Monday, April 28, 2008
"Craycraft Communique" by Galen Green; 2008
Galen Green
816.807.4957
Tuesday
February 12, 2008
(Abraham Lincoln’s
& Charles Darwin’s
199th birthday &
Scott Turow’s 59th)
Craycraft Communiqué #08-0001
%%%%%%%
For all our days are passed away in thy wrath:
we spend our years as a tale that is told.
So teach us to number our days,
that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.
-- Psalm 90: 9 & 12 (KJV)
%%%%%
“Take care of all your memories”
Said my friend, Mick
“For you cannot relive them
And remember when you’re out there
Tryin’ to heal the sick
That you must always
First forgive them.”
-- Bob Dylan, “Open the Door, Homer” (1975)
%%%%%%%
“Then is it wisdom, as it seems to me,
To make a virtue of necessity, …
-- Chaucer, from the Knight’s Tale
%%%%%%%
Dear Rick,
I’ve been thinking about Rollo Millspaugh lately. I was trying to remember whether it was you or someone else who was with me that evening I dropped by the supermarket at Grove & Kellogg where Rollo worked as a stock boy – just to say hello, to thumb through a few magazines and to maybe grab a bit of junk food – a few hours before Rollo was killed. Was it you? If so, what can you help me recall about that evening and about that last brief visit with poor Rollo? I want to get as much of this as possible down on paper before my memory starts to fail me even worse than it already has.
I don’t even recall precisely the year or the season, but it must have been a pleasant evening for a walk around the neighborhood – the kind that you and I often enjoyed together, back then when we were still in high school. Would it have been junior year or senior – or the summer in between?
Anyway, Rollo Millspaugh was one of the first people my own age and whom I knew fairly well to die so senselessly, so violently and so young. Do you remember him at all? He looked a little like Greg Benjamin, but not nearly so blond. The only class I ever had with him was Mr. Allen’s 5th period American History. I remember Rollo, who was about as obnoxious as Greg, though not nearly as urbane, trying to tell me what I think must have been some sort of sexual “joke” about masturbation, before class one afternoon. I laughed and nodded knowingly; but the truth is that I couldn’t quite figure out what he was getting at; the whole thing just didn’t quite make any sense. I suspect that Rollo had me pegged as a hopeless “square,” which, I’m confident you can confirm, I was not. I, on the other hand, tended to have Rollo pegged as being a young man “not quite right in the head,” as we used to say.
So, for the sake of our narrative here, let’s pretend that it was on a summer’s evening in 1966 that you and I dropped by that neighborhood supermarket to say hello to Rollo, who was wearing, if I recall correctly, one of those starched white grocer’s aprons which I myself had worn when I’d worked as a so-called “carry-out boy,” the previous summer at Mr. D’s IGA store at the west end of the Ken-Mar Shopping Center, around 13th & Oliver. That last evening of his life, Rollo was also wearing his usual winning smile. Despite the fact that I never got a chance to get to know him very well, it seemed to me at the time that he was genuinely “happy” – or was, at least, as happy as any high school student has ever been allowed to be.
The next time I saw Rollo was when I found myself gazing down at his corpse in its open casket. The mortician had done a splendid job of covering up the effects of the vehicular accident which had so abruptly snuffed out his rambunctious young life and crushed his handsome young skull. As anyone our age has undoubtedly learned long ago, there’s a world of difference between the experience of attending the funeral of someone who’s had the opportunity to grow up and have an adult life, to have known the agony and the ecstasy of the sort which you and I have each known, the tears and fears and cheers and beers of one’s 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, etc. . . and attending the funeral of someone who never has known and never ever ever ever will know any of what most of us tend to think of as a full existence. You may disagree with my characterization of it, but I know that you know what I’m getting at here.
As nearly as I can recall, this is how the Wichita Eagle summarized the circumstances of Rollo’s surprise visit from the Grim Reaper, how he went instantaneously from being the smiling stock boy in his starched white grocer’s apron to being the heavily made up corpse pretending to be asleep in his Sunday-go-to-meetin’ suit in the best casket his parents could afford:
After getting off work at the supermarket that last night of his life, Rollo had begun walking home along Kellogg, headed east. But he never made it. Instead, he evidently stopped off along the way at that funky little taco shop (on Kellogg), where he fatefully crossed paths with a friend of his, another of our East High classmates who was, himself, closing up for the night. His friend, as it turned out, had just purchased one of those unassuming low-horsepower little motor scooters, nowadays (42 years later) more often associated with the crowded marketplaces and alleyways of third-world countries. According to the article my mother pointed out to me in the newspaper, Rollo (being Rollo – at least for a few more seconds) hopped on this unassuming little Death Machine and proceeded to zip out of the driveway of the taco shop – without looking both ways (both lanes of Kellogg being all but deserted) – and straight into the path of the big truck delivering the bundled copies of that morning’s Wichita Eagle.
According to the next morning’s edition of that very same newspaper, Rollo’s skull had been crushed, and he had died instantly. (One moment we’re here, and in the next instant, we’re dead forever.) As I say, Margaret pointed that article out to me. She and Harry were more or less lying in wait for me the kitchen table when I came downstairs to breakfast the morning that it appeared. My guess is that the newspaper’s chief motive in bothering to cover Rollo’s death was to quell any loose talk to the effect that their delivery driver may have, in some way, been at fault. Harry & Margaret’s transparent eagerness to share the tragic news with me was obviously a spontaneous addendum to their tireless campaign to keep their eldest son – The Toolmaker’s Other Son (me) – off of motorcycles (which they referred to as “suicycles”), as well as away from guns. (One of Harry’s brothers, Harley, had accidentally shot to death another of their brothers, Tommy, when they were small children on the Kansas prairie, several years before Harry was born. My father was, thereby, generally believed to have been a so-called “replacement child” – not at all an uncommon phenomenon, as I’m sure you’re aware.)
%%%%%%%
So, why have I been thinking about Rollo Millspaugh lately? I’m honestly not sure why. He and I were never close. In a very real sense, I hardly knew him. And had his life not ended when it did, I seriously doubt that anything like a deep friendship would ever have developed between us. There was simply inadequate basis for it. Moreover, Rollo would most certainly never have fit in comfortably with any of my other friends – not you nor Novinski, Washburn, Ross, Newkirk, Wade, etc. . . . nor the Daniels Gang nor Eldridge, Batchelor, Freeman, Marlman, Adams and my other musical friends nor Art Dunbar, John Garvey, Kate Schulte and the other leading characters in my post-high school life nor James and Bill Nelson and the crowd of liberals, literati and academics who hung out at their spacious white stucco Mediterranean-style house, there on the southwest corner of 1st & Roosevelt, during our anti-war, civil rights, fiery feminist undergraduate years. In other words, at the risk of my sounding shamefully cliquish, Rollo Millspaugh was not “one of us;” although, admittedly, at the time, I think it’s fair to say that we weren’t even aware that there was an “us,” much less any-one who was “not-us.”
No. It’s nothing to do with my missing someone with whom I was once close and who’s been dead now for more than half my life. Instead, I suspect that it has far more to do with what Rollo Millspaugh and untimely demise symbolizes within the dark recesses of my psyche. And, given the timeframe of my flashing back to all of that relatively emotionless imagery, I’m going to make an educated guess that the recent event which triggered my thinking about Rollo Millspaugh lately was the young lady next door hanging herself last week.
As I was leaving for work the day they found her, I noticed three navy-blue police cruisers , two white C.S.I. vans and an ambulance, parked downstairs in the parking lot in front of our building, but with nobody in sight (except for the lounging ambulance crew) and no yellow “Crime Scene” tape anywhere around. As I was pulling out of my parking space, I called Marie on my cell phone and suggested that she take a look out our second-floor front window to see what she might be able to find out. Later that afternoon, she phoned me at work to share with me the fruits of her diligent window duty.
Before we get to that, however, let me back up to say that Marie’s apartment on Chestnut Circle is in the furthest back in the woods of the many units in the Chestnut Hills complex, which was built, sometime back in the early 1970’s, on what had previously been a golf course. We live in the most peaceful, secluded corner of what had been “the rough.” Very pleasant, with a rear balcony that looks out onto a placid little meadow and the woods surrounding it, with a little brook winding through the trees. Our unit has twelve apartments in it. A year or so ago, a nice quiet 20-something lesbian couple moved into the apartment on the other side of the wall from both our bedroom and our office. Then, maybe six months ago, the one with dog and the pick-up left, at the same time that a huge pile of junk suddenly appeared smack-dab in the middle of the basement floor, as though someone were planning a yard sale. The Chestnut Hills maintenance staff finally dragged it all out to the dumpster.
Neither Marie nor I ever met either member of this quiet couple, and I don’t remember seeing either of them more than three or four times, and only for a few seconds, and always at a distance. In this respect, their story’s sad ending was a bit reminiscent of that early Paul Simon song about the tenant whom nobody knows committing suicide by turning on the gas, etc. Except that the young lady who lived on the other side of the wall from us hanged herself instead.
As I was starting to say a while ago, Marie left several messages on my cell phone voice mail, later that afternoon, to share with me the fruits of her diligent window duty. The young lady had evidently worked at a bar in Westport, so that the bar's manager evidently became concerned when she didn't show up for work. Chestnut Hills’ management office was then evidently asked to send someone over with a master key to check on her, and found her hanging from (of all places) the central fixture on the ceiling fan in her dining room. It was only as I was driving home from work several hours later that it dawned on me that she'd probably been hanging there for at least a couple of days, not more than ten feet away from us, on the other side of our bedroom wall.
%%%%%%%
Rollo Millspaugh's death at an early age was not, however, the only memory to be dredged up by our neighbor's recent suicide. Depending on our life circumstances, I suppose it's a good guess that most of us over the age of 50 have been visited by more than ample opportunity to witness the deaths of some of our fellow human beings, in a variety of manifestations. For example, assuming that you've read the copy I recently sent you of my tenth installment of what I've been tentatively titling my autobiographical Mandle-Oz Memorandum, an episodic psychosocial essay presented ostensibly as an open letter to another of our East High classmates and a close friend of mine in early childhood, Dr. Shannon Mandle . . . assuming that you've read it, you're already aware that part of my professional time between 1996 and 2005 was devoted to schlepping dead folks around in various Kansas City area hospitals. Trust me: it's a therapeutic experience -- for the schlepper, at least, if not so much for the schleppee.
But I also consider it to be a good guess that, with most of us, the degree to which Death's Bright Angel's hand upon one of our fellow creatures impacts our deeper self is largely determined by context, as well as by the more obvious factor of our relationship to the decedent. With few exceptions -- infants and children in particular -- handling the recently deceased soon became an exercise in mental discipline. As long as each of these lifeless human bodies, each with its special story, was something I was dealing with within that professional hospital context, then the necessary distancing process usually occurred without emotional (or existential) complication; although I confess that I never did entirely manage to overcome my impulse to get uncontrollably choked up whenever I found myself in close proximity to a dead child or infant. It must have been something primal -- certainly subconscious.
I mention this issue of context here because of another close encounter with the dead -- other than the Rollo Millspaugh episode -- which our neighbor's suicide appears to have re-awakened within my memory. Since Marie was with me at the time, we were revisiting said close encounter earlier this week in conversation. As nearly as either of us could recall, it occurred on an unseasonably temperate March afternoon in 1997. We'd decided to go for a walk through nearby Mount Moriah Cemetery, a rare opportunity to stretch our legs and to shake off some of the winter funk.
Let me explain a couple of things very briefly. First of all, KCMO has some lovely cemeteries, accommodating such distinguished residents as Satchel Paige and Charlie Parker – so that a cemetery stroll is commonplace in these parts. Secondly, Mount Moriah had always proved especially inviting to us, because of its gently rolling landscape and its close proximity to Marie’s Chestnut Hills apartment complex. On the warmish March afternoon in question, then, we decided to cut a path back into a kind of hedged-round area, off in the cemetery’s far northeast corner – “the turf less traveled,” so to speak.
Because it happened to be an apt afternoon for taking an impromptu nap on the grass, I’ll have to admit that I didn’t think twice about the elderly lady lying on her side on the ground, maybe twenty feet away from us. It was Marie who stopped and stared and then said to me something like, “Galen, I don’t think that person’s asleep.” So, employing my finely hones investigatory skills, I yelled as loudly as I could at the supine figure: “Hey, wake up!” I’m sure you’re way ahead of me on this, Rick, so I’ll begin the next sentence with the words “of course.”
Of course, the figure on the ground didn’t so much as flinch. So I crept up closer, so as not to disturb the flies crawling all over her eyelashes. “Oops!” says I. “Only a dead person would allow that many flies to take up residence on her eyelashes!” Before you ask, let me defend my professional reputation by interjecting here that, no, I didn’t actually walk up to her and shake her. The unresponsiveness, the aggregation of busy flies and the faintly greenish pallor of her face in the afternoon sunlight were sufficient to convince both Marie and me that our new acquaintance had long since “gone to Glory.”
After a moment’s consultation, Marie and I decided that the best way for us to proceed at that point (so as to minimize the likelihood that either the police or the media would screw up our evening together) was simply for us to walk back to the car, drive to the cemetery office (which was actually the Mount Moriah Funeral Home), calmly report what we’d found, leave our names and contact information, then park the car in an appropriately secluded spot approximately fifty yards from the old woman’s body, where we’d be able to espy the subsequent comings and goings. We didn’t have to wait long before the coroner’s van and several police cars made their way back into the hedged-round area. (On a recent return visit to the scene of our gruesome discovery, I was disappointed to find that all of those ornately winding hedges, elegantly arranged in the style of a tea garden on an English country estate, had been ripped out to make room for more graves.)
An hour or so after Marie and I had returned home from our very different sort of afternoon walk, we were visited by a police detective who asked us each a dozen or so predictable questions before my curiosity got the better of me and I found myself asking him questions. Who was this dead woman, anyway? And why was she dressed in church clothes, including a purse and a hat? How did she get to that spot and how did she die? His story (which I find flimsier each time I reconsider it, as the years pass) was that she was a psychiatric patient who’d walked away from a nursing facility, that she may have taken a cab to the cemetery, that she’d committed suicide by shooting herself with a handgun (something which – as I’m sure you’re well aware – females statistically very seldom do).
For the next week or so, Marie and I paid extra close attention to the local television news reports and the Kansas City Star’s Local News section, but nothing at all about our dead woman was reported. A couple of months later, I phoned KCPD’s Detective Division and left a message for our mysterious visitor, but he never returned my call. Marie and I had too many irons in the fire to pursue the matter any further. It was obvious that the powers that be had their reasons for keeping it out of the public eye; and neither Marie nor I wanted to become an inconvenient witness to a mob hit or to some prominent family’s potential embarrassment.
%%%%%%%
It’s no great mystery why our neighbor’s suicide last week would re-awaken imagery and issues associated with our Mount Moriah Cemetery episode of a decade earlier or with the premature demise of Rollo Millspaugh of nearly a lifetime ago. Generally speaking, Death seems to have that effect on folks; one death reminds us of another, as well as of Death in general. Strange as it may seem to hear me say it at this point, however, I didn’t come here with the intention of talking about Death or about dead folks. All I set out to do here today, Rick, was to write you a letter, albeit a letter woven out of the loose strands of my memories of our shared experiences.
Nothing that any of us does has only one effect. Each individual struck note ripples through the air in every available direction. Likewise, nothing that any of us does is prompted by only one single motivation. (Although, I had a professor at seminary who was fond of saying, “I don’t trust more than one reason.” But he was an idiot.) We do what we do for a multitude of reasons; and everything we do causes a multitude of effects. Thus am I writing to you here today for a multitude of reasons; and thus do I live in the faith that whatever I end up writing cannot but have a multitude of effects, rippling through the ether of human events in every available direction.
We are not so-called “celebrities,” you and I. We are two childless old guys pushing 60 (pretty hard), born a week apart, partly raised a third of a mile apart, born and raised, as you yourself have recently suggested, under the same star – be that star named Wyatt Earp, Woody Guthrie, Harry Truman or the sign of somebody’s Bull. The point I started to make being that no one in the year 2050 is likely to bother to read anything at all concerning our lives, unless it is as anthropology, i.e. as psychosocial history. Thus have I been writing about my life and its context (human and otherwise) in the way that I have. Outside of my context, even the patientest reader is likely to view me as the cipher, the nebbish, the factotum, the tragicomic nonentity that I am. Viewed within my context, however, even the most jaded reader might possibly see me as The Happy Peasant Heretic [registered trademark; patent pending . . .] around whose puny existence the iron filings of human history once briefly gathered in an almost discernible pattern, just long enough to be crudely sketched by my memoirist’s feeble pen.
Instead of opening this letter to you by saying, “I’ve been thinking about Rollo Millspaugh lately,” I should have opened by saying, “Of course I know that it’s Eaton Hotel and not, as I carelessly misspelled it, the Easton Hotel.” I’m grateful to you for bringing that typo to my attention. And I’m wondering what other Wichitans and former Wichitans who read “Easton Hotel” must have thought of poor Galen’s seemingly faulty memory. For, faulty as my remembering mechanism might be on its way to becoming, each new day brings me another bucket-load of the bad news that my proofreading skills have grown faultier still.
Have you had an opportunity to read all ten installments of my Mandle-Oz Memorandum? As I started to explain earlier, each of those ten installments, while dressed up as ten autobiographical letters to Dr. Shannon, in fact constitutes one of ten short chapters of The Toolmaker’s Other Son, my memoir-in-progress. Thus, my sharing them with you was done in the same spirit in which I might have snail-mailed you photocopies, to your Alpha Farm address in the early 1980’s, of some of the song lyrics I was working on back then. Only the genre has changed. The spirit in which the Roaring Zeroes have caught me handing around, among a handful of special friends, these little essays I’m currently working on is the exact same spirit in which the Subversive Seventies once caught me handing around, among a handful of earlier friends, photocopies of those experimental poems and prose-poems I was forever struggling to get published (with mixed success) in little magazines and literary journals back then.
To be brutally accurate here, however, I suppose that I should amend my assertion that “only the genre has changed;” for the fact of the matter is that a great many factors have changed, over the past 35 or so years, most notably the means (i.e. the modes and media) by which we mere mortals communicate with one another – along with all that these new means/modes/media imply and ramify. It’s not so much that “the medium is the message” (a la Marshall McLuhan) as it is that the medium shapes the message, transforms the message, repackages the message. Thus, when all I’m wanting to do is to share my writing (i.e. my arts & crafts projects) with a few friends, the way I did back when we were starting out, the only feasible means available to me for doing so ends up transforming, repackaging and reshaping something (quite frankly) unique and beautiful and vibrant and alive into just another vapid, hackneyed blog (one of trillions!) cluttering up cyberspace.
Distinguishing Crap from Christmas, here in the Mythosphere of these Roaring Zeroes is, as I’m sure you’ve noticed a problem that’s by no means limited to cyberspace and the sharing of autographical essays via the Internet. Sorting things out was difficult enough during (let’s say) The Dark Ages (circa 600—1100 C.E.). Now that America is undergoing what I persist in calling (for lack of a better term) its Re-Endarkenment, however, the level of difficulty complicating our sorting-out process has been exacerbated by a multiplicity of state-of-the-art stumbling blocks, pitfalls and malfunctioning philosophical equipment. But you already knew that. And besides, that sounds to me like another can of worms for another fishing trip.
I sincerely hope that you’ll be interested in joining me on that (or some similar) trek, in the near future. As I started to say earlier, it seems to me that much mutual benefit could be derived from our sharing our individual reflections on our shared experiences (1964-1976), in some format or other – if you’re up for it. As for me, I hope to continue to compose and compile the type of “installments” you’re (hopefully) reading here at this very moment – the type which constitute the Mandle-Oz Memorandum I’ve been sharing via the Internet since last October.
I suspect that a tragically huge percentage of men and women who depart this world, as my parents and grandparents did, without ever having left behind any sort of written record of what it had been like to be them -- in their time, alive in the world – have done so because they simply put any such project off until tomorrow. In my own case, however, various reliable indicators, which I shan’t bother to name here, persist in warning me with ever increasing urgency and specificity that, for Galen Green, there very well may not be a tomorrow – at least not in the sense that my parents and grandparents evidently fooled themselves into believing there would be for them. Hence my haste in doing this now, instead of later.
%%%%%%%
One of the fondest memories from my high school years – and one whose mental movie, crisp and vivid, revisits me often, is of the afternoon, probably in the autumn of 1965, when you first invited me to walk with you to your family’s house after school to listen to Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ album. Because I’d heard Dylan on the radio (KLEO?) singing “Like A Rollin’ Stone,” and because I’d recently purchased the sheet music to “Blowin’ in the Wind” and the song, “The Times They Are A-Changin’” (because I’d been smitten by Peter, Paul & Mary’s renderings of these two Dylan songs, which I’d heard on the radio), I was under the mistaken impression that I truly knew Dylan's work. It must have because I shared this misconception with you, in the course of some conversation at school, that you took pity on me and invited me over after school that day to hear the real deal.
It was as though the scales had fallen from my eyes. It was as though I'd suddenly discovered a secret passageway into another world that I'd strongly suspected was there all along, but inaccessible to me without the help of a "spirit guide." Like Alice stepping Through the Looking Glass, I felt myself mysteriously transported . . . well, you get the idea. Actually, it was more like coming home a place inside myself toward which I'd been traveling all my life -- all those 16.5 years. And then, as you see, it would be another 42.5 years before I'd get around to writing about it. Anyway, for that -- and for so much more -- please accept my eternal gratitude. I just wanted to say that (and, hopefully, a whole lot more), before the sands run out.
%%%%%%%
Back in high school, it always secretly puzzled me that you and Bill Daniels never seemed all that close. Part of the reason for my puzzlement was that you and Bill were probably my two closest male friends throughout much of my high school career, and I simply hadn't lived long enough to grasp the basic fact that I wasn't living inside an episode of Ozzie and Harriet, wherein my closest friends would also be each other's closest friends. I mention this here only because, in the process of writing about my grade school and high school experiences, I've been finding myself curious about and fascinated by the various vantage points of certain of my school chums and chumettes. At the time that it was happening -- that we were going through it together -- I was, of course (as is only natural), too preoccupied with making y bumbling way from one problem-solving exercise to another (and then to another, etc.) to stop and analyze the roses. Moreover, it's generally understood by prudent students that keeping one's nose out of other students' business in any academic milieu is simply sound survival strategy.
For me, at least, an irony obtains in this matter, in that I've spent virtually every waking hour (and then some), since graduating from high school, sticking my nose into everybody's business. That's what writers do -- as do urban anthropologists, mythoklastic therapists and human rights activists. And, for better or worse, I'm all four (and then some). Be that as it may, I'd be very interested in hearing anything you're willing to share, with regard to your personal take on high school and on any of our mutual friends and/or acquaintances from "back in the day," as the current expression goes. It should go without saying that I'll respect completely your privacy, just as I've consistently respected that of all the other friends whose confidences no one has ever caught me writing about.
%%%%%%%
Before I go today, I want to say a word or two about the song lyric I'm including (below) as a "coda" to this installment. I'm sure that you're familiar with the classic American folksong, "Eyes On The Prize," most often associated with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950's and '60's. Over the years, as a result of my own wide-ranging involvements in human rights, environmentalist, feminist and anti-war movements, I've been exposed to dozens of renditions of "Eyes On The Prize." Starting in the fall of 1988, while still living in Wichita, I found myself involved in what was then called something like the Green Committees of Correspondence. Then, in the summer of 1990, a mere six weeks or so before my mother's untimely death, I found myself invited to perform several of my "Green" (mythoklastic environmentalist) songs at the Prairie Greens' annual gathering, just outside of Kansas City. "Eyes On The Prize" (the Green Version) was one of those songs.
In August of 1990, Margaret Green had a fatal heart attack while supposedly recovering at St. Joe's in Wichita from an earlier cardiac event. A month later, I put down the first month's rent on my first Kansas City apartment, at the Whitehall, across from the Nelson. My ties to the Greens lasted until 1997 when they began talking seriously about running Ralph Nader as a third-party candidate for President -- an exercise in self-deluding narcissistic nihilism which bore precisely the poisonous fruit I prophesied (at the top of my lungs) that it would.
Even though I escaped from what had become the Pseudo-Greens, in 1997, before I could have the (then) upcoming eight (8!!!) years of neo-feudalistic Re-Endarkenment pinned on me, I've continued to reap one especially precious benefit from my years of involvement with them: I met my partner, Marie J. Smith, at a Greens potluck at All Souls Unitarian Church, a month after moving to KC. We've been "a couple" now for nearly 16 years.
Let me know how you like the song. (I'm sure that you already know the tune.) I'm glad that we could have this time together, and I look forward to hearing from you.
Until Next Time, Stay Well,
Galen
%%%%%%%
EYES ON THE PRIZE
(Green Version)
1. Bound and gagged by the powers that be,
gonna build a better world for you and me.
Keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on!
I’m layin’ it down, and you don’t have to answer,
But the streets of this world are paved with cancer.
Keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on!
REFRAIN: Hold on. Hold on.
Keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on.
2. Grandkids a-comin’, better clean this joint;
otherwise, I’m a-wonderin’ what’s the point??
Keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on!
Clean air, clean water, that’s what we need.
But that means we gotta curb the rich folks’ greed.
Keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on!
(...repeat refrain...)
3. I don’t know, but I’ve been told
Capital Hill been bought and sold.
Keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on!
That river of Denial, it’s a-chilly an’ wide.
If you wanna get across, you better get on our side.
Keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on!
(...repeat refrain...)
4. Bound and gagged by the powers that be,
gonna build a better world for you and me.
Keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on!
But inch-by-inch and hand-in-hand,
Sisters & Brothers, we can save this land.
Keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on!
(...repeat refrain twice...)
Words by Galen Green, copyright 1989
/gg
Craycraft Communique II: The Sequel
Galen Green
8606 Chestnut Circle #3
Kansas City, MO 64131
816-807-4957 or 523-1813
Saturday
March 01, 2008
(the late poet Robert Lowell’s
91stBirthday)
Craycraft Communiqué II: The Sequel
%%%%%%%
Long ago was the then beginning to seem like now
As now is but the setting out on a new but still
Undefined way. That now, the one once
Seen from far away, is our destiny
No matter what else may happen to us.
-- John Ashbery, from “Blue Sonata”
%%%%%%%
It was an intimate and frank self examination. Not an autobiography – the events of his life were too insignificant, he thought – but an account of his “fantasies,” his imagination, his whims, his ideas. This sounds modest, but it quickly became one of the most ambitious projects in the history of literature….
-- Charles Rosen from “The Genius of Montaigne” in The New York Review of Books (February 14, 2008)
%%%%%%%
. . . any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness.
-- Marley’s Ghost, from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
%%%%%%%
Dear Rick,
How was it that I came to be seated in that rear pew in the modest sanctuary of Epworth Methodist Church, on that Sunday morning, there in our old neighborhood? Figuratively speaking, I’d come there to hear you “preach” to Tom Brokaw’s putative “Greatest Generation” about the gospel we were all fooled into referring to back then as “The Counterculture.” What season of what year would that have been? My crystal ball grows cloudier by the minute. For more reasons than I can rattle off here, I yearn to set down enough of the basics, before it’s too late, in hopes that other actors in the plot might have the opportunity to build something recognizable upon the broken shards of my mind’s imperfect archaeology.
%%%%%%%
As so frequently happens nowadays, in order to orient my memory to accurate times and places, I’m going to need to step back and contextualize. Wasn’t it in February of 1969 that I hitchhiked from Wichita to Denver and back to visit you in your dorm room at The University of Denver. Or was it an apartment? Or was it March instead? The main thing I’ll always remember about that trip was my getting caught in a sudden blizzard out in Western Kansas and having to spend the night trying to fall asleep on the icy floor of a pitch-black men’s room at a closed-up service station, and burning the pages of a pulp fiction paperback in the sink – a little at a time, throughout that long lonely night – to keep from quite literally freezing to death. The book whose burning saved my life had been a gift from one of the strangers who’d given me a lift earlier that day (as was the book of matches) I used to burn it. It’s always been that way for me: Dumb Luck placing in my path, for me to practically stumble over, seemingly useless objects which end up being wondrously transformed into the very tools I end up needing most urgently to carve my destiny – or at least to save my sorry skin.
Not many days after my harrowing return from visiting you and your friends at The University of Denver and nearly perishing in that highly instructive blizzard out in Western Kansas, I took a refreshingly less harrowing daytrip with my old pal James Nelson and his younger brother Bill (known back then as “Billy Paul,” but known in recent decades as “Dr. Nelson”) to the little town of Harper, Kansas. What impelled us thence that day was an article in The Wichita Eagle about some “hippy chick” who’d moved into an old store front there and set up what was purported to be one of those boutiques we used to refer to as a “head shop.” Although the grail of our quest that day turned out to be the aesthetic equivalent of a Styrofoam cup, the Nelson brothers and I had a pleasant enough time of it, sauntering together through Harper’s quaint old downtown and rail yard.
The reason I recall that particular day so vividly, there near the end of the winter of 1969, is that, later on, after the Nelson brothers and I returned to Wichita and went our separate ways for the evening, I ended up over at Becky Adams’ parents’ house where I met a young woman named Kate Schulte, who, as you’ll recall, two years later, became my first wife.
%%%%%%%
But all of this highly valuable contextualization hasn’t brought us any closer to answering that question I posed in the opening sentence of today’s ramble: How was it that I found myself in the sanctuary of Epworth Methodist in anticipation of your extemporaneous non-sermon (church chat?) on the non-gospel of “The Counterculture?” As of this writing, it’s been roughly 38 years ago; nevertheless, here’s what little I can recall of that far-off Sunday morning – the who, what, when, where, how and why of it:
Epworth Methodist was your family’s church and was located just a few blocks up the street from the house where you’d grown up. I seem to recall your explaining to me that it was through your mother’s continuing connection with folks at Epworth Methodist, after you and I had graduated from high school and put in our first full year at college, that the leadership at the church asked your mother to invite you to stand in as the floor show on the Sunday morning in question, talking with the (predominantly middle-aged) congregation about your college student’s perspective on issues of the day and then fielding questions from the floor. (If I’m misremembering any of this, please be so kind as to disabuse me.)
I honestly do not recall whether you invited me to show up for your performance that morning or whether I begged you to allow me to show up, on the pretext of providing with some moral support while satisfying my own perverse curiosity. In either event, I was there, sitting quietly in that aforementioned rear pew, taking it all in. Needless to say, your delivery was excellent, and it seemed to me that you were warmly received.
Of course, when I use the words “counterculture” and “sermon” here today, I intend it only as a kind of shorthand. I’m going to guess that your being invited to do your thing that morning was, in large part, the product of some shared anxiety on the part of a significant portion of Epworth Methodist’s membership that the world they thought they knew was disintegrating before their very eyes. (I won’t waste our precious time together here today with another tedious rehash of everything that was going on in the world back then – except to remind us all of the fact that a shockingly disproportionate amount of what your audience that Sunday morning had been witnessing on their television screens throughout the late 1960’s had admittedly been being played out on America’s university campuses. Moreover, I think it only fair to recall here that a considerable number of the more visible players in those televised campus dramas did, in fact, bear a sort of general physical resemblance to Rick Craycraft and Galen Green – as we appeared back then during our undergraduate days.
All of these understandable sources of the Epworth congregants’ high anxiety not withstanding, you and I were not then (nor have we ever been, either before or since) the enemies of public order, reasoned discourse, domestic tranquility, etc. . . . and most assuredly never the enemies of The United States of America, her flag, her people, her legitimate institutions, her purple mountain majesties above the fruit plain, blah blah blah. And yet, in so far as the term “counterculture” still has (if it ever truly had) any fact-based meaning, you and I, each in his own way, have lived that counterculture, every bit as much as have any other members of our generation. I’m well aware that there are those who would vehemently dispute this assertion; and that’s OK, too. History will tell, though none of us will be there to hear it. The proof is truly in the pudding, though none of us will be there to taste it.
%%%%%%%
I suggested at the outset here today that it was primarily to members of what Tom Brokaw has, for his own mercenary, pandering purposes, dubbed, “The Greatest Generation” that you’d come to Epworth Methodist to share your perspective on the Sunday morning in question. While I’m perfectly willing to acquiesce in referring to the brave women and men who struggled, sacrificed and/or fought to defeat German, Japanese and/or Italian fascism in World War II as “The Greatest Generation,” let me go on record as strong objecting to that label. It’s not my intention to take anything away from them. Most emphatically not! We owe them everything good that we’ve got in life. We owe them our very lives. We owe them more than we could ever have repaid, back in the 1970’s when enough of them were still around to have been repaid. But to dub them “The Greatest Generation” is to deny the historically verifiable fact that equally “great” generations had gone before them, in the vast history parade.
As I watched you standing, not up in the pulpit but down on the sanctuary’s modestly carpeted floor, down on the same level as those members of our parents’ and grandparents’ generation, that putatively “greatest” generation, eyeball to eyeball with them, it put me in mind of my own parents (adoptive parents), Harry (1908-1982) & Margaret (1912-1990) Green, of my sometimes difficult relationship with them, of my frequent (and frequently frustrated and frustrating) attempts to communicate with them, and of the metaphorical wall which my imagination had painted for me on the canvas of my mind’s eye, some years earlier, to explain to myself the very real, very palpable – yet totally invisible – Great Divide or Grand Canyon or impenetrable barrier which separated them – not merely from Kevin and me – but from everything that had happened since World War II. And the name of that metaphorical wall was World War II.
Speaking now only of my experiences with and observations of Harry & Margaret Green: I don’t mean to imply that WWII somehow changed them. Quite the contrary. What I mean to imply here is that, even though WWII changed the world, Harry & Margaret failed to change along with the rest of the world. (Perhaps “failed” is putting too much of the onus on them; let’s just say that when that enormous event we call WWII officially ended in 1945, Harry & Margaret somehow got left behind, evidently ill-equipped to change along with the rest of the world.) I also don’t mean to imply that my adoptive parents were the only human beings on the planet who lived out the remainder of their lives (from 1945-1982 & 1990, respectively, for example) “living in the past,” as the cliché goes. Intensive analysis of the anthropology of the matter, in fact, points us toward the suggestion that my parents’ situation was probably more the rule than the exception. In other words, as much as my adoptive parents struck me as being freaks when I was, let’s say, between the ages of 7 & 17, I grew eventually to understand that what appeared to me in them as freakishness (“oddness”) was, instead, representative of most of their cultural peers.
%%%%%%%
Memory being like a movie, it manifests its own logic. It moves within us, from time to time, as whatever force is playing the director cuts or fades or travels from one scene to the next . . . and then to the next. So it seems to be by my own memory’s cinematographic logic that I move, from that modest sanctuary of Epworth Methodist, to the Boulevard Theater, perhaps a five-minute walk away. At least that’s where this scene that I find myself remembering now always chooses to open. And yet, as so terribly much of the past begins to dim and fade, every memory upon which I try to focus leaves me with more and more questions, each time I play its movie inside me. Probably that’s not an entirely bad thing; for, as long as I continue to care even a fig about these gaps in my understanding of the past, then I’m filled with the mild thrill of that forward motion which passes for purposeful living.
In this particular scene, it is late at night. You and I had decided to walk the few blocks to the Boulevard Theater to attend a late-night screening of The Beatles’ recently released animated movie, Yellow Submarine. Now, the movie has let out and we’re headed back home – you to your parents’ house and me to mine. It’s nearly midnight, right around the winter solstice – very cold and very still. It would undoubtedly be very dark, as well, were it not for the streetlights, shining brightly down through the bare tree limbs onto the ice and the frozen snow. Instead of merely walking home, we’re skating home – or rather, running and sliding, like a pair of 10-year-olds, skating and sliding home from school.
But there is no school this week – not for either of us. In my reminiscence here today – if not in the Newtonian universe of that hushed and chilly night in the late 1960’s – we are both on what used to be called “Christmas Break” from classes at our respective universities. What season of what year would that have been? It seems that Yellow Submarine was released in July of 1968. Am I remembering this pleasant scene completely wrong? Back then, as you’ll recall, movie distribution operated entirely differently than it does today. Back then, even a major motion picture such as the one in question, might be released and distributed in larger markets (Denver, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, for example) several weeks before arriving in a middle-market town like Wichita. Moreover, any motion picture that was pulling its own weight at the box office, back then, might hang around in a town like Wichita for several months longer than it would now, here in the Roaring Zeroes. As is all too obvious to even the most disinterested observer, nowadays, it’s all about a film’s box office receipts in its first two or three weekends out of the starting gate, and the entire process (or life cycle) of a film’s release, distribution and amortization has been accelerated exponentially.
I mention all this here today because I seem to be trying to convince myself that a film with July of 1968 as its official release date could still have been playing in a theater in a (relative) backwater like Wichita, Kansas, in December of 1968. T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock measured out his life with coffee spoons; I seem to have measured out mine with American Presidencies and other such shared tribal experiences, here in our global village. Yet, the further the past lags behind the present, the more I find myself relying on an ever widening range of semi-reliable mnemonic devises to tell these bits and pieces of the story of what were once our lives and times. This present attempt to remember (with any respectable degree of accuracy) the night you and I went to see Yellow Submarine together at the Boulevard Theater, there in the old neighborhood, provides as benign an example of this frustrating phenomenon as any.
%%%%%%%
But, of course, there are more where that one came from – as I’m sure there are for you, swarming about like memory movies or life the ghosts of fireflies, captured and bottled long ago, within your own magnificent brain-world. It would please me more than I can say, to have you talk to me about some your favorites, either on paper or cassette tape or videotape (or “stream”) or cyber-mail – or by whatever verbal medium you feel most comfortable with – if and when circumstances allow.
%%%%%%%
In my own case: I “remember” that I was in the 9th grade at Brooks Junior High from September of 1963 until June of 1964, mainly because, analogous to everyone else on the planet, it is indelibly burned into my brain where I was and who I was with and what I was thinking and feeling and who said what and what the air around me felt like, on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, when the Vice Principal, Mr. Arnold, entered our study period in the school cafeteria to break the terrible news about what had just happened in Dallas. In other words, as the past grows smaller and smaller over my shoulder, I can recall the trivial events and time-frames of my own puny life mainly to the extent that I’m able to somehow associate them with the monumental historical events within which my mind has contextualized them.
One example of the flip-side of this dynamic might be the way I’m able to remember the approximate release date of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album or the approximate date of the so-called “Six-Day War” between Israel and several of her Arab neighbors or of the so-called “Sandy’s Parking Lot Riot” (the biggest race riot of our growing-up years in Wichita). As I’m sure you’ve guessed, the main reason I’m able to remember the approximate dates of these three historically important events is that all three occurred within a few days of our graduating from high school in the spring of 1967.
But wait! There’s more! The main reason I’m able to remember that it was during the 1960-61 school year that Kevin and I attended the Wichita Christian Academy (at the corner of Pawnee & the old drainage canal) – and that I was in the 6th grade that year – is that I have a vivid recollection of Steve Sowards walking with me along the little sidewalk which ran parallel to the street in front of our little box houses (way back before you and I met), when Kevin & I & Harry & Margaret lived on North Lorraine (near the university campus), instead of on South Lorraine (where we moved the summer between my sophomore and junior years at East) . . . and discussing (Steve Sowards and I) the fairly recent election of John F. Kennedy as President. I’d just finished explaining to Steve, who’d been one my closest pals since the 3rd grade at Fairmount Elementary, that my parents had voted for the Republican Vice President, Richard M. Nixon for President, but for the incumbent Democrat George Docking for Governor of Kansas. “Yea. We voted a ‘split ticket,’ too,” Steve replied – meaning that his parents (Dr. J. Kelly Sowards and wife Ardis) had voted for Kennedy (the Democrat) but for William Avery (the Republican).
At that time (probably the spring of 1961), my lifelong fascination with politics was just beginning to bud, so that Steve’s employing that term “split ticket” sent a tingle of boyish excitement all through me and caused a giant light bulb to appear over my head of haystack hair. Therefore, even though everything else about my conversation with Steve that afternoon – the year we all turned 12 – has evaporated into the Mists of Time, his casually introducing me to what struck me as a brilliant concept (i.e. that of a “split ticket”) has served as a mnemonic devise for these past 46 years, reminding me, right on cue, that the year JFK defeated Nixon for the Presidency was the year we all entered the 6th grade (albeit at different schools), way back when we all turned 11 years old.
%%%%%%%
Spastically traveling forward and backward in Time as we are today (“unstuck,” as Vonnegut says of Billy Pilgrim), let’s fast-forward now to one more pseudo-vivid reminiscence (or vivid pseudo-reminiscence) from that somewhat blurry transitional period in our lives when we were “young men” still young enough not to have yet begun to give ourselves permission to think of ourselves as men or to refer to ourselves as men – whatever that’s supposed to mean. (I, for one, was, strictly speaking, still a virgin – not that that has anything at all to do with being a man.) I’m going to take a wild guess that the memory-movie that’s playing in my mind’s eye at this moment took place in what most folks call “the real world” (i.e. the Newtonian, molecular world) sometime in the late summer of 1968, but I could easily be mistaken in this. There was, after all, a lot going on around that time, to monumentally understate the matter (e.g. the police riots outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago [MLK & RFK both having been assassinated earlier that year], the seemingly ceaseless senseless Vietnam War, racial tension throughout the country, my part-time job at the Wichita State University library, my collaboration with Diana Freeman [East ‘67] and Gwinn Walker on that fabulous [but short-lived] folk group we called the Canadian Railroad Trilogy [after a pretty good song by George Hamilton IV], as well as my early-summer hitchhiking adventure to Acapulco [Mexico] and back).
You and I had each just turned 19 the previous spring. And, as I say, the slice of life that I feel as though I’m remembering would most likely have taken place toward the end of summer, shortly before we’d have been starting the fall of ’68 semester at our respective universities; though, as I’ve already admitted, I might well have this entire reminiscence entirely scrambled. Be that as it may, here’s how I remember it:
I’m sitting in the chair at my desk, in my bedroom, writing. This would have been in that side room, which had once been a garage, there on the south end of our little box house at 621 South Lorraine. (The very same house which the detective fiction writer Gaylord Dold [East ‘65] once described with insightful accuracy in one of his Fawcett paperbacks novels as something like a bleak little “death’s head of a house.”) Anyway, it’s toward the end of the summer of 1968, and I’m sitting there, writing. Most likely, the screen door off the driveway is letting a warm breeze waft into the room. Unexpectedly, there’s a knock at the screen door, and I glance up to see that it’s my good friend Rick Craycraft [East ‘67]. Without getting up, I invite you in. You open the screen door and step into the room without saying a word. I see that you’re carrying under one arm that small dingy, sun-bleached, army-green canvas knapsack (with its ‘specially designed diagonal, single, heavy-duty brown leather shoulder strap) which I’d carried on my very first hitchhiking adventure down through the Deep South (Jackson [Mississippi], New Orleans, Mobil, Birmingham, Nashville, Paducah, etc.) in the summer of 1967, as well as on my aforementioned second hitchhiking adventure down through Texas and Mexico in the summer of 1968.
Again, without uttering a word, you ceremoniously drop the knapsack on the floor in front of you, as if to say: “Here’s your sacred knapsack back. I’m honored that you let me borrow it. This hitchhiking ritual is everything I was hoping it would be – and then some. You and I now have one more meaningful component of tribal initiation in common.” And I could easily have this part wrong as well, Rick, but it seems to me that you then immediately knelt down and touched your forehead to the floor – or something like that. Is that anything like the way you remember it? (RSVP) Also, I cannot for the life of me bring to mind where it was you’d just returned from hitchhiking to. It would be a great relief if you wouldn’t mind taking a few minutes to refresh my memory on that point, as well. Thanks!
%%%%%%%
If I recall correctly, that (3-gallon?) sacred knapsack had originally been part of my Boy Scout (BSA) gear years earlier; and after I wore out its original canvas straps on its “maiden excursion” of 1,500 or so miles in August of 1967, I’d taken it to Walt Davis’s harness & boot repair shop in the Oliver Square Shopping Center, at Oliver & Douglas, and asked Walt to pick out a sturdy strip of scrap leather and sew it onto the sacred hitchhiking knapsack as a single diagonal should strap (my own invention). Now, Walt Davis’s family had been friends with my family when Kevin & I were small boys living on North Lorraine. The Davises (Walt & Clarabelle [real name!] & Buddy & Cathy) had lived in a pink house, two doors south of us, and had occasionally grazed their rodeo ponies in their backyard. Buddy, who was a year older than me, was actually Galen Davis, the only other Galen I knew as a child. He grew up to be appointed Kansas’s first “Drug Czar” (I kid you not!) by Governor Mike (‘No Neck”) Hayden (R) in the 1980’s.
Coincidentally, Galen (“Buddy”) Davis had tried to hang me, back when we were little boys, playing cowboys & outlaws in his parents’ backyard. I survived, but the lasso from Buddy’s rodeo gear was made of rough hemp and left a nasty burn mark around my neck which proved difficult to explain away, the next week at Sunday School. (Perhaps this had been young Buddy’s way of honing his lynching skills for his later attack on [And here we come full circle.] The Counterculture.)
%%%%%%%
I need to close for now. But before I go, I want to share with you one last image that I’ve carried with me in my head, all these forty years since your church chat with whose recounting I opened today’s ramble. As I’ve said, after you’d regaled the congregation at Epworth Methodist for a few minutes with your college student’s perspective on some of the issues of the day, you took a few questions from the floor. Of those questions, the only one that’s stuck with me came, as I recall, from a probable WWII veteran wearing a plaid shirt, who was then approximately the same age that you and I are now. He stood up in the sixth row pew and asked you in all seriousness (or maybe not entirely) what our generation’s thoughts were on the National Debt. Being 19 at the time, I just happened to find his question to be amusing – given the fact that his generation had obviously not given the National Debt nearly enough thought.
(Incidentally, your response to his amusing question was admirably diplomatic and respectful. Well done!)
One of these days, I hope that we can engage in some sort of lightsome philosophical dialogue on the subject of hitchhiking. I imagine that you have at least as much to contribute to the discussion as I have. Meanwhile, here’s another song lyric of mine I thought you might find interesting. We do what we can.
%%%%%%%
Until Next Time, Stay Well,
Galen
%%%%%%%
THE DRUNK ON THE HIGH WIRE
My parents sold me to pay their taxes.
Now I teeter a hundred feet from my death,
On this narrow strand I call my home.
Yet it’s only my lack of nerve which waxes
This wire upon which I balance each breath.
Someday, I’ll fall like Saigon, like Rome,
Which is why my spinal cord never relaxes.
I’m the drunk you see on the high wire
With this balance beam which I use to fix
The planet beneath me. Full of rum
And steady as a hieroglyph,
I walk this length as a shrill wind picks
My flesh to shreds and leaves me numb.
Won’t you toss me up another fifth?
REFRAIN:
Above the crowd, I slide like a fox
Through a henhouse,
like a breeze through a tomb.
This high wire is the only path
I’ve known, since before I left the womb.
Deprived of safety net and bath,
As blind and confused as Oedipus Rex,
I inch my way from magic to math,
Trying not to look down at my doom,
As at my feet a downdraft sucks.
Sometimes I wonder how I’ve come
Into this hazard, by what hoax
Was I led into peril of life and tooth?
Below me I study your streets I’d roam,
If I could escape this distance which strokes me,
Numbs me like a fine vermouth.
Below, I can hear my destiny hum.
Words and music by Galen Green c 1986
/gg
8606 Chestnut Circle #3
Kansas City, MO 64131
816-807-4957 or 523-1813
Saturday
March 01, 2008
(the late poet Robert Lowell’s
91stBirthday)
Craycraft Communiqué II: The Sequel
%%%%%%%
Long ago was the then beginning to seem like now
As now is but the setting out on a new but still
Undefined way. That now, the one once
Seen from far away, is our destiny
No matter what else may happen to us.
-- John Ashbery, from “Blue Sonata”
%%%%%%%
It was an intimate and frank self examination. Not an autobiography – the events of his life were too insignificant, he thought – but an account of his “fantasies,” his imagination, his whims, his ideas. This sounds modest, but it quickly became one of the most ambitious projects in the history of literature….
-- Charles Rosen from “The Genius of Montaigne” in The New York Review of Books (February 14, 2008)
%%%%%%%
. . . any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness.
-- Marley’s Ghost, from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
%%%%%%%
Dear Rick,
How was it that I came to be seated in that rear pew in the modest sanctuary of Epworth Methodist Church, on that Sunday morning, there in our old neighborhood? Figuratively speaking, I’d come there to hear you “preach” to Tom Brokaw’s putative “Greatest Generation” about the gospel we were all fooled into referring to back then as “The Counterculture.” What season of what year would that have been? My crystal ball grows cloudier by the minute. For more reasons than I can rattle off here, I yearn to set down enough of the basics, before it’s too late, in hopes that other actors in the plot might have the opportunity to build something recognizable upon the broken shards of my mind’s imperfect archaeology.
%%%%%%%
As so frequently happens nowadays, in order to orient my memory to accurate times and places, I’m going to need to step back and contextualize. Wasn’t it in February of 1969 that I hitchhiked from Wichita to Denver and back to visit you in your dorm room at The University of Denver. Or was it an apartment? Or was it March instead? The main thing I’ll always remember about that trip was my getting caught in a sudden blizzard out in Western Kansas and having to spend the night trying to fall asleep on the icy floor of a pitch-black men’s room at a closed-up service station, and burning the pages of a pulp fiction paperback in the sink – a little at a time, throughout that long lonely night – to keep from quite literally freezing to death. The book whose burning saved my life had been a gift from one of the strangers who’d given me a lift earlier that day (as was the book of matches) I used to burn it. It’s always been that way for me: Dumb Luck placing in my path, for me to practically stumble over, seemingly useless objects which end up being wondrously transformed into the very tools I end up needing most urgently to carve my destiny – or at least to save my sorry skin.
Not many days after my harrowing return from visiting you and your friends at The University of Denver and nearly perishing in that highly instructive blizzard out in Western Kansas, I took a refreshingly less harrowing daytrip with my old pal James Nelson and his younger brother Bill (known back then as “Billy Paul,” but known in recent decades as “Dr. Nelson”) to the little town of Harper, Kansas. What impelled us thence that day was an article in The Wichita Eagle about some “hippy chick” who’d moved into an old store front there and set up what was purported to be one of those boutiques we used to refer to as a “head shop.” Although the grail of our quest that day turned out to be the aesthetic equivalent of a Styrofoam cup, the Nelson brothers and I had a pleasant enough time of it, sauntering together through Harper’s quaint old downtown and rail yard.
The reason I recall that particular day so vividly, there near the end of the winter of 1969, is that, later on, after the Nelson brothers and I returned to Wichita and went our separate ways for the evening, I ended up over at Becky Adams’ parents’ house where I met a young woman named Kate Schulte, who, as you’ll recall, two years later, became my first wife.
%%%%%%%
But all of this highly valuable contextualization hasn’t brought us any closer to answering that question I posed in the opening sentence of today’s ramble: How was it that I found myself in the sanctuary of Epworth Methodist in anticipation of your extemporaneous non-sermon (church chat?) on the non-gospel of “The Counterculture?” As of this writing, it’s been roughly 38 years ago; nevertheless, here’s what little I can recall of that far-off Sunday morning – the who, what, when, where, how and why of it:
Epworth Methodist was your family’s church and was located just a few blocks up the street from the house where you’d grown up. I seem to recall your explaining to me that it was through your mother’s continuing connection with folks at Epworth Methodist, after you and I had graduated from high school and put in our first full year at college, that the leadership at the church asked your mother to invite you to stand in as the floor show on the Sunday morning in question, talking with the (predominantly middle-aged) congregation about your college student’s perspective on issues of the day and then fielding questions from the floor. (If I’m misremembering any of this, please be so kind as to disabuse me.)
I honestly do not recall whether you invited me to show up for your performance that morning or whether I begged you to allow me to show up, on the pretext of providing with some moral support while satisfying my own perverse curiosity. In either event, I was there, sitting quietly in that aforementioned rear pew, taking it all in. Needless to say, your delivery was excellent, and it seemed to me that you were warmly received.
Of course, when I use the words “counterculture” and “sermon” here today, I intend it only as a kind of shorthand. I’m going to guess that your being invited to do your thing that morning was, in large part, the product of some shared anxiety on the part of a significant portion of Epworth Methodist’s membership that the world they thought they knew was disintegrating before their very eyes. (I won’t waste our precious time together here today with another tedious rehash of everything that was going on in the world back then – except to remind us all of the fact that a shockingly disproportionate amount of what your audience that Sunday morning had been witnessing on their television screens throughout the late 1960’s had admittedly been being played out on America’s university campuses. Moreover, I think it only fair to recall here that a considerable number of the more visible players in those televised campus dramas did, in fact, bear a sort of general physical resemblance to Rick Craycraft and Galen Green – as we appeared back then during our undergraduate days.
All of these understandable sources of the Epworth congregants’ high anxiety not withstanding, you and I were not then (nor have we ever been, either before or since) the enemies of public order, reasoned discourse, domestic tranquility, etc. . . . and most assuredly never the enemies of The United States of America, her flag, her people, her legitimate institutions, her purple mountain majesties above the fruit plain, blah blah blah. And yet, in so far as the term “counterculture” still has (if it ever truly had) any fact-based meaning, you and I, each in his own way, have lived that counterculture, every bit as much as have any other members of our generation. I’m well aware that there are those who would vehemently dispute this assertion; and that’s OK, too. History will tell, though none of us will be there to hear it. The proof is truly in the pudding, though none of us will be there to taste it.
%%%%%%%
I suggested at the outset here today that it was primarily to members of what Tom Brokaw has, for his own mercenary, pandering purposes, dubbed, “The Greatest Generation” that you’d come to Epworth Methodist to share your perspective on the Sunday morning in question. While I’m perfectly willing to acquiesce in referring to the brave women and men who struggled, sacrificed and/or fought to defeat German, Japanese and/or Italian fascism in World War II as “The Greatest Generation,” let me go on record as strong objecting to that label. It’s not my intention to take anything away from them. Most emphatically not! We owe them everything good that we’ve got in life. We owe them our very lives. We owe them more than we could ever have repaid, back in the 1970’s when enough of them were still around to have been repaid. But to dub them “The Greatest Generation” is to deny the historically verifiable fact that equally “great” generations had gone before them, in the vast history parade.
As I watched you standing, not up in the pulpit but down on the sanctuary’s modestly carpeted floor, down on the same level as those members of our parents’ and grandparents’ generation, that putatively “greatest” generation, eyeball to eyeball with them, it put me in mind of my own parents (adoptive parents), Harry (1908-1982) & Margaret (1912-1990) Green, of my sometimes difficult relationship with them, of my frequent (and frequently frustrated and frustrating) attempts to communicate with them, and of the metaphorical wall which my imagination had painted for me on the canvas of my mind’s eye, some years earlier, to explain to myself the very real, very palpable – yet totally invisible – Great Divide or Grand Canyon or impenetrable barrier which separated them – not merely from Kevin and me – but from everything that had happened since World War II. And the name of that metaphorical wall was World War II.
Speaking now only of my experiences with and observations of Harry & Margaret Green: I don’t mean to imply that WWII somehow changed them. Quite the contrary. What I mean to imply here is that, even though WWII changed the world, Harry & Margaret failed to change along with the rest of the world. (Perhaps “failed” is putting too much of the onus on them; let’s just say that when that enormous event we call WWII officially ended in 1945, Harry & Margaret somehow got left behind, evidently ill-equipped to change along with the rest of the world.) I also don’t mean to imply that my adoptive parents were the only human beings on the planet who lived out the remainder of their lives (from 1945-1982 & 1990, respectively, for example) “living in the past,” as the cliché goes. Intensive analysis of the anthropology of the matter, in fact, points us toward the suggestion that my parents’ situation was probably more the rule than the exception. In other words, as much as my adoptive parents struck me as being freaks when I was, let’s say, between the ages of 7 & 17, I grew eventually to understand that what appeared to me in them as freakishness (“oddness”) was, instead, representative of most of their cultural peers.
%%%%%%%
Memory being like a movie, it manifests its own logic. It moves within us, from time to time, as whatever force is playing the director cuts or fades or travels from one scene to the next . . . and then to the next. So it seems to be by my own memory’s cinematographic logic that I move, from that modest sanctuary of Epworth Methodist, to the Boulevard Theater, perhaps a five-minute walk away. At least that’s where this scene that I find myself remembering now always chooses to open. And yet, as so terribly much of the past begins to dim and fade, every memory upon which I try to focus leaves me with more and more questions, each time I play its movie inside me. Probably that’s not an entirely bad thing; for, as long as I continue to care even a fig about these gaps in my understanding of the past, then I’m filled with the mild thrill of that forward motion which passes for purposeful living.
In this particular scene, it is late at night. You and I had decided to walk the few blocks to the Boulevard Theater to attend a late-night screening of The Beatles’ recently released animated movie, Yellow Submarine. Now, the movie has let out and we’re headed back home – you to your parents’ house and me to mine. It’s nearly midnight, right around the winter solstice – very cold and very still. It would undoubtedly be very dark, as well, were it not for the streetlights, shining brightly down through the bare tree limbs onto the ice and the frozen snow. Instead of merely walking home, we’re skating home – or rather, running and sliding, like a pair of 10-year-olds, skating and sliding home from school.
But there is no school this week – not for either of us. In my reminiscence here today – if not in the Newtonian universe of that hushed and chilly night in the late 1960’s – we are both on what used to be called “Christmas Break” from classes at our respective universities. What season of what year would that have been? It seems that Yellow Submarine was released in July of 1968. Am I remembering this pleasant scene completely wrong? Back then, as you’ll recall, movie distribution operated entirely differently than it does today. Back then, even a major motion picture such as the one in question, might be released and distributed in larger markets (Denver, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, for example) several weeks before arriving in a middle-market town like Wichita. Moreover, any motion picture that was pulling its own weight at the box office, back then, might hang around in a town like Wichita for several months longer than it would now, here in the Roaring Zeroes. As is all too obvious to even the most disinterested observer, nowadays, it’s all about a film’s box office receipts in its first two or three weekends out of the starting gate, and the entire process (or life cycle) of a film’s release, distribution and amortization has been accelerated exponentially.
I mention all this here today because I seem to be trying to convince myself that a film with July of 1968 as its official release date could still have been playing in a theater in a (relative) backwater like Wichita, Kansas, in December of 1968. T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock measured out his life with coffee spoons; I seem to have measured out mine with American Presidencies and other such shared tribal experiences, here in our global village. Yet, the further the past lags behind the present, the more I find myself relying on an ever widening range of semi-reliable mnemonic devises to tell these bits and pieces of the story of what were once our lives and times. This present attempt to remember (with any respectable degree of accuracy) the night you and I went to see Yellow Submarine together at the Boulevard Theater, there in the old neighborhood, provides as benign an example of this frustrating phenomenon as any.
%%%%%%%
But, of course, there are more where that one came from – as I’m sure there are for you, swarming about like memory movies or life the ghosts of fireflies, captured and bottled long ago, within your own magnificent brain-world. It would please me more than I can say, to have you talk to me about some your favorites, either on paper or cassette tape or videotape (or “stream”) or cyber-mail – or by whatever verbal medium you feel most comfortable with – if and when circumstances allow.
%%%%%%%
In my own case: I “remember” that I was in the 9th grade at Brooks Junior High from September of 1963 until June of 1964, mainly because, analogous to everyone else on the planet, it is indelibly burned into my brain where I was and who I was with and what I was thinking and feeling and who said what and what the air around me felt like, on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, when the Vice Principal, Mr. Arnold, entered our study period in the school cafeteria to break the terrible news about what had just happened in Dallas. In other words, as the past grows smaller and smaller over my shoulder, I can recall the trivial events and time-frames of my own puny life mainly to the extent that I’m able to somehow associate them with the monumental historical events within which my mind has contextualized them.
One example of the flip-side of this dynamic might be the way I’m able to remember the approximate release date of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album or the approximate date of the so-called “Six-Day War” between Israel and several of her Arab neighbors or of the so-called “Sandy’s Parking Lot Riot” (the biggest race riot of our growing-up years in Wichita). As I’m sure you’ve guessed, the main reason I’m able to remember the approximate dates of these three historically important events is that all three occurred within a few days of our graduating from high school in the spring of 1967.
But wait! There’s more! The main reason I’m able to remember that it was during the 1960-61 school year that Kevin and I attended the Wichita Christian Academy (at the corner of Pawnee & the old drainage canal) – and that I was in the 6th grade that year – is that I have a vivid recollection of Steve Sowards walking with me along the little sidewalk which ran parallel to the street in front of our little box houses (way back before you and I met), when Kevin & I & Harry & Margaret lived on North Lorraine (near the university campus), instead of on South Lorraine (where we moved the summer between my sophomore and junior years at East) . . . and discussing (Steve Sowards and I) the fairly recent election of John F. Kennedy as President. I’d just finished explaining to Steve, who’d been one my closest pals since the 3rd grade at Fairmount Elementary, that my parents had voted for the Republican Vice President, Richard M. Nixon for President, but for the incumbent Democrat George Docking for Governor of Kansas. “Yea. We voted a ‘split ticket,’ too,” Steve replied – meaning that his parents (Dr. J. Kelly Sowards and wife Ardis) had voted for Kennedy (the Democrat) but for William Avery (the Republican).
At that time (probably the spring of 1961), my lifelong fascination with politics was just beginning to bud, so that Steve’s employing that term “split ticket” sent a tingle of boyish excitement all through me and caused a giant light bulb to appear over my head of haystack hair. Therefore, even though everything else about my conversation with Steve that afternoon – the year we all turned 12 – has evaporated into the Mists of Time, his casually introducing me to what struck me as a brilliant concept (i.e. that of a “split ticket”) has served as a mnemonic devise for these past 46 years, reminding me, right on cue, that the year JFK defeated Nixon for the Presidency was the year we all entered the 6th grade (albeit at different schools), way back when we all turned 11 years old.
%%%%%%%
Spastically traveling forward and backward in Time as we are today (“unstuck,” as Vonnegut says of Billy Pilgrim), let’s fast-forward now to one more pseudo-vivid reminiscence (or vivid pseudo-reminiscence) from that somewhat blurry transitional period in our lives when we were “young men” still young enough not to have yet begun to give ourselves permission to think of ourselves as men or to refer to ourselves as men – whatever that’s supposed to mean. (I, for one, was, strictly speaking, still a virgin – not that that has anything at all to do with being a man.) I’m going to take a wild guess that the memory-movie that’s playing in my mind’s eye at this moment took place in what most folks call “the real world” (i.e. the Newtonian, molecular world) sometime in the late summer of 1968, but I could easily be mistaken in this. There was, after all, a lot going on around that time, to monumentally understate the matter (e.g. the police riots outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago [MLK & RFK both having been assassinated earlier that year], the seemingly ceaseless senseless Vietnam War, racial tension throughout the country, my part-time job at the Wichita State University library, my collaboration with Diana Freeman [East ‘67] and Gwinn Walker on that fabulous [but short-lived] folk group we called the Canadian Railroad Trilogy [after a pretty good song by George Hamilton IV], as well as my early-summer hitchhiking adventure to Acapulco [Mexico] and back).
You and I had each just turned 19 the previous spring. And, as I say, the slice of life that I feel as though I’m remembering would most likely have taken place toward the end of summer, shortly before we’d have been starting the fall of ’68 semester at our respective universities; though, as I’ve already admitted, I might well have this entire reminiscence entirely scrambled. Be that as it may, here’s how I remember it:
I’m sitting in the chair at my desk, in my bedroom, writing. This would have been in that side room, which had once been a garage, there on the south end of our little box house at 621 South Lorraine. (The very same house which the detective fiction writer Gaylord Dold [East ‘65] once described with insightful accuracy in one of his Fawcett paperbacks novels as something like a bleak little “death’s head of a house.”) Anyway, it’s toward the end of the summer of 1968, and I’m sitting there, writing. Most likely, the screen door off the driveway is letting a warm breeze waft into the room. Unexpectedly, there’s a knock at the screen door, and I glance up to see that it’s my good friend Rick Craycraft [East ‘67]. Without getting up, I invite you in. You open the screen door and step into the room without saying a word. I see that you’re carrying under one arm that small dingy, sun-bleached, army-green canvas knapsack (with its ‘specially designed diagonal, single, heavy-duty brown leather shoulder strap) which I’d carried on my very first hitchhiking adventure down through the Deep South (Jackson [Mississippi], New Orleans, Mobil, Birmingham, Nashville, Paducah, etc.) in the summer of 1967, as well as on my aforementioned second hitchhiking adventure down through Texas and Mexico in the summer of 1968.
Again, without uttering a word, you ceremoniously drop the knapsack on the floor in front of you, as if to say: “Here’s your sacred knapsack back. I’m honored that you let me borrow it. This hitchhiking ritual is everything I was hoping it would be – and then some. You and I now have one more meaningful component of tribal initiation in common.” And I could easily have this part wrong as well, Rick, but it seems to me that you then immediately knelt down and touched your forehead to the floor – or something like that. Is that anything like the way you remember it? (RSVP) Also, I cannot for the life of me bring to mind where it was you’d just returned from hitchhiking to. It would be a great relief if you wouldn’t mind taking a few minutes to refresh my memory on that point, as well. Thanks!
%%%%%%%
If I recall correctly, that (3-gallon?) sacred knapsack had originally been part of my Boy Scout (BSA) gear years earlier; and after I wore out its original canvas straps on its “maiden excursion” of 1,500 or so miles in August of 1967, I’d taken it to Walt Davis’s harness & boot repair shop in the Oliver Square Shopping Center, at Oliver & Douglas, and asked Walt to pick out a sturdy strip of scrap leather and sew it onto the sacred hitchhiking knapsack as a single diagonal should strap (my own invention). Now, Walt Davis’s family had been friends with my family when Kevin & I were small boys living on North Lorraine. The Davises (Walt & Clarabelle [real name!] & Buddy & Cathy) had lived in a pink house, two doors south of us, and had occasionally grazed their rodeo ponies in their backyard. Buddy, who was a year older than me, was actually Galen Davis, the only other Galen I knew as a child. He grew up to be appointed Kansas’s first “Drug Czar” (I kid you not!) by Governor Mike (‘No Neck”) Hayden (R) in the 1980’s.
Coincidentally, Galen (“Buddy”) Davis had tried to hang me, back when we were little boys, playing cowboys & outlaws in his parents’ backyard. I survived, but the lasso from Buddy’s rodeo gear was made of rough hemp and left a nasty burn mark around my neck which proved difficult to explain away, the next week at Sunday School. (Perhaps this had been young Buddy’s way of honing his lynching skills for his later attack on [And here we come full circle.] The Counterculture.)
%%%%%%%
I need to close for now. But before I go, I want to share with you one last image that I’ve carried with me in my head, all these forty years since your church chat with whose recounting I opened today’s ramble. As I’ve said, after you’d regaled the congregation at Epworth Methodist for a few minutes with your college student’s perspective on some of the issues of the day, you took a few questions from the floor. Of those questions, the only one that’s stuck with me came, as I recall, from a probable WWII veteran wearing a plaid shirt, who was then approximately the same age that you and I are now. He stood up in the sixth row pew and asked you in all seriousness (or maybe not entirely) what our generation’s thoughts were on the National Debt. Being 19 at the time, I just happened to find his question to be amusing – given the fact that his generation had obviously not given the National Debt nearly enough thought.
(Incidentally, your response to his amusing question was admirably diplomatic and respectful. Well done!)
One of these days, I hope that we can engage in some sort of lightsome philosophical dialogue on the subject of hitchhiking. I imagine that you have at least as much to contribute to the discussion as I have. Meanwhile, here’s another song lyric of mine I thought you might find interesting. We do what we can.
%%%%%%%
Until Next Time, Stay Well,
Galen
%%%%%%%
THE DRUNK ON THE HIGH WIRE
My parents sold me to pay their taxes.
Now I teeter a hundred feet from my death,
On this narrow strand I call my home.
Yet it’s only my lack of nerve which waxes
This wire upon which I balance each breath.
Someday, I’ll fall like Saigon, like Rome,
Which is why my spinal cord never relaxes.
I’m the drunk you see on the high wire
With this balance beam which I use to fix
The planet beneath me. Full of rum
And steady as a hieroglyph,
I walk this length as a shrill wind picks
My flesh to shreds and leaves me numb.
Won’t you toss me up another fifth?
REFRAIN:
Above the crowd, I slide like a fox
Through a henhouse,
like a breeze through a tomb.
This high wire is the only path
I’ve known, since before I left the womb.
Deprived of safety net and bath,
As blind and confused as Oedipus Rex,
I inch my way from magic to math,
Trying not to look down at my doom,
As at my feet a downdraft sucks.
Sometimes I wonder how I’ve come
Into this hazard, by what hoax
Was I led into peril of life and tooth?
Below me I study your streets I’d roam,
If I could escape this distance which strokes me,
Numbs me like a fine vermouth.
Below, I can hear my destiny hum.
Words and music by Galen Green c 1986
/gg
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Saturday, October 13, 2007
%%%%%%%%%%%%% MONEY CONQUERS LOVE Money conquers all. It bends the oak of unspeakable truth. Money is the wrench that twists the brains of lovers Upon their pillows. There’s a thirst lurks inside Only money can quench. But don’t bother looking for money deep in the green wood. Don’t waste your life digging beneath the briar. For money flows freely, far beneath this river, To those who inherit it, easy as fire. Money, sex and power are the hurricanes which rip through The temples of peace, like plagues, like poisons. Money conquers all, and so we swallow its lies, Which lead us into these hellish seasons. Money buys health and youth and life and leather. Don’t let them tell you different. Even in China, Money remains the shield around the skull and the main string Between the lingum and the yoni. Money glares down at us like a judge from its bench and Will not weep or bend like a wind or a willow. We glut our guts on money until we’re broke, Then whore for more until we’re thin and hollow. Money even supercedes the quest for bosoms. Eyes, lips, flesh — even the airplane of love,- Even passion’s ocean’s shallow by comparison to Money’s deep champagne. My love, bright love, it’s to your touch I aspire. Yet I lack the money to put you into the mood for The respect I need to win the favor of the glutton Within you to whom money is food. Money, sex and power, in Carolina, and here Are all one word, slurred together. My love, bright love, it’s you to whom these dull brains point, As I watch money buy even the weather. Money conquers love. And so I follow you, bright love, Into the heat to soak up what wealth might Let me be your lover, if only just long enough to Learn to tolerate this joke. Money conquers love. And so I follow you, bright love, Into the heat to soak up what wealth might Let me be your lover, if only just long enough to Learn to tolerate this joke. Words and Music by Galen Green c 1986 %%%%%%%%%%%%% |
Friday, October 12, 2007
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
CHAIN AND DIE
I love to listen to the evening rain, as it gallops from the sky.
It always helps to ease the pain, when I listen to it cry.
I’ll dangle from my golden chain, until the day I die.
I love to smell the evening die, in a city full of rain,
To watch it dangle from its chain, then vanish into the sky.
It always makes me want to cry to hear it scream in pain.
Chorus:
When the radios rain from the sky and Love’s pain makes the city cry,
The shoppers form a chain and die...shoppers form a chain and die.
I love to taste the bitter pain, when Love begins to die,
And the radios begin to cry as they walk out in the rain.
They disappear into the sky, but leave their golden chain.
I love to dangle from that chain and writhe in clouds of pain
That jam the city’s evening sky as Love begins to die.
The radios begin to rain and make me want to cry.
(repeat chorus)
I love to watch the shoppers cry as they form an endless chain
And wander out into the rain to try to escape the pain
Of knowing that their brains will die before they reach the sky.
I love to touch the evening sky. It makes me want to cry.
I love to watch the radios die and leave their golden chain.
And I love to taste the bitter pain when Love dies in the rain.
(repeat chorus)
Words and Music by Galen Green c 1980
I love to listen to the evening rain, as it gallops from the sky.
It always helps to ease the pain, when I listen to it cry.
I’ll dangle from my golden chain, until the day I die.
I love to smell the evening die, in a city full of rain,
To watch it dangle from its chain, then vanish into the sky.
It always makes me want to cry to hear it scream in pain.
Chorus:
When the radios rain from the sky and Love’s pain makes the city cry,
The shoppers form a chain and die...shoppers form a chain and die.
I love to taste the bitter pain, when Love begins to die,
And the radios begin to cry as they walk out in the rain.
They disappear into the sky, but leave their golden chain.
I love to dangle from that chain and writhe in clouds of pain
That jam the city’s evening sky as Love begins to die.
The radios begin to rain and make me want to cry.
(repeat chorus)
I love to watch the shoppers cry as they form an endless chain
And wander out into the rain to try to escape the pain
Of knowing that their brains will die before they reach the sky.
I love to touch the evening sky. It makes me want to cry.
I love to watch the radios die and leave their golden chain.
And I love to taste the bitter pain when Love dies in the rain.
(repeat chorus)
Words and Music by Galen Green c 1980
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)