Unfinished Business

 

Sue Grafton, who died at 77.

Earlier, I was staring across the room at a couple of shelves of Sue Grafton mysteries.

Remember her? She wrote the “alphabet mysteries” told by the principal character, Kinsey Millhone—a P.I. The first was A Is for Alibi, and she went on through the alphabet, letter by letter. She ended with Y Is for Yesterday (2017).  She did not live to finish the Z novel; she died in 2017; her family says no one will finish the series.

I read almost all of them, starting, I think, with G Is for Gumshoe in 1990. Joyce was once on a panel with her, took her books, got them signed.

Anyway, this got me thinking of all the literary (and other artists) who died before they finished their work.

Norman Mailer died before finishing his novels about Hitler. Dickens didn’t finish The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Ralph Ellison didn’t finish Juneteenth. And on and on and on ...

So many writers died so early we don’t know what they might have done: Stephen Crane, Keats, Shelley, Byron, and so many others. What might Anne Frank have accomplished?

Others wrote so long ago we don’t know what else they did—or would have done. The ancient Greeks and Romans. Shakespeare. And on and on.

Some writers I know were writing on their death beds: Edwin Arlington Robinson, John Updike.

What we learn from this, of course, is what we already know: Life (and) Death don’t care about your plans. Death will arrive when he will and there’s nothing you can do about it.

All you can do is keep working until you can’t. Posterity will sort you out afterwards, will decide what remains (if anything does), what dies with you—or soon after.

Depressing? Yes. But also liberating in a way ...

Smile

 

Chaplin in Modern Times, 1936

Charles Spencer Chaplin wrote “Smile,” a song that appeared in his 1936 film, Modern Times. I used to teach a little Chaplin to my eighth graders when we were studying Jack London and the Klondike Gold Rush. Charlie has a great film about that Rush, The Gold Rush (1925). I showed that entire film to my students.

I was thinking about “Smile” today when I somehow got to thinking about the different ways people smile—I’ve seen much evidence on Facebook.

There are people who show virtually all their teeth, people who show no teeth, people who just purse their lips, people who seem not to smile but whose glittering eyes betray them, people whose smile much resembles a sneer, and so on (I’ll name no names).

Except my own. I show no teeth (if I can help it). This goes back to my boyhood when some in my family (alarmed that I rarely brushed my teeth) told me that I would grow up to have “yellow snags.” And so I quit showing my snags when I smiled. The only time you’ll see my teeth on Facebook is when I am laughing—or inattentive.

They’re actually not bad teeth—generally straight. And my dentist has never called them “yellow snags”—though perhaps she’s just being kind?

And Joyce married me, yellow snags and all, and she also told me, more than fifty years ago now, that if my teeth had been bad she wouldn’t have been attracted to me, literary brilliance and overall charm and “hotness” be damned.

My Osborn grandparents both had false teeth, full sets—which was far more common than it is now. Nowadays we have far better dental care options—implants for the yellow snags, etc.

Our dog Sooner showed his teeth a lot—this the dog we had from the early 1950s to the early 1960s when a driver hit him not far from our house in Hiram, Ohio, and zoomed away to let him die. I would still kill that person today if I found him/her. And every judge in the land would rule “justifiable homicide.”

Anyway, Sooner growled, showing teeth, when strangers or other dogs came around. And when my dad was playing with him (oh, he loved my dad!), he would, with Dad’s prompting, grin—wag his tail like crazy and grin! It’s one of my great childhood memories.

Not enough public grinning and smiling today. We’re too uptight. Too polarized. Too angry at ... whatever.

Maybe we all need need a dose of the great Charlie Chaplin. His films are on YouTube. And his song about smiling.

Link to song “Smile.”

Link to Modern Times.

Piecemeal

 

I’ve realized recently that I stream films and TV shows by using the same technique I use while reading books: piecemeal.*

Right now, for example, I’m reading seven books simultaneously (some via Kindle) at various locations around the house: Richard Osman’s The Man Who Died Twice, Jane Austen’s Emma, Tim Gautreaux’s The Missing, The Complete Poems of E. E. Cummings, Scott Turow’s The Last Trial, Ben Aaronovitch’s Moon Over Soho, and John Grisham’s The Rooster Bar.

I employ the same hop-skip-and-jump approach to the streaming we do at the end of the day when all we want is an hour’s entertainment ere we drop off to sleep. Right now we are watching bits of Ken Burns’ documentary about Muhammad Ali, Jack Irish, Fresh Off the Boat (we’re watching only because Joyce knows the actor who plays the next-door neighbor, Ray Wise: They acted in high school plays together), Hinterland, Schitt’s Creek (second time through), and The Cafe (second time through). 

We try to end the night with lighter fare.

I’ll confess that Joyce is not all that crazy about this streaming technique, but since I am the only one who’s bothered to learn how to use the remotes ...!

I’m not sure what all this piecemeal reading and viewing mean. Is my attention span fracturing? Am I trying to get as much in me before ... you know?

I don’t know. I know only that this is the way I function now.

When I was younger, I never read/viewed like this. I didn’t read much in high school (I was too busy preparing for my career as the catcher for the Yankees, the point guard for the Celtics). Oddly, though, bored in high school study hall (I had four in a row my senior year), I read Moby-Dick and Jack London’s Martin Eden—little did I know how his career would later consume me for about a decade!

And I had to watch TV shows all the way through because there were no recorders then—no Internet, obviously.

As a younger kid, I did read a lot more—Westerns mostly. Kids’ biographies of notable Westerners.

My mom was a big reader—read a lot until she no longer could.

Dad was less obsessive about it, but he did all right. He read enough to snort at my high-school reading patterns, such as they were.

My older and younger brothers both read far more than I did. Both ended up at Harvard. Both still read a lot.

Anyway, here I am, forever catching up, forever making up for those years lost in dreams of athletic fame.

And I’m having the Best Damn Time!

*piecemeal = made from two words that mean “in pieces” and “by a fixed measure.” Or at least that’s what the OED says!

Another Long Day at Seidman Cancer Center

Seidman Cancer Center
Orange Place
Beachwood, Ohio

Yesterday was a miserable day.

Our appointment was at 12:40, so we spent almost all of the afternoon there—most of it: waiting.

I first met with my oncologist, who still remains encouraged by my numbers from the blood tests I had taken earlier in the week. Me, too. I hadn’t been feeling too well and was surprised that my PSA (prostate specific antigen—a sure sign of the cancer’s return) remains undetectable—this the effect of a powerful new drug I’ve been on about a year (Xtandi), a drug that also helps make me dizzy and unstable most of the day.

The other tests were positive, too (in a good way).

But I’d been feeling crappy most of the day: unusually dizzy (Joyce had to push me in a wheelchair through the building) and—I don’t know—on the “edge” of something. Nausea, I guess. I was fairly laconic as the doctor spoke with me.

He’s not sure what to do next, once the numbers start to rise again (as they will). Everything else (e.g., chemo) is even more odious than what I’m on now—and offers no more hope for a cure.

I don’t want to go through chemo—don’t want to deal with the cancer consuming my bones.

Anyway, after the visit with him (a specialist I like a lot!), it was down to wait some more for the two quarterly injections I get there: (1) Xgeva for bone strength, (2) Trelstar to retard the PSA growth; the first is in a quadricep; the latter, in my, uh, derrière. Both hurt despite a very skilled and compassionate nurse.

Then Joyce drove me home, where I pretty much disintegrated. I saw no way I was going to be able to get up this morning (it’s the bi-weekly day for the young women who clean house for us; they arrive a little after 8).

But I did it. I felt better. And Joyce, as is her wont on these days, drove us to the Stow-Kent Starbucks, where we got “our” soft seats; I ate a scone, drank some coffee, caught up on the New York Times (digital edition), my e-mail, Facebook.

Then we drove home where I took a LONG nap.

In the Times this morning, by the way, was the news that Sue Thompson (age 96), died this week. I remember her song “Norman” so well, released in late 1961, my senior year at Hiram High School. It was popular at the sock hops.

I didn’t really need a reminder of mortality today—I’d had a long day of them yesterday. But that song had once made me happy as I danced (sort of) on that old Hiram gym floor. So I listened to it again—and recovered a little joy.

Link to “Norman.”

So Where Did My Love of Shakespeare Come From?

 

If you had told me in tenth grade (when we were supposed to read Julius Caesar) that I would end up loving Shakespeare, I would have laughed in your stupid face. I hated him. I just didn’t understand much of what he wrote. And I couldn’t understand why other students liked him—or pretended to do so.

Same thing senior year when we read Macbeth. Couldn’t do it.

Same thing in English 101 at Hiram College, when once again, we were supposed to read Macbeth. I just couldn’t manage.

And so I planned carefully: The professor who taught the Shakespeare course was on sabbatical the year I could have taken his class (he offered it only every other year). I was so happy: I got to graduate with an English major without having taken a single Shakespeare class!

My first teaching job was in a middle school, so I figured I wouldn’t need to know any Shakespeare. And I was right: I didn’t need to, but it wasn’t too long before I wanted to.

And soon I “needed to” in a very different way. I was hooked.

And I think it started with that old Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor version of The Taming of the Shrew, directed by Franco Zeffirelli (1967). I loved that film, saw it several times before I taught it to my eighth graders. Or tried to.

I was still mostly ignorant, you see. Relying on footnotes and quick trips to reference books before class (no Internet then).

But as the years went on, I added more and more to my Shakespeare efforts in class. We played Elizabethan games, ate their food, listened to their music, talked about their clothing and the like. I taught them some history—especially the “cool parts”—the severed heads on London Bridge, the behavior at the Globe, the behavior of the royalty, etc.

Soon, the Bard was consuming an entire 9-week marking period.

I learned that the best strategy was to read it aloud with them, sharing parts. Stopping to clear up a confusion. I saved Act V for after the film (all the Bard’s plays are divided into five acts—though the action was continuous at the playhouses).

Soon I found another film I liked even more—Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing (1993), a film that still moves me (Joyce and I streamed it a few months ago). One strength: the cast. It includes some people who are still notable now—Keanu Reeves, Michael Keaton, Emma Thompson, Denzel Washington, Kate Beckinsale—along with some wonderful English performers: Richard Briers, Brian Blessed, and others.

So I taught it the last few years of my public school career (I retired in January 1997).

Meanwhile, I was reading books about the Bard and his world, reading all the plays and poems and sonnets (memorizing about twenty of the sonnets).

I traveled to England to visit his birthplace (in Stratford-upon-Avon), to London to visit the new Globe (where my son and his sons saw A Comedy of Errors).

Joyce and I went to see every play we could—in Cleveland, Stratford (Ont.), Staunton (Va.—at the American Shakespeare Center). After some years we were waiting to see the last play we had not yet seen, Richard II.

My younger brother called one day and said that play was now running at Shakespeare & Co. in Lenox, MA, not far from where they lived. Off we went. And when the lights came up afterward, both Joyce and I were weeping.

A far cry (!) from Hiram High School.

My obsession really hasn’t waned. Although I can’t go out anymore, I still read books, still revisit the plays, still try to keep those sonnets in my memory. (A bit of a job these days.)

So what hooked me on the Bard? When I realized that I couldn’t read him if I didn’t enter his world (just as he wouldn’t know what-the-hell was going on in 2021 Hudson, Ohio). When I realized the profound truths that resonated through his sometimes unfamiliar words. When I recognized the beauty of his language.

My 1959-60 self would not believe what has happened to him. He would believe he’d turned in the biggest nerd in the world. Whereas I believe I’ve had the greatest education in the world—so much of it coming from a man who didn’t know what electricity is. What a Tweet is. What TikTok is. What ...

Slip-Slidin’ Away

 

You might remember this 1975 song by Paul Simon? (If not, it’s easy to find on YouTube.)

As I was thinking about it today, I was lamenting my current physical and mental condition and one especially deleterious effect it has had: forgetting.

Just a couple of years ago I had, firmly stored in my memory vault, about 230 poems I'd memorized over the years. I was able to trot them out and annoy friends and family all the time. (I took some pleasure in that, actually—the annoyance.)

It was a bit of work to keep them stored. I had a schedule I adhered to rigorously. I had a set of poems I said on my daily walks to and from the coffee shop, some I mumbled at the coffee shop, sets I mumbled various days at the health club (M-W-F, TU-TH-SAT). I had a set I rehearsed in the morning in the shower (I know, I know).

And so I was able to keep them all in my head.

But my New Life is different: I don't walk or go to the coffee shop; I can't go to the health club.

That leaves home, where I do my best—but just don't have the energy to do them all. Not nearly.

I try to keep the long, complex ones that took me so long to learn ("Kubla Khan," "Renascence," poems by Auden and E. E. Cummings, et al.), but some of the others have been slip-slidin' away the past couple of years.

I do have a complete list I keep on my computer so my survivors will know all that my dead head used to hold. Maybe they’ll be impressed. Maybe depressed.  (Why did he waste his time doing that?!)

One comforting thing I have learned over the years: Poems I learned long ago (and forgot) returned quickly when I re-memorized them. “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” for example, which I learned back at Adams Elementary School in Enid, OK, leapt back into my head when I began rehearsing it. As did the opening lines of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (Hiram High School).

A bit of consolation, I guess.

And I’d wager that most of you who’d loved that 1975 Simon song could not remember all the lyrics now, but if you look at them/listen to the song, they’ll return as quickly as a boomerang.

And to make it easier for you, here’s a link to Simon singing it!

Reading Anne Tyler #1

 

I’ve started reading Anne Tyler’s first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, published in 1964 when she was only 22 years old (I was still a student, midway through Hiram College).  It takes place in Sandhill, NC, where a young man from there, Ben Joe, is at law school at Columbia and, on impulse, decides to return to visit his family.

And oh what a complicated bunch they are! From a great-grandmother to a baby.

I’ll write more about the book when I finish it.

But it got me thinking of how different the world was when I was a college student. No cell phone; no computers (except the UNIVAC type that filled an entire room—we each carry more power in our pockets these days).

JFK was assassinated in November 1963. The MLK, Jr. speech “I Have a Dream” was earlier in 1963. The world was ready to boil as the Vietnam War was commencing. There was no Medicare or Medicaid. No Voting Rights Act. Etc. There was still de facto segregation throughout much of the South. The cities were ticking racial time bombs.

Born in Enid, Oklahoma, a small city fully segregated, in 1944, I would not speak to a black person till I was in college—where I found out what I had been missing. I felt like an idiot. And I was.

In 1964 I wasn’t sure what I was going to do—or be. My parents wanted me to teach; therefore, I did not want to. I found, because of a couple of wonderful professors, that I loved literature, so I applied to the University of Kansas for their American Studies Ph.D. program. I got in ... but with no financial aid. So ... I couldn’t go.

To appease my parents, I had done my student teaching, had earned my teaching certificate from the State of Ohio in secondary school English.

I’ve told this before, but my critic teacher at West Geauga HS (where I did my student teaching) warned me, “Don’t get stuck in a junior high school!”

But I did. I applied for only two jobs (there was a teacher shortage), and the first one to call me back was in nearby Aurora, Ohio. I interviewed. Got the job (7th grade) and started my career in the fall of 1966.

I was thinking I would stay a year and get the hell out.

Ha!

I stayed a dozen years (earning my Ph.D. at KSU, mostly part-time), married a wonderful woman, and left Aurora at the end of the 1978 school year, having accepted a job as the Chair of the Department of Education at Lake Forest College (north of Chicago).

But I missed middle school kids, and so ...

I’m drifting away from 1964, the year we elected LBJ, captured the Boston Strangler, the Beatles released their first album (on LP, of course), the USSR was our biggest fear, Cassius Clay defeated Sonny Liston for the heavyweight title ... and so much more.

I turned 20 in 1964–impossible to believe that our world was so ... different. Yet in some scary ways fundamentally the same. Divided. So many people certain they were right—about everything. And anger, boiling, that would soon flow out into our streets ...