Norman Mailer, Born Today

I mentioned on Facebook this morning that it's Norman Mailer's birthday today (he died in 2007)--and I also mentioned that, not long after he died, I spoke at Western Reserve Academy about him. I was teaching there at the time.

Here's the text for what I said that day to a school assembly, Wednesday, November 14, 2007 (he had died on Nov. 10).

Norman Mailer, R.I.P.

            Let me tell you a story …

            It’s not my story—I didn’t write it—but I’ve always liked it, and it’s not very long … so here goes …

            A man and a woman are walking along a city street.  They have been lovers.  And now they are breaking up.  Here’s the first sentence in the story: The writer was having a fight with his young lady.  They don’t walk far before she says, “I’m sick and tired of you being so superior.  What do you have to be superior about?”  The writer quietly disagrees.  Later—even more angry—she says he’s like a mummy, all wrapped up in himself.  As her anger deepens—and as her accusations become more bitter—he begins to feel uneasy, not about her anger (though that does bother him), but about the notebook in his pocket.  He had just thought of an idea to put into his notebook, and it made him anxious to think that if he did not remove his notebook from his vest pocket and jot the down the thought, he was likely to forget it.  He tries to resist the impulse.  But can’t.  He stops in the street, pulls out the notebook, starts writing an idea for a story, a story about a writer breaking up with his girlfriend.  The young woman, seeing him, begins to cry.  “Why, you’re nothing but a notebook,” she shrieked, and ran away from him down the street, her high heels mocking her misery in their bright tattoo upon the sidewalk.  He stares after her.  Soon she’s a block away.  He starts jogging after her, yelling that he can explain.  And as he ran the notebook jiggled warmly against his side, a puppy of a playmate, always faithful, always affectionate.

            Norman Mailer published that story in 1951.  He was twenty-eight years old; I was seven.  He would publish much, much more over the years—novels, long works of nonfiction, essays, screenplays, poems, plays … you name it, Mailer probably wrote it.  He made films.  Ran for Mayor of New York (he lost).  Married four times.  Sired nine children.  Carried on feuds with some of the great names in American letters.  He won the Pulitzer Prize.  He won the National Book Award.  And countless other literary honors.  He never won the Nobel Prize, and that irked him, for Norman Mailer had an ego, a titanic ego that constantly crashed into icebergs of all sorts over the years.  He hit those icebergs, head on.  But he never sank.

            Here are some of his best-known books.  …

            His most recent novel is this one.  It’s a story about Hitler that came out earlier this year.  It’s been tottering atop the Tower-of-Pisan pile beside my bed, but I’ve not read it.  Not yet.  I’d read that he was sick.  And I had a feeling this would be the last novel he would ever write.  And I wanted to save it.  To savor it.  To remember it.

            Norman Mailer died last weekend.  He was 84 years old.  He was one of the heroes of my youth.  Several times, I have dreamed—actually dreamed, at night—of meeting him.  It never happened.

            I do have his signature on this book, The Time of Our Time [show it], a collection of pieces he published back in  1998.  It will have to do.  His name scrawled on the title page.

            So as I think this morning about that little story “The Notebook,” a story now more than a half-century old, I think how fitting a way it is to remember him.  Norman Mailer charged through his life, barging uninvited into rooms, banging into polite people, making rude noises and ruder gestures, taking swings at enemies, celebrating, loving ferociously, enjoying every second of his life.  Standing up for Civil Rights.  Protesting the Vietnam War.  Going to jail for his beliefs.

            And we should be grateful—all of us—that through all those years he carried that notebook with him, and even at the damnedest, most irritating times, he pulled it out.  And took his pen, whose ink mixed acid and fire and blood and even sometimes poison, and wrote those words that sometimes made us shriek and cry and run away.  But could also comfort and agitate and shame and inspire and chide and enrage.  And even make us weep.

            Which is exactly what I did last weekend when I read that he was gone.

Inside Those Parentheses

In my writing I love to use parenthetical expressions (as you might have noticed)--both with actual parentheses and with em dashes.* Parenthetical expressions can add all sorts of things to your writing: complexity, humor, irony, confusion (if they're not done well).

There are times--I know--when I (well) go a little overboard with them. But that's the way love is, you know? Abundance = Affection.

But the last couple of days I've been reading a book (can't tell you what it is--I'll be reviewing it for Kirkus), a book of history, a book which, on nearly every page, gives us the inclusive dates of people it's talking about--e.g., Billy the Kid (1859-1881), Jack London (1876-1916), Mary Shelley (1797-1851) (these are not in the book, BTW).

And I got to thinking, darkly (of course!), about how all of us live inside similar parentheses. For all of our lives our parentheses look like this: Daniel Osborn Dyer (1944-). That little en dash, of course, has an invisible arrowhead on it, an arrowhead pointing toward ... well ... you-know-what.**

My mother was still alive when my father died on November 30, 1999, and for nearly twenty years their gravestone bore his date (1913-1999) and a portion of hers (1919-). When she died in 2018, her final date was added to the stone.

I remember that new books used to, in the publication information (the copyright page), include parentheses for the writer--e.g., Norman Mailer (1923-). (Mailer died in 2007.)

That's no longer a feature of books. Not sure why. Maybe some writers complained? Didn't want readers to know how old they were? Could be. Remember the final four lines of Shel Silverstein's "The Little Boy and the Old Man"?

“But worst of all,” said the boy, “it seems

Grown-ups don't pay attention to me.”

And he felt the warmth of a wrinkled old hand.

“I know what you mean,” said the little old man.

Yes, I fear, in our youth-dominated culture we sometimes fail to attend to the voices of those who are ... older, those whose final number is about to pop up inside their parentheses.

Anyway, now drawing nearer to my own final parenthesis, I find that I'm a lot more sensitive than I used to be about those numbers inside. As I read, I think, I'm older than he was! Or, What a shame she lived only that long. Or, Wow! That dude was old! I'll never get there!

There's only one consolation in all of this: You'll never get to see the completed dates inside your parentheses!



*Not sure what an em dash is? Here's a link to explain.

**Link to info on the en dash.

Kingston Trio, R.I.P.

Bob Shane is on the left.

The story was online and in the newspapers this week: Bob Shane, the last living member of The Kingston Trio, passed away at age 85 on Sunday (link to NYT obituary for Shane).

I remember the Trio well--remember Shane well. Back in the early and mid-1960s I loved the Trio's music, and they were the principal reason I acquired a guitar and learned to play some chords and "played" some of the Trio's songs. I thought I had talent (didn't) and even thought that a friend and I, who formed a duo called The Outlanders, would Make It Big (we didn't).

Okay, we did audition for Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour in the summer of 1968, and we actually got a callback to appear on the show, but by the time we heard, my friend was out in Wyoming going to grad school, and I was teaching full-time at the Aurora Middle School in Ohio. So ... Dreams Die.

And it's a good thing this one did: My "talents" on my 12-string were ... limited (to be generous). And my voice? Never mind ...

The Trio was very popular at the time. Lots of people were lugging around guitars and singing at gatherings: It was the time of the hootenany (there was even a TV show with that name from April 1963-September 1964). There was a Hootenany magazine, too, and the Trio appeared on the cover of the December 1964 issue. (See pic.)

And other folk groups and individuals were popular at the time, as well: The Limeliters; Peter, Paul, and Mary; the Chad Mitchell Trio; Joan Baez; Bob Dylan ...

Then ... here came The Beatles--and buh-bye folk music as the most popular genre.

Anyway, I bought the Trio's albums; I memorized their songs; and I even got to see the Trio perform once--after their years of fame.

It was December 1976--at Cleveland's Front Row Theater (R.I.P.). Shane was still performing with the group--and was, in fact, the only original member still with the group. Joyce was with me (we'd been married about seven years at the time), and she endured my humming along with "Tom Dooley" and "Scotch and Soda" and their other hits.

I don't remember a lot about that night, but I do remember this incident with Shane--and I remember it fairly clearly.

In one of the songs--in the middle of it--he decided he needed to change a string on his acoustic guitar. So ... while he and the others continued singing, he removed the old string, inserted a new one, tightened it, tuned it--and continued on to some considerable applause.

I remember thinking at the time What an awesome thing that was--changing a guitar string in the middle of a song! Then, later, I remember thinking: I bet he does that at every show.

So ... I was sad to learn that Shane had died. I was shocked to learn that he was 85. Because if he was 85, then that means I'm ...

Never mind.

R.I.P., Kingston Trio. Your songs still bounce around in my head at the damnedest times. And when I "hear" them that way, I am inexpressibly happy.

Face in the Window

I was about to leave the coffee shop this morning--was thinking about gathering up my stuff--jamming it into my backpack--when I looked outside the front window and saw a local school bus paused in the intersection, not fifty feet away from me, waiting to turn left.

It was a dreary morning--cloudy, chilly--and the sky couldn't seem to decide among rain or sleet or snow ... Which shall I spit upon these lowly humans today?

As most of us know, it's hard to divorce ourselves--our moods--from the weather. It's no coincidence that we have the expressions sunny day and sunny smile (or sunny disposition). And we also like to use cloud imagery to communicate our melancholy, storms our anger.

Anyway, the school bus ...

The passengers seemed to be very young kids--six? seven? younger? And the windows were somewhat steamy. I saw a young hand on one window, a hand wiping away the mist. And, the mist gone, I saw a little boy staring right at me.

The gloom upon his face told all: He didn't want to be on that bus; he didn't want to be going to school.

I empathized.

When I was that age (back in Enid, Okla.), school was about the last place I wanted to go, too. Why would I want to go sit in a row of desks in a dreary room and fill out worksheets? And take quizzes? And be quiet? And practice penmanship? And in the Weekly Reader read stories about things I didn't care about? And eat a sullen lunch with lukewarm milk? And avoid bullies on the playground? And stare at the same displays on the walls--the maps, the inspirational posters, the penmanship charts?

I didn't.

I'd rather be home, riding my bike, playing with friends (avoiding bullies), reading the funny pages, eating Cheerios, playing with Sooner (our dog), buying Snickers bars (5 cents) and orange Popsicles (6 cents) at the little local market, J & J Grocery, throwing rocks at my little brother. Maybe I'd take the bus to town (5 cents) and walk over to the Carnegie Library and find some books about cowboys and mountain men and the Alamo--or, at home, listen to some records (I had a great one called The Littlest Cowboy; I related).

Of course, this morning, I knew I was projecting onto that kid-in-the-bus my own boyhood feelings about going to school. It could be that he was perfectly happy--that he loved school--that the gloom on his face was due to a single cause: Through a  coffee shop window he could see some old guy sitting there, some old guy with a white beard, some old guy who was looking at a ... Is that a book? What a dreary sight on this fantastic morning!

Sunday Sundries, 261

1. HBOTW [Human Being of the Week]: A nurse at Seidman Cancer Center this week--a nurse who is the mother of a student I taught in 8th grade years ago--a nurse who treated me with supreme kindness as she (1) injected me with Trelstar (an anti-cancer med), (2) answered countless questions from both Joyce and me. Nothing perfunctory that day: She cares.

2. Coincidence Time: Yesterday, I posted here about Jim Croce (and Don McLean), pop singers from the 70s, and I used the image of telephones--from hand-crank to iPhone. And then, later, after the post, I remembered one of Croce's hits--"Operator," 1972--a song based on a telephone technology that seems a century ago now. (Link to the song.) (I just played the song and had to stop it halfway through: I was getting ... emotional. Geez!)

3. I finished three books this week ...

     - The first, which I've been reading in small pieces at night on my Kindle, was the most recent novel by Craig Johnson about contemporary Wyoming sheriff Walt Longmire--Land of Wolves--a complicated novel about the death of a shepherd up in the mountains, a shepherd who, post-mortem, shows signs of having been munched on by a wolf.

Longmire pursues the case (and is pursued himself at times), employing the services of his dog (called Dog) and his undersheriff, Vic (a bright, attractive, fearless woman with whom he's also sleeping). Curiously absent in this volume (for the most part) is his old friend Henry Standing Bear, a huge Cheyenne whose values and strength and intelligence and even mysticism Longmire has long depended upon.

The story quickly gets complicated (perhaps too much so?), and Longmire (once again!) ends up in the mountains in danger as we approach the denouement.

Oh, and, yes, the wolf is a factor throughout ...

BTW: The TV series based on the Longmire novels varies greatly from the texts. The characters are the same; the events, different (and crazier in the TV version). (Link to series info.)

     - The second was another of the books I've been reading portions of at night--Wilkie Collins' 1881 novel, The Black Robe. (I'm reading all of Collins' novels, in the order that he wrote them--only a few to go!)

This one tells the story of an attempt by the Roman Catholic church to persuade a wealthy Englishman to convert--but what they're really interested in is the re-acquisition of an abbey that they'd lost centuries before when Henry VIII decided the country would be Protestant and that all Roman Catholic lands and properties would belong to the Crown.

Complicating the plot: The wealthy young man is marrying. So the Bad Priest also works hard (and slyly) to break the marriage.

Obviously, this is not a plot designed to appeal to Roman Catholics! And it was quite uncomfortable to read in 2019-20.

Not that we today are without our own religious preferences and paranoia. (My Facebook page sometimes shows bizarrely biased memes, etc., posted by my FB Friends--especially against Muslims.)

So ... read this one, if you will, for its literary merits (and there are many)--not for its thematic ugliness.

BTW: One of Collins' most well-known novels is The Moonstone (1868), one of the first published detective novels (Poe, of course, who died in 1849, had published three detective stories earlier on)--and lots of fun to read. In The Black Robe, Collins re-introduces, briefly, one of the characters from The Moonstone and even uses a letter from that character to provide a key bit of information near the end.

     - The third book I finished this week was a new collection of short fiction by Zora Neale Hurston, whose fine novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) I greatly enjoyed teaching at Western Reserve Academy in 2007-08 when we English teachers decided to require it for all juniors that year.

There are no new stories in the collection, but they have been freshly edited, checked against the originals, etc. The title is Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick (2020), and, coincidentally, the New York Times Book Review this week included a glowing review of the book. (Link to NYTBR review.)

I admired many of the stories and was even dazzled at times by what she was doing back in the 1920s (when these stories appeared in various periodicals). But not always. There were times I felt she was kind of ... going through the motions? Especially in some pieces she wrote that used a Biblical format (diction, even verse numbers). I knew what she was going, but I just could not get interested. (My bad?)

She almost always writes about ordinary people who are confronting sometimes extraordinary events/problems in their lives.

My favorite was a story published posthumously--appropriately titled "Black Death." It's a story that takes place in Eatonville, Fla. (where she grew up; Joyce and I spent a day there in June 2003). It's a story about a lying man (!) and a vulnerable young woman, whom, of course, he betrays. Then ... some magic and revenge and death ... Very moving and imaginative.

4. We're starting to get a little sad as the final episode of the wonderful series Upstart Crow grows ever near. Just watched a great episode about the writing of Hamlet and Love's Labour's Lost. We started an episode last night--and he's at work on The Merchant of Venice. So funny--clever--knowledgeable--imaginative--relevant.

But ... Vera is back, and we'll start streaming that series once the crow has winged away!

5. Last Word--a word I liked this week from one of my online word-of-the-day providers:

     - from Oxford English Dictionary (actually, this one was in December ... oh well)

spit take, n. An act of suddenly spitting out the liquid one is drinking as a reaction to something surprising or funny, esp. as a technique in comedic acting.

Origin: Formed within English, by compounding. Etymons: spit n.2, take n.1

Etymology: <  spit n.2 + take n.1 (compare sense 10 at that entry), probably after double-take n.

1971 Esquire  Feb. 91 Students are practicing the ‘spit take’ made so famous by Danny Thomas on Make Room for Daddy.

1991 Vogue  Sept. 380/1 After sixty-nine years, forty-five of them spent in Hollywood, he still finds spit takes and trouser-zipper jokes hilarious.

2006 N.Y. Times Mag.  21 May 54/2 I sat at the bar. And then I practically did a spit-take when I saw that the entire Gyllenhaal family was sitting just a few feet away from me.

C'mon, Brain!

Yesterday, "relaxing" in the dentist's chair, waiting for the Novocain (or whatever it was) to kick in so that the staff could repair a broken filling, I was listening, alone, to the soft-rock music they were "sharing" with me through the sound system.

And then I heard some songs by Jim Croce (1943-73--died in an airplane crash, for those who don't recall), and I thought about a bunch of things, hearing them. Most prominent--back in the 70s at Harmon (Middle) School in Aurora, Ohio, I was teaching an elective in filmmaking (my students ran all over the place with a Super 8 camera and tripod), and one clever group of girls had decided to take Croce's song "Vincent" ("Starry, starry night" ... link to song) and to photograph relevant images of paintings from Vincent Van Gogh (whom the song was about). A great film; they won a Cleveland award for it.

But it wasn't Jim Croce, was it?

It was Don McLean, a friend of Croce's in college--and later. (Doesn't count, I know.)

But yesterday, in that chair, I was positive it was Croce. Only ... I could not for the life of me remember his last name. Just "Jim" was all my (fading?) brain would supply.

I sat there--thought, thought, thought. Nada.

Then, later, when two dental technicians had their hands in my wide-open mouth, I remembered. I almost shouted aloud--only, of course, I couldn't.

Over and over in my ... latter ... years I have had this problem of recall. I used to be really good at it--a dynamo at that game Trivial Pursuit (remember it?).

But now, say, sitting with my friend Chris at the coffee shop, I have to reach for my iPhone often to tell him about something I "remembered" but couldn't remember--the title of a book I read, a TV show we'd streamed, etc.

And so I realize: As I've gotten older, my brain is no iPhone; It's a flip phone.

No, worse ...

It's a dial phone...

No, worse, It's one of those really old phones--crank-and-call-the-operator type. I don't remember the official name of the device--I suppose I could check my iPhone?

At Seidman Cancer Center, continued

Seidman Cancer Center
Beachwood, Ohio

Wednesday, January 22, 2020; 6:30 a.m.

In just a little bit, Joyce and I will drive up to Seidman--again!--to go over the results from my recent blood work and scans (a CT scan of the abdomen, a nuclear bone scan--last week). I've already seen the results on the University Hospitals portal. My blood work looks okay, though my PSA (Prostate Specific Antigen) is still creeping upward. It remains very low, but all movement the past few tests has been in a direction I don't like. A higher PSA means cancer activity.

This chart shows you my PSA results since I underwent radiation therapy back in the fall of 2018 (the second round of radiation I'd experienced)--some cancer had invaded one of my vertebrae, so ... they zapped it repeatedly for a couple of weeks.

6 August 2018	20.13
12 September 2018	11.98
16 October 2018	3.36
9 November 2018	1.93
15 January 2019	1.07
18 April 2019	0.33
10 July 2019	0.29
11 September 2019	0.63
9 October 2019	0.85
12 December 2019	1.01
14 January 2020	1.3

As you can see, it bottomed out at .29 in July 2019--and now, five months later, it's up to 1.3. So, we'll see what my oncologist says about that later this morning.

As for the scans, I read the reports, but I'm not exactly sure what they mean (I was an English major, recall!), so I'll have to delay news on them until I find out what's going on--or not going on.

I'll try to update this post later today when we get back.


10: 40 a.m.

We're finally home--took a long time to do not too much. Waiting, it seems, is a part of everything that's important.

And, oh, there's nothing quite like I-271 at rush hour, a time when the latent inhumanity of all drivers rises to the surface and roars like the MGM lion!

The medical news is not so encouraging this time. The bone scan showed new spots on two different vertebrae, so I'll repeat the nuclear bone scan--as well as PSA test--in three months, at which time I will probably, says my oncologist, go on a new med to see if it can retard the spread. It, too--even if it works--is temporary. Then it's on to something else. Chemo also now lies in my future, it seems.

Side-effects of the new med include weariness--as if I need more of that!

We ended my morning getting my quarterly injection of Trelstar (in my hip), and the nurse who administered it this time is the mother of my former (and wonderful) Harmon Middle School student, Ashley Quintin. (She's now married with a different surname.) Her mom told me that Ashley was in my 8th grade English class thirty years ago--and has two kids now, both of whom (I think) are older than she was when I taught her. This is getting annoying ...

Anyway, the news was a little darker this time, as I said, but no one is panicking--or dealing me that final all-black card.

So ... on I go on this walk into a future both certain and uncertain ... with Joyce holding my hand, whispering soft words to me with each step ...

Stuttering in the News

There's been a kerfuffle in the news the last day or so about Lara Trump (wife of Eric) who made fun of Joe Biden's stuttering.  Ret. airline pilot/hero "Sully" Sullenberger weighed in--blasting her for ridiculing Biden for a problem that Sully has also had.

Now, I'm not defending what she said--not exactly. But read on ...

I was a stutterer (as I think I've written here before). Kids made fun of me in elementary school, and it got to be such a problem in class that one of my teachers sent me to the speech therapist.

According to my mom (years later), the therapist asked me, "Danny, do you know why you're here?"

And I replied, "N-n-n-n-o." (There were probably even even more n's.)

The therapist told my teacher (and my mom) that I didn't seem to be all that upset about it, so she sent me back to class. And I took, oh, several decades to get my stuttering to simmer down.

There are still a few words that give me pause--literally. When I know I'm going to say them, I have to stop and think a minute, take a breath. One of them is statistics. (You can imagine the fun I had in grad school when I took a couple of statistics courses!) (And I can already picture some of you approaching me in the coffee shop, asking me to say "statistics." Sometimes adults are exactly like fourth graders!)

I knew I'd found someone to love me when I met Joyce back in July 1969, and she told me she thought my stuttering was cute. That's one of the things love is, I guess--finding attractions in your lover's weaknesses!

Anyway, the Biden-stutter story sort of dovetails with something else I've been thinking about--about how we want to hold politicians accountable for everything they've said for decades. Now that recording devices are ubiquitous, no politician can say one thing in Ohio, another in Alabama. And every inanity they muttered back in their twenties or thirties is now ... out there.

And one consequence, of course, is that we're forcing politicians to be scripted. Going off script can consume a few news cycles, you know? And so we often get repetitive pablum.

I wonder: How many of us would like to have everything we've said the last, oh, thirty years, recorded--and played to millions of listeners/viewers?

Not I, my friends. For I--like the rest of you (I suspect)--have occasionally said things that are cruel, insensitive, un-PC, inappropriate, thoughtless, intended-to-be-funny-but-not, etc. And I definitely wouldn't want them on CNN or Fox tonight.

And so ... maybe my childhood/young adulthood stuttering was a gift in a strange wrapping: I didn't say as much as I otherwise might have; I didn't finish things I started to say. Whew!

So I think we need to lighten up. If a politician said something untoward back in 1975, well, guess what? He/She wasn't the only one!*


*I'm excluding from this discussion, by the way, those hateful things that a person might have said throughout her/his life. For you longtime racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, etc.--you do not get the protection of the umbrella of forgiveness I've described above for those who make those slips of the tongue (and brain) that are profoundly human--especially when we're "off script."

Loss

Laurence Fishburne as Othello; Kenneth Branagh as Iago, 1995

Okay, I know this post has kind of a depressing title--maybe not even kind of. But I've been thinking about my parents lately, about their aging, about their losses. About how--if we live long enough--we will surrender most (if not all) of the territory we thought we'd conquered.

When my father died on Nov. 30, 1999, he could do none of the things he had once loved. At age 87 he (until his final days) was in a wheelchair. He slept most of the time--and I remember asking him (sensitive I) if he liked sleeping so much. And he told me that he did--because he dreamed a lot, and when he dreamed, he was young again.

And it was then that I realized (as I've mentioned here before) that my father was like Rip Van Winkle, waking up from youth multiple times a day, realizing that time has somehow flown ...

And what a youth he had had! A tremendous tenor voice--great athletic talents (a track and football star in high school)--the kindest of hearts--a silly sense of humor--and such a gift with animals: birds and other critters would approach him. Curly-haired, muscular handsome.

My mom, who died at age 98 on March 10, 2018, also followed the same decline that my father had: cane-walker-wheelchair-bed. And this once-vigorous woman--who'd hiked great lengths of the coast trails in Oregon in her 70s, who swam every day, who consumed books like the chocolate she loved--could do nothing that she loved by the end of her life. She could not even turn on her TV set to watch the news; she had forgotten how to use her laptop (she was the earliest in our family to have/use a computer). And--somehow (how?)--she did it with a grace that astonished me. She was able to laugh at her disabilities--not in an ironic way, either. Or in a bitter way. She genuinely laughed.

I witnessed, too, the physical decline of my dear friend and colleague Andy Kmetz. He had been a superb dancer, had choreographed lots of shows I directed back in my Aurora days. And, later, in our weekly visits to see him in his assisted-living unit, I watched that physical regression I'd seen in my parents: cane-walker-wheelchair-bed. And, once again, it was devastating to witness. But Andy, too, somehow, kept being Andy, right to the day before he died (which was the last time Joyce and I saw him).

In the last few years I've seen my own physical abilities begin to desert me. I had to give up my bicycle a couple of years ago: My balance had become unreliable. And has become even worse. Even walking now can sometimes be an ... adventure. It's gotten to the point that I can no longer, for now, go out to the health club to walk laps on the indoor track, to ride the stationary bike (even the illusion of movement makes me dangerously dizzy).

A number of other things I used to love to do are gone now--playing catch with my grandsons, shooting hoops in their driveway. Impossible now--if, that is, I want to stay on my feet.

Joyce and I used to roar off on road trips at a moment's notice. Sometimes clear across the country. No more. I do not get dizzy when I drive (not yet), but the possibility of a long trip is now an impossibility. We had, a couple of years ago, to give up our annual week in Stratford, Ont., where we loved their annual theater festival--we'd see 11 plays in 6 days--walking everywhere. We usually didn't drive at all for the entire week. I'm just no longer remotely capable of that.

Intellectually, I can still do much of what I love to do--reading, writing, enjoying spirited conversations with Joyce and family and friends. My memory seems good--though my quick recall is now housed in my iPhone.

For example, I knew the answer to the final Jeopardy question the other day (which Shakespeare character has the most lines in a play that is not named for him?). (I didn't watch the show, but someone posted the question online.) I knew almost immediately it was that Bad Guy in Othello, but I could not for the life of me come up with his name (Iago) for about 20 minutes (I refused to check my iPhone!). I've read that play many times, have seen it several times--and the film with Laurence Fishburne and Kenneth Branagh (as Iago!), taught it a couple of years at Hiram's Weekend College. But Iago's name was gone ... Until my brain, grudgingly, at last surrendered to my insistent entreaties.

The walk over to the coffee shop each morning (about 1/4 mile each way) has become such an adventure that Joyce likes it when I text her that I've arrived safely.

Arrived safely.

That's the key, isn't it? Arriving safely at our destination. And--for every single one of us--we know what that destination is, though, in youth, we pretend that we don't.

Sunday Sundries, 260

1. HBOTW [Human Beings of the Week]: The women who check me in at Seidman Cancer Center when I'm there for one of my all-too-frequent visits. They are kind, friendly (they remember me!), encouraging, patient, funny, understanding, empathetic--all the qualities, in other words, that I wish would flourish more pervasively than they do in this contentious time.

2. Had an adventure at the gas station this morning. It was so cold (about 18) that once I got the hose hooked up to our car, I got back in while Joyce, who could see the pump, told me how much had gone in. I was expecting about seven gallons (our Prius is never all that thirsty). Joyce told me eight had gone in, so I got out and checked: The eighth gallon--and maybe more--was on the pavement, and gasoline was bubbling merrily out of our car. I stopped it, went inside and told the attendant that a pump had malfunctioned. He took care of it, while I drove away smelling of gasoline.

3. I finished four books this week--two of which were from my read-a-little-in-each-pile beside our bed. I'll deal with those two first.

     - The first was a book I've been reading on my Kindle at night--Val McDermid's The Last Temptation, 2002, the third in her series about Tony Hill (a psychological profiler) and Carol Jordan (a cop), a series I became aware of when we began streaming Wire in the Blood, a Brit show based on the novels--a show I learned about from our good friend Chris.

Anyway, once the series was over (a series we really enjoyed, BTW), I began reading the books in the order that McDermid wrote them. So: three down and 100,000 to go.

This one has Carol Jordan going undercover to entrap a major mobster, whose late GF looked a lot like Jordan. Tony is helping out--and pursuing another case, as well (someone has been murdering psychologists). Things get tangled; things get violent; things get bloody; things get ... you know.

There is a lot of sexual electricity between Hill and Jordan, and it really flared in this volume. BUT ... considering what happened near the end, I'll have to see if the sparks are still there in the next book--which I'm delaying a bit because, first, I have got to finish the (relatively) new Lee Child novel about Jack Reacher.

     - The 2nd book I've been slowly reading through is the most recent collection of poems by Sharon Olds, whose work I have always greatly admired. This one--Arias, 2019--is, I fear, very uneven, at least according to my taste.

She seems to have abandoned (in many of the poems) her narrative clarity that I felt had always been her great strength--the power of story and all that. She has become more allusive, even secretive, in these poems, and they just didn't "get" me the way so much of her work has over the years. (I've loved her poems so much I've memorized a half-dozen or so.)

There are some poems here I loved, don't get me wrong. But many I had to force myself to complete.

I met Olds back on April 19, 2006, when she spent the day at Western Reserve Academy--doing a reading, a book-signing (yes, I did), meeting with students, visiting classes, etc. Liked her a lot.

     - I have not yet read Zadie Smith's celebrated novel, White Teeth, which is having its twentieth anniversary. But when Joyce recently bought (and read) her new story collection, Grand Union, I decided to read it, too.

And I found much to admire in these pieces--though it is far from uniformly good, I fear. There's a clever story about a corset shop, a sad story about a druggie who can't get his job back at a library, another about a young man who, for the first time, feels the presence of death, etc.

And there are some lines I liked: "ALL THE WORLD IS TEXT" (199); "Being wrong is a lifelong occupation" (219); "In the suffering person, suffering is solely suffering" (231).

So ... look for the gold among the glitter. It's there.

     - Finally, I've always bought more Ian McEwan than I've read (I've got a full shelf), but, lately, I decided I'd better get to it--time's winged chariot, and all that. I first read all the ones on the shelf, and now I'm going back to read the novels from early in his career. And I started the the first one, The Cement Garden, 1978, a grim, even macabre story about a family.

The first sentence sets the tone (our narrator is Jack, who's fourteen at the time he speaks of): "I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way" (13). Okay ...

Jack has three siblings--a younger brother (Tom), two sisters (Julie, the oldest; and Sue). They're each kind of ... messed up. In a way, Jack is a typical sullen adolescent with eruptive skin (and behavior).

Mom tries to deal with it. Then ... she dies.

There are no friends or relatives, so the kids decide just to stay in the house and, you know, bury Mom in the basement.

Julie gets a BF--Derek, a guy who hustles games of snooker--and who gets very curious about that odor in their basement.

And on we go. Don't want to give away any more of it--but let's just say that some ... unusual ... things go on in that house ....

3. As I've written here before, we are streaming a series we really like--Upstart Crow--a comedy based on the early career of Shakespeare. It's filmed in front of a live audience, and the sets are generally simple; the language and behavior are at times (and always amusingly so) anachronistic.

We see a Shakespeare who gets ideas for his plays from everywhere and everyone--from his sullen teen daughter, his nasty father, his servant Bottom (!), from Kate (another--very bright--servant). And this, of course, is actually far more realistic than the idea of the Bard sitting up in some dark, cold room dreaming up every single thing in his plays and poems.

Anyway, we just saw the Christmas episode (he's working on Twelfth Night), and it was incredibly good; Joyce thinks we ought to watch it every Christmas Eve the rest of our lives!

I'll not say more ... don't wanna spoil it. It's on Amazon Prime--though for some weird reason we had to pay $1.99 for the Christmas episode?!!? (Some Amazon Scrooge-ian policy?)

4. Final Word--a word I liked this week from one of my online word-of-the-day providers.

     - from dictionary.com

mythomane [mith-uh-meyn ]

noun: a person with a strong or irresistible propensity for fantasizing, lying, or exaggerating.

The noun and adjective mythomane is a relatively recent word, dating from only the 1950s, and is a synonym for the noun and adjective mythomaniac, which is almost a century older (1857). Mythomaniac originally meant someone passionate about or obsessed with myths, its etymological meaning. By the early 1920s mythomaniac had acquired its current sense “someone with a strong or irresistible propensity for fantasizing, lying, or exaggerating.” The Greek noun mŷthos means “word, discourse, conversation, story, tale, saga, myth”; it does not mean “lie.” The curious thing is that the source word mythomania “lying or exaggerating to an abnormal degree” dates from only 1909.

Lawrence himself was a mythomane and, after the first world war, took particular pains to project an image of himself to the public that was as much a construct as anything worked up by the PR team of a film star or celebrity of today. WILLIAM BOYD, "LAWRENCE OF ARABIA: A MAN IN FLIGHT FROM HIMSELF," THE GUARDIAN, APRIL 29, 2016

… he is a flat-out mythomane, dedicated to the Sublime, the Enormous and the Ultra-German; a marvelous artist at his best and at his worst a Black Forest ham. ROBERT HUGHES, "MOCKER OF ALL STYLES," TIME, MAY 27, 1999

Snow up to My Armpits ...

I never rode a school bus to school.

As a kid in Enid, Okla., and Amarillo, Tex., I walked or rode my bike. Later, in Hiram, Ohio (7th grade through high school), I also walked (up Hiram's steep north hill! snow up to my ...) or, later, a high school buddy with a car would pick me up.

In my school years, the only times I rode a school bus were for field trips (few and far between) or to basketball games. (Later, I would have the "pleasure" of riding buses for field trips at the school where I taught--and, for quite a few years, chartered buses from Aurora, Ohio, to Washington, D.C., for our 8th Grade Washington Trip each fall--I'm still recovering from those experiences!)

I should say that I even walked to kindergarten--about 3-4 blocks. Alone. (Unthinkable these days.) I sometimes didn't make it because (as I've written here before) Kiwanis Park was right on the way, and, well, I occasionally couldn't resist the swings, the merry-go-round, the creek with the crawdads ...

The teacher, Mrs. Dugan, would call Mom; she would come find me in the park, walk with me the rest of the way.

I never thought at the time that Mom was probably terrified about my absence. There are a lot of things in this life that you don't really understand until you've experienced them yourself. I really believe I became a more conscientious teacher when our son was born--and for the first time I realized, truly realized, how parents of my students felt.

So, anyway, Dad, born in 1913, grew up on a farm in Oregon and sometimes rode a horse to his rural school (and Dad lived to see the moon landing--and beyond!), but he usually walked: He had nearly a dozen siblings--and not that many horses.

Years later, when my brothers and I would complain about snow, he would actually employ that snow-up-to-my-armpits line. But it didn't really diminish our grousing. We were spoiled--not the archetypal "spoiled brats" but spoiled by the good fortune of being American kids in the 1950s and beyond.

Dad, as I said, had lived on a farm; his own father had died suddenly when Dad was in high school. But Dad went to work--worked his way through college during the Great Depression--went off to WW II (both the Pacific and Europe--earning a Bronze Star)--came home--completed a Ed.D. program at the University of Oklahoma--got called back to active duty during the Korean War, a conflict that sent him not into battle again (thank goodness) but to Amarillo AFB, where he served as a chaplain--returned to Enid to serve on the faculty of the now-defunct Phillips University ... I could go on.

And my brothers and I?

None of that. About the biggest crisis in my boyhood was not having enough money for a Popsicle. And, of course, those inches of snow that I always saw as a great impediment to my walking to school.

Mont Blanc Fountain Pen, Part 2

A few days ago I did a post here about my 1997 impulse purchase of this Mont Blanc fountain pen in the Portland, OR, airport. A sweet $375 that took me, oh, quite a long time to pay off.

And I wrote about how that pen had failed recently to ... perform ... the way a fountain pen should (i.e, it failed to write).

So, I wrapped it up and mailed it off to their service center in Fort Worth, TX (which seems an odd place for a Mont Blanc service center!), and yesterday I heard back from them with an estimate.

The repair cost will be ... a lot (I'm too ashamed to post the amount).

But I approved it all. Gotta have that pen. I've been using it most every day since 1997, and I feel, well, dysfunctional without it.

Besides, what are credit cards for except to allow us to do things we can't really afford?

Which reminds me ... I am really grateful that early in my teaching career (I began in Aurora, Ohio, in 1966) I had no credit card except one for Sohio (now BP). My salary was pathetic my first year: I got paid a net $168.42 on the first and the fifteenth. I had rent to pay--a car pmt.--utilities. Sometimes I had enough left for some food. And so I developed deep friendships with Aurora people who could feed me--especially near the end of a pay period when my bank balance would often be below one dollar (I kid you not).

If I'd had other credit cards back then, I'd still be paying them off.

Anyway, today I'm sending in my approval to Fort Worth (via snail mail), and now I'm going to have to wait 2-3 more weeks, they tell me, until they snail-mail it back to me. I'm bereft.

And, oh, last night? In bed I was taking notes on some reading with my favorite mechanical pencil. It died. I don't mean it ran out of lead--I mean: IT DIED.

I loved that mechanical pencil.

And so I wonder: Am I getting some message from some mystical place? Some message that is hinting, not too subtly, that the demise of my beloved writing instruments is but the opening chord in a dark dirge for ... (three guesses).

And I don't think there's any service center in Fort Worth for me!

The Strangest Thing in My Head

When you've been swallowed by a machine, the strangest things careen around in your head. Yesterday, for example, when I was undergoing a couple of different scans at the Seidman Cancer Center, lyrics from an old song began echoing around, and I could not convince them to go away.

The line I kept hearing was this one: He wears tan shoes with pink shoe laces ...

a nuclear bone scan machine

For some mysterious reason, I somehow remembered the name of the singer: Dodie Stevens. And I remembered I was either in junior high or high school when the song was popular.

But I had to wait until the scans were over before I could check my portable memory (iPhone) and learn what I could about that song. I've put the full lyrics at the bottom of this post.

Link to YouTube of Dodie Stevens singing the song.

And another video of her actually performing it in 1959.

Now for trusty Wikipedia (and other sources). Composed by Micki Grant (a talented woman who later wrote a number of musicals, including Alice, 1978), the song became popular when Dodie Stevens (only 11 or 12 at the time) recorded it. She released it in February 1959--and by April it was the #3 hit in the country. It sold more than a million copies--those old 45 rpm's.

In February 1959 I was in 9th grade at Hiram High School. I was thinking that high school was impossibly long--it would never be over. I was taking English 9, Latin I, general science, physical education (my favorite!), Algebra I, band, and choir. (Don't ask me about my grades--though I will say that once I got to high school, my grades crept upward from my junior high years. Crept is the key word here.)

I remember the song well (as evidenced by its insistent appearance in my head yesterday). It was, I think, what they call a "novelty song"--not something you could dance to all that well (actually, I couldn't dance all that well to anything) but had considerable appeal because of its comedy--and silliness. It was kind of an odd song, too--especially since Elvis had burst onto the scene with "Hound Dog" in 1956, and popular music was undergoing a major transformation. Oddly, it also had a lot of rhythmical talking in it--an rap ancestor?

Dodie Stevens, born in 1946 and still alive, had a few more modest successes, then retired and married, then divorced, then reappeared, mostly as a back-up singer and at oldies concerts. She now teaches singing near San Diego.

Dodie Stevens

I learned just now that "Pink Shoe Laces" appeared in the soundtrack for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which we are now streaming (though we haven't hit that episode yet).

Pink Shoe Laces

Now I've got a guy and his name is Dooley

He's my guy and I love him truly

He's not good lookin', heaven knows

But I'm wild about his crazy clothes.

He wears tan shoes with pink shoelaces

A polka dot vest and man, oh, man

Tan shoes with pink shoelaces

And a big Panama with a purple hat band

Ooh-ooh, ooh, ooh

Ooh-ooh, ooh, ooh

He takes me deep-sea fishing in a submarine

We got to drive-in movies in a limousine

He's got a whirly-birdy and a 12-foot yacht

Ah, but that’s-a not all he's got

He's got tan shoes with pink shoelaces

A polka dot vest and man, oh, man

Tan shoes with pink shoelaces

And a big Panama with a purple hat band

Now Dooley had a feelin' we were goin' to war

So he went out and enlisted in a fightin' corps

But he landed in the brig for raisin' such a storm

When they tried to put 'em in a uniform

He wanted tan shoes with pink shoelaces

A polka dot vest and man, oh, man

He wanted tan shoes with pink shoelaces

And a big Panama with a purple hat band

Ooh-ooh, ooh, ooh

Ooh-ooh, ooh, ooh

Now one day Dooley started feelin' sick

And he decided that he better make his will out quick

He said, "Just before the angels come to carry me

I want it down in writin' how to bury me."

A'wearin tan shoes with pink shoelaces

A polka dot vest and man, oh, man

Give me tan shoes with pink shoelaces

And a big Panama with a purple hat band

Ooh-ooh, ooh, ooh

Ooh-ooh, ooh, ooh

Ooh-ooh, ooh, ooh

And a big Panama with a purple hat band!

At Seidman Cancer Center

Seidman Cancer Center
Beachwood, Ohio

January 14, 2020
9:30 a.m.

Joyce and I are sitting in the Starbucks at Legacy Village. We have about a two-hour wait before we must be back at the somewhat-nearby Seidman Cancer Center, where I will undergo a nuclear bone scan. Right now, nuclear material (via a recent injection) is flowing through me, and pretty soon, I’m sure, I’ll be able to shoot webs across the room and maybe swing my way back to Seidman.

We’ve already had a pretty busy morning. We reached Seidman at 7:30 so I could get a blood draw (a PSA test + some others). They check my Prostate Specific Antigen level every month now, just to see if it’s rising. If it is, that means my cancer is back in business. My score's been lower since I underwent  immunotherapy about a year ago + a sequence of radiation treatments, zapping one of my vertebrae that had been glowing in bone scans.

Anyway, after the blood draw, it was time to head downstairs to drink some “flavored” water (seemed to be a couple of gallons—but it wasn’t) in prep for my CT scan (they’re checking my abdomen—any cancer-spread going on down there?).

After my consumption of that luscious liquid we headed back upstairs to get the injection of nuclear material that I’ve already mentioned. Then ... back downstairs for my CT scan, a process that has me lying on my back and going through a large machine that whirs and speaks to me (TAKE A BREATH AND HOLD IT. [pause] BREATHE). The scan doesn’t take all that long, but it does involve the ... pleasant ... experience of having to, uh, “drop trou.” Always fun to do when you don’t want to do it—like in front of strangers!

After all of that we drove over here for the required two-hour wait while my Spidey sense begins to tingle ever more intensely. Then we’ll drive back to Seidman for the nuclear bone scan (which takes about a half-hour or more), and, to end our glorious morning, an injection of Xgeva, a drug that helps move calcium from my blood into my bones.

My bones need help, for that is where my prostate cancer has been moving. Also, another powerful drug I’m on (Trelstar—which kills testosterone, a favorite food of prostate cancer) has a number of unpleasant side-effects, one of which is the weakening of my bones.

That damn Xgeva shot, by the way, I receive every two months in my quadriceps. And for some damn reason (notice the deterioration of my polite language) it hurts more than any other shot or injection I get.

Joyce is reading FranKissStein, Jeanette Winterson’s 2019 riff on Frankenstein and A.I. I read it a while back and loved it (Joyce is loving it, too). (Johnny Mathis is coming through the sound system right now--flashback to Hiram High School soc hops!)

I’ve been sitting here with my iPad—reading the New York Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the Akron Beacon-Journal online. Found a couple of funny cartoons that I shared on Facebook. I’ve consumed a blueberry scone already—am sipping a Grande Pike. (I’d rather be at Open Door Coffee Company—but here I am.)

I’ll finish and post this when we get home, which should be sometime in January.

Oh—I don’t see my oncologist until next week—so I won’t know until then what all these tests and procedures have discovered.


1:40 p.m.

We got home about 1:00--so we were up there for five hours this morning: 7:30-12:30 (with a break for Starbucks mid-morning). And it's all over--for now.

The nuclear bone scan always takes much longer than I want it to--and is more uncomfortable than I want it to be: holding positions for a long time, trying not to move at all. But ... that's over.

And the Xgeva shot went better for me this time--never my favorite thing. But ... that's over.

As I said, we'll see my oncologist next week and find out what all of this uncovered ... and, of course, I will post the news here, good or bad.

I'll close with an observation I've made before--the astonishing capacity of people to help one another in this place. The young helping the old, the old helping the young ... it's incredibly moving. Although I've been dealing with this disease for fifteen years now, I have never been as distressed as so many folks I see here. Nothing more humbling in life.