Spencer Tracy and I

I have a thing for him. He looked like my father. He played characters I admired like Clarence Darrow in Inherit the Wind and the good guy in Keeper of the Flame and again in Bad Day At Blackrock. I don’t think he ever played the villain. He seemed to always exude wisdom and courage with a self-assured and even temperament.

As a young and innocent moviegoer, it was hard to separate the actor from the real character. In fact, Tracy was a guilt-ridden alcoholic. Unbeknownst to those in my generation he was also a redhead. When Technicolor came in his hair had turned white.

Why the guilt? Partially because of his long relationship with Katharine Hepburn while still married to Louise Tracy. The other reason is where it gets personal for me.

Spencer Tracy had a son, John, who was born profoundly deaf.  In 1942 his mother founded the preschool educational center, named John Tracy Clinic. The guiding principle was to teach children how to lip-read and speak, rather than signing.

My daughter Janice was born in 1962, congenitally deaf.  My wife and I sought help from the Tracy Clinic. They offered a program for parents to work with their children to teach oralism as their first language. A group of twelve families were chosen for a special place in what they called the Demonstration Nursery. These twelve were afforded intense tutoring by student-teachers from USC. This was a coveted position and how we got it begins another act in this drama.

In the late 1950s I was befriended by a man about ten years older than I. We seemed to meet in terms of left-wing politics and as a foursome with our wives. I introduced Fred Keavy to some of my other radical friends and he accompanied me to regular Tuesday night meetings featuring a speaker.

Going back to the Tracy Clinic I should add that it was largely supported by movie people. When the time came to plead for entrance into their special program I called upon Lee Keavy, Fred's wife. Her mother was the sister of Bob Hope’s wife. And so it was that a letter from Dolores Hope to Louise Tracy is how we were awarded a place among the anointed twelve families. Janice speaks and lipreads so well today because of their program and the hard work my wife and I put in with lessons. 

As an aside, each family was expected to contribute our time and service for the Clinic. I wrote their newsletter. Just as Janice was gaining her speech I was finding my voice on the page. 

But wait, there’s more. Returning back to Fred Keavy, the host of our Tuesday meetings had taken me aside to voice his warnings about my friend. He didn’t trust Fred and thought he might be an FBI informer. Looking back, I believe he probably was hired to infiltrate our group… as if we were going to topple the order. The notion that a few compassionate progressives posed a danger was dangerous nonsense. However these were the times where sniffing out subversives was the national pastime.

So it was that Fred used me and I used him and Spencer Tracy never knew any of this. He was too busy getting drunk and living with Katharine and probably going to confession.

 

 

 

 

Two Poems

What's The Big Idea? 

I was just about to say something.

It must been profound,

one of those enormous thoughts

that explains everything

yet is so simple it slips away

in the garble of discourse,

a chime at midnight

in the music of the spheres.

If it should make another orbit

I’ll be sure to jot it down on a napkin

or in the dust of my dashboard

but it’s more likely, 

a cosmic wrong number

I won’t even recognize 

since it belongs to some opaque world

when it strayed into this one

never intending to be caught

in so many words.

______________________

Out Of Doors

Words we say without thinking of the words.

Yes, we do go through a door or two

to get to the seeded soil, to the

spreading coral tree hanging over my patio,

a curtain of rhombic ovate leaves

(so says Google)

soon to shed its chlorophyll-laden load

to make room for the dazzle of red flowers 

just outside my sliding door.

 

But to really be out of doors,

bereft in that inner chamber,

would be a sorry state,

We need our doors ajar

in that essential, inscape,

where no one has trespassed.

And if the doors are locked

I will break them down

or walk through walls

in my mansion of infinite rooms

and doors, yes, doors to enter

and meet myself in of doors.

I shall go on in this grand meander

turning knobs to the unknown.

There could be red lanterns

and leaves like fish, like leaves,

or a version of myself

in the elsewhere I have never risked.

 

 

 

Gone With A Sigh

The death of old movies is as if a moribund surrogate parent has died again. Having been raised on Saturday matinees I am mourning the threatened change at TCM in which Cooper and Cagney will fall to the cutting room floor along with Grable, Gable and Garson. In the U.K., old movies made before 1975 have already been dumped. They have been deemed bad for the bottom line. Soon AARP members will be bereft. Evidently young audiences haven’t figured out that whatever they are watching has its antecedents.

The Austin Theater in Kew Gardens could never be mistaken for a Dream Palace but the place was thick with them. It was there I got caught in the swirl of Busby Berkley or posed as a mild-mannered reporter looking for a phone booth or overthrew the order with a raised eyebrow like Groucho and climbed the stairway to heaven. There was no gravity in that floating world.

Movie-going was an event apart from the big screen. We screamed and laughed, hissed and cheered in a communal experience even as the usher hushed us as she patrolled the gum-encrusted rows.

She was dressed for the part in a red uniform like a drum majorette or doorman. With a deft turn of her flashlight, she would highlight the rowdies and those with raging hormones in the balcony the way a warden turned his searchlight on the prisoner climbing the wall with tied sheets. All she really wanted was a quiet aisle to imagine her life in that shaft of smoke from the projection booth. She would walk home on deserted streets under blinking neon, as a chorus girl, hat-check girl or the girl next door having left this world and finally stepping back into an Edward Hopper painting.

I had a near-death experience at the movies before my legs reached the floor from my seat. With eyes still wide from the sun a man inched his way along my aisle about to sit on top of me. Just as he was stooping to crush me, I rattled my Good and Plenty and barely avoided an ignominious demise.

As a kid I was movie-smart having been suckled on double features from age four in the custody of my older brother. It was there I learned that babies came from hot water and towels. I found out how to almost kiss, that most people wore tuxedos and sailors were the best dancers. I could tell the clean-cut good guy from the dirty double-crosser by his mustache alone. And I knew that second bananas married second banana-ettes. Tarzan’s words were not lost on me when he said to Jane: It’s a jungle out there.

It was at the movies where we figured out the difference between fantasy and agreed-upon reality. Left to our own devices, we learned that people were not likely to carry one roller skate and a cup of coffee in their overcoat as Harpo had honked. We entered the theater any time heedless of beginnings and ends. Yet, this is where we came in, I would say when the two fragments met as if life made sense after all even if I didn’t yet know where I fit in.

 

 

Two Poems

 At The Van Gogh Exhibit

His portrait is an earth-encrusted shoe

with a screech of crows

in his gauzed ear

and a cyclonic sky for eyes.

The gnarled tree could be his body.

For six rooms you are impastoed,

washed in an ocean of wheat,

then herded into the seventh

where the spell is severed

by displays of mugs and magnets

and wheat is mere wheat again.

As if scorched by the yellow awning

or the madness of potatoes

you are returned to the safe and familiar

with all the quiet acts of desecration we allow. 

_____________________________________

Urban Bucolic

The plan for a hike in Sycamore Canyon

became a picnic on a bench at La Brea Tar Pits.

Urban bucolic, I am thinking                                     

as we share a submarine

while a crane lifts a mastodon

from a river of primordial ooze

running deep under Wilshire Blvd

where saber-toothed cats are caught 

in snarl and claw

under the subterranean parking lots

of insurance companies.

The black cauldron bubbles

pre-history in our nostrils

and my old brain almost remembers

the accidents it took to get us here.

How it has all come to this:

a paved swamp with rectangles gone wild

on a street of hung dreams and silenced howls.

Long Ago Yesterday

One of the ironic phenomena about aging is how we have easy access to events decades back but can’t remember what we did yesterday, much less an hour ago…. or even why I am writing this. Yesterday’s conversation remains out of reach in a different precinct of my brain, from the words I managed in the spelling bee as the last one standing, eighty years ago.

Our short-term memory loss is the subject of two of my favorite jokes. I’ll only mention the punch line to one: So, where’s the toast? The full joke is available on request. As time goes on it has become more prophetic than funny.

Certainly, memory loss is nothing to laugh at. I'm not there yet but some friends may be close. While forgetfulness seems to accompany aging the move from annoyance to anguish is to be dreaded. It could arrive on cat's feet when a tipping point is crossed between nuisance and dysfunction.

Perhaps the only remedy is to stay close; we need each other for loving support and to help exercise the muscle of recall, both proximate and distant. Of course, it could be said there is much to be unremembered about today’s world in upheaval. It’s tempting to take refuge in those glory days seventy or eighty years ago. We embellish them with every return and why not? It is our movie and there are probably no eye witnesses around to refute our account.

If yesterday’s lunch or phone call got lost in the clutter, perhaps one compensatory move is to try for less input, less clutter. The tsunami of content coming at us from social media requires an enormous resistance in order to simplify our lives. I wonder if we’d have an easier time of it in a Zen monastery.

Another suggestion is to take a look at the side effects of our prescription meds. This may be more easily said than done given our infirmities in these twilight years.

Google says to eat well and exercise which is the panacea for everything that ails us. I suppose it keeps the blood moving north to the grey matter. Aside from those nostrums are the usual array of nutritional supplements ranging from derivatives of jellyfish to lion’s mane mushrooms. I have ingrained skepticism about such products which aren’t subject to FDA scrutiny but are known to lighten the wallet.

I have no wise, overarching solution. Sometimes I write just to find out what I have to say. Even if it ain’t much at least it keeps my synapses doing their aerobics. And maybe next time I'll remember where I parked my car at Costco.

Good Fortune

No eatery promises words of wisdom at the end of a meal like the local Chinese restaurant. For all my gluttony there is always room for a slice of orange and fortune cookie with its strip of a pithy aphorism inside. I never give up hope that Lao Tzu will turn up. Instead I usually get some Chinese version of, Have a nice day, which I wouldn't put up with on an empty stomach. 

But after being narcotized by egg foo young and moo-shoo I can imagine God scribbling away in their kitchen. Where else would he be except in some undiscovered recipe. Certainly not watching over the soy sauce or steaming the hell out of the rice. Though he might be sympathizing with the oversized fish in the underside tank or on the tip of my muted tongue between the hot and pungent.

But last night's words could have come from Rilke (or my eye doctor). You will see beauty where others see nothing unusual.

As the new tea steeps, I am drawn into the wallpaper where a foot bridge spans across a stream in a hill town along the Yangtze, soon, I imagine, to be dammed and the village flooded. The river is a dragon whipping its tail through the mountains swallowing the landscape with its unseeing eyes. Beauty seen and beauty erased but with its remembered residue. 

On the way home I am suddenly fluent in the language of roots, how they slither under the fig tree like an amphibian, half seen and half immersed doing their fancy dancing. What does it mean? Nothing and everything depending on how much we give ourselves over to it. 

Half an hour later I am hungry but only for beauty, still under the spell of my fortune cookie. There is nothing unusual except my gratitude for this lucky life, with moments still pulsing from every one of my ninety years, from column A and column B, the sweet, the sour and spicy.         

Two Poems

OLYMPICS

Bad enough that Sparta reigns over Athens for a few weeks

and in the rush for gold the field is littered with broken dreams

but it is the judges who frighten me most, the difference between first and last

being a hopped toe, half-splash or crimp in the pike position.

It makes me dare the bruised peach to drip on my T-shirt.

When I cut the morning melon I feel the eyes of the Bulgarian judge

all over me taking points off for my grip and if I get it right my urine is suspicious.

What is the first bud in a false spring other than a lurch in response to the starter's gun?

I celebrate messy humanity; a misstep here, a blemish there, Satchmo's rasp,

the riffs not on the page. Blessed are the slips and wobbles 

when we don't nail the landing,

the accidents that got us this far as we stumble our way along.

The Hopi potters knew to make a hole in their bowls not to offend the gods.

_____________

REAL FANS              (For Ron who never saw the home run but made it happen)

Descendants of pagans

Idolaters who speak to the gods in wood or fire,

who understand the power of the sacrificial act.

Real fans are the zealots who move their bodies

into others to do battle, once removed

against the forces of darkness.

Never just spectators, they suit up for the game 

in a different skin, grow fur and fangs,

and have found the clearing in the forest

where they can lay down and die for a day.

Their song is an incantation over the brew.

Even in their full ferocity with the crowd on its feet

real fans remain in their seats, back against wood, 

against tree and root, tunneling across ocean floors

and centuries, aligned with the slayers of dragons

and those possessed.

In the end it is they who control the fate, 

not the mere players, 

who reenact the ritual theater, the game again and again. 

Getting A Grip

Given all the news of End-Times fast approaching with degradation politically and in planetary terms, we need to get a grip; to summon our core values and find ways to live our lives in creativity and full consciousness. That includes opening our hearts to each other. To think globally and act locally. To lower the temperature figuratively and literally.

Add an e to grip and we have gripe. The far right has harvested a bumper crop of gripes and made a meal of them. I have to believe the platter of crumbs and hollow promises served as remedies will be seen as a dainty dish of junk food to serve only the king.

I’m remembering how that word grip had yet another meaning, spelled grippe. As a kid, around 1940, it was one thing to have a cold but to be diagnosed with the grippe conferred added gravity and a touch of drama to the malady. I pictured myself caught in a vise gripping my gripe.

102 degrees, rectally speaking, was enough to get the doctor for a house call. He came with a satchel-full of modern remedies such as tongue depressor, alcohol rubdowns, eucalyptus for the vaporizer and Argyrol to paint my throat. As I imagined it the germs were short for Germans and I would scatter the Nazi invasion by sheer will, driving them out of Normandy. When my fever dropped, I was too modest to tell anyone how I had just won the war.

The war we must win today requires a joining of hands with massive doses of common sense. We have tens of millions of voters casting their lot and their ballot against their own interests. Yet the forces of Democracy have outnumbered them in seven of the last eight presidential elections.

There is a substance within us for healing that prevails. Just as my body drove Nazis to retreat and surrender without the benefit of antibiotics so too will decency, compassion and truth defeat the infestation of hatred from the American soul.  

I don’t mean this to be a prescription for complacency but rather as a plea to speak out with the belief that our advocacy carries the ring of truth. It is the difference between the sounds of Brubeck or Beethoven versus the screech and jangle of a revved-up motorcycle. One is music. the other, noise.

 

Cicadas and Crickets

 It seems that everyone is talking about them. Well, maybe not everyone but poets have been writing about cicadas since the Greeks and just this morning I overheard someone in the laundry room speaking about crickets. I have now learned that cicadas are a completely different species from crickets.

You may not care about such things but I imagine a cricket, with no sense of direction, wouldn’t be looked upon kindly in a throng of cicadas. They might serenade him to an early demise.

I always thought cicadas were the highfalutin name used by people who graduated college heavily in debt and needed to show something for all that, while the rest of us just say crickets.

Marlon Brando has a great line in On the Waterfront when Eva Marie Saint suggests that he move to the country. He says, Naw, da crickets make me noivous.

He would never have said cicadas. They are related to leafhoppers and spittlebugs (you have to love them for that) and crickets have no such lineage. Neither are they in the locust family in spite of the Bob Dylan song.

Both of them sing as best they can. Male crickets have that instrument on their wings, and there's the rub, while male cicadas have their noise-makers on their tummies. Females have better things to do. It turns out those chirps come from troubadors crooning their repertoire of mating songs. 

I gave up singing in the 6^th grade when I was designated a Listener. Nothing cricket about that. I’m so tone deaf I have to lip-synch Happy Birthday. If I had wings to rub together, I might have been invited to more parties. I can hardly wait for my next incarnation.

The most famous cricket is, of course, Jiminy Cricket which I always took as one of those euphemisms for Jesus Christ along with Jumping Jehoshaphat. Some crickets can jump as high as five feet which is higher than Jehoshaphat.

People actually grow crickets in farms. Who knew? They can be used to increase protein intake for livestock. Sort of like Ensure-Plus. They also make Good Bait… one of my favorite jazz tunes.

In fact, cicadas are on the menu throughout Asia. Beware of what you order from column B. I’m told, they taste like mushy asparagus and can never be mistaken for beef broccoli.

I’m glad we’ve cleared up all these matters. Now I’m ready for those summer nights when a choir of either one or both can chirp me back to my misspent youth, suddenly lit by fireflies in the deep silence when crickets hesitate.

Independence Day

This is the day Thomas Jefferson declared that all propertied white men are created equal. The rest of you guys, get over there. And you too, wives, sisters and daughters. You may be equal but not to us plantation owners who are more than equal. Nor are these savages who were so hospitable we never left. Nor those dark-skinned people we buy and sell who have built this country. 

Where do I sign, said our Founders. Now, let's get to work. There is cotton to be picked, stolen land to be tilled, bales to be lifted and barges to tote.

From 1800 to mid-century the slave population quadrupled from one to four million. The face on our twenty dollar bill was a particular abomination. He hungered for Native American land and was particularly angered because the Choctaw nation of five tribes were reported to be harboring runaway slaves, all 3/5ths of them. He then relocated 46,000 of the tribe about twelve hundred miles away, indifferent to their Trail of Tears, the thousands who died along the way. 

Is it fair to judge our Founders for their role in human bondage? I believe it is. The truth about inhumanity is self-evident. In the case of Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette urged him to liberate his slaves and the Polish military commander and engineer, Thaddeus Kosciuszko, offered to compensate our esteemed author /architect / inventor / and President for his losses. But the man from Monticello declined, even upon his death bed. Apparently, he had grown accustomed to his privileged position and Black lives did not matter. After all, manumission might have set a bad precedent.

In fact, upon Kosciuszko’s death, in 1819, he bequeathed $20,000 to Jefferson but T.J. took the money and passed on his enslaved men and women to his nephew. So much for declarations of independence.  

In Lincoln’s prose-poem we call The Gettysburg Address he got his first sentence wrong. Maybe on purpose. Four score and seven years ago in 1863 our fathers did not conceive of a new nation. We were not a nation for another eleven years when the Constitution was ratified. In 1776 we were, at best, a confederation of states. The sovereign states, to this day, are loath to relinquish many of their Antebellum ways.

This is no year for fireworks. The country is already combusting. Let this Fourth of July be the time to revisit and redress the omissions and injustices baked into our Constitutional yeast.

Our cherished document is yet to be realized. The legacy of Independence Day is still aspirational. The lofty words need to be brought down to ground-level. Heirs of Thomas Jefferson’s 230 slaves have been emancipated on paper but not as yet freed from economic suppression, disenfranchisement, daily indignities. The festering worm of racism still slithers.  

Ironically this day of Independence reveals our dependence upon each other; for love, for community and for the survival of our species. We are custodians of the natural world and own nothing. Social media has strained our social contract far beyond anything our visionary founders ever conceived.

In fairness it needs to be said that our floundering Fathers were bold and brave men. By signing their names to this document they were committing sedition with a bounty on their heads and subject to hanging. 

They are not to be dismissed but to be seen in full light. The document refers to one people dissolving ties with our Motherland. That number one can now be seen as either the torch of liberty or the phallus of male domination. Laid down, that figure one could be the trail of pioneer settlers in covered wagons or a convoy of aggressive land-grabbers as seen by the indigenous people. Or the vertical may be the thread our democracy is hanging by. The candle is rough-hewn containing our stained history. We are called upon to hold all these opposing forces in our consciousness without seeking any resolution.

Freeways..What The

My daughter, Lauren, who lives in Northern California reminds me there is no the before our shared freeways. Down here we have The 405, The 101 and The 5 etc... Somewhere en route those major highways lose their, The. Maybe it happens in the wine country of San Luis Obispo so that by the time it reaches San Jose they are too inebriated for The. What I call The Silicon Valley, she calls Silicon Valley. And to think, my daughters were raised in The San Fernando Valley.

What would The Vatican and The Bronx be without them. Certain words demand the article as do THE Museum of Modern Art and THE Metropolitan Opera or just The Met. As I recall the main street in The Bronx was The Grand Concourse just like The Grand Canal in Venice.

Then there’s The French Quarter, The Renaissance and The Roaring Twenties. It would be unthinkable to leave out the The. Imagine if Hamlet had said, To be or not to be. That is questionable. I rest my case.

I have a request to write about the 5 freeway. I might tell about the dog I rescued that wandered out between cars or the time I got a ticket for going too slow because my mother was in the back seat yelling that I was going too fast. However the first never happened and the second occurred on the 10 freeway…which must be twice as good as the 5.

As freeways go, the 5 is one of the few single digit ones I have known. The number 1 wins the prize for being so scenic one can die happily driving over the cliff. The 2 is stuck in Glendale and the 5 is notable for being the shortest but dullest route to the Bay area. It is so boring one has to plan ahead with loud music and a bottomless thermos of  coffee.

In fact I can’t recall ever driving on the 5 unless it was that time I made a wrong turn and ended up in Bakersfield. That might be the way Bakersfield was settled; by folks with no sense of direction.

Why do they post signs on freeways announcing distant destinations? Is that the work of visionaries intended for people who want to get as far away from here as possible? San Diego? Sacramento? I expect one to direct me to Patagonia or the polar ice cap.

If I lived in Lancaster or Palmdale, God forbid, it might be my favorite freeway, too, but I’m willing to live out my remaining decades without calling the Antelope Valley my home. The 5 freeway receives most attention for the stretch known as the Grapevine as in I heard it through the…. It becomes a headline in the holiday season when thousands of travelers are stuck there for 48 hours due to black ice and fog. Seems like a good location for a soup kitchen.

A friend told me she and her husband found themselves on it during a sand-storm, getting off just before a multi-car pile-up. They pulled into a Mobil Station where she wanted to use the restroom. Upon leaving the car the wind started to carry her off. She wrapped herself around a gas pump till her husband rescued her. There is no more ignominious way to die than clinging to a high octane pump.

I expect we all have a love/hate relationship with the freeway that gets us to and fro. I’m thankful I don’t need the 710 or 605 which specialize in jack-knifed big rigs.

My favorite is the Marina Freeway on a Sunday morning or any other time. It has only two exits and I could put up with anything for that long.