Love and Marriage

The older I get the more (old) songs invade my head at night and will not leave. And it drives me batty, throughout the night, that I can’t remember all the lyrics—nor who sang it.

This one, “Love and Marriage,” I was sure was by Dean Martin—or Perry Como.

Nope.

When I got around to checking Google this afternoon, I saw, to my surprise, it had been Frank Sinatra—and more than once.

The first time was for a 1955 TV production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town; the second, a release of a 45 rpm single in 1956. And the latter became a huge hit (Dinah Shore had good luck with it, too). Nelson Riddle arranged the Sinatra versions.

Here are the lyrics—and here is a link to Sinatra singing it.

“Love And Marriage"

Love and marriage, love and marriage,
Go together like a horse and carriage.
This I tell ya, brother, you can't have one without the other.

Love and marriage, love and marriage,
It's an institute you can't disparage.
Ask the local gentry and they will say it's elementary.

Try, try, try to separate them, it's an illusion.
Try, try, try and you only come to this conclusion:

Love and marriage, love and marriage,
Go together like a horse and carriage.
Dad was told by mother you can't have one
You can't have none.
You can't have one without the other.

[Musical interlude]

Try, try, try to separate them, it's an illusion.
Try, try, try and you only come to this conclusion:

Love and marriage, love and marriage,
Go together like a horse and carriage.
Dad was told by mother you can't have one
(You can't have none.)
You can't have one without the other.

 

1956. That was the year I finished sixth grade (in Oklahoma) and began 7th (Hiram, Ohio). I attended my first school dances in seventh grade (though I’d taken a dancing class—at Mom’s insistence—back in the Sooner State).

Although I’d liked a number of girls back in sixth grade (and earlier), the feeling was usually not reciprocal, and it wasn’t until Hiram that I broke some hearts, had my own broken (deservedly so, I must confess).

And I remember this song at our school dances, remember dancing on the gym floor, remember thinking that love and marriage were a lifetime away.

Turned out to be not that long: late 1969.

By then popular music had changed drastically, and in the sixties Sinatra’s song sounded like something from an entire other era.

And it was.

Grandparents

 

The first seventh graders I taught in 1966—and many from later years—are now grandparents. I see their pics on Facebook, and I roll into a world of disbelief. Those seventh graders I taught are now on Medicare—on Social Security—and many, as I said, are grandparents.

I won’t say “That’s not possible!” because it clearly is.

Some of those former students don’t resemble at all the kids I knew; others are dead ringers—except they’re, you know, older. I’d know them in a heartbeat if I saw them on the street.

I’ve felt the same phenomenon at my high school reunions (Class of 1962). Some of the people I’d recognize instantly, even though I haven’t seen many of them in sixty years.

Others I don’t recognize even when I look at the name tag: They don’t resemble at all the teenager I knew back in the early 60s.

(I, of course, haven’t aged at all.)

I had wonderful grandparents—though I knew only three of them. My father’s dad died before I was born.

For most of my early years we lived a couple of blocks away from my maternal grandparents in Enid, Oklahoma. He taught religion there at Phillips University (now defunct), the school where my dad and mom met. Dad eventually taught there, too, while my mother dealt with Her Three Sons—as different, one from the other, as animals on the Galapagos.

But they were so kind, supporting each of us. Grandpa went to my baseball games, encouraged my older brother’s interest in opera, helped my younger brother figure out who he was. And I still remember Grandma, holding me in her lap in the rocking chair that now sits in our living room, reading to me from Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses.

My dad’s mother I saw only a few times (she lived in Oregon, not far from Dad’s birthplace, a farm near Milton-Freewater). But I really liked her, too. Funny and a wonderful storyteller.

Now I’m a grandfather (two boys: 12 and 16), and they, too, are quite different from each other. One loves books and writing and drawing; the other is great at math and loves golf and computer games.

I’m glad they’re old enough now that they will remember me and their wonderful Grandmother Dyer (whom they call “Gommy”; I’m “Silly Papa”).

But back to where all this began—with my former students. When I see their posts pop up on Facebook, I can’t help it: I remember the 12-13-year-old version of them.

Until I see a picture. Until I see their grandchildren.

Then I remember how older people used to tell me when I was a kid how fast time passes.

I didn’t think so—not at all. Not sitting in study hall on a hot May afternoon thinking the school day would never be over. Thinking that school itself would never be over. That I would forever be stuck there, frozen in time, forgotten by the future.

It hasn’t worked out that way.

July—My Month Off

 

When I was a teacher (1966-97, 2001-11), July was my only month off. I usually taught the early week(s) of June—and school re-commenced in late August. And during those times of teaching, I like to say (because it’s true), I worked seven days a week plus evenings. As an English teacher, I always had piles of papers to grade, preparations to do, meetings to go to, etc.

Don’t get me wrong: I loved it.

But that left only July for my family and me.

I read piles of books, did some writing, traveled to visit sites of literary importance. Even when I took a strictly “family trip” to see my parents and two brothers in western Massachusetts, I could see the nearby home where Melville wrote Moby-Dick, Edith Wharton’s home, Hawthorne sites, and on and on.

Once our son, Steve, left home, Joyce and I would take literary trips all around the country—to see places related to my writers I was teaching, writers she was teaching.

But once August 1 arrived, that basically ended. I would then begin to do a little schoolwork, every day—such things as preparing vocab lists, preparing writing assignments, working out lesson plans. So by the time school actually started, I was READY.

I can’t say I was fond of August, but I was always glad (afterward) that I'd done the work. Things generally went so much more smoothly. I could concentrate on my classes, grading papers, etc. And didn't have to worry about any of that other stuff once the first bell rang.

I will confess that it took me awhile to learn this. Early in my career I didn't really have the time. I was in grad school (1968-77), and I am grateful for that: I met Joyce in a Kent State classroom in Satterfield Hall; those advanced degrees helped me out now and then, too.

Though I have to say my middle school students weren't all that impressed. When I finished my Ph.D., I told them they could call me "Dr." or "Mr."—I didn't care (and I didn't). But then they wanted to know what kind of doctor I was.

And I frankly replied I was the useless kind—couldn't treat their dog or cat, couldn't prescribe medicine for human beings.

Some of them looked very puzzled, and I could tell that they very much agreed I was the "useless kind" of doctor.

Nowadays, oddly, I miss those busy days—days when the future seemed endless, when I could tell myself, after a mistake I'd made (and I made many), that "There's always next year."

There wasn't, and there isn't. As my current medical status confirms.

But I don't think I could teach these days, anyway: the many standardized tests, the rigid curriculum—not to mention the face masks all day!

I loved the academic freedom I enjoyed almost my entire career. The things we could read, the plays we could write and perform, the class trips—my wonderful colleagues and I could basically decide what would be good for the kids.

And we did it.

Sure, we all screwed up now and then, but I knew I had always next August to straighten it all out.

Tennis Racquet

 

Hiram College Tennis Team, 1966

A few days ago there was an obituary in the New York Times. It was for former tennis star Shirley Fry, who won the Wimbledon title a long, long time ago. Link to obit. She also won the three other majors in her career.

I didn’t know Shirley Fry—I’m not even sure that I ever saw her play. I think I remember hearing from the older players that she had once come to Hiram with her dad and worked out a bit with the team. Oh, I wish I’d seen that!

But I did know her father, Lester R. Fry, fairly well, for in the late 1950s and 60s (and probably beyond) he used to come to Hiram College in the fall and spring, park his car by the tennis courts (which in those days were behind the old library, now a computer center), and spend his day selling tennis racquets, stringing them, selling other tennis supplies.

And talk. Oh, could he talk! It was fun just to sit and listen to him, even when I had no product or service I needed from him.

I bought a number of racquets from him—usually the wood-framed Jack Kramer (a popular brand in the day).* I broke a few of them, too: I had a temper and when I did something stupid on the court, which was often, I would smack it into the court—or against my leg (I learned this from Phil Barry, an older, far more gifted player than I on our Hiram College team) and had bruises similar to his near my shin on my right leg.

I liked to watch Mr. Fry string the racquets on a machine that looked as old as a Gutenberg printing press. He could talk non-stop while he worked, and that impressed me as well.

Later on, I would sometimes stop down at his shop on E. Exchange St. in Akron—his shop which was basically his glassed-in front porch—to buy a new racquet—or a couple of cans of balls—or get a re-stringing job. He seemed ageless.

The other day, certain that he was no longer alive, I checked the Beacon-Journal archives (online) and discovered he’d died on Aug. 4, 1984–he was 92 years old.** That meant that when he was working on tennis rackets for me and others in the mid-60s, he was in his seventies. No surprise.

What was a surprise in that obit was that he had been a life-long tennis player himself. He had played regularly with his wife into his 80s.

He never once said a thing to me (that I recall) that suggested he was himself a player. He was just our Geppetto of tennis racquets. 

Oh, and I also learned he was born in Suffield Twp. in Portage County. When I was in high school, we played Suffield in basketball. (It’s now Field High School, merged with some other nearby wee high schools.)

I miss those Hiram days, the days when I would see his car by the tennis courts, his stringing machine in action, his stories emerging from him with simple, fluid eloquence.

Shirley Fry

*I am not holding one in the pic—but other teammates are.

** His obit is in the Aug. 7, 1984, edition of the Beacon.

Booksellers—A Superstore That Is No More

 

I did a recent Facebook post about Anne Rice and her book Interview with the Vampire. I mentioned that I had briefly met Rice up at a signing at Booksellers, a wonderful store on Chagrin Blvd. in Beachwood, Ohio—not far from Cleveland. (One of my FB friends, Ben Woodworth, worked up there for a while; he had played Danny, the male lead, in the production of Grease I directed in the 1980s back at Aurora [Ohio] High School.)

For years, Joyce and I went up to Booksellers every Friday evening—after I had graded my vocab quizzes for the week.

There, we browsed, bought, and always found time for an apricot scone at the little coffee shop inside the store.

We also attended many of the frequent author appearances they hosted. One of those authors, in 1995, was  I, who had just published an annotated, illustrated edition of The Call of the Wild. I was sure I was headed for a Nobel Prize.

I wasn’t.

Maybe a dozen people showed up to see my slide show about Wild and Jack London and to get their books signed.

But I was still thrilled: a signing at Booksellers!

Booksellers, I know, had to struggle. Border’s and Barnes & Noble both had stores nearby, and the competition must have been fierce.

I wish I could remember some specific titles I bought there—and there were a lot: Every week we went home with at least one. Sometimes an armload.

They had a wonderful inventory, full of writers I’d heard of and writers I should have heard of and did so principally because of the intense browsing we did. Fiction (my favorite), nonfiction, poetry, drama—all got our respectful attention.

Each week, I could not wait to get there, dreaded having to leave. And all the way home, Joyce and I talked about books, books, books (okay, and maybe scones, scones, scones).

Wandering around that store gave me a glimpse of a form of heaven that would really make me happy—not playing a harp on a cloud for all of eternity.

And maybe I’d get to chat with Shakespeare, with Dickens, with Raymond Chandler, with so many others ...

One can hope ...

Uncertainty

 

For most of my life I’ve been fairly certain about how things would go. I would be healthy, athletic, educated, a good teacher, etc.

It did not cross my mind—for many years—that I would be uncertain about most things—like walking across the room, say.

This morning, for example, we had to be out of the house for a couple of hours because the women who clean our house every two weeks were coming over.

So we drove over to Kent (the back, scenic way), found a place to hang out for an hour, get some coffee, etc. And I was fine—no, I was more than fine. My balance was pretty good; I felt stable.

I started thinking (foolishly) that things were getting better; maybe I was getting better.

Nope.

When we got home (still feeling good), I headed up to bed for a nap (my late-morning custom) while Joyce headed off for an important engagement. I promised her I would stay in bed.

And I was fine.

Until I got up to go you-know-where, and, suddenly, my fierce dizziness returned, and I had to hold on to pieces of furniture, coming and going.

I improved (mildly) when I sat down for lunch for a while, but I knew now that my nemesis had not left me but had just taken a break, perhaps, cruelly, to let me think I am better—then return to remind me that I am not.

Thank goodness Joyce was home to help me settle in to where I am now—on the living room couch to do a little work before heading up for Nap #2.

I remember thinking—as my parents aged (my father well before my mother; he was six years older)—that Mom was, well, denying certainty because she had remained in far better health than my father.

She was proud of that—acted is if weakness and fragility were not part of her future because, you know, she exercised, ate well, stayed active, didn’t smoke or drink (okay, except for some wine now and then).

And then she learned otherwise. She ended up in bed, as many of the rest of us do/will, where life slowly abandoned her.

Of course, as I was judging Mom then, I wasn’t thinking that I would ever be in her place. After all, I exercised regularly, ate well, didn’t smoke or drink, etc.

And now ... here I am.

I’m asking myself: Will I make it across the room? Will I be able to survive a shower? Is it time for a nap yet?

It seems I’ve reached the beach where I’ll enjoy my final sunsets and walks before I find I cannot escape the incoming tide.

The Evanescence of Magazines

 

When I was growing up, magazines were a big part of our lives. Each week and/or month a flight of them would arrive, flapping into our house like so many birds. I can’t remember them all, but here are some: TV Guide, Time, Life, The New Yorker, The Saturday Review of Literature—there were others I just can’t remember.

In our high school study hall (which featured the school library at the front of the room) I would check out The Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic, Popular Mechanics, and others

Early in our marriage, Joyce and I were subscribing to quite a few: The New York Review of Books, The Saturday Review of Literature, TV Guide, The New Republic, Newsweek, The National Review, The New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, People, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s. Again, there were surely others I can’t remember.

We kept most of those subscriptions going for years. Some went out of business; others we just lost interest in. But not all ...

Until a month or so ago.

What happened? I realized I wasn’t really reading them anymore. It’s not that I didn’t have any interest; it’s that I didn’t have the energy—or the keen eyesight—I needed.

And so I cancelled all but one: The New Yorker. It’s always entertained me, and Joyce and I know two writers there—Ian Frazier and Robert Sullivan. And, yeah, I love the cartoons, too.

Of course, the magazine industry has changed dramatically, too. It used to be that huge numbers of American families subscribed to general magazines like Life and Time and Newsweek.

But with the advent of the internet and cable news all those publications began to shrink—or disappear altogether. Who wants to wait for a weekly news magazine when you can flick on the news 24/7/?

Magazines also began to focus and specialize. Look at the magazine rack in your local grocery store. A few general titles remain, but the rest are highly focused. Magazines for golfers, chess players, bakers, bicyclists, etc. Fashion. Style. Etc.

Of course, one thing all this means is that we’ve lost yet another medium that helped to unify us. We saw things we didn’t agree with in magazines—but we often read them anyway, just to see. At least I did.

Now, you can be on media platforms all day and never see or hear a syllable that you disagree with.

Not good.

Anyway, I miss those magazine days, miss the person I was then. Miss seeing in the mail the latest issue of Newsweek. Miss what I would learn from it.

Many today, I fear,  are numbed by news monotony, a condition that, surprisingly (?), can lead to hate. Or worse.