January 2005 Archives

I wanted to use Raymond Carver's best-known short story collection title, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? but didn't want to plagiarize, so I'll just shorten it. I am feeling beyond exasperated, tired of mean-spirited religionism wrapped wrongly in the flag. It is especially tedious living here in what the snobbish coasts--who are far more provincial than we--sniff at as the hinterlands. On the other hand, the hinterlands gripe constantly about the "overwhelming" liberal bias of the media. That conveniently ignores a fact as obvious as standing in the middle of the Minnesota North Woods and asking where the trees are. Our regional conservative media are more than adequate at combatting liberal bias, believe me.
In my 16 December blog, "I'm an Aries," I dealt with an Omaha World-Herald editorial against my last judge. The newspaper didn't stop but, after two responses published in its Public Pulse, attacked Judge R.'s supposedly preferential treatment again, which pushed me over the edge. This was my 19 December response:

Oh, stop already. Another Judge Randall editorial because you didn't get pinged and two lawyers write you letters. You're in your Weird-Horrid phase again, apparently cueing up with the Bush Leaguers' playing God, looking down your morally correct noses at the rest of us, bullying us by media manipulation. As I wrote last Thursday, the 16th, in my blog, as an ex-court reporter, editing out some other matters and my condensation of your first editorial: [Here I quoted the blog, beginning "A social climber if there ever was one" and ending with "Shucks, you're not surprised. I'm shocked."]
End of blog excerpt. Your executives are major movers-and-shakers of the heavyweights behind the Omaha scenes, so spare me any protestations of innocence. Want to bet, e.g., the Scotts don't get Rainwood Road shut off out by Standing Bear Lake? I spent almost 25 years in the court system that also led me elsewhere in my blog to explain why I have nothing but contempt for drunks, out of that courtroom experience.

And I cited my blog website. Now, the Public Pulse warns that it won't publish letters of any length or that have been published elsewhere. So I knew my chance of being published was slim, just as I knew that the newspaper did publish lengthy replies, when they felt the subject warranted, on the page opposite the editorial/Public Pulse page. Signing off as a "Retired District Court Reporter," I thought I had some reasonable expectation to appear there, nor did I view my blog as "publishing elsewhere" in the usual sense. But obviously my letter was unworthy--or maybe it was the last paragraph--for I disappeared into the wastebasket.
My allusion to the Scotts in the letter's last paragraph refers to the Walter Scott family, one of our billionaires, whose family compound sits on a hill overlooking Lake Cunningham north of the city. The hill is a kind of penisula, a campground on the east side and a small park corridor around the base. The north edge of the Scott compound, Rainwood Road enters the lake from the east, a popular site for wind-sailing, and, after submersion, picks up on the west side beyond a closed-off portion. A side road runs off north to an actual park area with swings, covered picnic shelters, outdoor toilets. I know it well because it's where I frequently ran and walked before my artificial knee, and the moldy alfalfa bales on that hilltop always plugged my sinuses. I also know the hill of the Scott compound well because it figured prominently in a much earlier divorce suit as undeveloped land owned by a testy little twerp, the man who created one of the earliest and largest housing development monsters. Judge M. was asked to value it in the property settlement, which he did at a million dollars.
Once the Scotts had bought the hill, built their elaborate family compound, installed high security, they have tried to close Rainwood Road past the campground entrance (I think they would like the campground closed too), which the long-time neighbors in the area have resisted, as have people who used the wind-sailing site and the park area. Walter Scott offered a million to build a path completely around the lake (much of that already done by the City) if the City Council would just let him shut down Rainwood Road. About a week after I had written my letter, the newspaper ran an article that Walter Scott had again been to the City Council with his request. My final paragraph referring to a billionaire's throwing his considerable weight and much money around fit right in with my blog theme.
About a week later, a regional paper I grew up with, the Norfolk Daily News, had an editorial which set me off. Ordinarily, I try to ignore it, for, like Ivory soap, its political cartoons are 99.9 anti-Democratic, often venomously so, like its highly conservative, equally venomous Republican columnists. I think journalism of any integrity is duty-bound to try to observe some kind of fair-mindedness, parity to each party, so to speak, much as The Week news magazine tries to do, but objectivity is hard to come by in Jesusland. I suppose such publications can claim to be speaking for their conservative rural publics, but I am aware that they are presenting such prejudice as meanly as and more influentially than any coastal liberal bias. More influentially, because cities enforce tolerance simply by their makeup, whom you ride the bus with, like it or not, whereas in rural areas you can wallow comfortably in your bigotries without having to deal with other races, other religions, other lifestyles.
Anyway, here is the NDN's 23 December editorial:

"Our View: A Traditional greeting at this year [sic] has its proper place in America, and regarding it as inappropriate reflects adversely on the critics. A small sample of season's true spirit." Merry Christmas! Here in the middle of America, among lots of people who do not forget to keep the Christ in Christmas, there is hardly any controversy about that greeting.
It is not so everywhere in America. Some large retailers have felt called upon to remind employees to be sure to say "Happy Holidays," or a similarly less specific greeting for the season. They do not wish to offend customers who are among an estimated 20 percent of the population who practice other faiths, or none at all.
With the publicity given to efforts to raise the barrier between church and state by eliminating official prayers, references to God on coinage, at swearing-in ceremonies or opening sessions of councils, legislatures and Congress, it is a wonder there has not been a legal assault on Christmas being a federal holiday.
It is the one such holiday that does have an unmistakable tie to one religion, though the nation's government nowhere demands that it be observed in any special way. It provided only that people can have the day off--those whose employers grant them that privilege.
We hope America's dedication to diversity does not eventually find it bestowing holiday status on other significant religious days, but rather keeps this evidence of the affiliation between Christianity and the nation's declarers of independence and authors of its Constitution. It is a firm tie that did not seem to bother the few agnostics of the late 1700s or offend the Jewish faithful within America who were then and are now full participants in the political and economic life of the nation.
As long as the nation is true to its principles of protecting the freedom of all to worship as they choose, or not to worship at all, it should not be regarded as offensive or, in the extreme, illegal to take special note of Christ's birthday.
The sectarian movement to eliminate religious symbols has gone far enough--the banning of creches in public places, for instance, or eliminating Christmas music from tax-supported schools.
America must remain as it has been, despite the undeniable influence of the Christianity which most of its founders practiced, a nation tolerant of all faiths. It has a right to expect some tolerance for a religious tradition which imposes no demands on participation by those who disagree.
Indeed, the spirit of the season seems most imbued in those of other faiths who are not infrequently heard at this season to respond in kind, "And Merry Christmas to you, too."

Oddly enough, the writer apparently was unfamiliar with the Post Office's various seasonal stamps, two kinds--sacred and secular--for Christians, plus Hanukkah, Kwaanza, and Eid; oddly enough, I will be registering a similar complaint about popular music. I even agree with a certain amount of the editorial, but the point here is the aggressively self-righteous Christianity masquerading behind historical distortion as being a kind of patriotic tradition from our forefathers. Which is why I replied this way:

Well, at least you recognize something of Emma Lazarus' Mother of Exile's open arms to "The wretched refuse of your teeming shore" and gay Walt Whitman's celebration of American diversity in your "nation tolerant of all faiths" in your December 23rd editorial.
But, of course, you're patently wrong about "a religious tradition which imposes no demands on participation by those who disagree" when a front-page Omaha World-Herald story quotes one of the several post-election gloaters, a pastor, saying, "There is a revival taking place in our nation that is causing Christian and right-minded people to say, 'Wait a minute. We've gone too far.' " Love that wedding of "Christian" and "right-minded," the either-or intent like "Love it or leave it" of brain-dead bigots accusing anyone not housed in their whited sepulchres as wickedly un-American. That's the "thinking" that must go along with the Christian charity of attacking a Moslem nation, razing its cities, killing somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 noncombatants, hard to tell how many with a secretive Administration who also tried to hide the lack of proper troop armor, the abuse of prisoners, initially the number of our war dead, the failure to find WMDs, and the Halliburton corruption, for a short list.
But then it goes along with your willful or woefully historically ignorant error in claiming "the affiliation between Christianity and the nation's declarers of independence and authors of its Constitution," for, of course, our Founding Fathers were largely Deists like Voltaire, most notably Jefferson, who shares D.C. Mall memorials with Washington and Lincoln, whom we celebrated for his remarkable foresightedness in the Lewis & Clark Bicentennial. The same Jefferson, a Deist, who wrote in a letter to John Adams, "The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter" [Works, IV, 365] and several other unchristian but godly thoughts. As the Catholic Encyclopedia, naturally critical of Deism, puts it, "[Deism] asserted its right to perfect tolerance on the part of all men . . . . So far, while critical and insisting on its rights to complete toleration, it need not be, though as a matter of fact it undoubtedly was, hostile to religion." Hence, the assurance of separation of Church and State written in.
And John Adams, undoubtedly the main force behind our famous documents as the musical 1776 portrays, wrote, "As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?"
On behalf of at least some of our Founding Fathers,

Of course, I wasn't published. No letters were for a day or two after they received mine, and then they published a frequent contributor's biblical rantings. So is it worth writing to such publications?
Let me veer wildly off the road now to bump through three significant court-reporting experiences. We had so many rape trials of all ages, including of infants, that my judge was sardonically termed the rape judge for a time. The worst of the elderly was of a lady in her 70s raped by three white punks, who had earlier set fire to a pet hampster in a church basement, among other misdeeds. The three not only raped her but used a broomstick to rape her, broke several of her fingers, cut off her hair, laughing all the while. The woman was so traumatized, counsel and court were especially kind and brief in questioning her.
A heavy young woman worked at a convenience store. I mention her weight only to suggest that she was not some skinny little thing easily intimidated. In a robbery by one of our most violent defendants (raging right into the courtroom), she told him the safe was timed and, not being the manager, she didn't have the combination, tearfully begging for her life. He blasted her with his sawed-off shotgun anyway, blowing away most of her face. Several plastic surgeries ensued to reconstruct her face, still severely scarred, one eye permanently blinded and scarred over. She cried throughout her testimony.
In chambers, trying very hard to be brave, a young boy, about 8 or 9, I think, broke and sobbed and sobbed, promising to be good, to be good, if the judge would just not send him to Boys Town (not just for orphans but also juvenile delinquents). He wanted to live with his dad: "Please, Judge M., can't I stay with my dad, please, please, please?" Neither parent could manage him out of their own dysfunctional relationships, and the father had to work long hours. The mother, who didn't want him, had had to take him temporarily because the father's new girlfriend couldn't stand the boy and abused him. The father loved his son, he said, but loved his new girlfriend more. The mother couldn't handle him, and the boy, who dearly loved his working father, got in fights constantly at school, had been transferred around for disciplinary reasons, and had run away at various times, nobody wanting him, nowhere to go. He finally went to his knees, begging, sobbing, and forever imprinting himself on my memory. The judge had no choice. Truly, nobody wanted him.
I shouldn't have been a court reporter. Gravitas, somewhere between gravity and the grave, overwhelmed me. Scalded babies and raped infants are a horrifying category unto themselves. In my lifelong pragmatism and passion, I have no use left for instutionalized dogmatic sectarian religions. The deadly daily headlines illustrate why. We are all in this precarious life together. Please, in our little time here on this globe of finite resources, let us all help each other however we can, whether we like each other or not, even if that means leaving each other alone. Do no harm. Please.

     “Scientists estimate that on average the brain can distinguish among four hundred thousand sounds on file in the wet gray database between the ears.”  —Michael Sims, “Lend Me Your Ears,” Adam’s Navel:  A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form (Viking, 2003), p. 93.

     My title is a pun on the musical equivalent of spa reps, vocalises having a definition of “singing with one vowel,” voice exercises moving up and down the scale, mi-mi-mi-mi-mi, mah-mah-mah-mah-mah.  My topic is, however, more like my piano practice:  I seldom practiced my actual lesson, but I played all kinds of music a great deal to the extent that Mom read my moods by what and how I played and my piano teacher grumbled but admitted that I continued to learn fingering, dynamics, note reading.  I was to end up with a vocal music major for my bachelor’s, and I have to think about how or why I took that road.

     I have a collection of songbooks used by Women’s Club, Project Club, schools, other community organizations, with Grandma’s or Mom’s name on the covers.  Under a wreathed Vox populi vox dei  [“The voice of the people is the voice of God”], a title covers an integral part of my childhood:  Favorite Songs of the People:  School, Home and Community Songs and Choruses, Old and New, For All Occasions (1927).  The back cover has a short “Patriotic Reading from ‘Washington’s Farewell Address’ ” for Leader and All, an excerpt from Kipling’s “Recessional,” “God of our fathers,” for All, and “Psalm CL.—Laudate Dominum” for Leader and All.  The first song is “America the Beautiful,” the last “Old Zip Coon,” to the tune of “Turkey in the Straw,” an “Old American Jig.”  In between are Christmas carols (“Silent Night,” “O Come, All Ye Faithful”), hymns (“Ein’ Feste Burg/A Mighty Fortress,” “Holy, Holy, Holy”), patriotic songs (“Marseillaise Hymn,” “The Maple Leaf Forever,” “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” “Dixie”), folk songs (“Oh, My Darling Clementine,” “Santa Lucia,” “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes”), spirituals (“Deep River,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen”), Scotch Irish songs (“Wearing of the Green,” “Annie Laurie”), some opera ( “Anvil Chorus from ‘Trovatore’ “ “Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin”—none of the words “Here comes the bride,” but that’s the tune—”Pilgrim’s Chorus” from Tannhauser), several rounds like “Are You Sleeping?” and “Three Blind Mice,” “Reuben and Rachel” for alternating sexes, “Good Night, Ladies” specified for Men’s Voices, Sir Arthur Sullivan’s (yes, of Gilbert & Sullivan) “The Lost Chord,” and Anton Dvorak’s “Songs My Mother Taught Me,” the rollicking “Funiculi-Funicula.”

     The Golden Book of Favorite Songs also has a page of “Responsive Readings,” starting with a short Psalms excerpt, in Unison Thomas Jefferson’s “We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . from the consent of the governed,” Leader and Assembly for the complete “Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address,” a short patriotic Leader and Assembly section by Mary McDowell, in Unison a long Woodrow Wilson quote on the flag and the language, and finally “Pledge to the Flag,” which, of course, does not include “under God,” that phrase not added until my graduation year, 1954.  Its CLASSIFIED INDEX lists Children’s Songs, Christmas Songs, Civil War Songs, College Songs, Folk Songs, National and Patriotic Songs, Negro Spirituals, Old Folks’ Songs, Peace Songs, Religious Songs, State Songs, and Stunt Songs.  The first section is patriotic songs, with explanations of their origins.  The overall variety is similar to that in the last paragraph, the last two songs being the French Canadian folk song, “Alouette,” the Czech “Stodola Pumpa.”  Included are “Solomon Levi,” a Jewish storekeeper’s narrative; “Central Will Shine [Tonight],” which most pep clubs should know; “March of the Men of Harlech,” the Welsh air sung superbly in Zulu [excellent 1964 film]; “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”; “Hail to the Chief” of Presidential pomp; “Jolly Old Saint Nicholas” and “Up on the House-Top, [Click, Click, Click].”

     The 1935 America Sings:  Community Song Book For Schools, Clubs, Assemblies, Camps and Recreational Groups has no responsive readings but under the letter O:  “The Old Oaken Bucket,” “Old Black Joe,” “The Old Gray Mare,” “Old MacDonald Had A Farm,” “Old Folks At Home,” “O, Little Town of Bethlehem,” “Oh Marie,” “Oh, My Darling Clementine,” Oh! Susanna,” “Oh! Dem Golden Slippers,” Onward, Christian Soldiers,” Our Boys Will Shine Tonight,” “Out The Window He Must Go,” “Over The Summer Sea.”  I knew all but the last two and remember several others fondly, “Billy Boy,” “K-K-K-Katy,” “I Don’t Want To Play In Your Yard, [I Don’t Like You Any More],” “She’ll Be Comin’ ‘Round The Mountain,” “Where Is My Little Dog Gone,” to say nothing of popular songs such as “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows”—which few know is an pop adaptation of the slow section of a very difficult Chopin Fantasie Impromptu in C Sharp Minor—Kate Smith’s theme song, “When The Moon Comes Over The Mountain,”  “Singin’ In The Rain” from Hollywood Review of 1929, made immortal by Hollywood’s most popular musical of the same name in 1952, and “Pagan Love Song,“ also 1929, one of Mom’s favorites.

     The All-American Song Book:  A Community Song Book For Schools, Homes, Clubs And Community Singing of 1942 starts with the National Anthem and then drops into several popular songs like “Good Night, Sweetheart,” the one that always ended our public dances; “Linger Awhile”; the pop version of Debussy’s “Reverie,” “My Reverie”; “My Blue Heaven”; two songs I heard at every dance, “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball” and “Whispering”; Judy Garland’s theme song, “Over The Rainbow,” from The Wizard of Oz; a curiously popular World War II Andrews Sisters song, “Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree (With Anyone Else But Me)” just before “Anchors Aweigh”; two Grandma loved, 1914’s “When You Wore A Tulip (And I Wore A Big Red Rose)” and 1921’s “Peggy O’Neil”; then into the variety suggested above, ending in “While Strolling Thru’ The Park One Day (In The Merry Month of May)” [1936], “The Man On The Flying Trapeze” [1933, when Mom graduated], “Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built For Two)” [1892], “There Is A Tavern In The Town” [1934], and “The Band Played On” [1895].  I wonder how many viewers of the 1993 AIDS movie of that name know the song?

     The 1941 Songs We Sing, A book suited to every singing occasion in the school, the home, the club, and in all recreational gatherings is a similar mix.  And I later had also the National 4–H Club Song Book and, from our church youth group, the small Songs of Many Nations that we sang from at Pilgrim Fellowship conferences and church camp, the last most interesting because it was just what the title says, starting with the Slovakian Folk Song, “Morning Comes Early,” and the Swiss “Vreneli,” ending in many spiritual songs, including “Hanukkah Hymn.”

     We sang on most occasions, certainly at school, wherein some of my teachers would hand out hectographed copies of such as the 1944 “Dance with a Dolly with a Hole in Her Stockin’,” which I learned later was the revamped 1844 “Buffalo Gals” sung in It’s a Wonderful Life, our most popular Christmas movie.  This practice of handing out popular lyrics predated the magazine Songs That Will Live Forever, of which I have eight 1952 issues, with some “Stories and Pictures” but largely just song lyrics to 130, 140 songs, ranging from “Skylark” to “In a Shanty in Old Shanty Town.”  I want to detour a minute, because I loved helping teacher Mom hectograph papers and patterns.  One wrote/drew with a special iridescent metallic ink on a master sheet, the sheet then being pressed inked side downward on a wet thin sturdy jelly in a box the same size as paper, 8 1/2 x 11, to transfer it to the jelly.  Carefully pressing blank sheets on the jelly made copies until the ink wore off.  You can make the jelly of gelatin and glycerol; the ink can also be homemade, as I discovered on the Internet.  This reproduction process was the crude predecessor of mimeos and Xeroxes. 

     Anyway, teachers and song leaders had us singing much more than the National Anthem on most public occasions, and Mom was both and relished the role at alumni banquets or regional Royal Neighbor conventions or Women’s Club.  She and Grandma sang a great deal of the time, around the home and especially in the car, our entertainment along with Grandma’s imaginative penchant for “knowing” everyone we met.  That is, she made up stories causing us to marvel how she knew that that man we just passed was Mr. Howard Dempsey, who often lied about his very homely wife, who had a wooden leg and gambled a lot.  His wife happened to be a very good yodeler and played the banjo.  Naturally, this straight-faced fibbing had to be about strangers, for we knew all the neighbors and town folk.  When Grandma wasn’t regaling us with her funny fictions, we sang songs like “When You Wore a Tulip,” “Baby Face,” “I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover,” “Tip Toe Through the Tulips” (which 1929 song Tiny Tim made his theme song in 1968), “Ain’t We Got Fun,” “Bye Bye Blackbird” (which 1926 song was hauntingly sung by Peggy Lee in 1955’s Pete Kelly’s Blues), all of which Grandma could pound out on the piano.

     Of course, in the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties musicals were common movie fare, instead of as rare as Chicago’s winning six Oscars today.  We had not only Astaire and Rogers singing and dancing to splendid Kern and Gershwin scores but Busby Berkeley extravaganzas from the Thirties into the Fifties, including Esther Williams’ swimming numbers.  The big MGM musicals started in 1929 and continued into 1960, the Forties and Fifties having such hits as Meet Me in Saint Louis (Judy Garland introducing “The Trolley Song” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”), Anchors Aweigh (see Gene Kelly dance with the mouse Jerry), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Easter Parade, Singin’ in the Rain, Show Boat,  The Band Wagon, Gigi.  Debbie Reynolds made a hit in the biographic Three Little Words about songwriters Kalmar and Ruby  and so at 18 was put into 1950’s Two Weeks with Love, her duet with Carleton Carpenter, “Aba Daba Honeymoon,” a huge hit record (I have the sheet music).  Several biographic movies were about composers (Strauss in The Great Waltz, 1938) or songwriters (Rodgers and Hart, my rhyming favorites, in Words and Music, 1948), vaudeville families like the Cohans and Five Pennies, the Dolly Sisters, Marilyn Miller, Al Jolson.  Some of the biggest stars were out of the Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald mold, operatic sopranos like Deanna Durbin, Kathryn Grayson, Nancy Powell, the Philadelphian tenor, Mario Lanza, a superstar who earned the first Victor Red Seal gold disc and has sold over 50 million records. Frequently in such films were the classical pianist/conductor, suave Jose Iturbi, and the theatrical organist, Ethel Smith.  The best Bugs Bunny cartoon, “What’s Opera, Doc?” [1957], is a condensed satire of Wagnerian operas, and one of the best Marx Brothers comedies is A Night at the Opera [1935].  Song of the South [1946] was a musical about Uncle Remus stories with Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and Brer Bear in cartoon versions. I have mentioned earlier that radio and later television had dozens of musical shows, whether Bert Parks emceeing Stop the Music phoning the public, with its puzzling Mystery Tune national buzz, or Talullah Bankhead emceeing The Big Show or Arthur Godfrey with his uke and all his singers or Kate Smith with her “God Bless America” that baseball has recently adopted, Perry Como or Dinah Shore or The Hit Parade.  Wurlitzer color-explosion Jukeboxes sang for us in every cafe and in many bars.  (That’s how I became a Patsy Cline fan many years later, from a restaurant jukebox in Minot, North Dakota.)

     In the meantime, many homes had pianos, as did our Mary’s Cafe, so that we gathered around that wonderful instrument to sing away.  In our family first Grandma and then I played for Mom and my aunts (Aunt Betty also a lovely alto, which meant our family reversed the usual soprano dominance).  After choir practice, especially in the summer, we gathered at Mary’s with Elaine LaFrenz’s playing by ear or from Mary’s extensive sheet music collection, Mama comically bellowing “Chloe” (“Through the darkest night”) to the rocking twin owls on top of the piano.  (Mary unplugged the jukebox on such occasions.)  Such a time of vocal ease.

     “Remember the Christmas morning long ago,/The frosted glass, the dancing snow,/The happy time?/  Remember the painted horse, the carousel,/The choc’late kiss, the caramel,/The happy time?/  Remember the pale pink sky,/Your first Easter hat?/And if you should ask me why,/The reason I ask you this is that/I want to remember you/Remembering the happy time./  Remember the day you found the dollar bill,/Or roller-skating down the hill,/The happy time?/Remember the compliment you once received,/The lie you told they all believed,/The happy time?/Remember your first school play,/The sound of applause?/Why do I go on this way?/. . . . . . . /The reason I ask you that is this:/I’m longing to see you smile/And hear you laugh/So I can have the photograph/And remember you./Remembering the happy time.”  —John Kander and Fred Ebb, title song from The Happy Time [1968].  

 

“What kept him from remembering what it was/That brought him to that creaking room was age./. . . . . . ./A light he was to no one but himself/Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,/A quiet light, and then not even that./. . . . . . ./One aged man—one man—can’t keep a house,/A farm, a countryside, or if he can,/It’s thus he does it of a winter night.”

                                 —Robert Frost, “An Old Man’s Winter Night”

     Like patient Penelope’s to stave off the usurping suitors in The Odyssey, my tapestry of constantly weaving-unweaving connections, shifting pattern changes, ripped-out seams, repaired tears—the last word works either way—continues, one of the many crafts I was taught to occupy myself with.  This morning’s newspaper brought an abundance.  In “Baby Blues” Zoe says, “I need to write a current event report. . . . I want to do a good job, so we should make it extra-current.  And super-eventy . . . Let’s not scrimp on that, either!”  In “For Better or for Worse,”  Elly Patterson is led by an automated voice into a tantrum that deletes all her “Yaptel” messages.  (It involves PINs, of which I have a surplus, a different one for every credit card, as many do—and we’re expected to memorize them all??)  “Prince Valiant” has a Freudian typo in meeting a trio of hags Macbeth style:  “One of the hags croaks, ‘Welcome O Price Valiant of Thule.’ “  “Luann”s parents are into Casablanca-film noir:  “I love these old movies.  That snappy tough talk they all do.”  “ And the clothes.  Men in suits and hats, women in fur-lined gowns,” to which Luann and her brother say, “Mom and Dad are so weird sometimes.”  “Are they makin’ out or fighting?”  “Pickles” is about hobbies, an unwritten entry as yet but something Mom and Grandma insisted upon that led to certain family traditions.  The Sunday O W-H Parade magazine Q & A—the most standard court-reporting format—deals with trendy too-long trousers for women and hanging shirttails for men with “Don’t worry:  This too shall pass.” (See 19 December entry.)   The  “Howard Huge” cartoon reminds me he is a St. Bernard (see last entry).  In my favorite part, “Ask Marilyn,” Marilyn vos Savant has the following Q & A:

Please explain to Hollywood why a spaceship would not make any sound when blown up.

—R.C., Denver, Colo.

Aww, that would be like pointing out that sunsets are not accompanied by background music.  People don’t go to movies because they want to experience real life;  if they did, space movies would have a lot in common with silent movies: There is no air in space, so sound waves are virtually absent.

     Which reminded me of an end-of-the-year Time article on new skyscrapers with photos, most leaning, bulging, curving, one even patterned after a Mobius strip, right angles rare (see 15 December entry).   The January 2005 AARP Bulletin’s “Humor” dealt with a television pilot writer’s [Alan Zweibel] actual experience with “an unnamed executive at an unnamed movie studio” about a script on President and Mrs. Roosevelt in which the latter suggests Queen Latifah for Eleanor—”. . . Eleanor Roosevelt wasn’t black.”  “Why are you being so difficult?”—and then a “big dance number”—”Maybe a hip-hop thing in the White House or in front of Congress.”  “But FDR had polio.  He was in a wheelchair.”   “The unnamed executive at the unnamed movie studio told my agent that I was out of touch with today’s audiences.”  And in “The Science of Things,” the January 2005 National Geographic, Joel Achenbach wrote: 

The world, we strongly suspect, is real, and not an illusion.  But there is no getting around the fact that many of our perceptions are internally constructed.  It’s like a movie constantly being filmed, edited, and sometimes censored by an idiosyncratic director running around in our skulls.  And there are plenty of special effects.

     Well, I beat him to dwarfs in the skull, but I need all the above to combat January, enero for crossword puzzle lovers.  With the same 31 days as some others, this month stretches relativity-ly into twice its length, a hazardous piece of road for me always, when I  changed jobs, made drastic shifts, broke habits, “cut off my nose to spite my face,” as Mom used that cliche, which, from my reading, apparently comes from nuns’ deliberate mutilation to make themselves unattractive to would-be pillaging rapists, like Attila and the Huns, back in the Dark Ages, albeit slicing off noses is also an ancient punishment for traitors and other criminals. 

     I’m meandering from being Up West with my maternal family amid outlaw tales over to my paternal side, with its own western resonance.  George Washington Luckert, my grandfather born on Washington’s birthday, came out here from Newark, New Jersey, his birthplace, in 1891, looking for his father.   John Charles Luckert, Captain John in family gossip, immigrated with his parents from Saxony, the German province of Leipzig and Dresden, next door to the Czech Republic with Prague, from whence my great grandparents Koftan came.   According to Mom’s “Ancestor Chart,” his parents were Andrew J. and Henrietta Luckert, about whom a distant cousin keeps asking but I know nothing.   Dad told me long ago that the name was German and French; the way his high palate pronounced it, auto parts salesmen often misspelled it Teutonically.  He had also said one of our ancestors was hanged from a bell tower during the French Revolution, certainly an apocryphal story.  We know Captain John was born in Saxony from his marriage certificate, a copy in my Luckert scrapbook—but that’s getting ahead of the story.

     Captain John somehow passed through West Point Military Academy  and had a New Jersey family.  He left George, a “slow” son, Charley, who died rather young, a daughter(?), and his wife, Cathryn Brummerhauf, in Newark to go West to fight in the Indian wars.  As an Army captain, he would’ ve gone to Omaha, the territorial capital and Army headquarters at Fort Omaha (with its General Crook House Museum now),  from where he was apparently stationed up at Niobrara City, the state’s second oldest settlement after Bellevue, between the Ponca Reservation from 1865 and the Santee Sioux Reservation established in 1869.  (Nebraska became a state in 1867.)   At that time Niobrara was the county seat of L’eau qui Court County, the French for “Running Water”  betraying early voyageur trappers intermingling with the Indians and leaving several names I grew up with like Frazier, Rouillard, Robinette.  “L’eau qui court” is Niobrara’s oldest cemetery and Running Water a tiny settlement on the South Dakota side of the Missouri River, where the ferry ran to in my childhood, the county name changed to Knox in 1873.   We’ re not sure what all Captain John was doing, but the family also thinks he spent a mysterious year out in the California gold fields.  When he decided to settle in finally at 36, he wed 21–year-old Julia Dannert on 7 August 1880 and had a second, larger family.  (I grew up hearing her referred to as Widow Dannert, but the marriage certificate says Miss, not Mrs.)  In the meantime after a suitable period, his Eastern “widow” remarried, which is where the Brummerhauf comes in, I think, for [Great] Uncle Al Hermes, married to [Great] Aunt Daisy Brummerhauf, came in summers with his family to visit Aunt Lizzie and the rest of us when I was little.  The paternal family tree thus has two major grafts, and Grandpa had several half brothers and sisters to my confusion.  (I went to school and danced with their children, my second half cousins, I guess .) 

     Grandpa came out here at 18, possibly to escape a pregnant well-to-do(?) girlfriend, to confront his father in a western soap-opera, for his stepmother refused to acknowledge or even talk to him, as did his tight-mouthed dad, plowing in the field, till George simply stood in front of the horse team and made his dad recognize him.  The new family of children all received $10,000 each at Captain John’s death, very sizeable sums then, while George got a gold watch, which I have handed on to Jared, a fifth-generation Luckert Nebraskan (his surname is the Swiss Rohrer).  (I have given my other nieces and nephews keepsakes, lest you think me unfair.)  Four years later Grandpa George married into an English-Welch family, Jones, his wife’s having come to Nebraska at 2, Iowa-born at Schleswig. 

    I don’t intend here to drive far into my paternal history, but I do want to mention some other Western notes, such as George and Anna’s living in a dugout Dad and his brothers remembered very well, and that does mean a home dug into a hillside, like Grandma Koftan’s canning/storm cellar but a bit larger.   One of his stories had the family rifle, propped by Grandma at the doorway, stolen by Indians—reason for the Army presence, I guess—and, weeks later, when Grandma put some pies out to cool, the pies stolen and the rifle left in payment, the butt studded in nail designs.  Dad also recalled an aunt and uncle taking a team and wagon for an all-day trek—in our Knox County hills!—to go up to the Missouri and dig up trees to bring back for planting, so bare was the landscape, some of the many who led to our becoming the Tree Planting State with Arbor Day.  (J. Sterling Morton, the salt king, pushed for that holiday from his Arbor Lodge at Nebraska City before he moved to Chicago.)  Another story has it that Dad, John Herbert always known as Jack,  was named for Grandpa’s half brother, Johnny, who died in a bizarre accident at 19 in December  two years after Dad was born.  Having the team and carriage ready to go to a dance, Johnny got a rifle to shoot some birds on the way.  Somehow dropping the rifle or stumbling against the carriage, he killed himself.  I’ve already mentioned that his and all the other second-family graves cluster around Captain John’s at the crest of the Bloomfield Cemetery’s highest section.

     And, in connection with George Washington Luckert’s birth date of 22 February, his son, Chester Winford, was born on April Fool’s Day, his daughter, Bessie Liberty, was born on the Fourth of July, and his grandson, my cousin,  Alton Lincoln, was born on 12 February, though his and Grandpa’s birthdays have now been merged into Presidents Day.  Grandson George Washington the 2nd, however, was born on the same day as my oldest nephew, Justin, 8 January, his name simply Uncle Rich’s flattery of Grandpa.  And my being born on Good Friday doesn’t count but maybe was a nice try.

“I know I pass around the mute dead/And hold within myself my own death./But I have lost my being in so many beings,/Died my life so many times,/Kissed my ghosts so many times,/Known nothing of my acts so many times,/That death will be simply like going/From inside the house into the street.”

—Sophia De Mello Breyner, “I Feel the Dead,”  trans. Ruth Fainlight, The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry  

I grinned gleefully at an episode of That 70s Show tonight, with its flashback Casablanca sequences, Eric as Bogie, Donna as Bergman. Except that Donna swiped Eric's/Bogart's repeated line, giving me my title. So we travel westward, not as Horace Greeley said, "Go west, young man, and grow up with the country," but as he merely repeated that sentiment of an Indiana Terre Haute Express editor, John Babsone Lane Soule, in 1851. Mom spoke of all-day trips Up West to see Grandpa and Grandma Peters. It didn't take us all day but merely seemed so traveling U.S. 20 to little Newport, the same size as Center, and turning north out somewhere southwest of the White Horse Ranch, famous enough for its albino horses that it had touring groups and made Life magazine and a Warners Brothers short, which gave the folks from Naper southward bragging rights. I've mentioned Peggy Ann's kicking me at the Bloomfield farm. Though I fantasize now about being a superb horseman, contrary to the adults, then I was more interested in the Peacocks' St. Bernard, a pony-sized dog much larger than my cousins and I, the only one I saw for decades. (This Alpine hero with his collar brandy cask figured in many cartoons I did see.)
Oddly, years later while on one of my western forays, I found my way back out to the Peters homestead. The road had been widened, places had changed, but I somehow spotted enough landmarks to home in. I could not do that today. Anyway, here I'm headed out to the eastern edge of our Sandhills, the largest expanse of dunes in the Western Hemisphere, from sand blown along Pleistocene glacier edges, 95% grassland with surprisingly huge hills as tall as Star Wars' Gorax [30 meters=100 feet] on State 2 Charles Kuralt made one of the nation's most scenic drives. This sea of grass is parked over the [Sioux-named] Oglala Aquifer, an unbelievably huge underground lake from Nebraska to Texas, much of its million-year-old reservoir being depleted by irrigation in the U.S. Granary's Great Plains of low rainfall, caught between mountain range wringers, most wetness sweeping up this central corridor from the Gulf of Mexico, as do tornados. Geography is history. Cherry County, the second one over from Rock County, my destination, is larger than Connecticut. Near its county seat, Valentine, is the state's most popular tubing site down the Niobrara River to an area now being readied for national-park status, thanks to the Nature Conservancy, because it's the junction of three major ecological/forest zones, as I was thrilled to read about in my Backpacker and Outside magazines several years ago. Ted Turner of TBS, the Atlanta Braves, the Weather Channel, and Jane Fonda's ex-, seems intent on buying it up for his bison, 320,000 acres to this point. I mentioned Jane Fonda because, of course, Henry, her father, comes from Omaha and was persuaded to act by Mrs. Brando; his green-painted family home is restored at Stuhr Museum grounds in Grand Island (been in it). And the local Community Playhouse, the nation's largest in subscription memberships, staff, budget, has a Fonda-McGuire (as in Dorothy) theater series; Dodie Brando starred in its first play a year after Marlon was born.
Before I finish this detour, I must add that the most stunning bare sand dunes lie snugly in a mountain pocket made national park northeast of Alamosa, Colorado, definitely worth an exhilarating side trip. Further, most travelers yawn their way across Nebraska on mostly flat Interstate 80, part of the Great Platte River Road of our pioneers, who took it precisely because it was flat and had water; but the state is mostly hilly, like Omaha, and one of the best surprises lies near I-80 at North Platte where a glance north sees huge oceanic waves cresting and crashing southward, the Sandhills menacing. From the air this north-central part of Nebraska looks like a stormy seascape except where wind has pitted it with blow-outs, grassless eroded sand hollows.
The Peters homestead is in sandy soil, which meant that Grandpa's corn was often dwarfy next to the Bloomfield farm's. It also meant that on the back way to Bassett, cutting across farms and their roads rather than following the county roads, I learned you should deflate your tires halfway so they can balloon over the sandy trails rather than spin helplessly. Mom told me and demonstrated more than once. West of the farmstead down the hill on a flat was a fine spring creek, as cold and as glass-clear as they come, where we loved to sit on the sandy bottom in the hot summers, grass roots wavering like hairy clumps of "seaweed" along the low banks. Farther west slanted a long hill, the Sugar Loaf of crumbly white rockiness, rising to a little point in a neighbor's pasture. I tried to find the Indian pipe Mom had recalled but found instead native grass, cactus, and yucca or Spanish bayonet, which Grandma called soapweed, claiming women had used its roots for laundering. It is also where Mom found those arrowheads I missed. I didn't go hiking up it very often, unlike my cousins, because I had a rattlesnake wariness. The rocky hill was ideal snakeland, as was a prairie dog town a mile south, just beyond the nearest neighbors, Andersons, on the east side of the county road. In their teen years my cousins hayforked rattlers rather regularly when shocking grain, but I never saw one, so my wariness worked. High on the rattlers' menu, the prairie dogs were funny--that word always means "comic" to me--little creatures, standing as nosy sentries, barking at us, racing between burrows, worth the walk under the cottonwoods (our state tree) and trying to stay silent so they didn't disappear on us. They were/are considered pests, though they have a well-tunneled section at our nationally acclaimed Henry Doorly Zoo, always in the U.S. Top Ten Zoos.

. . . . . . .
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses good-bye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
--Billy Collins, "Forgetfulness," Sailing Alone Around theRoom: New and Selected Poems

So I have to cheat a little and look at the aerial photo of the farmstead many of us have. In Grandma's photos I also have one of the stark "E.L. Peters homestead 1911," as I have a picture of Grandma in the yard at 19 of whom my cousin Penny seemed a clone, as well as a crowd photo of "Wolf hunt in Rock Co. near Mariaville 1908." We visited it often, for my aunt and uncle and cousins lived on it at one time, my grandparents later; but it hadn't the frequency of the Bloomfield farm, and I liked it even less. It was, however, too distantly isolated to start walking home. Down the lane westward, the house was a T, the letter's top the two-story section with living room and bedrooms, the stem the dining room and kitchen. Later, needed additions were another bedroom and an indoor bathroom on the north of the dining room, a separate garage. The porch was along the base behind the front two stories, the door opening into the kitchen. The unporched, seldom-used "front" door facing east was next to a large living room window, like ours in Center (forerunners of picture windows), but with a rectangular stained-glass panel at the top which cousin D.J. bought and treasures. (Consequently, his sister makes her own stained-glass creations.) The kitchen and dining room were larger Up West but the living room and bedrooms smaller. In fact up the narrow, steep stairway to the walk-in freezer--which reminds me now of the cramped stairwell in little Mark Twain's Hannibal boyhood home--at the top of the stairs to the north was simply a bed in the open under the slanting roof. No privacy. I remember being the furnace sandwiched between always-cold cousins M.L. and D.J. in either that bed or the preferred one in the southern room. And the chamber pot contents were always frozen in winter.
I'm not going to catalog the furniture because I can't remember my aunt's and I threw in even the kitchen sink, as you surely noticed, at the Bloomfield farm entry, same furniture Up West. Well, I never did mention the living room carpet or The Last Supper print over the sofa or Edgar Guest's framed "A House by the Side of the Road." I've been trying to recall the pumps, stymied because my paternal Aunt L. had a memorable one at her sink that I can't erase. I think Grandma had such a little pump at her sinks in both places, but by the time they moved Up West, they installed several modern conveniences, though the outhouse north of the kitchen and clothesline is in the photo. It seems there was a dug-out storm/canning cellar in there too. I think there were larger pumps at the Bloomfield farm by the windmill and in the garden. These were the kind, all metal, still in use then, on which we Center boys dared each other to put his tongue in winter, a painful moronic feat also performed on the pipe ditch guards.
Northwest of the house and yard was the henhouse with small attached equipment shed. One of the ways Mom and my grandparents kept me occupied in Rock County Siberia was to keep me busy. When my aunt and uncle moved Up West, we required the whole family to renovate the house's disrepair, new wallpaper, paint, linoleum. One of my jobs was to catch the numerous mice and drown them in the slop bucket. "See, Grandma, I caught another one," holding the squirming vermin by its tail. Likewise, Grandma delegated me to crawl under the henhouse and remove the baby skunks, a truly odorous task, albeit I found them cute, as most baby animals are--fully equipped, though, as baby rattlers are. I had dish towels wrapped around my head except for my eyes, like a Tuareg, as a homemade gas mask. (Skunks love eating chickens and eggs as we do. And my dogs had already proved the effectiveness of their squirt-gun stench in Center.)
In the middle of the bare yard was a big corn crib-shed combination again with a central passage, where in opposites-attract repulsion-fascination I watched them butcher terrified squealing hogs hanging in the empty corn crib. The white hoghouse--all the buildings were white but the little barn--was at the yard's southwest corner, where I watched baby pigs being born, as I had on the other farm. I really thought the little barn repugnant, a worn-out red and about a fourth the size of the Bloomfield one, the floor and the cow stalls a 6"-8" quaqmire of dung and urine we sank into, Grandpa altogether too matter-of-factly blithe about it. South of the hog yard was a ravine with sheep sorrel, a weedy shrub that Mom cautioned us was poisonous, a favorite place to play, climbing up and down its eroded sides and terraces. Naturally, we could also easily walk up to the Mariaville school with its playground, the store gone in the photo I'm looking at. And there was the separator on the porch to crank, homemade ice cream more frequent up there than at Bloomfield, which meant hard cranking of the ice cream churn with its salt and ice around the paddle and cream concoction that beats any store-bought, even the expensive brands. In those days the cream was so thick it hardly poured. Mom got it and eggs and chickens from Grandma and later farm women close to Center. I can remember the latter using quart jars and our having to spoon the cream out. (All these good farm products bought or bartered for directly disappeared with increasing government interference--uh, health regulation.)
Grandpa did extensive shelterbelt tree planting north of the house and buildings and along the lane, this being largely haying country, mostly with cottonwoods along the roads and outlining wetness.
The family's having been in the area for a long time, my grandparents knew virtually everyone for miles, and communal picnics were held regularly at the dam a couple miles south, with its pond, treated as a park area. Some of the neighbors were lifelong friends, like Cloydie Turpin and her two bachelor sons with their high squeaky voices sputtering so fast I couldn't understand them very well. James/Jim/Buzz and Lena Brown--Lena Bishop was from the Bloomfield area--had a large family of big-brown-eyed children, the only ones I remember playing with, and Buzz and Lena continued to visit Mom at Center until they all died. When I went to Norfolk J.C., a grade behind me was totally friendly and musical Dick Turpin, whose parents, part of my grandparents' world but Mom's age, lived in Bassett, at whose house I naturally stayed during our college spring music tour; in a small-world incident when I took the folks to Florida to visit Uncle L. and Aunt B. decades later, Dick was taking the plane as far as St. Louis. He went on to become a kind of legend in the Nebraska State Game Commission to his retirement, cropping up yet in newspaper articles sporadically, as with a cougar photo recently from that Niobrara "national park" area. While going to one of my nephews' football games three years ago, besides visiting the graves of Great Aunt Nellie and Uncle John F. in the main Bassett cemetery, I recognized many of the family names while wandering around looking for Grandpa's sister's grave. I do the cemetery thing well. Great Aunt Bess K. C. and her 5-year-old daughter died in a rooming house fire in 1927, in O'Neill, I think, though they lived at Bassett, when she mistakenly threw kerosene on a stove fire she thought had gone out. Nebraskans being who they are, when I stopped at a convenience mart-gas station and asked about cemeteries and explained why, I had all kinds of helpful friendly directions, and they thought Aunt Bess was more likely in a country cemetery south of that corner, which I didn't have time to explore. I heard from her Missourian great granddaughter a few years ago, asking if I knew anything about her, who disappeared back into shocked genealogical space when I e-mailed her what I knew when apparently she hadn't known about the fire.
Up West did have some redemption in its outlaw history. In Mari Sandoz's Love Song to the Plains, she mentions, "Jesse James was all through the region, and apparently hid out with the Santee Sioux near the mouth of the Niobrara for a while, using the name of Jesse Chase, although the Indians all knew who he was. The mixed-blood Chase family there are said to be the descendants." (P. 212, Bison Book edition, 1966.) She's referring to the area in my home Knox County known as the Devil's Nest, rugged Missouri River hills that people once toured. Sandoz also described Doc Middleton's gang and Kid Wade's supposedly taking it over when Middleton went to prison. Those were stories of Grandma's. Another great raconteur like Dad, she thrilled cowboys-and-Indians children with stories of vigilantes in the area. One account involved burying a rustler alive, tied to a chair, in the farmyard (the home place?). Another involved the lynching of Kid Wade, another of those 16-year-old outlaws graduating upward to crime, though he was mostly a horse thief until a Knox County deputy got perturbed and a posse dragged him back from Iowa, after which a midnight mob of masked vigilantes took him from jail and lynched him at the age of 21 from a railroad hitching post in February, 1884, his body laid, as it were, in wintry cold storage on a stack of cordwood in front of a general store, the rope cut up and sold for souvenirs. That was her story, and the lynching site was just east of Newport, where we drove past the store awed. However, a local historian with solid research, from one of the area families my cousins know better than I, Harold Hutton, says in his 1978 Vigilante Days: Frontier Justice Along the Niobrara that the town was Bassett. A photo of Kid Wade is his frontpiece. I lucked out on the book, an autographed copy, in the O'Neill Drug Store when I took Mom to the chiropractor there not too many years before her death and also bought his 1974 Doc Middleton: Life and Legends of the Notorious Plains Outlaw, both with much about my home county area, from where the Niobrara River dumps into the Missouri at a camping site of Lewis and Clark, westward into Rock County. Obviously, western history has deep resonance for us.
I merely wish I could remember better amid my little attic rooms full of such reverberant tales. "So time, that makes us objects, multiplies our natural loneliness," Derek Walcott, "Crusoe's Journal," Collected Poems 1948-1984.

Did this before, clicked badly, argh! and lost a couple hours' invention, and they wonder why I'm wary of electronic banking. Or why we want to protect our computers. Desultory is like water dropped into an oiled skillet to test the heat--it should bounce around--or a chrome ball careening through a pinball-machine obstacle course to reach its cozy home-base rut or a teenager mall shopping or a tot with too many toys. I'd been thinking of some endings, Jerry Orbach, Artie Shaw, Willie J. I'd seen Jerome Orbach in his Tony-award-winning Promises, Promises role from the nosebleed balcony on a spontaneous whim the night before I flew to Europe. Artie Shaw, born Arthur Arshawlsky, recorded his Porter hit, "Begin the Beguine," in 1938 (my birthyear) and quit playing his clarinet in 1954 (my h.s. graduation). (I liked better his theme song, "Nightmare," and "Frenesi.") Willie J. was a year behind me in h.s., a tall, good-looking basketball player actually a year older, as his obituary told me, Indian, with a beautiful, gracious mother who made sure her four boys had college educations. Two of them had troubled lives, Willie one of those. But it was Janus' Day, the two- or four-faced god of doors, not the hypocritical "two-faced" but the one warily watching backward and forward, like those India peasants who wear masks on the backs of their heads to ward off tiger attacks. Julius Caesar declared January 1st started a new year. Which set me off on the calendar and our arbitrary time fiddling over the centuries. As the O W-H's "Random Facts" column pointed out, the Romans--and Americans are nothing if not Romans culturally--kept a calendar only for the agricultural year, planting through harvest; the Roman Catholic Council of Tours in 567 A.D. reverted "to celebrating the new year in late March to coincide with the vernal equinox," Eastertime, a pagan festival time like Christmas and Valentine's Day. (A.D., anno domini, "[in] the year of our Lord," and the more current C.E., Christian Era, demonstrate amply Religious Historical Power.) Our present calendar has been around only 400 years, and a Sunday (Jan. 2nd) newspaper article said Richard Conn Henry, a Johns Hopkins University astrophysicist, is out to change that in the interests of busy-little-bee bureaucratic conformity, efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. The last time I found efficiency experts funny was in Cheaper by the Dozen. He's created a calendar in which "30 days hath January, February, April, May, July, August, October and November. [See those Janus pairs?] All the rest have 31." And every five or six years he'd add a 7-day Newton Week to make up for our uneven Earth year now managed with Leap Year's extra day. An awkward addition, Newton Week should be simply for "a good time." Henry's calendar puts everything on the same weekday every year: under it your birthday will always be the same day, forever a Wednesday, say, as will your anniversary, holidays, and election days. No more fooling around with three-day-weekend finagling or a one-day mid-week holiday. No more being born on Good Friday and having my birthday on Good Friday every eleven years--which only lasted through my 33rd anyway. What efficiency! What knee-jerk conformity! Makes you want to salute. But then why not? As an infuriating Sideways Look at Time did register arbitrary time patterns on me, think of weeks. As long as we match the monthly lunar cycle, weeks can be totally arbitary. Why not three weeks of ten days, ten weeks of three days, two weeks of fifteen days? Who decides this stuff? It ain't the Bible. And if we can play around with time illusions, years ago Einstein turned time into a warped curved space[-time] surface of potholes and mounds, and quantum physics has since made time a potential playground of simultaneous lives, a hotly contested theory, very Twilight Zone, a theoretical funhouse of mirrors. Give a minute to the greatest illusion of all. Sitting down? The earth spins in space at about 1040 miles an hour while rushing around the sun at about 18.5 miles a second, 66,600 mph, as the solar (sun) system is ripping along at about 155 miles a second, 556,000 mph, in the Milky Way Galaxy, itself breaking the speed limit at about 185 miles a second, 666,000 mph. How's that for sitting still? It puts our media-spinning illusions to shame. But, then, ever since Forrest Gump, even those who forgot how easily tapes were spliced and diced in Nixon times know how easily electronic media are manipulated, whether by sounds or sights, by lengths or any other dimensions. So we have carefully arranged photo ops, often phony, as "news." As an Oz episode pointed out, ABC may give a story 5 seconds, NBC a minute, CBS nothing, and the editing is everything. In the December 20th Time, Leonard diCaprio said:

It's difficult to give certain types of performances, but most of the time you're in character for about 10 seconds, and editing makes it look complete. The toughest part is sustaining a career, and that's about choices. It's the choices you make that decide your longevity and the type of actor you are. You just have to be smart, dawg.

In musical history one reason the piano lost its premier place in the home was because it couldn't begin to match electronic sound effects most notably of rock music, as I discovered way back in the Fifties with the 77-pound-weakling sheet music of rock hits. It also couldn't reach 100 decibels without electronic help. (Actually, the nonrocker Les Paul is usually credited with multitrack recording, turning his guitar and his wife Mary's voice into orchestras and choirs.) But we should've been Paying Attention earlier yet to media duplicity instead of being merely engrossed with media magicians' sleight-of-mind entertainment. That's what I was thinking after I blundered into an Alias Smith and Jones marathon, a series I'd forgotten entirely, nor did their episodes prevent my surfing away. (Strange word, surfing: I always think of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys and "California Dreaming," which have absolutely nothing to do with my well-worn remote rifling through 170+ channels.) The ads for future Encore Western channel movies were Chuck Connors as Geronimo and Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday in the 1993 Tombstone, the sort of ads that make me cross-eyed. However did Hollywood manage to palm off (sleight of hand and eye) 6'5" Nordic blond blue-eyed Hollywood-Handsome The Rifleman for the stocky, homely Chiricahua Apache "terrorist" Geronimo, Spanish for Jerome, described in San Antonio newspapers as "something like five foot eight inches in height and about 9,000 feet in meanness"? I've been to the inhospitable southeast-corner rockpile where Arizona's fiercest tribe, the Chiricahua, lived and fought the invaders of their homeland. I've also been to Tombstone, its sun-scorched, barren, rocky landscape as hostile as the Apaches in protecting its mineral riches (a bit like Iraq), a surprising aridity for the fertile imaginations creating, first, dime novels for the folks back East and then movies and later television stories for everyone, repeating and retelling the homegrown effort at Homeric legends with characters like the Earps family and their friend, Doc Holliday, in as many versions as Billy the Kid acquired, William Henry McCarty-Antrim Bonney, a homely, scrawny New York-born teenager handy with a gun and so dead at 21, a plotline taken over by blacks and Hispanics currently. (Wyatt Earp was born in Monmouth, Illinois, not far from where I taught at WIU; Jesse James, killed at home 138 miles from Omaha in St. Joseph, Missouri, held up his first train near Adair, Iowa, 85 miles straight east of Omaha, and most of the James Gang robberies occurred in Missouri, no western movie landscapes of Wyoming, Colorado, the Southwest. The first train robbery, by the way, was in 1866 in Indiana, the inspiration for our very first movie, silent The Great Train Robbery, 1903, which I've also seen, several times.) I've been to Lincoln, New Mexico, where the Lincoln County War put Billy the Kid on the mythical map forever, in the courthouse from which he made his final famous break; also to Fort Sumner, New Mexico, to his gravesite near where he was killed by one-time friend, Pat Garrett, his grave cemented over and jailed in to prevent tombstone-stealing, grave-robbing fans. Really. (Sometime I'll have to learn how to stick photos into my text.) James Joyce, my top novelist in our language, liked a peculiar word I associate instead with the Three Magi and a cousin's birthday on January 6th, their day, when this Zoroastrian trio followed some star happening to a stable, allegedly. To Joyce's biographical self, Stephen Daedalus (yes, named after the Greek artificer but in Ulysses standing in for Telemachos, Ulysses' son), epiphany

meant a sudden spiritual manifestaton, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.

So I guess my epiphany about how ludicrous our Hollywood/New York magicians' tricks had become was with a huge closeup of Eva Marie Saint in The Stalking Moon (1968). Ten years a prisoner of her Apache "husband" modeled after Geronimo/Jerome, she escaped with her handsome young half-breed son from his ferocious father determined for the rest of the movie to get his son back (and described in movie reviews of the time as "psychotic"). Out of a desert landscape of wind and blistering sun floats this beautiful pampered face of neatly mascaraed eyebrows, false mink eyelashes, eyeliner, so blatantly phony I've never gotten over my disgust. And I happen to like the movie, a fairly good thriller, with Gregory Peck the rescuer-protector. The only movie that's resonated with wrongness more wildly is John Ford's creative version of the Custer Massacre--which, as now recognized, should be Sitting Bull's Victory--set with the wrong tribe in the Southwest of deserts and buttes, Fort Apache, Omaha's Henry Fonda in the Custer role, the star Marion Michael Morrison a/k/a John Wayne of Winterset, Iowa, home of those Bridges of Madison County. (I've been to all those places.) Of course, we have as many Custers as we do Jesse Jameses as we do Billy the Kids as we do Wyatt Earps as we almost do Jesuses, all movie Beautiful People except possibly Michael J. Pollard's Dirty Little Billy (1972), Pollard resembling Billy more than any other actor. But that who-is-this-guy-really is a different spin from our TV news now; it is a dizzying spin, if not quite like the dizziness thinking about the total speed we're whizzing through an unknown universe of Black Hole mysteries and gorgeous galaxies captured in ravishing photos in The Universe: 365 Days, a book every school should own. I mean the spin of what years and years of "received history" like Washington and his cherry tree have stored in our rote cultural memories, the accumulated false versions, misstated facts, trumpeted as "true stories," not that Stone's "awesomely awful Alexander" claims truth. What have we done in condoning history perversely mistold for profit, selling Hollywood beauties for the Real Stuff, Paul Newman and Robert Redford for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid--could you make robbers funnier or more attractive?--or Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway for Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, a homely impotent perhaps bisexual and his so-so machine-gun-toting married girlfriend. As Don Kaye described the perversely affecting Bonnie and Clyde (1967) in a condensed NYT movie review, a movie that puts its audience firmly on the side of its outlaw heroes with their shocking death scene: "Its combination of sex and violence with dynamic stars, social relevance, a traditional Hollywood genre, and an appeal to hip young audiences set the pace for many American movies to come." But everybody knows these are just movies. Uh-huh. How do we learn in elementary school again? Write it on the board 100 times. What has Catholic education accomplished by daily drilling? Repeat images often enough, they stick in the brain. Repeat bad stories often enough, they become history. Which is also why no one should for a minute accept the legal arguments of, say, cigarette companies or Hollywood producers of violent films who whine defensively their myriad repetitions don't damage the young. And so we spin on. I spun on New Year's Day next to happier mid-day hours, when I caught the Norwegian Blue Parrot skit of a Monty Python marathon, my favorite, this-parrot-is-dead-no-it's-not-it's-just-resting; and Gaudi Afternoon (2003), a fair thriller, albeit Marcia Gay Harden doesn't pass as a pre-op transsexual-to-be in this gender-bending story of ambiguous sexuality, with a magician who does disappearing tricks. She has no Adam's apple, the way to spot any transgender character. The movie is mainly interesting for its three major Gaudi landmarks--Park Guell, La Familia Sagrada (The Holy Family) Cathedral, La Pedrera apartment house--all fairytale products of an archconservative Roman Catholic's uniquely exotic creativity, all seen during Barcelona's Olympics. (I think I've already mentioned that I started college wanting to be an architect.) New Year's Day ended happily with classic Casablanca : "Here's lookin' at you, kid." After not having seen it in years--that's part of movie power, the rote cultural memories of seeing and seeing and seeing these deceptions--I found the 1942 film reminiscent suddenly of blackout drills in Center during World War II when we had to buy black-out shades for home windows and took refuge in the courthouse as bombers flew over our darkened town, streetlights out, in dead-serious war exercises. The movie surprised me with its art-fine film noir photography, all sharp black-and-white shadows more often associated with crime/mystery films of the Thirties and Forties. A surgeon's son of disputed birthdate who first said, "Tennis, anyone?" onstage, a half-inch taller than Geronimo's five-foot-eight, in his iconic tough phase as poster boy for cancer (never without a cigarette), Humphrey DeForest Bogart has a splendid cast up to his Richard/Rick Blaine: Swedish Ingrid Bergman as crossword puzzle love interest Ilsa (before she scandalized American puritans with her out-of-wedlock children and was ostracized for decades); English Paul Henreid as Bergman's husband in the film's central menage a trois, "two's company, three's a crowd"; the fine character actors, Hungarian S.Z. Sakall's plump Carl, Bogart's majordomo, and Canadian John Qualen's fez-wearing Berger, Greenstreet's majordomo, like hometown neighbors, seen in dozens of films I grew up with; the witty partner-in-cynicism closet patriot, English Claude Rains, with at least half the memorable lines; Hungarian Peter Lorre, born Lazlo Lowenstein, and English Sydney Greenstreet of Bogart's later Sam Spade The Maltese Falcon; Arthur "Dooley" Wilson as Sam, like a 1942 Bobby Short, as Rick's Cafe Americain pianist, a role intended originally for Hazel Scott or Lena Horne or Ella Fitzgerald, given the theme song, "As Time Goes By." And the great tired-cynicism lines you can look up at IMDb's "Memorable Quotes from Casablanca," which never did include "Play it again, Sam," but several close variations. The lines I copied down:

"Go ahead and shoot. You'll be doing me a favor." "As I suspected, you're a rank sentimentalist." "You're trying to escape from yourself. You'll never suceed." "Serves me right for not being musical." "Who are you really, and what were you before? What did you do, and what did you think, huh?" "Here's lookin' at you, kid" (twice). "Round up the usual suspects," the source of a later brilliant film's title. "Louis [pronounced Lou-ee, French style], I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

Matching the memorable dialogue is a score right out of one of my Remick's/Witmark's/Harms' Hits Through the Years, all of which Mom sang often except "Parlez Moi d'Amour/Speak to Me of Love," and the next entry will be Grandma and Mom singing as we motor Up West. A very desultory day indeed.