak out of the café before Maureen can recognize him, but the impulse passes and he closes his eyes and remembers the moment he met her—the opening night of a group show at the Hawkins Gallery in San Jose. His friend George had four paintings in the show and Paul was there out of loyalty to George. Maureen was gallery hopping with her friend Lisa who knew George and came to give George a congratulatory hug. George introduced Lisa to Paul, and Lisa gave Paul a hug, too. Then Lisa said, “This is my amazing friend Maureen,” and Paul and asked, “What’s so amazing about you?” And Maureen said, “Take me home and I’ll show you.”

Paul opens his eyes and sees Maureen at the counter talking to Elisha; and he feels gut punched, which is how he felt every time Maureen confessed her latest infidelity to him. They married a month after they met, separated after a year, divorced a few months after that.

Maureen pays for her bag of pastries and turns to leave; and Paul sees her face clearly for the first time and realizes this is not Maureen.

He puts down The End of Something, opens his notebook, and writes Maureen was constantly unfaithful because deceiving me made life more exciting for her. She never expressed the slightest interest in my writing or music, yet I invited her to live with me, married her, went deep into debt buying her a new car and expensive clothing and taking her out to trendy restaurants. Why did I do that when I knew from the beginning she cared nothing for me? Was it because she was beautiful and I never thought a beautiful woman would ever want to be with me?

The café door opens and the woman who is not Maureen enters again. She buys a cup of coffee and a cinnamon swirl and looks for a place to sit—all the seats taken except one at Paul’s table.

“Would you mind if I sit with you?” she asks, her voice identical to Maureen’s voice.

“No, please,” he says, thinking maybe this is Maureen transformed by thirty more years of life.

“Thank you,” she says, sitting down with a weary sigh. “I tried to get my daughter and her friend to come in, but they have no interest in leaving the car.” She shrugs. “We’re driving to Portland via the coast because it’s so beautiful, right? But they won’t get out of the fucking car. Pardon my French.”

“How old is your daughter?” asks Paul, imagining a surly teenager.

“Thirty,” says the woman, nodding dolefully. “Going on twelve. My fault. Should have kicked her out long ago, but…” She glances at The End of Something. “That any good? Mystery?”

“Poetry,” says Paul, certain now the woman is not Maureen.

“Wow,” says the woman, wistfully. “Poetry. Boy does that take me back.”

“To where and when?” asks Paul, wondering why he thought this woman was Maureen, when she is nothing like Maureen.

“To Santa Cruz a million years ago when I used to get really stoned and read Emily Dickinson.” She smiles, remembering. “Heaven.”

“Would you like me to read you one of these poems?”

“Here?” she says, glancing around the room. “Now?”

“Yeah,” says Paul, laughing. “My wife is the manager and she encourages the out-loud reading of poetry.”

“Okay,” says the woman, blushing. “But tell me your name first.”

“Paul Windsor,” he says, loving that she blushed at the thought of being read to by a stranger in a café. “What’s your name?”

“Victoria,” she says, taking off her sweater and revealing a shimmering sleeveless red shirt and tattooed arms—mermaids and unicorns—and a necklace of turquoise stones.

“I did not expect tattoos,” says Paul, gazing in wonder at her.

“Oh I used to be a super hippy,” she says, remembering those halcyon days. “Before I got pregnant and had to get real.” She winks at him. “You know what I mean.”

“Not sure I do,” he says, imagining her as a young woman smoking a joint and reading Emily Dickinson, the words amazing her.

“Yes, you do,” she says, bitterly. “To pay the bills. When mommy and daddy wouldn’t anymore. Right?”

“Right,” he says, nodding. “I see what you mean.”

“Is the poem sad?” she asks, biting her lower lip. “The one you want to read me?”

“No,” he says, opening the book. “Not sad.”

69. BLACK SNOW

I thought we might be friends. Or we were friends but

who we turned out to be was disappointing.

 

She walks to the corner of the field. One of those cold

bright days you remember from childhood.

 

The past, nothing.

New people, nothing.

 

She sees him but she doesn’t know him.

She’s wearing his coat.

Victoria purses her lips and says, “I like that poem.” She sighs. “A lot. Would you read it again, please?”

He reads the poem again, slower this time.

She nods. “I feel like that all the time now. Like I’m outside what’s going on. Like when I’m driving my daughter and her friend and they’re plugged into their phones and I look out at the hills and the sky and the clouds and the ocean and I think how beautiful it is, and they’re not even aware of it, and I’m just driving through it, driving them through it to some motel on the way to some hotel in Portland where they’ll go to some dance club and take Ecstasy and then we’ll drive back to Palo Alto the fast ugly way. For what? Like the poem says. The past, nothing. New people, nothing. Why do I live like this? It’s like I’m only half-alive. I should sell everything and get a place around here. Near the wild ocean. Have a garden and a cat and volunteer somewhere. Help people. I’ve got enough money. Let my daughter take care of herself, though I don’t think she can.”

A silence falls between them.

Victoria tears off a big chunk of her cinnamon swirl, dips the chunk in her coffee, and puts the drenched chunk in her mouth, her eyelids fluttering with pleasure at the marriage of bitter and sweet.

fin

Kate Greenstreet reading her poem 69. Black Snow

Todd reading his poem Why Now?

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Old Books

When Words Become Irrelevant (Kevin O'Day Ballet) ©2013 David Jouris : Motion Pictures

When Words Become Irrelevant (Kevin O’Day Ballet) © 2013 David Jouris/Motion Pictures

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser November 2015)

I recently came upon an old book I inherited from my grandmother Goody, The Concise Oxford Dictionary Of English Literature published in 1939, a seventy-five-year-old book that has provided me with several days of enjoyable reading. Part of my enjoyment comes from frequently encountering words I have to look up in my trusty Oxford English Dictionary. But the larger part of my pleasure comes from the fascinating details to be found in the hundreds of miniature biographies of once-famous writers who are largely forgotten today.

In terms of my vocabulary, I have learned that a cottar is the equivalent of a sharecropper, a prebend is a stipend derived from a percentage of a church’s profits, a squib is a satirical jab, a suppostitious child is one fraudulently substituted to displace the real heir, and a pindaric is an ode in the manner of Pindar.

Of Pindar, this little old book says, “(c.522-442 B.C.) the great Greek lyric poet, acquired fame at an early age and was employed by many winners at the Games (Olympics) to celebrate their victories.”

I first came upon the word pindaric while reading the two-column biography of Jonathan Swift who was a cousin of Dryden, who also garners a two-column biography. Only Shakespeare warrants three columns, which means Swift and Dryden are thought to be among the most famous writers of all time, according to the editors of this edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary Of English Literature.

Also according to this dictionary, Dryden, upon reading one of Swift’s pindarics, remarked, “Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet.”

And the last line of Swift’s little biography states, “Nearly all his works were published anonymously, and for only one, ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, did he receive any payment (£200).”

Famous writers making little money from their writing is a recurring theme in this dictionary, as is the fact that many noted writers from the 1600’s through the early 1900’s died insane. Syphilis, the cause of madness in most of those cases, is never mentioned in the dictionary, but the editors doubtless assume their readers know about the link between syphilis and insanity in the days before the advent of antibiotics.

Indeed, the editors make a number of assumptions about their readers, which assumptions in 1939 were probably sound. For instance, they assume anyone reading this volume will probably be fairly fluent in Latin and know most of the famous writers of the past three hundreds years by their last names. Scott is Sir Walter Scott, Arbuthnot is John Arbuthnot, Pope is Alexander Pope, and so on. Fortunately for the likes of me, if an author is referred to solely by his last name, he will have a biography in the good book and I can discover why he was so famous.

As one might expect of a book published in 1939 summarizing the history of English Literature, there are few women authors mentioned therein, though Edith Wharton, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, George Sand, Virginia Woolf, Anne Bronte, and Emily Bronte all garner tiny paragraphs, with George Eliot and Jane Austen winning half-columns, and Charlotte Bronte nearly a whole one.

Another delightful feature of the book is that for super famous authors—Dickens, Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, Melville, Thackeray etc.—in addition to their biographies, there are separate entries synopsizing of each of their most famous books, plays, and poems, as well as separate entries for important characters in those works.

What a different culture we had before the advent of television. In that sense, the 1939 edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary Of English Literature is a fascinating time capsule from the end of an epoch in our cultural history when literature was of paramount importance and influence, and hundreds of great novels and plays and poems lived for hundreds of years as part of the contemporary cultural fabric.

Have you perchance heard of the book The Old Wives’ Tale? “…a novel by E. A. Bennett (1908) one of the greatest novels of modern times. It is the long chronicle of the lives of two sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, daughters of a draper of Bursley, from their ardent girlhood, through disillusionment, to death. The drab life of the draper’s shop, its trivial incidents, are made interesting and important. Constance, a staid and sensible young woman, marries the insignificant Samuel Povey, the chief assistant in the shop, and spends all her life in Bursley. The more passionate and imaginative Sophia elopes with the fascinating Gerald Scales, an unprincipled blackguard, who carries her to Paris, where she is exposed to indignities, and finally deserts her. She struggles to success as a lodging-house keeper in Paris, where she lives though the siege of 1870. The sisters are reunited and spend their last years in Bursley.”

Never heard of E.A. Bennett, the author of this greatest of novels? “Bennett, (Enoch) Arnold (1867-1931), became a solicitor’s clerk in London and in 1893 assistant editor and subsequently editor of the periodical ‘Woman’. After 1900 he devoted himself exclusively to writing, theatre journalism being among his special interests. His fame as a novelist rests chiefly on ‘The Old Wives’ Tale’ and the ‘Clayhanger’ series. ‘Clayhanger’ (1910) ‘Hilda Lessways’ (1911) ‘These Twain’ (1916). The ‘Five Towns’ which figure prominently in these works are Tunstall, Burslem, Hanley, Stoke-upon-Trent, and Longton, centers of the pottery industry; and the features, often ugly and sordid of this background are skillfully woven into stories of lives which he presents dispassionately, with an infinite delight in significant detail. Among Bennett’s other best-known works are: ‘Riceyman Steps’, ‘The Grand Babylon Hotel’, ‘Milestones’, and ‘The Matador of the Five Towns’ (short stories, 1912)”

Then there is John Knox (1505-72) who “…addressed epistles to his brethren in England suffering under the rule of Mary Tudor, and in Scotland under the regency of Mary of Lorraine. It was this situation which led to the publication of his ‘First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women’ (1558), of which the title, Saintsbury remarks, was the best part.”

Saintsbury? “George Edward Bateman Saintsbury (1845-1933), a distinguished literary critic and historian…”

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Brandon Crawford

(This article first appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser August 2011)

“The Possible’s slow fuse is lit

By the Imagination.” Emily Dickinson

While following a seemingly insignificant line of thought I will suddenly find myself on a broad avenue of inquiry that becomes the on-ramp to a sixteen-lane super highway of conjecture leading to an imposing citadel wherein is housed the solution to all the problems of humankind. Wow. Talk about grandiose. But isn’t that how our minds sometimes work, leaping from the insignificant to a grand unified theory of everything?

For instance, my recent musings about Brandon Crawford merged onto the super highway of an idea that all the problems of human society can be traced to a lack of imagination, to the inability of people to imagine new ways of proceeding rather than repeating the same old nonsense that dooms us all to slide down the steep and slippery slopes to a most unpleasant bottom of the dysfunctional pyramidal paradigm.

Who is Brandon Crawford? A descendant of English royalty? An up-and-coming politico? A movie star? Nay. Brandon Crawford is a baseball player, an easy-going California guy, a wide-ranging and quietly brilliant shortstop for the San Francisco Giants recently sent back to the minor leagues where, because of the aforementioned lack of imagination by people in positions of power, he definitely does not, in the way I imagine things, belong.

When Brandon was called up from the minor leagues a month or so ago, the Giants were reeling from injuries to star players and mired in a debilitating ennui that threatened to send our team spiraling out of contention for a return to the World Series. Desperation, not imagination, inspired General Manager Brian Sabean and Manager Bruce Bochy to call up the young Brandon, and the results were miraculous. The moribund team came to life, moved into first place, and steadily won more games than they lost. Brandon Crawford, as far as my imagination is concerned, was the catalyst for this revival, and his removal from the starting lineup and eventual demotion to the minor leagues was the cause of the team’s recent collapse. Crawford’s individual statistics may not support my view, but baseball is a team sport, synergy ineffable, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

“The status quo sucks.” George Carlin

Few of the people in power in the Giants organization, and terribly few people in power in our local, state, and national governments, and almost no one in power in the movie business and publishing industry, in energy production and transportation and environmental protection, in education and agriculture and healthcare and foreign policy seems capable of understanding what is blatantly obvious to you and me and millions of moderately intelligent people. Why is this? Could it be that the people in power have little or no imagination?

Assuming that’s true, how did such unimaginative people get into positions of power over so many people with more imagination than they? And the answer is: unimaginative people select other unimaginative people to work for them and succeed them, while actively discriminating against people with original ideas and less conventional ways of doing things. Thus the status quo is forever protecting itself unto decrepitude and terminal ossification. Yes, you agree, but how did those unimaginative poop heads get into power in the first place, from which positioning they continue to perpetrate such stultifying stupidity? Good question.

“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” Mark Twain

Assuming not every election is rigged (and maybe that’s an unwise assumption), we, the people, elected the amoral dingbats now actively destroying our world, and we’ve been electing them and re-electing them for hundreds of years. Why do we vote for these unimaginative people? Why do we continue to buy unimaginative books and go to unimaginative movies and watch unimaginative television? I think we do these things because we fear our imaginations, which we were taught to fear. I would even say we are a culture that punishes children whenever their imaginations get the best of them and lead them into uncharted territories where their timid elders fear to follow. But why are the elders so afraid?

Because imagination is unpredictable and potentially disruptive of what we are used to; and what we are used to, for most adults, is apparently preferable to the unknown, probably because we’ve also been taught to fear the unknown. I, for instance, spent a large part of my previous life staying in disastrous relationships long after I should have jumped ship, so to speak, because though I could imagine myriad preferable alternatives to my rotten imbroglios, I was frozen by the fear that the fruits of my imagination would never ripen and I would fall into a bottomless pit of loneliness or even lousier relationships.

“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” Michelangelo

Hold everything. My imagination just did a loop-dee-loop and deposited me at the foot of a monument whereupon is engraved the command: Teach them to fear the unknown. Is this the imperative underpinning what I first imagined to be an imagination deficiency? Would it be more accurate to say that our fear of what we might imagine, rather than a lack of imagination, has brought humanity to the brink, and in some parts of the world, over the brink of disaster?

Buckminster Fuller, who imagined and then created the geodesic dome, convinced me through his highly imaginative writing that the largest impediment to humans making the world an environmentally zaftig and robust utopia is our misguided collective imagination. And just who has been misguiding our collective right brain? Clever, greedy, left-brain-dominated people who won’t allow themselves to imagine that spaceship earth was designed by an impeccably imaginative universe to provide plenty of food and comfort and fun for everyone onboard.

According to Bucky, humanity is choking to death on the ancient fish bone of the idea (the imagining) that life on earth is all about scarcity, when, in fact, with a modicum of creative re-imagining, we can open the non-existent doors to our illusory cages, step out onto the lush playing field, play shortstop, bat second, and be paid handsomely to do so.

“Baseball was made for kids, and grown-ups only screw it up.” Bob Lemon

Which brings us back to Brandon Crawford. Four days ago, having failed to win a game in five tries since Brandon’s exile to the lesser leagues, our Giants exploded for eight runs (the most this year at home) and our pitcher Brian Vogelsang continued his inexplicable, unpredicted, and hard-to-imagine (except for those of us with sufficient imagination) dominance and allowed but one run. Put another way: we finally won a game without Brandon Crawford. However, since that solitary win, we have played our archenemy the Philadelphia Phillies twice and had our butts handed to us on paper plates. That is to say: they beat us with ease.

So now our challenge is to imagine that despite the shortsightedness and lack of imagination by those in managerial positions, the collective imagination of millions of Giants fans will synergize to produce a shift in team consciousness and we will start winning again, defeat the mighty Phillies in the National League playoffs, and return to the World Series against who else but the New York Yankees.

My current dilemma is that I keep imagining dire scenarios involving multiple injuries to perfectly nice players necessitating Brandon Crawford being called back up to the mother team, and his return sparking a renaissance. But that’s old paradigm stuff. Hollywood hogwash. Violence-based winner-loser crap. Why not imagine multiple emotional and spiritual epiphanies overtaking our stars and journeymen alike, epiphanies leading to a harmony of energies that makes of the entire team one gigantic Brandon Crawford, only with a good batting average?

If I can imagine such a transformation of a silly old baseball team, surely we can put our psyches together and imagine millions of obscenely rich people sharing their wealth with everyone else in heretofore unimagined and totally groovy ways, so that war and weaponry and mountaintop removal quickly become things of the past and we are set free to imagine the infinite potential of what Bucky dubbed livingry.

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Dead Airplane Kerouac Caen

(This article originally appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser February 2011)

“The past is never dead, it is not even past.” William Faulkner

When my wife and I joined forces four years ago, she came equipped with the nicely aged Toyota pickup I’d always wanted and I came with a Toyota station wagon ideal for toting cellos, so we swapped. The station wagon was subsequently crushed by a falling pine and replaced by a more commodious sedan, but the pickup lives on and I love the old thing.

Marcia bought the truck from the person who bought the truck new, Jim Young, our superlative chiropractor and friend and coach of the Mendocino High School (boys) basketball team. Now and then when I am under Jim’s thumbs, as it were, he will inquire about his former truck and I am happy to report the old thing is humming right along and still getting admirable mileage in this age of fast-rising fuel costs.

The pickup is faded white, eighteen years old, with the requisite rust spots and windows that must be manually cranked up and down. Otherwise non-descript, the truck sports a subtle ornament that Jim affixed to the rear window, an insignia identifying the vehicle as a chariot of the Dead, the Grateful Dead, the band, not my ancestors. I had no idea these five nearly identical dancing bears—blue green yellow orange pink—had anything to do with the Grateful Dead until shortly after I took the helm and picked up a hitchhiker on my way to Fort Bragg, his first words to me, “Love those bears, man. Long live Jerry Garcia.”

Over these ensuing four years, I have been treated to salutes, knowing smiles, waves, words of comradery, and a Pass The Joint victory signal on the order of once a month as a result of Jim affixing those dancing bears to the truck’s window. There seems to be some debate among Deadheads as to whether the bears are dancing in the manner of a famed fan named Owsley tripping on LSD or whether the bears are marching. One Grateful Dead web site claims that a flipbook rendition of the bears proves conclusively that they are marching. In any case, a Gypsy woman winked at me yesterday as a consequence of those bears, and her wink sent me hurtling back to the bygone years of my youth when I and a few of my friends had the Grateful Dead, live, all to ourselves for hours on end.

I feel compelled to admit that I am not a Grateful Dead fan. Indeed, the only Dead tune I ever liked was Barefootin’ from their very first album, and the only words I think I remember from that song are See that girl, barefootin’ along, whistlin’ and singin’, she’s a carryin’ on. When I lived in Santa Cruz in the early 1970’s, I had a friend who was a drummer in a Grateful Dead cover band, if you can imagine such a thing, and after attending their third concert of astonishingly accurate, and, to me, horrifying imitations of their heroes, I have avoided listening to the Grateful Dead for lo these forty years. Yet I do love the Grateful Dead, for they were of the utmost importance to me in my teenage years and provided the soundtrack for a great awakening.

“Stories, like whiskey, must be allowed to mature in the cask.” Sean O’Faolain

Ladera is a housing development a few miles from Stanford University that sprang up in the 1950’s and was home to professors and doctors and stock brokers and dentists and school teachers, mostly white people with a sprinkle of Chinese and Japanese families, and a few serious artists who liked living close to San Francisco in a rural setting not far from beaches with such beautiful names as San Gregorio, Pomponio, and Pescadero.

Ladera had an elementary school that sent its graduates to junior high at La Entrada in Menlo Park, and from there to Woodside High, famous for being the first public high school in America to have a major pot bust in the early 1960’s, many of those busted being children of the first families of Ladera. And it was there in Ladera that the Grateful Dead, yes, Jerry’s band when the keyboard player was a gravel-voiced guy called Pig Pen, used to rehearse on weekends in the multi-purpose room at the elementary school; and I and a handful of my friends were admitted to that sanctum to dance to the music on a vast expanse of highly polished linoleum.

What I remember most vividly about those amazing afternoons are two superb conga players, each with multiple drums, and several men with long hair and mustaches playing guitars in front of stacks of amplifiers, Pig Pen hunched over his keyboard, the music all of a piece—a vast electric raga made of pulsing chords and hypnotic rhythms over which fantabulous guitar solos cried like phantasmagoric muezzins to which I danced and twirled and danced, my too too solid flesh melting and resolving into sweat and ecstasy, my body free of pain at last, and those persistent inner voices of doubt and shame drowned in the sonic deluge, my entire being steeped in glorious visions of life beyond the choking confines of suburbia and parental neuroses.

And I remember my anguish when I arrived at the multi-purpose room one sunny Saturday afternoon and found the entrance barred by a huge man who said the rehearsals were now closed to the likes of me, only invited guests allowed, my magical mystery tour at end. I waited around for my friends to show up, and watched indignantly as the bouncer admitted my most beautiful friends Mona and Cassie, and rebuffed all the boys and the less beautiful girls. But that big goon couldn’t take away the visions I’d had while dancing to those awesome ragas of the Dead; and I vowed to start my own band one day and blow the roof off the jail, so to speak, and set everybody free.

“Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.” Denis Diderot

My father had a 1963 Karmann Ghia, red bottom, white top. Cute little long-nosed Italian body, a two-seater with a Volkswagen engine. Remember those? In 1966, gasoline was twenty-five cents a gallon, the Karmann Ghia got about thirty miles to the gallon, and it was twenty-seven miles from Redwood City to San Francisco. Four teenagers could squeeze into that little car, one in the cramped back compartment, one sitting on the lap of the one sitting in the passenger seat, and one (me) driving. And that’s how we got to the Fillmore, that vast windowless rotting warehouse in a dangerous part of San Francisco on many a Saturday night to hear Quicksilver Messenger Service (with or without Dino Valenti) open for the Grateful Dead who then set the stage for the Jefferson Airplane, pre-Grace Slick.

I have had several musical heroes in my life, most of them jazz people, but I have only adored one band and that was the original Jefferson Airplane. I saw the Airplane perform with their first female vocalist Signe Anderson four times, and each time I saw them they were brilliant and fabulously musical. Then Signe split and I was devastated, the devastation of a jilted teen. And then Grace Slick came aboard and my misery deepened, for to my ears the magical synergy of my favorite band was gone, so I kissed the folk rock scene goodbye.

“One need not be a chamber to be haunted;

One need not be a house;

The brain has corridors surpassing

Material place.
”

Emily Dickinson

So here we are forty-five years later living in the wilds of Mendocino where through the auspices of unseen patrons the San Francisco Chronicle arrives on our driveway every Sunday morning. The Chronicle of today is largely unreadable junk and wire service propaganda, but I dutifully solve the Sunday Jumble words, skim the Sports section for news of the Giants, and thank those unseen ones for providing us with a week’s worth of fire starter.

And this morning, while I was getting the fire going, a headline in last week’s pink section caught my eye: Jefferson Airplane Mansion for sale. Upon closer examination, I found this headline to be the lead item of a section entitled Wayback Machine, the headline referring to something that happened twenty-five years ago.

“February 4, 1986. The ‘Airplane House,’ a piece of San Francisco rock n’ roll history, is up for sale. The mansion overlooking Golden Gate Park that was once the home of the Jefferson Airplane, one of the pioneer psychedelic bands of the ‘60s, is on the market for $795,000. The three-story, Colonial Revival-style mansion on Fulton Street, with its distinctive Doric columns in front, has 17 rooms, stained-glass windows, silk wallpaper, rich mahogany woodwork, fireplaces on every level and lots of memories. ‘If the walls could talk,’ said Nadine Condon, publicist for Starship, the band that evolved from the original group. ‘We’ve had some great parties here,’ she said, climbing to the uppermost floor. ‘The joke used to be that the higher you got, the higher you got.’ In 1968, still flush from the Summer of Love a year earlier, band mates Paul Kantner, Grace Slick, Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Cassady and their manager Bill Thompson, bought the mansion for $70,000. When the mansion was built in 1904 by R.A. Vance, a lumber baron, the Golden Gate Park did not exist and sand dunes rolled uninterrupted to the ocean. The mansion survived the earthquake and fire of 1906. According to legend, the great tenor Enrico Caruso, a friend of Vance, fled from the Palace Hotel on the day of the quake and found refuge in the house. Most of the house is as it always was, but the second-floor kitchen is trimmed in orange and purple Day-Glo paint. ‘The last vestiges of hippiedom,’ Condon said.”

EARLY SPRING

The dog writes on the window

With his nose

Philip Whalen

So what should I find on the flip side of that pink page with the story of the Jefferson Airplane mansion but a Chronicle Classic reprint of Herb Caen’s column from October 22, 1969, entitled One thing after another, which includes the following:

“Poor, embittered Jack Kerouac, dead at 47, almost forgotten in the North Beach byways he frequented—and helped make famous—more than a decade ago. In his last years, he turned on the young people, sometimes viciously, and they in turn turned their backs on him. Yet a small literary niche will forever be his. ‘On the Road’ remains the finest chronicle of the Beatnik era.”

And in the same Caen column: “Steve Frye, a hippie-hating L.A. policeman, now has mixed emotions. Last Wed. night, driving through the rain in Big Sur, he had a flat tire, and the only people who stopped to help him were—two hippies. This so unraveled him that after he drove on he was suddenly seized with an uncontrollable urge to pick up a hippie hitchhiker. Which he did. There is hope for us all.”

See that girl, barefootin’ along,

Whistlin’ and singin’, she’s a carryin’ on.

There’s laughing in her eyes, dancing in her feet,

She’s a neon-light diamond and she can live on the street