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..."
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..."
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