“Stay, little Valentine. Stay.” – Lorenz Hart
February 15, 2009
I probably should have known this already, but when I opened the Daily Office this morning I learned that today is dedicated on the church calendar to Saints Cyril and Methodius, brothers who spread Christianity in the Slavic countries in the ninth century. No chocolate hearts involved, as far as I can tell. St. Valentine, it seems, was dropped from the calendar in an update that occurred in 1969. He was removed because his history is vague. In fact, there was more than one Valentine – or Valens – in the early history of the church, and the whole affair was too indistinct to justify the observance. Those Valentines, apparently were all real, but there was nothing romantic in what little is known of their histories. Some writers have claimed that Geoffrey Chaucer, in his “Parlement of Foules” made the first reference to “Valentine’s Day,” but I gather that has been pretty much debunked. Too bad. It might have compensated a little for Chaucer’s role in torturing generations of English students. I gather from what I saw at the mall yesterday that the rededication of this day has had no impact on Hallmark or Russell Stover.
Uber alles
February 14, 2009
As though the economy weren’t enough to worry about, Germany is involved in a controversy over re-publication of news stories from the period of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. If I understand this correctly, the Allied Powers gave the copyright of much of this material to the State of Bavaria, and Bavaria does not grant permission to republish it. But a British publisher decided to ignore the copyright issue and distribute a collection of articles, including an account of the burning of the Reichstag in 1933, the incident that gave Hitler the excuse he needed to assume dictatorial powers. We all know how that worked out.
Agents of the German government is going around seizing copies of the second weekly edition of the reprints, but 250,000 copies of the first issue have been sold already. One complaint the government has is that the first issue included a Nazi poster in which a large swastika was visible. Images of the swastika have been prohibited in Germany since the end of World War II. Another complaint is that the articles are not accompanied by any commentary that might be helpful for those who do not know the legacy of National Socialism.
The broader rationale for stifling these reproductions is that neo-Nazis could use them to further their goals.
Poor people. Poor, poor people who carry such a burden and try to make it lighter by surrendering their fundamental rights. Poor people who forget or never knew the “Action Against the Un-German Spirit” and its blazing festival in May 1933 – 25,000 books burned in one day, more than a quarter of a million burned before the Thousand Year Reich came to a premature end, all to “purify” the Fatherland and rid it of “Jewish intellectualism.”
“The future German man will not be a man just of books,” Joseph Goebbels told a mob of students at the May bonfire, “but a man of character.”
Or perhaps, Germany would rather forget that too.
He’ll see you now, damn it!
February 12, 2009
The other day I was railing to one of my daughters about doctors who make appointments that they can’t meet. Why schedule a patient for 8:30 a.m. if you can’t see him until 9 a.m.? Like that. My primary doc and my dentist see patients on schedule. Be careful what you wish for. This morning, in the outer waiting room, I was engrossed in a magazine story about an international movement to grant rights similar to human rights to your great apes, your orangutans and your gibbons. I had at least eight or ten paragraphs to go when I heard the voice: “Charles?” You never get back to a magazine you were reading in a waiting room. That’s a law of nature. I think Darwin first described that phenomenon and, by the way, Happy Birthday! Then there is the wait between the nurse’s initial rituals and the arrival of the doctor himself. Jerry Seinfeld talks about that, and Morty Seinfeld probably has a few things to say about it too. Except that he’s dead. Today I was engrossed in a magazine article about the disappearance of the Pygmy culture in equatorial Africa when in came the doctor, right on time. So I was left mid-gibbon and mid-Pygmy, but – the doctor tells me – everything else was normal.
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Somewhere, out there
February 11, 2009
Today, when I should have been working, I went out walking. It comes from working by a window and from a day that you know, just by looking at it, you can either surrender to or regret its passing by without you. I’ve never liked regrets. Once I had left the work behind and felt the day around me, I knew what had been at stake. Sunday was mild, but the breeze flicked enough of a chill at you to remind you of the season. In the breeze today, the chill was gone. The breeze today wrapped warm arms around you, and you could either fall for it – the course I chose – or suspect it as a trick to put you off your guard. There were at least a half dozen crocuses at the foot of an elm tree that chose the same course as I did.
This was no day for that first-aid kit of an exercise room. I walked outside, nearly a mile along my usual route on a busy street, but then I turned into a road I had never explored. There was a very large house with a wraparound porch and a mansard roof, and an outbuilding big enough to be a small house itself – also with a mansard roof. Across the way was a ballfield – 315 feet down both foul lines – just relaxing, greening, and waiting for what won’t be long in coming. A person could sit on the porch of that house with the mansard roof and watch the ritual play itself out, across the way there, in the gloaming of many summer days.
I thought, as I imagined myself on the porch I was seeing for the first time – a porch about a mile from my own front door – that we often live as though we were on a stage set, traveling the same routes every day, not looking beyond the familiar scenery, although most of the world lies beyond.
There was an e-mail on my Blackberry from my friend Ed, who had warned me that the e-mail would say it had come from George. Ed’s first name is George. I didn’t know that until today, standing by the ballfield and the house that was also new to me. I have known Ed for more than 30 years, but today he told me that he has always been called by his middle name to avoid confusion with another George in the family – his namesake. That’s a funny outcome, I thought, inasmuch as he was christened to honor the earlier George but cannot use the name. My middle name is Dominick – to honor my paternal grandfather – but almost nobody knows it.
I turned home, keeping up a pace that I thought would satisfy a 3.5 setting on the treadmill, and I arrived to find the undone work frowning at me, unimpressed that my shoulders were damp with sweat. I’m finishing the work now, regretting nothing.
Silk City
February 11, 2009
Charles Turndoff used to have a fur shop on Ellison Street in Paterson. It’s likely my mother bought such fur as she owned from Charlie, as the grownups called him. I drove by Ellison Street today. I knew Charlie and his shop were long gone, but still, I looked that way. That look was like the flick of a tongue at a sore one knows will hurt but still must touch.
It isn’t that I miss Charlie. I knew him only through the filter of my parents, and I don’t remember ever being in his shop. The ache comes from the larger transformation that his absence signfies in the city. A few blocks from Ellison Street, by the great falls of the Passaic River, Alexander Hamilton stared across the chasm and saw the future, but his vision – fortunate man – didn’t extend past the middle of the 2oth century. Hamilton Street and the Hamilton Club – at least, its spectre – are still among the landmarks downtown. The visionary’s dream is not.
This is a grim place now – Market Street, where my mother walked with us from one store to another, always lingering at Meyer Brothers, with its gleaming floors and polished counters and its saleswomen all in black. We’d expect my mother to remind us again that she, too, had worn black here, at 14, after exaggerating her age – her contribution to her family’s wellbeing. We’d be proud when the floorwalker, who would call her by her maiden name, and whom she still would call “Mr.”, recognized her after all those years. On the street again, we often encountered “Herman,” a mysterious, unexplained figure from my mother’s past – a well-dressed blind man walking with a white cane. My mother’s greeting would always be enthusiastic, and Herman always recognized her voice. We most likely would cross paths, too, with another jaunty figure with a cane, a figure of a different sort that wanted no explanation. And “Mr. Peanut” – in full costume – gave us the cue we needed to hound our mother to take us to the Planter’s store before boarding the bus for home.
When we were old enough to go on our own, we rode or walked to Paterson and bought records from a man named Rip who looked like Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and called me “Mr. Paolino” when I was 15. And we’d go to a movie, sometimes two, at the Majestic, the Garden, the Rivoli, the U.S., or the Fabian. We were still children, really – insensitive to what was going on around us and coming behind us.
On my way to Paterson today I passed through Woodland Park – strange name on the map of Passaic County, there because voters managed last November, after vainly trying in the past, to shed the name “West Paterson” and with it an association with the city that stirs under its grimy, ruined facades, a city that can’t forget its own name as it tries to see past tomorrow to a future that Hamilton didn’t plan. I sat in my car at a broken parking meter and watched the people who dream in Paterson now – black, Latino, Arabic – and I was glad to be back.
I made a new friend in the city today, a man who teaches some of those folks I watched on the street. “I was born in Paterson,” I told him. It sounded, it felt, so much better than saying “Woodland Park.”
“E qui la luna l’abbiamo vicina”
February 10, 2009
We looked out the back door just now, and there behind the trees was Cosmo’s moon – bright enough to almost hurt your eyes if you stare at it. I don’t know if it was out there last night, but it would have been appropriate: We stayed up ’til midnight watching “Moonstruck” yet again. We had just watched “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” which neither of us had ever seen. That was directed brilliantly by Elia Kazan, who later went before the House Unamerican Activities Committee and named names. In 1945, when Kazan made that film, we Americans hadn’t yet refined our paranoia about Reds.
We knew “Moonstruck” was scheduled to start at around 10:30 and neither of us made a move to turn off the TV or change the channel. We watch it whenever we’re aware that it’s being broadcast – and this was TCM, with no commercial interruptions and no dubbing over expletives. Of course, one can achieve the same thing by watching the movie on a DVD, and, in fact, there is a DVD of “Moonstruck” in a cabinet immediately under our TV. But that wouldn’t be the same, because we’d be watching it, but no one else would. We can do that any time – and we do, at least twice a year – but the communal experience was too much to pass up.
“Look! It’s Cosmo’s moon! … Is he down there?”
Back in the saddle again
February 8, 2009
Now that I’m back to teaching, I’m used to being the one giving assignments. But I have been given an assignment which can be summarized as follows: “Blog!” I don’t know when I’m going to find the time – to say nothing of where I’m going to find the original thoughts – to sustain this journal, but I know an assignment when I hear it. If there were any chance that I wouldn’t recognize it as an assignment, it came with the word “assignment” explicitly stated. So within the hour I had opened an account on WordPress and posted this first message. This process reminds me of my days in college radio, when I often wondered while I was talking into the microphone whether anyone but the engineer and I were listening. In a way, that was part of the romance – especially on a night shift, when there was nothing but darkness outside the studio window and the engineer in his den seemed oblivious to anything but his own thoughts. My own mind wandered while the records were turning, but the call I dreamed of never came, that throaty whisper both exciting and thrilling: “Play ‘Misty’ for me.”
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