life, the universe, and everything

liliales birthday countdown: 2006

We had only a little over two years in the house I thought was to be my home, and in early 2006, moved again, this time to a rented house with a pool in Lakewood; a Hasidic and Orthodox Jewish enclave a little farther southwest. We were kinda isolated there, but I tried to tell the kids it was just another short-term adventure we were taking. 

I fixed up the landscaping a bit, and planted a few things. We swam in the pool. Here's a short blog post about one of our hot days there. 

A few months before this, my friend Yvonne disappeared from my view, never quite knew why. She isolated herself and stopped speaking to anyone I knew, as far as I knew. I saw her once sometime later while out with a friend visiting from another state. She gave a short sharp nod and hello, and moved on. 

Ironic then, our new house was only 15 minutes away from hers, instead of nearly an hour. 

I have 170 photos from 2006, which do I share? 

Here's the fish we found when we were cleaning up a leafy area of the yard shortly after we moved in:

Here's my youngest son, doing what he does best, at Valley Forge:

Here's my youngest daughter at the Central Park zoo:

Me in the woods:

And the dragonfly which inspired one of my favorite little stories:


 

liliales birthday countdown: 2004

In early 2004, we moved to a neat house in Tinton Falls, 4 miles west of our very old one. I loved our Tinton Falls house. It was a true split level, with four sections, and it had a very large backyard, and it was on a very nice and friendly u-shaped street. Also, it was built in the late 50s, and the main bathroom had pink fixtures and a grey boomarang countertop. I thought we'd be there forever because of some things. I was wrong. But anyway. 

Here's a picture of me there against a wall from which the paper had just been stripped.

I got a job at a cool old bowling alley so I could bowl for free. Seriously, I did that. I worked in the snack bar 2-3 days a week, making pizza, cooking sandwiches and fries, etc. I really loved it. I do not give a crap that my intellect, creativity, and general skills make me suited for something more—I don't even know what. I got a kick out of young Brazilian people and their penchant for cheese fries. And all that bowling kept me in really good shape. When you bowl like I do, it is real exercise. 

Here's a blog post from 2004 which tickles me. Funny that MenWeek™ only lasted a week back then...

liliales birthday countdown: 2003

From this point forward, a lot of my online presence is archived, and I thought it would be a good idea to share some thoughts I had each year. 2003 is the year I started keeping a blog. Before that I had a website on which I'd post ideas, pictures, lists of things that interested me, whatever I could think of. 

My first blog was homemade and very crude-looking. Over the years since then I've had them at Blogger, Vox, and TypePad, and I have several things going at Tumblr, but I've also got accounts at a few other places. You never know when you might need a new one. 

That year, I turned 38. I found a great deal of Bobby Darin music I'd never heard before, and downloaded it from Limewire. I feel no compunction about that. It wasn't as if this music was available for me to purchase. Me and Lars Ulrich, we'd have words if we ever met. I think that was also the year I discovered archive.org, which is still pretty much my favorite place on the web. I'm not linking, whatever. Go there if you never have, and find the Prelinger archives. Thank me later. 

I was not super well that year. The year before, I'd become ill and semi-bedridden for awhile, and was exposed to huge toxic amounts of mold. I developed asthma (the body sometimes gets confused about our need for defense mechanisms, eh?) and it's been a bother ever since. But in the summer of 2003, I was actually in terrific shape, and feeling pretty good about myself otherwise. In the autumn, I couldn't breathe again, and we prepared to move to a better house, a few miles farther inland. 

Here's the text of my first blog post. Please indulge me by reading it and the ones to follow in the other countdown posts. It was maybe more entertaining with photos, I dunno. The rest of these countdown posts will have photos, because they are archived back to 2004 on this particular computer. 

An indulgence for myself in this one instead; three poems I wrote in 2003:

Chokecherry Beach

mussel shells, tiny in my palm
born on waves, 
borne to shore on a blanket of foam,
born to live and to die
all in an instant.

mapmaker

cartographer's hands, once an abstract notion, 
merely pixels on a screen; 
unreal evidence of tangible form, 
now trace a complex route
through barriers named yet unspoken,
radiating a slow-burning energy
from within their hesitant source

he traces this path with his mind, his voice,
his carefully measured speech, and sears
a dark trail deep into my fevered skin.

humbert's reasons to drink

dedicated to Lola, the showgirl

stupid frigging nazis
poems don't rhyme
stopped changing lightbulbs
takes too much time
lights in train car
flicker off and on
she gave him her phone number
three weeks he's gone

left hand shakes so
i'm using the right
milk's gone sour
thirsty at night
that movie was absurd
blue alien moron freaks
i'd cut my own eyes out
but irony still speaks

it never seems to end
the cliche won't die
keeps finding new shelter
rabbits getting high
spewing Nietzsche, Tolkein, Plant
basement ruminations
they arrested Adam Ant
fashion indignations

winking at boys
inviting them in
they watch as i sip
pineapple juice and gin.

 

liliales birthday countdown: 2001

Hey, I got a little behind in the game! And with only a week to go, too. Well, life, and everything, you know. Often more important and interesting than sitting at a computer. 

Anyway. Some aspects of our years in Rumson run together for me. There was a big summer storm the weekend we were having a garage sale, and we had no power for a couple days, plus it was all mayhem everywhere. And once we had a blackout; that I could look up because PSE&G lost a big part of the grid, and if you are on the east coast, you'll remember that. 

But 2001, well, of course what stands out in my mind was that really good math morning we were having; our second day of school for the new year. And the phone call, with the man yelling and telling me New York was under attack. I ran down the block to the main street and then headed up the street, to see if I could see planes or anything, and then ran home to turn on the TV. And a building came down before my eyes. We've all seen it hundreds of times, but that was the first time, right when it happened. 

And later that day, the eastern horizon was black and orange. We drove up to Sandy Hook and stood on North Beach with about 20-30 other people, just staring at the skyline. 

It was at least two years before I got used to the hole in it, especially as I'd always look north as I drove over the Rumson-Sea Bright bridge, to see if the sky was clear that day. And the city smelled charred for months, with this strange haze that we'd wear home on the train and have to scrub off in the shower. 

A couple people from our town died that day, and there was a memorial for them down by the river. But across the river, in Middletown, they'd lost dozens. It was physical, palable, everywhere we went for a long time. 

liliales birthday countdown: 1999

embrace
madness swirls, darts away, returns
slithering in to take hold.
grasping and gulping i apply the disease; 
a coat made of sooty smoke 
and even after it has fled, once again, 
you can smell the residue on my graying skin
begging, aching
rain pour down and wash me clean
weak spits of snow are the reply

little match girl where are you now?
i have homemade soap to sell 
and candles to keep you warm, for a while.
not much else to offer— 
cheese and crackers and a six dollar bottle of belgian beer
that somebody brought by.

aura made of clouds gathered thickly 
guarding my soul
the rest was stolen during the last flood, 
or washed away.
galatea in solitude  

the base is cracked upon which she stands,  
they knew much of earthquakes in her ancient land 
was it the wrath of gods and goddesses spurned; 
their rare and precious gift returned?   

did pygmalion watch in sadness or relief as she slowly hardened into stone?  

now she is posed and waiting through the centuries 
to be sculpted back to life 
she does not know that in her own gracefully chiselled fingertips 
she is already holding the knife

I think I started to recognize who I was when I turned 34. It wasn't who anyone else had much thought I was up to that point, which might have been the source of a lot of my trouble. I'm a fairly passive person, and also very internal. So whoever I was inside isn't who anyone else chose to look for (and define, as people seem bound to do,) and it hadn't really occurred to me that others saw everything so very differently than I did. 

Like with Jesus. All that time I thought me and the various churches of people were on the same page about that, but it turned out they weren't thinking what was inside my head at all. I didn't have a strong sense of right or wrong about most of the differences I saw in other people; they were one way and I was another. But realizing that if Jesus was who they said he was, then he could be very little of what they said he was, that was truly enlightening. That was wrong. So I went back to my childhood thinking tree, at least in my mind, where I could contemplate it all without all the layers of veneer that had been slathered on over the years. Not just about Jesus, but about the math I never learned, and the music on the radio in towns which didn't have the secret club password, and the art I always wanted to wrap myself in even though I never got "the artist" badge. 

And then I turned myself into a cool kid on the outside, instead of just on the inside. 

In 1997, I'd started this garden in my backyard, with zinnias and tomatoes and herbs and some other things. And the following year a lot of it sprang back to life on its own, like magic. That was a magic I realized I could do. I mean, manipulating the right kinds of energy: that's all magic is. It's physics married with desire. So I was sustained through early 1999 with the promised of renewed growth.

this will be my testimony...

the verbose can run out of things to say
a heart filled with shouts and screams
can fall mute and shrink away
while the deafening silence of a heavy snow
can blow out the eardrums
of a hibernating spirit

this will be my testimony...

all in this universe mourn the death of a star
some are reborn from the ashes it leaves behind,
some get sucked into a singularity
of depression and loss
compacted into nothingness
never to escape

this will be my testimony...

in my backyard under 15 inches of winter
flavors rest and wait
hope to freshen the breath,
faith to soothe a cough.
joy to add depth to some soup
patience to perfume my bathwater

Season's unbroken cycle
brings comfort to their peaceful repose

My poetry improved tremendously after that stage. And I realized many things are not as difficult as they appear to be, even though there were many times, in the middle of fresh or renewed pain, I felt that this could not be so. The lowest place hadn't even been reached. But I knew that I was standing on the surface of something larger and more wonderful than I'd realized since childhood.

And so this is the point at which, though there were still some very bad years to come, I'm more comfortable in the aftermath of them to keep the pain and grieving tucked safely away from the parts of living that need to get done and which are still ripe with pleasurable opportunity. 

Late Night TCM and Me: A tale of frustration and angst

The featured star on TCM this month is Joel McCrea. I love him. You might already know this. He had some of the best shoulders in Hollywood, though I am not sure he'd win against Bill Holden in a shoulder baring contest. Hard to say, as he was several inches taller. Anyway. 

I like his early comedies, some of his "working man" dramas, some of the spy things, some of the westerns. I'm not completionist about him, though. He was in a million things. Some of it isn't my groove. But I set up my bedroom DVR to record most of the films TCM is showing on Wednesdays this month, particularly the early "pre-Code" ones with which I'm less familiar. Tuesday night I started watching a really old one called Born to Love, from 1931, also starring Constance Bennett. It was a very early entry for both of them, and neither is very good, but they're endearing enough. And this movie was on in the wee hours of the morning, when they tend to show the films only a hard-core interest would find appealing.

It's set in London at the tail end of WW1. They meet, fall instantly for each other, and it is made clear they give themselves to each other just before he is to leave for battle, promising they'll marry upon his return. And then she is pregnant. If you don't know much about movies of that era, you can't have a complete understanding of how scandalous it is, because she isn't made out to be a bad girl. But she is paid back for her indiscretion.

At first, tragedy; her young man is dead! Then a savior; the rich lord who loves her agrees to marry her and raise the baby as his own. And then I fell asleep. 

Last night, I turned it on again. Let me back up first, and foreshadow how this ends for you. The movie is 75 minutes long, ordinary for that time. So is my recording. But the first 15 minutes of my recording are the end of the previous movie, and some previews. This never happens on TCM, so I assumed the movie was even shorter than I'd thought, which is sometimes the case, and the rest of the time slot is filler. 

Moving along. They baptize the baby in the lord's name. At the christening party, she receives a phone call. Her love is still alive! She won't see him. She tells her husband. She does see him! But rejects him for her marriage. She tells her husband. He doesn't believe her! They divorce. He takes full custody and kicks her out. 

Two years have passed. McCrea is back in London, everyone assumes Bennett has been with him, but he didn't even know of her divorce. She is in a crappy flat, clearly preparing to hock her necklace when he turns up. She pushes him away! If she doesn't, she won't be allowed to see the child, and she is about to for the first time since she was sent away. She pawns her necklace, excitedly buys a gift for her son, and rushes to her old home. Her ex-husband is there, and she asks, "Will I be able to see my child regularly now?"

He says, grimly, "I can never again interfere."

She rushes up the stairs and we see her run into the nursery, the crib in shadows. She gasps! And the TV asks if I want to delete the recording. 

This is the last thing I see on my screen. 

 So, you know, I worked out what happened next. The kid is dead, the dad is full of regret, she runs off to kill herself. McCrea shows up at the last second, but I couldn't decide if he's too late or not. These movies used to go either way, you know. Reluctantly, I looked it up. 

Tu m'enivres...

I thought I'd muse a bit about a book I read fairly often which I was enjoying last night before sleep: Busman's Honeymoon by Dorothy L. Sayers. It's the final book she wrote about the adventures of Lord Peter Wimsey, though there are a couple later short stories, and this is both good and bad. 

People say she was too in love with Lord Peter. Or they did at the time; I seem to remember Margery Allingham, who wrote Albert Campion stories, criticizing her of this. The thing is, you just can't not be in love with Lord Peter. If you like to love men, that is. (And perhaps are of a somewhat intellectual bent...) So this book, besides being a very clever story, is a summation of his mystifying and ever-so-slightly awkward glory. The first section of the book is a prologue (Prothalamion) told in epistolic (letters and diary entries) form, and just to read that without ever reading the story itself is like having really exquisite foreplay, knowing that whatever follows will supremely consummate the long time longed-for love. But then...that's it. Where else could the tale go? Yet I always wish it would just carry on and give me more.

But Dorothy L. couldn't have him, of course. She'd made him up. So she gave him to Harriet Vane, which was as close as she could get, and then began focusing on theology instead of mystery stories. 

I've done the same thing in my own stories, but I want to rework it. Initially, I wrote Jack D'Abruzzo like a brother I wished for, and when I realized I was wishing in the wrong direction, I gave him to my rather absurd fictional twin, Violet. Because you can't draw down the moon and conjur reality just by writing it all down. But it's nice to think you can come pretty close.

Il arrive toujours le moment où l'on apprend à distinguer entre embrasser et baiser...

liliales birthday countdown: 1967

As an amateur 20th century historian, one of my favorite years to look at is 1967, the year I turned two. The 60s are pretty interesting altogether, but certain years stand out not only in terms of politics and world affairs, but also pop culture. 

One memory I have of the first house I lived in was of managing to put the Beatles' record "Help" on the turntable and making it go. 
 

I got in trouble for that. I wonder if they noted it was a fairly precocious thing to do? But in my family, precociousness would have been the accepted standard. They were all "sharp," at a time whan that's just what some people were.

Only they say (they said) I spoke very little at that time. And I was, apparently, easily offended, easy to cry, too "sensitive." I remember a little of that, but that's for another day's musings. 

In the colored photo, I'm sitting in my musical rocking chair. And that Motorola TV is from 1965. We had it until I was sixteen, in 1981. Behind it is the odd bookcase I mention from time to time, which I later raided for Ian Fleming and Agatha Christie books. 

In the black and white photo, I'm two and a half. That doll's name was Drowsy, and I had her for years. When I was about six, my brothers were fighting over her and she was whacked against that shiny (pink) chair in the background; which had a brown slipcover on it by then. Her hip was permanently dislocated, and ever after that, when I pulled her string, she said only, "Gabblegabblegabble." I was heartbroken.

liliales birthday countdown: 1966

In 1966, my family lived in a little house on Denver Avenue in Northeast Kansas City near where my parents grew up. I don't recall the house number, but I've seen it a few times over the years, and can find the approximate area. Somewhere south of Winner Rd, I think, but my grandparents lived farther northeast, near St. John Avenue. 

Stories I'm told about that house include the time a carton of Coke bottles was left on the back porch and the tops blew off in the summer heat. I have the barest recollection of that porch and my rocking horse, but that's for tomorrow, if I can find the photo. It was a different world back then; no one who lives there now would recognize much of it. 

The number one song on the radio when I turned a year old was "When A Man Loves a Woman" by Percy Sledge. 
 

It was knocked down the following week by "Paint it Black," which shows how schizophrenic things were at the time. 

And there was a very silly movie playing in the theaters called The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming. If you've seen it, well. Alan Arkin is adorable. Here's the trailer:  

liliales birthday countdown: 1965

Chapter One: I Am Born

I'm in love with the year I was born. It straddles two eras, as do I, and was filled with creativity and chaos...as am I.

Wait! Let's back up. In order to properly glorify every facet of my being, it's important to look at what was going on the week I was conceived. (I was born on my due date. I like to be on time.)

Goldfinger starring Sean Connery was released in UK theaters. 
  

"The House of the Rising Sun" by The Animals was at the top of the Billboard chart
  

Bewitched premiered on American television :
  

And then I came along 9 months later. Legend has it I was never meant to be born. My mother was told not to become pregnant again after a difficult miscarriage the year before. When I was born by Caesarian section, uncommon in those days, my father was asked, "Which one do we save?" and I was laid aside while emergency procedures were applied to my mother, who had two little boys at home to care for. It is due to the administrations of an off-duty nurse who happened by that I am here now, Dear Reader, typing this to you.