Often my head comes to a crossroads, dangerous in ancient times, a place to meet gods, spirits, the otherworldly, where Hecate and Hermes were special traffic cops and Oedipus killed his father in road rage. My mental gridlock, brain traffic jammed to a teeth-grinding halt, came from various directions: a cousin wanting me to remember growing up and also--in another context--reciting a mantra of "Change is good"; an ex-student whom I have not seen since 1971 asking what was before REA (the Rural Electifrication Administration that finally brought electricity to farms mainly in the 1940s and 1950s) on my grandparents' farm; my playing through a stack of old sheet music from the turn of the century, those 13 1/2 x 10 1/2 pages often containing ukelele chords above the treble clef, songs a sentimental light year from teen-dominated ego noise now or my Magnetic Fields 69 Love Songs or Brian Wilson's Smile; and my continuing epic exploration of aging and "What's it all about, G.?" (not cinematic Alfie, too much a jerk to learn anything, whether acted by Michael Caine or Jude Law). The first philosopher, Heraclitus, of course, made Change ironically the Big Constant in the universe of mysterious Order; and nothing has really changed since, as nonlinear Chaos Theory insists on demonstrating. Our world is not the facile French "Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose," roughly, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Nope. Heraclitus rains in a deluge of change. And, yes, that is a bad pun singing in the reign.
Let me explain by a quick personal reference. Once I was a very gregarious college English teacher, a frequent chaperone and group sponsor. Then I switched occupations to court reporter, that silent stressed-out stenographer who tries to keep up with the judge, the attorneys, the witnesses who more often than not overlap, i.e., talk at the same time. Well aware of contempt-of-court power, having spent over 25 years in the bitchy legal arena--people aren't in court because they're happy or law-abiding--I viewed our staff function as social garbage collectors, cleaning up the messes of divorce, crime, contractual feuding, whatever, in the most litiginous country in the world. And I grew so tired of trying to record faithfully all those words assailing my ears that now, in retirement, I refuse utterly TV legal shows, radio or TV talk shows, and now usually mute commercials and certainly sportscasters who refuse to shut up. Love that mute button along with my solitude away from the gritty reality of the courtroom and the everyday world that makes TV "reality" as silly as it is, cameramen, producers, directors, prop people, caterers all hovering out of lens leering.
If you really need a for instance about TV "reality," take a current Bravo series,Long Way Round, with that really good English actor, Ewan McGregor, and his buddy, Charley Boorman, and a cameraman motorcycling from the Ukraine across Asia down through Alaska and Canada, confronting cultural differences (changes) and various "hardships." But McGregor has a satellite phone and probably GPS, they carry tents and supplies not too different from my camping days, and there are two vans full of producers and staff traveling nearby just in case (and, I would imagine, interpreters for the bike repairs, etc.). Danny Liska from a town near my birthplace was a long-haired, leather-jacketed biker on a Harley Davidson when I was growing up--we're talking the 1940s and '50s--not one of Brando's Wild Ones but definitely not a '50s conformist. With just what he could stow in his saddlebags, certainly no cell phone, no GPS, no staff documenting his travel, just his camera, Danny went from Alaska down to the tip of Chile, nearly bogging down in Central American jungles. Later his wife and he went from Lapland at the northern tip of Scandinavia down through Europe and Africa to Capetown, with several near-death experiences in Africa. He supported his traveling with slide lectures and some books few people read. He always stopped to visit my dad, a popular mechanic-welder with a constant card game at the back of his shop, so I heard second-hand about a truly daring tourist, and you can understand why I snicker at the costly TV series.
So the subject is change, and I have other proof. The sheet music from my grandmother and others included, incidentally, two well-worn early Irving Berlin songs, "I Want to Go Back to Michigan Down on the Farm" (1914) and "The Ragtime Violin" (1911), and in fairly good condition George M. Cohan's "Father of the Land We Love (Written For The American People)" for Washington's 200th birthday anniversary (1931). For the young or those not so musical, Berlin's most famous songs were "God Bless America" (1938, my birth year), "White Christmas" (1942), "Easter Parade" (1948), and "There's No Business Like Show Business" (1954, when I graduated from high school), among dozens of others; Cohan's "The Yankee Doodle Boy" and "Give My Regards to Broadway" are from 1904, "Over There" 1917, and "Grand Old Flag" 1906.
The songs include many waltzes left over from the Gay Nineties, romantic ballads in 3/4 time, filled with big treble arpeggios (piano chords rolled to sound harplike), "Wondering If You Care," "Pal of My Dreams," "I've Been Through the Mill" about Billy and Milly, "My Sweetheart Went Down with the Ship," "On the Banks of Lovelight Bay." Several are geographical, like the Berlin one on Michigan or "There's a Girl in the Heart of Maryland (With a Heart That Belongs to Me)," "In the Hills of Old Kentucky (My Mountain Rose)," "Beautiful Ohio," "Moonlight on the Colorado." The South was still popular, as in "I Want to Be in Dixie" (1912) "By Berlin & Snyder" though Irving is not specifically cited with Ted Snyder or "Down Where the Cotton Blossoms Grow" (1901) or--you want change? think Politically Correct Change now--"Mammy's Little Pumpkin Colored Coons (Plantation Slumber Song)" (1897)with the inside back page listing "Coon Songs That Are All the Rage in the Rage of Coon Songs" for 40 or 50 cents each. Of course, that's out of the Minstrel Show tradition but still not the kind of Blast from the Past we feel nostalgia for. And then there is "Don't Be So Rough Jim [sic], I Can't Play Tonight," in 3/4 time with arpeggios, little punctuation, worth quoting: Verse 1: "A poor little newsboy was standing alone/At the close of a winter day/He was hungry and cold dejected and sad,/Too heavy at heart to play/A big boy approach'd him unheeding his tears,/And pushing him roughly he cried/What yer mopin' about,/ why don't you move on?/And the poor little waif replied,"/Chorus: "Don't be so rough Jim,/I can't play tonight/My luck's turned I've troubles to spare/My mother is dead and I'm left alone/I'm broke and there's no one to care." Verse 2: "Jim's big heart was touched and his eyes filled with tears/I'm sorry I spoke so, he said/You will go home with me I've enough for us both,/I'll see that you're dress'd warm and fed/My luck is all right and my bus'ness is good,/There's a place for you Joe at my side/We'll be pardners us two, together we'll go,/I'm your friend whate'er may betide." Chorus: "Playing or working, thro' thick and thro' thin,/Life's changes we'll meet side by side/True comrades we are/each pleasure we'll share/We're staunch friends whate'er may betide."
Tomorrow my reunion with Forrest and REA down on the Nebraska farm.
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