the marvels of the dreams of youth and the things my father and mother taught me:


THE OLD CLICHE IS TRUE...
NOTHING IS FOREVER.  When I was a young boy, I would travel with my parents to Elitch Gardens in Denver to sit on the green grass and listen to the musicians playing free concerts, a place where I was able to see Duke Ellington  standing with a baton in his hand up there on the stage in front of me like an American aristocrat, and then allowing me to listen over-and-over-again to Vaughn Monroe singing Ghost Riders in the Sky on my RCA record player in my bedroom.  As an old man, I now ache for certain places and times and people; and the sojourns to the  Gardens with my Mom, as well as the lingering voice of Vaughn Monroe, is one of those aches.  The recurrence of that ache is obvious proof that they were alive and so was I.  They existed in the world and I was there to see them.  


  They taught me that I could forever be in a place where everything seemed possible, to look at the marvels of the world, to be in the company of glad people in a glad place in a glad time, and live out a life where nothing was trivial, where the old and the weak were never in danger, where I would one day meet women with the highest cheekbones and creamiest skin in the universe, and to have enough time to know all I wanted to know; which would be watching  Roy Campanella coming to the plate, a bat in his hand and men on base or Jack Roosevelt Robinson rounding third, heading for home and Mickey Mantle hitting one out of the park.  The main reason was simple: I loved the game of baseball and my Mother and Father knew that baseball was one of the marvels of my young world.


  Other marvels that they allowed me to experience were mere examples of mindless entertainment and diversion, like eating a Dolly Madison strawberry ice-cream cone, or candies called Houtons, Sky Bars, or Mello Rolls and chewing and blowing Double Bubble, then listening to Billie Holiday singing the blues on records for hours on end, these were the simple gifts.  Little things that made me feel safe.  There was a sense that you would to all right in life if you only followed the rules.  Always pay your debts.  Put food on your table when you grew up for your children.  Never cross a picket line.  Don't look for trouble.  But don't back off either.  Always say "Yes, sir and No, ma am," and never disregard the elderly.  


  Which was why my Father always urged me to have grace under pressure and to always surrender to life's magic, to shape my future nostalgias without rudeness and occasional irritations.  He wanted me to gaze at boats, listen to music, and read great legends of literature; and said that no matter where you were born, or how rich or poor you were, you could always breathe the air of the breeze of life by going down to a river to watch the tides or the blocks of ice in winter or stare up at the grandeur of the Rocky Mountain Range in summer, and to remember that these are the things that have existed before man.  Past and present are merged in the memory of the things my Father taught me.  But something else is in the mix too.  Even though he passed-away on October 20th of 1975 t the age of 72, my memory of my Dad is always in the present tense...

                                            
  ...In my finest memory of my Mother, I am 10 years old, coming home from the Bluebird Theater on Colfax Avenue in Denver.  My Mother still has brown hair.  She is laughing and exuberant clearly made happy by going to a movie with her son.  She takes my hand and the two of us are singing "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah-Zip-a-Dee-A-My-Oh-My-What-A-Wonderful Day!"  We have just seen Song of the South. I will learn that the woman I call Mom is actually Bertha Winckel Daugs, an immigrant from Belgium, who arrived on New York's Ellis Island in 1907 at the age of 3.  She would tell me tales of Belgium fading into the fog and of the long voyage across the vast Atlantic to the City of New York, of how the family of 13 made their way across the land walking west to the State of Colorado, and that she knew that here in America everything was possible, if you only worked, and that the first requirement for creating an American future was not only working hard but to forever remember that the iron certainties of the European past must never be forgotten.  Somehow in the midst of so much turbulence and fear, young Bertha Winckel managed to do what few women, and almost no Catholic women ever did in those years: she obtained a degree in teaching and passed on to me the value of having a finely-tuned education, and that there was nothing wrong in flirting with a pretty girl.


  She taught  me that the only way to get to know a place was by walking its streets, and when she left this Earth in August of 1992 at the age of 88, I went for a long walk to the bandstand at Elitch Gardens and sat down on the green grass where the three of of us once sat watching Duke Ellington with a baton in his hand...




  ...And I closed my eyes and gave thought to the words of  William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar : "If we do meet again, we shall smile; If not, then this parting was well made..." 

once upon a time, there was a neighbor of mine who...


CLAIMED TO KNOW WHAT BILLIONS...

OF OTHER WOMEN WERE NEVER smart enough, or enlightened enough to understand: Her view was that Sexual intercourse was the essential act of male domination, created by sinister male cabal to hurt and humiliate all women and thus maintain power over them forever.  "There are only fuckers and fuckees and the sooner the fucker's books are burned and they are castrated, the better," she once announced at a neighborhood party.  Women were, in her view, essentially children, and they must be shielded from harm, corruption and filthy thoughts.  It didn't matter to her that the vast majority of women, even many proud feminists, didn't see the world the in the way that she did.  With the same amazing knowledge of the entire human race that allowed her to speak so glibly about men, she dismissed their views as well.  She calmly said that these women who took the side of men were "nothing more than house servants  who side with their masters."  


  Her name was Gertrude, and I had the misfortune of having her living across the street back in the days when I resided in Brentwood, California.  Other than her husband, Orville, who once informed me that she would not allow him to divorce her and that even though the marriage was devoid of Sexual intercourse,  she would take him to-the-cleaners and destroy his reputation if he ever even thought about it, making him wish that he had never been born; Gertrude was the saddest human being I have ever met.  


  Absolutely certain of her rectitude, Gertrude was totally free of doubt, equipped with an understanding of human beings that had eluded all previous generations.  A woman without joy or wonder.  Not laughter.  Not love.  Not the simplest luminous pleasures of a summer afternoon.  There was no room in her dark vision of the world for Fred Astaire or Lucille Ball or Maria Callas, for the music of Mozart or the art of Claude Monet.  There was no fantasy or magic, no awe in the presence of human beauty, no desire for spiritual or carnal wisdom.  She lived her life in an airless, sunless world.  I heard nothing from her about decent husbands and loving fathers, of families that have triumphed over poverty, or mothers who have lived hard lives with their intelligence, heart, sensuality and pride in tact. 


  Above all, in her sad and bitter world, there was no wide tolerant understanding of a species capable of forgiving our endless gift for human folly; and it was a few months back when I read in the local press that her husband, Orville, had shot her as she was taking her usual afternoon nap, stood over her until he was certain that she was dead, placed the revolver back into the drawer next to the bed, drove over to Cap's Oak Street Bar and Grill for a good steak dinner and a couple of drinks, then called the police and turned himself in; and I could only imagine him, as he sat in his cell awaiting his murder trial, parroting the words of Martin Luther King, saying to himself: "Free at last.  Free at last.   Thank God almighty I am free at last..."




  ...And although I do not condone murder...


  ...May God forgive me...


  ...I could not help but give a small smile... 

letter to a lost friend

THE TWO OF US FIRST MET WHEN I WAS HALF...

THE AGE THAT I NOW AM, WHICH WAS 39 YEARS ago.  As with all friendships, ours endured some of the most terrible strains, even though we usually saw the world in the same way, were enraged by the same atrocities, amused by the same hypocrisies, celebrated together the often paltry evidence of human kindness or generosity. I first met you in 1975, the year that the city of Saigon surrendered and the Vietnam  War came to an end.  As the years passed, there was even more awful evidence of man's apparently infinite capacity for stupidity, but between us there was a splendid exchange: Yeats for the blues, James Joyce for Miles Davis, Ernest Hemingway for Langston Hughes, both of us claimed Willie Mays.  That simple faith, with its insistence on irony, was at the heart of our friendship.  But America grew older and so did we and something changed between us. 


  The bitter truth was: over the years, a shadow had fallen on the once sunny fields of our friendship.  At the heart of the matter was the fact that you had lied to me about your heritage, when you informed me that you had a tinge of African-American blood running through your veins, and I found out by accident that was not true, when your sister snitched on you and told me that your family was 100 percent Irish.   I had heard your endless tales of woe about the mixed heritage, the damage it had done to you while growing up in Louisiana, how you had always felt yourself to be a part of the permanent Underclass.  I believed you because you had convinced me of it.  Then you retreated defensively into cliches of glib racialism when I approached you about what your sister had said.  Your argument was simple: if I didn't believe you, then I was a bigot. 


  In the best of all possible worlds, of course, none of this would have happened.  You would have been honest with me.  Instead, you came at me with a steel face and inflamed eyes and an apocalyptic solution to our friendship: there would no longer be a friendship because I was nothing more than a yahoo liberal and was, therefore, a disgusting hypocrite, as well. It was then that you came to the decision that you never wished to speak to me again.  


  It was many years after than when I arrived in that peculiar time zone where I was no longer young and had grown old without having you in my life.  Through the grapevine of old acquaintances, I came to understand that your health was rapidly deteriorating, that you were now unable to walk, and have difficulty in breathing.  And the terrible truth was that upon hearing the news, I was neither sad nor happy, because you no longer mattered to me...


 
  ...And the both of us ought to be regretful about that... 

memories of long-gone summer days...


SUMMER, WHEN I WAS A BOY IN DENVER, WAS...

WAS A STRING OF TOGETHERNESS, AND A SUM of small knowings, none of which cost any money.  Nobody ever figured out a way to charge us for morning, and morning was the beginning of everything which lay ahead.  We didn't decide what to do with our time; the day decided for us.  Each day had its own rhythms.  I don't recall ever drawing up plans, or waiting for some adult to arrive and direct us.  Usually the day would tell us to meet in the park right after breakfast.  We lived and breathed the game of baseball.  When there were enough players, we started the full games, with rather elaborate, specific ground rules: Over the the playground fence was, of course, a home run, and into the street was an automatic double.  Around the neighborhood there were dozens of other variations.


  We didn't have giant radios, the radio in our house was shaped like a cathedral, and you had to hold the aerial in back to hear clearly.  But somehow we always knew the Score of each and every game that the Yankees or Dodgers played because Red Barber and Mel Allen were giving us a play-by-play.   We knew; we always knew.  The Score was like some insistent melody being played in another room, parallel to our own lives and our own scores.  We got Knothole Club tickets for the Denver Bears professional  triple A baseball team and were almost always in the bleachers, could hardly see the game, but we didn't care; and up in the big leagues, we now knew that a black man had a right to steal home because our Dodgers and a man by the name of Branch Rickey, who had made Jackie Robinson's dream come true.


  We collected baseball cards, which came with bubble gum, and meant that we could actually see the faces of Pee Wee Reese and Stan Musial, Johnny Mize and Ted Williams and Enos Slaughter and Joltin' Joe DiMaggio.  We would read the papers, memorizing statistics, knowing each minor fluctuation in averages, at bats, strikeouts, or walks and ERA's.  And when we finished with the sport pages, we could turn to the comics: "Dick Tracy," Milton Caniff's "Terry and the Pirates," and, later, "Steve Canyon," and some of us would cut them out, pasting entire runs of the strips into scrapbooks, making our own comic books.  Reading the newspapers, before or after a game, was usually accompanied by eating Yankee Doodles, iced Pepsi, Mission Bell grape. 


  We knew that sneakers had to last for an entire summer, no matter how worn and disgusting they became, so we learned to bandage them with tape.   We would have one pair of roller skates for the season, and one skate key.  The skates were the kind that clamped on shoes and had metal wheels.  When the skates began to wear out, we took the skates apart, nailed them to two-by-fours, nailed milk boxes to the top of the two-by-fours, and scooter season had begun.  When late summer came, we began to play touch football with a genuine Wilson leather football. 



  There was room to run barefoot in the streets, because there were almost no cars until our fathers came home for the day.  We lived with marbles, comics, balls, newspapers, and baseball scores; then would go down to the public library on Colfax Avenue and 14th Street and vanish into books, or walk to the Bluebird Theater on 15th Street to see a movie, where Bobby Braswell's mother was a cashier.  Books made us think; the movies let us dream.  One tempered or enriched the other. And both were free.  So were the streets.  So were we.