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


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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”


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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)

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. . . 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

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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.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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!


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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.)


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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.


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Until Next Time, Stay Well,

Galen

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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