Lance Mannion

Virgin martyrs and boys being boys: first reading

Mined from the notebooks, Sunday, September 30, 2018. Posted Wednesday morning, October 10, 2018.

Detail from a painting of the 20th Century Italian virgin martyr Saint Maria Goretti at prayer on display at her family home, via the St JoseMaria Institute.

This is the first of two parts. Part two in the works.

Somewhere in the jumble of self-flattery, self-pity, self-satisfaction, fallacious logic, overacted righteous indignation, and lies and evasions that made up his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday [September 27], Brett Kavanaugh played the good Catholic card.

Being a good Catholic appears to be synonymous in his mind with being a good person or, at any rate, a key quality of being a good person which he appears to think is synonymous with being Brett Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh’s defense of himself has been essentially tautological.

“I wouldn’t have done that because I was too good a person to do such a thing and the proof that I was too good a person to have done such a thing is I was too good a person to have done such a thing.”

Well, he wasn’t and he did, and as a self-professed good Catholic he should know that, given the right temptation and under the right circumstances, nobody in the history of Christianity, except Jesus and Mary themselves, has been too good a person to commit even the worst of sins.The Catholic Church wasn’t really built upon Peter the rock. It was built on the letters of Paul, and Paul, before he was Paul, was Saul, a religious terrorist and murderer.

Judging by his mood during his testimony, I’d guess Kavanaugh would identify more with the martyred St Stephen than with the leader of the mob who stoned him to death, whom he’d see as a one of the committee’s Democrats. If he were to meet Paul, I wonder if he’d ask him if he liked beer.

I don’t know what Kavanaugh means by being a good Catholic. I’m pretty sure it means being against abortion. That’s one of the main reasons he was nominated. Beyond letting us know he goes to mass on Sunday and makes sure his kids say their daily prayers, he didn’t elaborate. He seems awfully proud of his Jesuit education. The Jesuits aren’t all that proud of him at the moment.

As Pierce says, you don’t fk with the Society.

Other than that, it’s not for me to judge. Questions of faith are between the individual and his god. I don’t know what I mean by being a good Catholic myself. It’s been a long time since I’ve been one. In fact, I stopped being one while I was still an altar boy. I know what it was like to have been raised a good Catholic in St. Helen’s parish in the 1960s and 70s. Not being able to wait to take off my tie and white dress shirt at the end of the school day, getting out of class to serve funeral masses---a mixed blessing--- and being taught by nuns who loved baseball and had advanced college degrees. There’s been a lot of focus on Kavanaugh’s high school days at Georgetown Prep, naturally, but I can’t find where he went to grade school or junior high, so I don’t know what else he had in the way of a Catholic education. I’m not that much older than Kavanaugh---he’s the same age as my kid sister Linda---but there’s enough difference in our ages that it’s a good bet that if he did go to Catholic schools before high school he wasn’t taught by as many nuns as I was.

For the record, there was Sister Mary Francis, who was crazy; Sister Mary James who was very young and lots of fun and who you won’t be surprised to hear left the convent within a year after she taught our second grade class; Sister Mary Anthony, who gave us a good grounding in...the ground and the people who lived on it---geography and world culture were her specialties; Sister Mary Antonia, who taught me everything I know about grammar and usage; Sister Mary Jacinta, who, despite her being strict and stern, was my favorite; and Sister Mary Catherine, who taught us that Darwin was right and evolution and natural selection were how God did it. They belonged to the Sisters of the Presentation, a progressive teaching order, and they all had college degrees in an era when the great majority of women, including my mother, didn’t. Several had master’s degrees, and Sister Mary Catherine either had or was working on her Ph.D.

I had lay teachers too. Mrs Fulmer, who looked to me like Lois Lane and with whom I was madly in love; Mrs MacLane, who was my second favorite teacher ever, grade school, high school, college, and grad school included; Mrs Hinkel, who tried her heroic best to teach me algebra; Mr Schick, whom I’ve written about as the destroyer of my faith in the bible as the literal word of God; and Mr Snyder, who had sideburns like Mike Nesmith and from whom I learned that teachers can be too cool for school. Along with his style of cool, he passed along to us his love of literature. He couldn’t get us to appreciate “The Pearl” though. Not his fault. That’s all on Steinbeck.

No priests or brothers taught at St Helen’s. Whatever I learned from men in backward collars I learned as an altar boy in the sacristy at church when we were getting ready for mass. Mainly what they taught me and my fellow servers were practical things, like how to light a block of incense with a length of candle wick and how to put out the burning surplice sleeve of an altar boy who got too close to the candle wick. That happened. Not to me. I was the one who very calmly let my friend Paul know he was on fire. Father Cote put him out. Paul was lucky he didn’t go up like a candle wick himself. The lesson from Father wasn’t God was looking out for him, but Paul’d and the rest of us better be more careful next time.

Anyway. In the year between when I started kindergarten and Kavanaugh would have graduated whatever Catholic grade school he might have attended, nuns and priests began taking off their veils and dog collars and leaving the Church in droves, and in the ensuing decade very few young men and women took up vocations to replace them.

So, depending on how the post-Vatican II changes played out in the daily life of his parish, it’s likely young Brett Kavanaugh received more of a lay education than I did, which means he probably wouldn’t have been taught certain lessons we were taught by the Sisters of the Presentation--- the morals to stories of the lives of the saints and what it meant to say that boys will be boys---at least not in the same terms and with the same emphases.

Most of us boys in my grade liked our nuns and felt they liked us. But we also thought they were harder on us than they were on the girls. More demanding, more strict, less forgiving of our mistakes, less tolerant of our minor misbehavior and lapses in judgment, manners, and self-control, less willing to give us the benefit of the doubt, and more likely to administer more severe punishments. And they were.
We thought this was unfair.
They saw it as realistic and necessary.

When people say “Boys will be boys” as an excuse for young men’s bad behavior they usually mean only minor misbehavior. But often they mean actual crimes, from acts of vandalism on up to violent crimes short of murder and sometimes even that. And, of course, there’s the question of what they consider minor misbehavior, and we’re getting reminded that many people think sexual assault is minor misbehavior. Whatever the phrase excuses, however, behind it is the sense that boys are entitled to misbehave and their lives and feelings take precedence over the feelings, lives, and bodies of anyone they hurt. In fact, it’s up to their victims to shrug it off and forgive them because, well, you know, boys will be boys and their lives shouldn’t be ruined because of it.

The sisters at St Helen’s believed that boys would be boys too. But they didn’t see it as an excuse. They saw it as a problem. To some extent, as the problem.

Boys were undisciplined. We lacked self-control. We were impulsive and self-indulgent. We were irresponsible and lazy, and not just when it came to schoolwork but when it involved anything that required mental, spiritual, or moral effort and strength of character and purpose.
We were vain and self-centered. We thought too highly of ourselves and too little of the feelings of others. We could be casually cruel just for fun. We were prone to be bullies and the followers of bullies. We liked to show off for each other by ganging up to pick on whoever we decided was too weak to stand up for themselves at the moment.

Boys who were allowed to get away things because they were just boys being boys grew up to be bad men.

The sisters thought our parents let us get away with too much. They thought they were too often too easy on us, too impressed with our most trivial achievements, too willing to overlook or excuse our worst behavior.
Our nuns thought it was their duty to protect us from ourselves. They did this out of love for the stupid, careless, and naughty boys we were and a greater love for the good men they believed we could become.

End of Part One. Part Two to follow.

Letters from my father he never wrote and never sent

Mined from the notebooks, Monday, August 13, 2018. Posted Sunday morning, August 19.

The obscure writer who wrote one of Pop Mannion’s favorite novels. Copyrighted photo of Saul Bellow by Kelly Wise, courtesy of the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center.

Some people thought he was cracked and for a time he himself doubted that he was all there. But now, though he still behaved oddly, he felt confident, cheerful, clairvoyant, and strong. He had fallen under a spell and was writing letters to everyone under the sun. He was so stirred by these letters that from the end of June he moved from place to place with a valise full of papers. He had carried this valise from New York to Martha’s Vineyard, but returned from the Vineyard immediately; two days later he flew to Chicago, and from Chicago he went to a village in western Massachusetts. Hidden in the country, he wrote endlessly, fanatically, to the newspapers, to people in public life, to friends and relatives and at last to the dead, his own obscure dead, and finally to the famous dead.

That’s from Saul Bellow’s “Herzog”. As I wrote the other day, prodigious reader of non-fiction that he was, Pop Mannion did read fiction and he had a number of favorite novelists and short story writers, but I don’t think Bellow was one of them. He read him, but dutifully, and with nowhere near the same enjoyment he got from Walker Percy, Brian Moore, E.L. Doctorow, Alice Hoffman, Updike, and Vonnegut. But I think “Herzog” was one of his favorite novels. I think of it as one, anyway. Probably because it was the first "grownup" novel I remember talking about with him.

I’m not sure when this was or exactly under what circumstances it occurred. Not when “Herzog” came out, that’s for sure. At that time I hadn’t even started reading the Hardy Boys. Pop thought I was precocious, but I doubt he thought i was precocious enough to discuss contemporary literature. Probably we talked about it when “Mr Sammler’s Planet” appeared. Probably we started talking about that one because I’d noticed he was reading it. Probably I asked him if he liked it. Because, probably, I’d started reading it myself and didn’t like what I’d read. I found it daunting. Not because the writing was beyond my comprehension. I wouldn’t have admitted that even to myself. After all, I’d read "Moby-Dick", "The Lord of the Rings", and half of Shakespeare and was overly proud of myself for that. I could comprehend fine. And that may have been the trouble. I comprehended too well. And I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready for a view of the world as scabrous as Bellow presents in the opening chapter of “Mr Sammler’s Planet”. So probably what I was asking was if Pop thought Bellow was right.

Probably.

I’m guessing. I don’t really remember or what I do remember is bits and pieces of what might very well have been several conversations. Whatever the case, Pop somehow conveyed, either explicitly or by implication, that he liked “Herzog” much better. He also left me with the impression that “Herzog” was a funny book. For a long time after, until I read it for myself in college, I thought of Moses Herzog as a whimsical, little tramp of a character whose eccentric letters to the famous made up most of the book and whatever there was of a plot was sad sack sketch comedy setting up each new epistolary joke.

Pop managed to steer me away from continuing with “Mr Sammler’s Planet” but not towards reading “Herzog”. Given what I thought “Herzog” was like, I wonder what I’d have made of this early paragraph if he had:

It was the peak of summer in the Berkshires. Herzog was alone in the big old house. Normally particular about food, he now ate Silvercup Bread from the paper package, beans from the can, and American cheese. Now and then he picked raspberries in the overgrown garden, lifting up the thorny canes with absent-minded caution. As for sleep, he slept on a mattress without sheets---it was his abandoned marriage bed---or in the hammock, covered by his coat. Tall bearded grass and locust and maple seedlings surrounded him in the yard. When he opened his eyes in the night, the stars were near like spiritual bodies. Fires, of course; gases---minerals, heat, atoms, but eloquent at five in the morning to a man lying in a hammock, wrapped in his overcoat.

Maybe I’d have laughed, thinking it funny, because funny was what I expected the whole novel to be. If I did laugh, I hope I wouldn’t have been laughing at poor Herzog in his loneliness and misfortune. Maybe I was precocious enough by that point that I would have recognized it as comic and known that comic is the flipside of tragic. I doubt I’d have appreciated it as the prose poem it is.

But like I said, I didn’t read “Herzog” until I got to college. I didn’t read any more Bellow until I got to college. And by then I’d picked up on the fact that while Bellow could be funny and was in his way a comic writer the import of what he wrote was not funny. In the meantime, though, I steered myself toward reading other “grownup” writers. I read Mark Twain’s more grownup work---”Roughing It’, “Life on the Mississippi”, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”---I’d already read “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn”---and all of Kurt Vonnegut’s stuff to date, starting with “Slaughterhouse Five”. I read “Catch-22” and Faulkner’s “The Reivers”. I read John Cheever’s “Bullet Park”, which I hated, and “Capable of Honor”, “Advise and Consent”, and “A Shade of Difference” by Alan Drury, which I thought told me all I needed to know about how Washington worked. I read the rest of Shakespeare. Except “Henry VIII” which I still haven’t read to this day. I read Asimov's "Foundation Trilogy". All of this by the time I was a sophomore in high school. When I finally did get back around to Bellow, I started with “The Victim” and “Dangling Man”, both of which left me cold. Not cold enough that I gave up on him. But it was a couple of years before the chill wore off and I made another stab with “Henderson the Rain King”.

“Henderson” cracked me up. For a while after I read it, every chance I got I would say “I want! I want!” and break out laughing. Then I would wonder why nobody around me got the joke. Hadn’t they all read it? Wasn’t it a great American novel? Wasn’t the reference universal because of that? Like "There's a catch" and “So it goes”? I tried reading it to the future Mrs M---the Blonde as was---and I discovered two things. She didn’t like being read to---still doesn’t---and I never made that mistake again. And “Henderson” wasn’t as funny out loud as it was in my head.

Anyway, I kept reading Bellow. Next up was “The Adventures of Augie March”, which instilled in me the still unfulfilled ambition to write my own coming of age story in the form of a raffish bildungsroman, and “The Dean’s December”. By the time “The Dean’s December” came out, I was working in the bookstore and reading every new “literary” novel that came into the store as homework in preparation for my applying to grad school. I was also reading a lot of criticism, also for homework, and somewhere I read that “The Dean’s December” represented a falling off in Bellow’s talent and a curdling of his vision, and I believed it. It was there I stopped with Bellow. I went back to him later. Other contemporary writers captured my attention, became influences, obsessions, heroes, and favorites. Paul Theroux, William Trevor, William Kennedy, Elmore Leonard, Mavis Gallant, John D. MacDonald, John Updike, Philip Roth. I had a fitful and often antagonistic relation with Roth. Still do. But it's kept me going back to his books again and again.There have been plenty of others. And then there's the dead. The list of them is too long to get into here, but Dickens, Dostoevsky, Conrad, Chekhov, Faulkner, Joyce, and Flannery O'Connor would top it.. All told, I left myself little time and room to squeeze in more Bellow. Somewhere along the way I read “Seize the Day”, “Mr Sammler’s Planet”, and “Herzog.” I didn't get to “Humboldt’s Gift” until I was in my late thirties. It’s still my favorite of his books. 

What I never got around to doing was asking Pop what exactly he liked about “Herzog”. It’s hard to imagine he was much taken with the plot or with Moses Herzog himself. He probably just enjoyed the writing and found it funny. But I can’t help thinking it was the letters. I think he identified with Herzog’s impulse to write cranky letters to strangers. I can imagine him imagining himself he getting some things off his chest by sitting down to write earnestly-worded letters to, well, anyone he thought could benefit from his advice, praise, criticism, or simple correction.

In reality, Pop wasn’t a letter-writer. He kept up a voluminous correspondence by email once that was commonplace, but most of that was business and politics and replies to email he received. He rarely initiated a conversation and he usually let it drop quickly when he did. Before email, whatever he communicated was probably just the same, business and politics and polite replies, only less of it. That’s my impression, anyway. We’ll see what turns up when we go through his papers. But I’m getting a kick out of imagining that hidden behind a filing cabinet or stashed away in a far corner of the attic, we’ll find a battered valise stuffed full of bundles of unsent Herzog-esque letters, going back to when he was young…

Dear Professor Einstein, even though I am only twelve years old and wasn’t yet born at the time you published your general and special theories of relativity, as a budding genius to an established one, let me offer my belated congratulations on the economy of your insight that energy does indeed equal mass times the speed of light squared; however, I have a question…

__________________________________

Dear Admiral Rickover,

Although I am only an ROTC cadet and a second year physics major at Rennselear Polytechnic Insitute, I hope you will forgive my presumption in making this suggestion, but, and you may have already considered this, it occurs to me that a submarine powered by twin nuclear reactors...

__________________________________

Dear President Johnson,

I understand your anxiety about going down in history as the first American president to lose a war, but you really shouldn’t worry on that score. That dubious distinction belongs to our fourth president, James Madison, who, as you probably remember, had to flee the White House---then known as the Executive Mansion---just of ahead of the British Troops invading Washington in the War of 1812. When your capital city is occupied and put to the torch, that definitely should count as a loss. Just a side note: as I’m sure you know, the White House became a white house when its scorched gray exterior was given a coat of white paint as part of the restoration that took place after the British burned the place down…

__________________________________

Dear Thomas Kincade,

My wife and I have long enjoyed the affinity we feel with your vision as expressed in your paintings. Some have dismissed your work as sentimental and overly-nostalgic and idealized, but we have always been taken by the essential truth behind the supposed sentimentality; it speaks to our hearts and expressed our hopes and dreams with a faithfulness that has given us great comfort over the years. A print of “Cobblestone Bridge” hangs over our living room sofa and every December we look forward to replacing last year’s kitchen calendar with this year’s. But, I’m sorry to say, that we have noticed something in your latest calendar that has caused us to question our relationship with your work and, by extension, with you yourself. I refer specifically to the painting that accompanies the page for June…

__________________________________

Dear great-grandfather Mannion,

Allow me to give you some advice about the job offer you will soon get for work in the sandpit from the General Forge and Foundry Company...

There we go. Now I just have to explain to myself what he enjoyed so much about “A Confederacy of Dunces”.

"Something humdrum about being bad": A study of Pop Mannion's reading habits

Posted Sunday morning, August 12, 2018.

One of Pop Mannion’s favorite authors, Graham Greene. Even though they were both Catholic, Pop didn’t share Greene’s brand of guilt-ridden Catholicism, still Greene was one of the few writers whose books Pop read through to the end. Photo via the Paris Review.

I inherited very little of Pop Mannion’s brains and almost none of his gifts. I did inherit a bunch of his foibles, flaws, weaknesses, quirks, and enthusiasms. Among them: his taste for sweets; his love of baseball; and his habit of acquiring books he was never going to read or if he did wouldn’t ever finish. To Mom Mannion’s frustration and dismay, books piled up at the old Mannion homestead in two foot high stacks seemingly overnight. They ran out of shelf space and one of the upstairs bedrooms, which had become Pop's home office, steadily decreased in floorspace as the stacks were moved out of the living room and up there (instead of carried out to the car to be donated to the library as Mom wished) until it got to the point that Pop’s desk was walled within a bunker of books and reachable only by a narrow path through the tomes. Or so it seemed. At any rate, it’s a good bet that most of those books---probably nearly all of them---he didn’t read through to the end. Many of them he didn’t read past the first few chapters. He saw no point in continuing with a book that wasn’t holding his interest, but it usually wasn’t the case that he’d gotten bored or wasn’t enjoying the book. It was most often that he’d read a review in the New York Times of a new book that had just come out and that stole his attention and had gone right out to Barnes & Noble to buy it. Or, just as likely, he got the gist of a book, saw where it was heading, and in his head got there ahead of the author and then some.

He was also, like his hero Franklin Roosevelt, another collector of books he never read all the way through, a spot-reader. He acquired a book for the information on a subject he was interested in for curiosity’s sake or because he was researching it, went first to the index, and then read only those parts that were relevant to him at the moment.

So it was typical when I borrowed a book from him to come across one or more  of the used envelopes he tended to use as bookmarks marking the place where he’d left off or the places where he’d found the information he was looking for. It was a fun intellectual game to try to figure out from the bookmarks what he’d been researching. On the envelopes he’d scribble lists of words and another game was trying to figure out why he’d written down those particular words. Odds were, when I was stumped and asked him, he couldn’t tell me. He’d read so many more books since the one I was asking about that he couldn’t remember himself and then we’d try to solve the mystery together. They were probably words he just liked for their meaning or inherent poetry and he wanted to use them in his own writing, or, in the rare case when they were new to him, he was entering them into his own prodigious mental dictionary and thesaurus.

Pop read broadly, mostly non-fiction, preferring books about science and history, and within both categories he read mainly biographies. He collected books about FDR and this past spring when Ken told him how he and I were listening to Jon Meacham’s "Franklin and Winston" he was surprised at himself for not having heard of it and having it in his collection. Ken gave him a copy for his last birthday. I hope he had a chance to not finish it. I didn’t get a chance to check for the envelope when we were up for the funeral. I will next time we visit Mom Mannion.

Pop did read a good deal of fiction. He had a number of favorite writers whose books he bought as soon as they came out or were reissued. Walker Percy. Brian Moore, Alice Hoffman, Stephen Millhauser, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, T.C. Boyle, E.L. Doctorow, Vonnegut, Nabokov, Updike, and Graham Greene. Pop’s affection for Greene is actually the point of this post.

Long way to go for it, as usual. Sorry about that, Dad.

Pop always thought I had a bad habit of writing too long, indulging a weakness for going on and on. My feeling is, like father, like son. It’s part of my inheritance.

Anywho...

Last night I was reading Paul Theroux’s new collection of travel essays, “Figures in a Landscape”. One of the essays is about Graham Greene.Good Catholic that he was, Pop read Greene for his Catholic themes, although he didn’t share Greene’s guilt-ridden, conscience-stricken, we’re-all-on-our-way-to-hell brand of Catholicism. So I think he’d have gotten a kick out of this....

While there is something humdrum about being bad, and an irrational banality in the act of doing wrong, high drama can be achieved with the words “sinning” and “evil.” Greene indulged himself by casting his action in those terms. Right and wrong didn’t interest him, but good and evil did. Orwell remarked that Greene seemed to share the idea, “which has been floating around since Baudelaire, that there is something rather distingue about being damned.”

Maybe he’d have gotten too much of a kick out of it. Pop wasn’t a particular fan of Theroux. That would be me. But I’m imagining Pop liking that quote so much he’d run out and buy "Figures in a Landscape" to add to his latest stack of books he’d never finish and Mom Mannion frowning and wondering why he didn’t just select one of Greene’s novels out of his collection and re-read that.

Of Pop Mannion, Mrs M, spinach pasta, and the persistence of memory

Posted Saturday, August 11, 2018.

Members of the Wedding: Pop Mannion, his new beloved daughter-in-law, the brand-new Mrs M, some guy in a rented tux, and Mom Mannion. May 28, 1988.

Mrs M has been home from the hospital three weeks now, and in those three weeks she’s made excellent progress in her recovery. Physically. She’s been regaining her strength. Walking more and farther and standing longer. Her coordination’s improving. She’s still wobbly on her pins. Her balance isn’t what it needs to be. Her left arm and left leg are still showing signs of neglect and are much weaker than her right. She has to be reminded to use her left hand and her left foot doesn’t always want to hold her up, so she’s in constant danger of falling and one of us needs to be nearby to spot her when she’s up and about. But with Ken acting as her personal trainer, she’s been diligent about doing her exercises. She surprises her physical and occupational therapists with her progress with each visit. And her doctors are thrilled. The trouble now is she’s getting cocky and thinks she can do more than she can. One of the things she thinks she can do is drive. This is a point she returns to again and again.

“You can’t drive,” I tell her, refusing gently but firmly to give her the keys.

“Who says?”

“Me, for one.”

“What do you know?”

“The doctors.”

“Oh, them.”

“Your therapists. New York State. Pretty much the whole world. Nobody wants you driving yet. You’d be a menace to traffic.”

“I would not.”

“You still have trouble navigating around the house. You turn right when you want to go left trying to get from the kitchen to the living room. I let you take the car to the grocery store and the next thing I know I'm getting a call from the Oregon state police telling me to come get you.”

“You worry too much. Where are the keys?”

Mrs M’s determination to get in the car and go is somewhat unnerving, mainly because she’s sneaky and quick. One day Oliver caught her on her way out the door and had to haul her back in the house. But as scary as it can be, it’s also heartening. I take it as a sign her old independence of spirit and need to keep herself busy are reasserting themselves. It shows she’s getting better, although, as is characteristic, she’s impatient and in too much of a hurry. What’s truly disconcerting is where she wants to drive to and when.

One example: Evenings after dinner she announces she has to go into the office for a bit to finish up some work.

The office she’s referring to is the newspaper office where she hasn’t worked in five years.

Physically her progress has been steady. Cognitively she’s been improving in fits and starts as her brain works to knit itself back together, a slow, complex, and unpredictable process. Mainly she’s been experiencing what are called confabulations, a mixing up of real memories with false memories with what’s actually taking place with what she’s imagining taking place. To listen to her confabulate is like listening to someone describe a dream while dreaming, with the dream being very real to the dreamer. Sometimes it’s as if Mrs M is living in two and even three realities at once, this one, an alternative and largely imagined one, and a remembered one. For instance, routinely in the mornings since she’s been home she’s waked up in her parents’ house and had her coffee in their kitchen while recognizing our bedroom and our kitchen and wondering how we managed to bring all our kitchenware down with us when we came to visit.

Her thoughts have to take detours and they don’t always get on the same train and travel along the same tracks. And some of those trains are hauling cars loaded with false memories and jumbled memories, and the passengers are looking out the windows at imagined landscapes and towns, and the trains are stopping at imagined stations to take on more confabulations.

The trains can be redirected and all the cars coupled on the same track, and her thoughts arrive at their scheduled destinations. It just makes for an interesting journey. And there’s a psychological aspect as well as a neurological one, although the two are part and parcel. Her confabulations usually seem to have roots in what is really going on or represent wishful thinking. Mrs M is itching to get back to work as a newswoman so her mixed up brain is telling her she already is.

Mrs M is aware this is part of her condition and sometimes it amuses her and even makes her laugh at herself. She calls her confabulations and memory confusions “brain hiccups” and tells people “my brain is loose.” I’m not sure she isn’t making a pun there, describing how some screws still need tightening and how her thinking occasionally escapes her control and goes wandering on its own. Her surgeons and her neurologist assure us that this will clear up, it’s just going to take several months.

Her other major cognitive issue is with her short-term memory. It’s not that she’s experiencing short-term memory loss. It’s more like short-term memory misplacement. New information takes a while to get stored where she can get at it easily when she needs to recall it. It’s as if on her way to put them on their proper shelves in  her mental attic she gets tired of climbing the stairs and puts the memories in a side closet to be carried up later, then when she needs them she forgets to look in that closet. Usually a gentle reminder is all it takes for her to go look. Sometimes she has to be told. When she finds them, she seems to recognize them. She actually remembers. But sometimes a memory comes back to her as news and she’s surprised by it as if this is the first she’s heard of it.

Which brings me to the other morning, Wednesday, two days after Pop Mannion’s funeral.

When I went to help her get up and get dressed, Mrs M noticed I wasn’t my usual ebullient I’ve-been-up-since-four-a.m.-and-I’m-still-full-of-vim-and vigor-and-rarin’-to-go self.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“It’s a sad morning,” I said.

“What are you sad about?”

“My dad.”

She reached out and stroked my cheek. “He’ll get better,” she said soothingly. Back in the beginning of May, when she went into the hospital, we thought that he would. I almost didn’t have the heart to tell her.

“Kid,” I began. We really do call each other kid. “Kid, we went to the funeral, Monday.”

She looked stricken. Her lips and chin quivered and her eyes filled with tears. It all came back to her in a rush.

A moment like this has happened just about every day since Pop died. Mrs M and Pop were very close. I’ve only had to lose my father once. She’s lost her beloved father-in-law five or six times and will likely lose him a few more until the memories finally make it to their proper place in the attic.

I debated with myself over what order to tell this, whether I should put the sad part or the funny part first. Yep. There’s a funny part. Obviously, that was the sad part. So here’s the funny part.

Pop loved all four of his daughters-in-law and both his sons-in-law, but he and Mrs M had a special affinity. They could talk to each other about politics and current events, the news business, books, and sports with an enthusiasm and directness and sense of fun that was a delight to listen in on. There was a time, when I was in my late teens and early twenties, when Pop and Mom Mannion nearly despaired of me. The thing that convinced them I wasn’t the complete screw-up and ne’er-do-well I appeared to be was my bringing this ebullient, gregarious, big-hearted, smart, talented, and ambitious curly-headed blonde home and then getting her somehow to agree to marry me. Not only did Pop enjoy talking with her, he enjoyed that she fed him well. On one of her early visits to the Old Mannion Homestead, Mrs M---the Blonde as was---made dinner for the whole clan. She was just learning to be the great cook she is, but she already had a delicious specialty, a spinach and cheese pasta dish that Uncle Merlin can attest is addictive. Pop devoured it. But it wasn’t until his third or fourth helping that he asked.

“What is this?”

“Spinach pasta,” he was told.

Pop looked taken aback.

“It can’t be,” he said.

“Why not?” Mrs M wondered.

“I don’t like spinach,” Pop said matter of factly.

So that’s the funny part. And whenever Mrs M gets sad about Pop, I just have to say “spinach” and she brightens right up. She remembers. Truly remembers. Not just that he’s gone but how happy we all were when he was here and how happy the two of them were whenever they got together, although...

She’s taught herself many more recipes over the years and I’m not sure she ever served him spinach again.

Flags for Pop

Posted Monday morning, August 6, 2018.

Flags at the Niskayuna town hall flew at half-mast for former supervisor Ed Reilly who died this past Wednesday and is being buried today. Most of you know that Ed was known on the blog as Pop Mannion. He was known in the real world as a great man. This story in one of the local papers doesn’t even get at the half of it…

"There is no one in recent memory who has had a greater impact on the town of Niskayuna than former supervisor Ed Reilly," said Denise Murphy McGraw, a member of the Town Board, in an email. "He continued to have a positive impact until his final days through the advice he provided to his daughter Diane [currently the town’s Receiver of Taxes], me and other town officials. I will miss his wise counsel, quick smile and good nature."

To read the whole article in the Daily Gazette, follow the link to Former Niskayuna Supervisor Edwin D. Reilly Jr. di

Not sure who took the top photo and when. Bottom photo is by my sister who took it Thursday morning, August 2, when she brought Mom Mannion to see the flags. Mom nearly burst with pride.

es.

Mrs M the Pest

Posted Monday, May 28, 2018.

Way back in 1968, Beverly Cleary predicted the course of my life over the last thirty years in her wonderful book “Ramona the Pest”. I didn’t read “Ramona” when it came out. I was too caught up in the Hardy Boys. But Mrs M did and loved it, and I’ve often wondered if it put ideas in her head:

Ramona came to a halt at the intersection guarded by Henry Huggins in his yellow slicker…”Look at all the nice mud,” she said [to her friend Howie], pointing to the area that was to be the parking lot for the new market. It was such nice mud, rich and brown with puddles and little rivers in the tire tracks left by the construction trucks. It was the best mud, the most tempting mud Ramona had ever seen. Best of all, the day was so rainy there were no construction workers around to tell anyone to say out of the mud.

“Come on, Howie” said Romana. “I’m going to see how my boots work in the mud.” Of course she would get her shiny boots muddy, but then she could have the fun of turning the hose on them that afternoon after kindergarten…

“Ramona, you come back here!” yelled Henry. “You’re going to get into trouble.”

“Traffic boys aren’t supposed to talk on duty,” Ramona reminded him, and marched straight into the mud…

“You’re going to get stuck!” [Henry] yelled.

“No, I’m not!” insisted Ramona, and discovered she was unable to raise her right boot. She tried to raise her left boot, but it was stuck fast…

Ramona’s chin began to quiver.

“Look at Ramona! Look at Ramona!” shrieked the kindergarten, as [their teacher] Miss Binney, in a raincoat and with a plastic hood over her hair, appeared on the playground.

“Oh dear!” Ramona heard Miss Binney say…

The second bell rang. Miss Binney was not looking at Ramona. She was looking thoughtfully at Henry Huggins, who seemed to be staring at something way off in the distance…

“Boy!” Miss Binney called out. “Traffic boy!”

“Who? Me?” asked Henry, even though he was the only traffic boys stationed at that intersection.

“That’s Henry Huggins,” said helpful Ramona.

“Henry, come here, please,” said Miss Binney.

“I’m supposed to go in when the whistle blows,” said Henry, as he glanced up at the boys and girls who were watching from the big brick [school] building.

“But this is an emergency,” Miss Binney pointed out. “You have boots on, and I need your help in getting this little girl out of the mud. I’ll explain to the principal.”

Henry did not seem very enthusiastic as he splashed across the street, and when he came to the mud he heaved a big sigh before he stepped into it. Carefully he picked his way through the muck and puddles to Ramona. “Now see what you got me into,” he said crossly. “I told you to keep out of here.”

For once Ramona had nothing to say. Henry was right.

“I guess I’ll have to carry you,” he said and his tone was grudging. “Hang on.” He stopped and grasped Ramona around the waist, and she obediently put her arms around the wet collar of his raincoat…

Henry lurched and skidded through the mud to the sidewalk, where he set his burden down in front of Miss Binney.

“Thank you, Henry,” said Miss Binney with real gratitude, as Henry tried to scrape the mud from his boots on the edge of the curb. “What do you say, Ramona?”

“Thank you, Henry,” Ramona called after him [as he started across the street to school]. There was something very special about being rescued by a big, strong traffic boy in a yellow slicker…

Then something on the sidewalk caught Ramona’s eye. It was a pink worm that still had some wiggle left in it. She picked it up and wound it around her finger as she looked toward Henry. “I’m going to marry you, Henry Huggins!” she called out.

Even though traffic boys were supposed to stand up straight, Henry seemed to hunch down inside his raincoat as if he were trying to disappear.

“I’ve got an engagement ring, and I’m going to marry you!” yelled Ramona after Henry, as the morning kindergarten laughed and cheered.

I had to edit this episode quite a bit for length, but if you know the book you know that when Henry plucks Ramona out of the mud he lifts her right out of her boots which get left behind as he carries her to dry land. To stop her crying, he plods back in and rescues the boots. That’s been me. That’s been us. Thirty years of me grumpily chasing after my Ramona and picking up the boots she’s run right out of as she’s marched cheerfully and bravely into the mud. The difference between me and Henry Huggins has been that I’ve always found that there’s something interesting and exciting Mrs M has led me to as she’s marched confidently onward.

Mrs M the Pest on our honeymoon in May 1988 somewhere on the trail on Cape Cod in the middle of a bike ride she organized and which for some dumb reason I initially resisted going on. At the end of the trail, following directions Mrs M got from a park ranger she made fast friends with in a five minute conversation, we had our first lunch at what was to become one of our favorite seafood shacks on the Cape. I should have learned right then but it took me thirty years to realize it: Following Mrs M into the mud always leads to fun and adventure.

Coop was a sweet man

Posted Saturday night, April 7, 2018.

Gary Cooper and my third favorite Bridges, Jeff and Beau’s father Lloyd, as Marshall Will Kane and his unreliable, opportunistic, and rivalrous deputy just before they begin their epic fistfight in “High Noon”,” a scene they would have to film twice, thanks to seven-year-old Beau.

Ken and I are listening to Glenn Frankel’s “High Noon:The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic”. It’s a pretty grim book which isn’t a surprise, considering it’s centered on on one of the most shameful periods in post World War II American history. But it’s not without fun, being also about making movies, and this is one of my favorite moments of fun in the books. In fact, I love this story, mainly because of what it says about Gary Cooper but also because I’m a Bridges fan. All three Bridges. Lloyd, Beau, and especially Jeff. I became a fan of Lloyd when I was a little kid and “Sea Hunt” was one of my favorite Saturday morning TV shows. So I was predisposed to become fans of his sons when I became aware of them. I became a fan of Beau when I was a teenager and he starred as a young Ben Franklin in "The Lives of Benjamin Franklin", one of the most interesting of TV miniseries of the time---five different actors played Franklin at various stages of his life, including Willie Ames, Richard Widmark, Melvin Douglas, and Eddie Albert. I thought Beau was the best.---and  “Gaily, Gaily”, a movie I took as predicting my future even though it was set in the 1890s. Jeff was already a movie star but I was later and slower to join his fan club. The movies that made him a star---“The Last Picture Show”, “Fat City”, and “Bad Company” were rated R and I wasn’t allowed to go see them. But then I saw “Rancho Deluxe” and then, with greater appreciation and affection, “Hearts of the West”, another movie I took as predicting my future even though it was set in the 1920s. It contained an exchange between Bridges as a would-be novelist and Andy Griffith as a one-time famous one I took to heart and that’s stayed there ever since. “Son,” Griffith says, “You’re not a writer until someone else calls you a writer.” (You can imagine how I felt in grad school when the novelist Fred Busch called me a writer.) After that, it was “Starman”, then “The Fabulous Baker Boys” (which also renewed my fanship for brother Beau), and finally “The Fisher King” that convinced me that Jeff was the greatest movie actor of his generation. (No apologies to Meryl necessary. This is why I contend we need the word actress. It cuts down on wordy clarifications like this one.) But to get back to “High Noon” and the making of “High Noon”:

The last day on location was devoted to filming the fight scene between [Marshal Will Kane and Deputy] Harvey Pell, played by Gary Cooper and Lloyd Bridges] in the livery stable. Lloyd Bridges says [Cooper, who was fifty and an old fifty] was reluctant to do the scene because his back was hurting and he had other physical ailments as well. But in the end he decided to perform it without a stunt double.

Before the filming began, Bridges smuggled his wife, Dorothy, and his seven-year-old son, Beau, who were visiting the set, up to a hayloft to watch. Lloyd explained to Beau that it would be a pretend fight and no one would get hurt. But when at the end Cooper threw a bucket of water on Beau’s supposedly unconscious dad, the boy burst out laughing. “My father did not tell me he was going to get knocked out,” recalled Beau, himself now a highly respected actor, more than sixty years later. “Then Cooper goes over and throws a bucket of water on him, and I wasn’t ready for that, and I just started cackling and laughing and I destroyed the shot.”

The two men had to film the entire fight scene again. Cooper never uttered a word of complaint.

Beau said his father bawled him out all the way back to the hotel, but when Cooper got on the elevator with them he invited Lloyd and his family to join him for dinner. “He was a sweet man,” Lloyd Bridges would recall”

Bridges, by the way, was a committed ultra-liberal activist who for a very short time was a Communist, which earned him an appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He named names. Just about everybody named names. If you didn’t you risked being arrested for contempt of Congress and then blacklisted. Actually, naming names didn’t always save people from the blacklist. Bridges wasn’t blacklisted but he was “graylisted.” He had been a young star on the rise but he didn’t work steadily again until he was cast in “Sea Hunt”, eight years later.

I told you it’s a grim book. Very few people come off well in it. But you know who comes out among the best? Cooper. Who was a very conservative Republican.

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“High Noon” by Glenn Frankel is available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible. “High Noon” the movie is available for streaming, also at Amazon.

No use making a fuss about growing old: birthday greetings from my new dead writer friend

Posted Thursday evening, March 1, 2018.

Got a birthday card from my new writer friend yesterday.

You knew yesterday was my birthday, right? Yep. Thank you. I know. I don’t look it, do I? Not a day over 365 days from last year. Anyway…

My new writer friend sneaked a birthday message to into her last book. I mean her last book. She won’t be writing any more. My new writer friend is a dead writer. And I don’t mean I recently lost a friend. I mean we didn’t become friends until after she was dead. Ursula Le Guin.

When she died in January, I decided it was time for me to catch up and read her work I hadn’t read when she was alive. Which turned out to be nearly all of it.

I’ve never been a fan of science fiction.

As a genre.

I’ve enjoyed individual novels, stories, movies and TV shows that happen to fall into the genre. I tend not to think of them as science fiction, though, even though that’s what they are. At any rate, science fiction isn’t a thing itself I seek out. Just the opposite sometimes. I’ve actively avoided something that’s come to my notice as science fiction.

This isn’t snobbery. I don’t dismiss science fiction as a lesser form. I don’t think of the science fiction I’ve enjoyed as being good despite their being science fiction. It’s simply a matter of preference. I prefer “literary” fiction. I prefer mysteries. I prefer non-fiction, history, journalism, and biography. There are only so many books you can read in a lifetime, and time is growing short. But even when I had more time ahead of me, I avoided science fiction, mostly out of habit and, like I said, preference. In libraries and bookstores, I drifted towards familiar sections and aisles. It might also have been a matter of association. Science fiction will always be associated in my head with buying a copy of Robert Silverberg’s “Tower of Glass” from the rotating metal rack of the sad grocery store in the sad town on Lake George where for a brief time Mom and Pop Mannion owned a summer home they really couldn’t afford and none of us Mannion kids liked. Mom Mannion had mixed feelings about the place too. Pop loved it for its big front porch where he liked to sit in a rocker all day and take in the panoramic view of the lake. I liked it best---I only liked it---at night when Pop and I would sit inside by one of the two fireplaces and read, each with his own choice of reading material. The previous owner had left behind a bookcase full of Book of the Month Club main selections and that’s how I first came to read writers like John Cheever, David Halberstam, and Kurt Vonnegut. But I must have had them all read when I found myself in that sad grocery store with ninety-five cents burning a hole in my pocket and Silverberg’s book with its icy blue and black cover staring me in the eye.

I knew something about it ahead of buying it. My best friend Sandy was a science fiction fan and he’d read it and told me the highlights. The plot revolved around a secret religion invented by a race of androids who were themselves invented to serve as slaves to the richest man in history who was using them to build a giant communications tower in the Arctic from which he intends to make contact with intelligent life in another galaxy. The female androids had ruby red skin and spent most if not all their time naked. I bought it for the religious symbolism and biblical allusions, of course.

I was fourteen.

It wasn’t as sexy a story as I expected. It was kind of creepy, actually. I expected the sex to be romantic, physically joyful, and mutually satisfying. I was a naive kid and didn’t know much about sex other than than biological basics, but I believed adult lovers finished their lovemaking in love. I hadn’t read “For Whom the Bell Tolls” yet, so I didn’t imagine them asking each other “Did the earth move for you?” but I thought lovers were considerate of each other’s feelings and they’d ask each other something like it and were happily relieved when they each answered “Yes!” Which of course they would. Android-human sex seemed weirdly dispassionate and twisted by self-loathing. I was too young to understand what it meant that the androids were slaves. I finished “Tower of Glass” feeling confused and alienated. From then on, science fiction was all versions of “Tower of Glass” and forever associated with adolescent loneliness, longing, and disappointment. If I was John Updike there’d be a short story in that.

So this is how it happened that although she was already famous when I first heard of her---although it probably wasn’t because she was famous that I heard of her. Either Sandy or some other friend likely called her to my notice.---and she was diligently and prolifically at work my entire adult reading life, growing increasingly famous and more and more highly regarded as a writer, a poet, and a thinker as time wore on---she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997!--- I managed to read very little of her work and what I did read didn’t include Earthsea, not even “A Wizard of Earthsea”.  I might have read “The Left Hand of Darkness”. Back when I worked in a bookstore in Boston I was in charge of our fiction sections, including the science fiction section, and I made a conscientious effort to read the new releases and Hugo and Nebula Award winners and classics so I wouldn’t come across as a complete idiot to customers. I may have read it then but if I did I have no recollection of it. And it explains why now that I’ve set out to read as much of what I didn’t read in the time I have left I’ve started with her non-fiction. And it’s the reason I now think of her as a friend. I’ve grown fond of the person she come across as in the essays and blog posts collected in her newest and last book, “No Time to Spare”.

Of course she had a blog. She was also on Twitter. Le Guin was old-fashioned and conservative in certain ways---I should say in certain of her ways---but she was progressive and forward-thinking in many others, something you might expect of a science fiction writer but is not universally the case. Think of Robert Heinlein. Think of Orson Scott Card. Then again, save yourself the headache and don’t.

Of course I’m aware that the person I’m think I’m chums with is a “person.” A persona. A character Le Guin created for herself to pass off as herself to her readers and audiences when she lectured and read in public. In other words, she is a “she” and as a “she” she's a work of art---a figment of Le Guin’s imagination. “Ursula Le Guin” is somebody Ursula Le Guin made up. That’s what writers do. They make things up. She once said novelists are in the business of lying. She didn’t specify that they only lied when the wrote fiction. So it’s possible I’m pals in my head with a lie. But I have a feeling “she’s” awfully close to the real McCoy or a least “Le Guin” and Le Guin have a whole lot in common. I hope so. Whichever or whoever, I like her. She seems like she’d have been the older, wiser, wryer colleague and friend I wanted and needed when I was a young teacher and ambitious but clueless wannabe writer.

Presumptuous of me to think she’d have wanted me for a friend. But there it is.

Since she wrote the essay in which she sneaked in my birthday card when she was eighty-three, I’m imagining she really meant it for my octogenarian self and expects me to deliver it when I meet the geezer in a couple more decades. I’m not looking forward to meeting him. In fact, I’d rather not meet him. But as Le Guin herself says, “Consider the alternative.” I don’t like considering the alternative or what it will be like when we do meet. I don’t want to think we’ll have anything in common. Lately, though, I have felt some sympathy for the old coot. Things are signs we already have stuff to talk about. Anyway. Here’s Le Guin’s birthday greetings to him via me. It’s from the essay I quoted the other day, “The Diminished Thing”:

A lot of younger people, seeing the reality of old age as entirely negative, see acceptance of age as negative. Wanting to to deal with old people in a positive spirit, they’re led to deny old people their reality.

With all good intentions, people say to me, “Oh, you’re not old!”

And the pope isn’t Catholic.

“You’re only as old as you think you are!”

Now, you don’t honestly think having lived eighty-three years is a matter of opinion…

Old age isn’t a state of mind. It’s an existential situation…

I think the tradition of respecting old age in itself has some justification. Just coping with daily life, doing stuff that was always so easy you didn’t notice it, gets harder in old age, till it may take real courage to do it at all. Old age generally involves pain and danger and inevitably ends in death. The acceptance of that takes courage. Courage deserves respect…

…diminishment isn’t all there is to aging. Far from it…

If memory remains sound and the thinking mind retains its vigor, an old intelligence may have extraordinary breadth and depth of understanding. It’s had more time to gather knowledge and more practice in comparison and judgment. No matter if the knowledge is intellectual or practical or emotional., if it concerns alpine ecosystems or the Buddha nature or how to reassure a frightened child: when you meet an old person with that kind of knowledge, if you have the sense of a bean sprout you know you’re in a rare and irreproducible presence.

Same goes for old people who keep their skill at any craft or art they’ve worked at for all those years. Practice does make perfect. They know how, they know it all, and beauty flows effortlessly from what they do.

But all such existential enlargements brought by living long are under threat from the lessening of strength and stamina. However well compensated for by intelligent coping mechanisms, small or large breakdowns in one bit of the body or another begin to restrict activity, while the memory is dealing with overload and slippage. Existence in old age is progressively diminished by each of these losses and restrictions. It’s no use saying it isn’t so, because it is so.

It’s no use making a fuss about it, or being afraid of it, either, because nobody can change it…

Hmm. She left off the “Happy Birthday!”

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Recommended related Mannion re-run: Why I don't like Science Fiction even when I do and vice versa.

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"No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters" by Ursula K. Le Guin is available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.

"Spotlight" and the last conversation I had with a priest

Posted Saturday night, February 10, 2012.

Rachel McAdams as Boston Globe reporter Sacha Pfeiffer realizes that a “retired” priest who’s admitted to molesting children lives unsupervised down the street from a school in Spotlight, the movie about the Globe’s investigation of the sex abuse scandal that should have brought about the collapse of the Catholic Church.

The last serious conversation I had with a priest was nearly fifteen years ago and it ended with him calling Mrs M and me bad parents and me telling him to go to hell.

That was the day I was done with the Catholic Church forever. And it broke my heart.

By that point in my life I wasn’t much of a Catholic. I was barely a believer. But I had been both whole-heartedly when I was young. I was proud of having been raised Catholic. I was grateful for my Catholic grade school education. I had nothing but fond memories of being an altar boy. The priests I served with were great guys. The nuns who taught me were smart, progressive, demanding, and kind. Over the years, my faith and the practice of it brought me mostly joy. I was a lazy CAPE Catholic by the time we became parents, but when Mrs M decided she wanted to raise the boys Catholic, I was glad. And when the time came I was happy and proud to send them off to Catholic school. Which is where the trouble began.

In first grade, Ken’s physical and emotional development problems started to show themselves, his several learning disabilities and blocks began to take their toll. And we had no idea what was happening to him. All we knew was that a very bright, imaginative, creative, happy, and kind little boy who wanted nothing so much as to please his parents and teachers and other kids suddenly couldn’t do anything right. With his friends and in class, it seemed to be always the case that whenever he should have turned left, he turned right, whenever he should have pushed the on button, he pushed off. He was constantly annoying the other kids, exasperating his teachers, and frustrating himself.  He became anxious, fretful, lonely, and desperately unhappy. Predictably and understandably, he acted out by misbehaving. Not by being naughty and disobedient, exactly, at least not usually. By either refusing to participate, getting silly, or by melting down in tears.

Having no idea what was wrong and therefore no ideas about how to help him, Mrs M and I turned for guidance and advice to the people whose job, we thought, was to look out for the children in their professional care, his teachers, the principal, the pastor, and eventually the head of the diocesan schools.

That last person was the priest who called us bad parents and I told to go to hell.

We got no help or guidance. The pastor and the principal made it increasingly clear that Ken was our problem to solve and the way they thought we should solve it was by taking him off their hands. We should have done it right then. We might have if we weren’t afraid he’d get lost in the public schools---the public elementary school in our neighborhood was one of the most chaotic in the city, with a reputation for a lack of order and discipline, and one thing we knew was that Ken did best in quiet, structured, predictable situations---and if we weren’t such still-loyal Catholics. We thought it was important that he get a Catholic education because almost unconsciously we believed that was the only kind of real and complete education there was.

Mrs M and I weren’t helpless. We didn’t throw our hands up in despair. We sought out specialists and counselors on our own.  But it was slow going and led to many dead ends. Eventually, our family doctor got Ken in to see the top child neuropsychologist in town and he made the diagnoses of Asperger’s, ADD, and dyscalculia that got Ken the IEP and the special education he needed and essentially saved his life.  But by then he was in fourth grade and well and good out of Catholic school.

Two-thirds of his way through second grade, in the spring of 2001, our pastor told us Ken would not be welcomed back for third grade. Not only that, he would have to finish second grade at home or somewhere else.

That’s when we made one last appeal to the head of the diocesan schools. That’s when he called us bad parents. That’s when it finally dawned on me.

While Ken’s situation was coming to a head, the molestation scandal was breaking.  The Boston Globe’s investigative series that’s at the center of the movie Spotlight hadn’t yet begun to run but there’d been enough stories in the news in the Globe and elsewhere and over a long enough period to realize, if you thought about it, something even more heinous was going on than that a few bad priests here and there were sexual predators.

There were too many for the church higher ups not to have known. There were too many who weren’t defrocked for it not to be a policy not to punish them as they deserved. There were too many put back into regular parish work after a year or so of “counseling” and “therapy” for it not to be the case that pastors and bishops cared more about the deviant priests than about their past and future victims. There were too many of these predator-priests and too much official looking the other way for all the other priests who weren’t idiots or predators themselves not to know what was going on and too few of them on record as having tried to put a stop to it even by complaining to church authorities, never mind going to the police, for it not to be the truth that just about every priest was to some degree complicit.

Even the rare bishops who policed their own dioceses and punished the predators and protected their flocks were guilty of not doing more to stop what they knew was going on in other dioceses.

The Church was rotten from top to bottom, and while it was desperately protecting and enabling child molesters, it was throwing our child to the wolves.

It was hand-feeding other people’s children to monsters.

That was it. I was done. It didn’t feel like a momentous decision at the time. For the past few years, I’d only been going through the motions of being a Catholic anyway, and I’d only been going through those motions for the sakes of Mrs M and Ken and his little brother. But something else had happened it took me a while to notice, something more wrenching when I finally realized it.

In going through the motions, I’d been keeping what residual faith I had alive. When I stopped going through the motions, that last bit of faith died.

Sadder to me than that, though, was that all my joyful memories of my life as a Catholic were tainted and made suspect. I couldn’t go back to church physically in the present and I couldn’t go back in the past by remembering without anger and without mourning. There were priests in the background and foreground of all my memories and I had to wonder. Those great guys I served with, was one of them…? The priest who married Mrs M and M, was he…? How about the priests who baptized Ken and Oliver and gave them their first communions? And what about all the other children, my fellow altar boys, my classmates, Ken and Oliver’s friends…?

And then all around them and through them was the Church itself and weren’t all of us foolish and to an extent complicit too by turning our lives over to an institution that demanded obedience and loyalty but didn’t care about us even enough to protect our children in return?

This is one of the reasons I was so impressed and moved by Spotlight. It’s a terrific film, beautifully directed by Tom McCarthy working in a minor key and with a muted palette to create a world that is somber and sad and fallen but lovely for the warmth of the good hearts beating at its center, and brilliantly acted by a cast led by Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Brian d’Arcy James, Live Schreiber, and Stanley Tucci. But it’s the screenplay, by McCarthy and Josh Singer, I want to talk about here.

The dialog isn’t packed with snappy one-liners. There are few big and meaningful speeches. No angry confrontations. No pithy back and forths. It’s realistically conversational. Characters simply talk to each other. And they reveal themselves, their personalities, feelings, thoughts, experiences as people tend to do in conversations in real life, indirectly, off-handedly, often unintentionally, in asides, in lead ups to making a point, or in expressing a concern or working out an idea or asking a question, or wrapped up in their points, concerns, ideas, and questions so that nothing they say doesn’t tell us who and what they are. And who and what the four journalists working on the story---the movie’s four lead characters, editor Robby Robinson and his team of reporters, Mike Rezendes, Sacha Pfeiffer, and Matt Carroll, played by Keaton, Ruffalo, McAdams, and James---are all lifelong Catholics

All of them were raised Catholic and to varying degrees they’re believers, but none of them think of themselves as that connected to the Church anymore. Carroll attends his wife’s Protestant church. Pfeiffer regularly goes to mass but only as a favor to her grandmother who needs the ride and likes the company. Rezendes hasn’t been in years. And Robinson is more or less a social Catholic---he’s most Catholic when in the company of other Catholics and his ties to the Church are based on friendships, social connections, professional obligations, and nostalgia. And while of course as they investigate the story and uncover the breadth and depth of the scandal they are shocked, angered, and outraged, they are also...wounded.

To different degrees and in different ways they are shaken. Things they thought knew, things they thought they believed, their sense of who and what they are are called into question, become subject to doubt and rejection. Whatever pleasure, comfort, and joy they had gotten out of being Catholic is tainted, even lost, and it breaks their hearts.

Just as it did mine.

And Mrs M’s.

And millions of other Catholics’.

I can’t believe the scandal didn’t bring about the collapse of the Church.

Spotlight might not have been the best movie to see the weekend before Christmas.

I’m glad I did, though. I was forgetting how angry I was.

Am.

We’d never told our sons the story of my conversation with that priest.  I finally did before we went to see the movie.

They wanted to know if I’d really said go to hell to a priest.

I told them of course not.

“I said, ‘Go to hell, father.””

Once an altar boy...

Dishwashing lesson

Mined from the notebooks, Wednesday, November 29, 2017. Posted Sunday morning, December 10.

Dishwashing triumphalism: See how they sparkle and shine?

Dishwasher's on the fritz again. Not a big deal. Minor fix is all it needs and the part's on the way. But it does mean we've had to wash our dishes by hand and I've had to learn a lesson I've learned before.

I’m the only one in this house who know how to wash dishes.

I'm not the only one who does dishes. What I mean is I'm the only one who knows how to do it quickly and efficiently and get them all clean. Sparkling clean. Even the forks.

This is something I learned how to do in high school.

Learned it from the girl who would eventually become my first girlfriend, the one who looked like Elizabeth Montgomery not the one who looked like Scarlett Johansson, and it's a case of cause and effect.

Christmastime my junior year and her senior year---Yep. She was an older woman.--she hosted a caroling party for our gang and after we went out and frightened the neighbors and set all the dogs to barking her she and her step-mother served us up a hearty dinner, after which I volunteered to help out with the dishes.

I was not trying to be a thoughtful guest.

I realized that it was my chance to be alone with her under circumstances in which we would either awkwardly try to hide our feelings for each other or even more awkwardly try to reveal the. We were both on the shy side.

So for half and hour we stood side by side, pretending there was nothing on our minds but getting those dishes clean as fast as we could so she could then serve up dessert, and talked about this and that and while we were at it she taught me all I know now about how to wash dinner.

There's more to the story but I have to sign off here.

Dishes are piled up in the sink.

Roy Moore and me

Mined from the notebooks, November 12, 2017. Posted November 16.

When I was a senior in high school, two freshman girls had obvious crushes on me. (Yes, Uncle Merlin. Palaver, palaver.) Both let me know through friends that if I asked them out, they would say yes. Going out meant going out for ice cream or a soda (our equivalent of going out for coffee) and maybe a movie. That was never going to happen. All we senior guys knew freshman girls were off limits. And I was only seventeen.

When I first met Mrs M in college and decided I would ask her out, I thought she was nineteen. When I found out she was only seventeen, I almost ran screaming into the night. We didn't go out until she'd turned eighteen.

We went out for pizza and a movie. Two movies, actually. A double feature. Casablanca and Play It Again, Sam.

The anniversary of our first date is coming up. Thirty-eight years! December 1, 1979. That's right, the same year thirty-two year old assistant district attorney Roy Moore was pushing himself on a fourteen year old, college kid me thought a seventeen year old was too young to ask out for pizza and a movie.

Lance Mannion has come unstuck in time again...and again...and again

Mined from the notebooks, October 5, 2017. Posted Sunday morning, November 5, 2017.

“Brendan Foley, an underwater archaeologist, holds a 2,000-year-old bronze arm recovered from the Antikythera shipwreck.” Photo by Brett Seymour EUA/Argo courtesy of the New York Times.

I know I come across as a solid citizen of the Reality-based Community. Mr Facts. Mr Logic. Mr Does His Homework. I follow the links, do the reading, listen to the experts and trust the scientists. I'm a hard-headed materialist. If it can't be seen, toughed, tasted, measured, and quantified, it doesn't exist. If I'd been the thirteenth apostle, the expression would be a Doubting Mannion not Doubting Thomas. Only I'd have put my hands in the wounds. That Thomas, he calls himself a doubter? What a piker.

But skeptic and rationalist that I am, I have moments of weakness. When my mental discipline slackens and restless imagination takes flight. Then the universe seems to me a magical place, God exists, Martians do too, and all kinds of things are possible. It's not that I start believing in magic. It's that the magic that popular science fiction passes off as future science really does seem like future science. Warp drive, teleportation, whatever supposedly goes on to make food synthisers and the Holodeck work, truly intelligent artificial intelligence---I accept that it will all come to be. And given the way technology has developed and science has advanced in just my lifetime, it may be that the most unscientific part of my thinking is thinking that accepting it is believing in magic.

Time travel, though, I can't think of as anything but magic. Probably a result of too much TV and reading of comic books. Whether it's via the Wayback Machine or the Tardis or the Flash running backwards or the Enterprise slingshotting around the sun or the flux capacitor kicking in at the last, crucial second, it's all a version of Dorothy closing her eyes, clicking her heels three times, and saying, "There's no place like home, circa [fill in the date]."

Travel to alternate universes seems as plausible to me as falling down the rabbit hole or passing through the looking glass.

But even though I don't accept that time travel is possible, I believe the past is there to be traveled to.

I've seen it.

I see it.

Routinely.

Usually happens when I'm somewhere the past is still a physically functioning part of the present, not there as an artifact, a museum or museum piece, but as a building still in use as what it was built for or tool or machine or even article of clothing still being used the way it was the day it was first put to work. And then I see not just the things themselves but the people using them and all the things around them the people used to fashion and maintain their lives and the landscapes and cityscapes in which they lived those lives and them living their lives, which is to say, I seem living, alive in the past, the past alive in the present.

Used to happen almost every day when I lived in Boston. Happens most regularly and most vividly now when I'm driving along a country road and a remodelled vintage auto comes into view,  tooling towards me in the opposite lane.

In Boston I'd leap between centuries in a matter of blocks. One moment I 'd be jostling through Fanueil Hall and suddenly I'd see  myself rubbing shoulders with people who rubbed shoulders with Samuel Adams. Another moment, making my way to my apartment in Allston I'd pass by the doorsteps the young Jack Kennedy would have climbed to knock on the doors of the residents he was going to ask to vote for him for Congress and I'd see those steps and those doors and the people opening them and the hallway behind them and the rooms opening on those hallways and I'd see them as they'd have looked to JFK. I'd even hear the telephones ringing and the radios blaring. I would catch glimpses of the tiny screens of the TVs in the few houses that had them.

Out driving, when I see an old car approaching, a Model T, a ‘54 Chevy, any make and model with real fenders, any make and model with tailfins, any make and model pre-dating my first driver's license, in fact---because the past doesn't include my life, of course. That's still the present.---right before my eyes, the roadside changes, the road signs change, trees grow taller or disappear, farms appear and disappear, fields clear themselves or are overgrown, barns are raised or collapse or vanish into the woods entirely, the number and style of the houses change, accordingly.

Some of those roads haven't changed. The houses and farms along them have been there for a hundred years. The past isn't all in the past. It's even wrong to say Kennedy's Boston was part of the past. There were still plenty of people alive who'd voted for him in his first campaign for Congress. Still living in those same houses, very likely. There were still people alive who'd voted for his grandfather for mayor.

What I most like to see is that the people are like us. Are us. The changes in fashion, in technologies change some things about how they go about their lives, but the lives they're going about aren't that different from ours.

They don't think about all the same things, but they think along the same lines. We have lots in common to talk about. We make the same jokes. I know I'm not being profound here. I'm being sentimental. Can't deny it. Not trying to. It's what I'm being when I see the past. I know it, and I know what's going on. I want those people to be there because I want to still be here a thousand years from now when some sentimental descendent looks into the past and sees life going on in 2017. It's me imagining that life is eternal and we all live forever.

But knowing what’s going on doesn't stop me.

It also happens when I look at old photographs and certain paintings, although not, oddly, the most photographic ones like Vermeer's, probably because I'm so overawed by the technical achievement I forget to think about the subject. It happens when I watch old movies but rarely when I watch contemporary movies set in the past no matter how meticulously the designers have recreated that past. And it almost never happens when I read novels no matter when they were written, probably because I'm not seeing with my own inner eyes---the writer's vision takes over my imagination but at some level I'm aware of that happening and a stubborn part of me resists.

It happens more frequently when I read non-fiction and journalism, and then usually most vividly when I'm reading a newspaper or magazine article, probably because I'm not expecting it and I'm taken by surprise, with my intellectual defenses against it down. Which is what happened when I read this story in the New York Times, Bronze Arm Found in Ancient Shipwreck Points to More Treasure Below:

Measuring an estimated 160-feet long, the ship was like the Titanic of its time. It met its iceberg in the form of a violent storm that smashed it against the island’s cliff, scientists believe. The ship then had a turbulent trip to the bottom of the ocean where it most likely rolled several times, flinging its treasure, and goods across the seafloor. In the two millenniums since, earthquakes and landslides have rocked its remains, further breaking and burying its trove of Hellenistic and Classical pottery and artwork.

It's an interesting article, full of fascinating details about what's down there, the history of explorations of the wreck. the work of the archaeologists, how they go about that work underwater, and what they hope to learn from what they've been able to bring up. But here's the part that launched my imagination into time travel:

The ship that carried the treasures of Antikythera was something like an ancient supertanker or luxury liner that carried grain and artwork for trading in the Mediterranean, including marble and bronze statues being shipped to the richest of the rich, according to Dr. Foley. The site thus provides a peek not just into the lives of the elite, but also into the blooming global and urban society at the beginning of the Roman Empire.

On the face of it, that’s one of the blandest paragraphs in the story. Rich people spending lots of money in order to flaunt their wealth? Where's the news in that? But here's the thing.

I didn't see those rich people. I saw their agents coming down to the wharf collect their purchases. I saw the merchants and middlemen who were there to take their orders to their shops and galleries and showrooms. I saw the stevedores and longshoremen and other dockworkers unloading the cargo. The carters there to haul away the merchandise. I saw the shops and stalls and taverns and inns that catered to the dockworkers and the sailors come ashore and the townsfolk who'd come to the waterfront to shop and gawk. I saw the waterfront come to life and behind it the whole seaport town going about its daily business. And I saw the whole culture that sustained and maintained it, the customs and traditions and bureaucracies and legal systems, and the offices where those things were negotiated and bargained and contracted, and the workers in those offices doing the negotiating and bargaining and contracting, and it was all familiar.

The people wore sandals and tunics and togas, their tools were all hand tools or hand operated, there were many more animals about, but it was still a scene I knew first hand from my own wanderings along the wharfs and docks of port towns on Cape Cod and north and south of Boston and Boston itself. The people were people I recognized, engaged in the business and busy-ness that people alive today engage in in ways that are so similar as to be almost a continuation, as if I was seeing ancient Ostia and 20th Century Boston (when I knew it best) as existing and thriving together in the same web of international trade. Ostia might as well be Boston. Both might as well be London in the 18th Century, Shanghai in the 19th, Lisbon in the 16th, Venice in the 15th...you get the picture.

Anyway, enough magical thinking. To read Nicholas St Fleur's whole article, follow the link to Bronze Arm Found in Famous Shipwreck Points to More Treasure Below at the New York Times.

With my grandfather with Lowell Thomas with Lawrence in Arabia

Posted Saturday evening, September 9, 2017.

T.E. Lawrence and the young journalist who made him world-famous as “Lawrence of Arabia,” Lowell Thomas. Photo via the Hollywood Reporter.

Neither of my grandfathers talked.

I should amend that to the more truthful neither talked much. But Pop Mannion's dad, Grandpop Mannion, really didn't talk in company for hours at a stretch. He listened, intently, but whole visits to his and Grandmom Mannion's would pass with his saying nary a word. He'd sit in his favorite blue armchair chair and smile mildly, as conversation, chatter, and confusion raged throughout the house, taking everything in while creating a space of perfect calm and quiet close around him. I have no memory of his voice. I hear my three other grandparents' voices in my head whenever I think of them. But Grandpop Mannion appears smiling but silent.

My other grandfather, whom we called Big Pop, not because he himself was all that big, although he was close to six feet and probably weighed in at about 220, but because my grandmother was. She was five ten and 180 pounds in her fighting prime. She was big for a grandmother, especially compared to Grandmother Mannion, who was five foot even. Naturally we called the one Big Nanny and the other Little Nanny, and by extension their husbands were dubbed Big Pop and Little Pop---wasn't chatty but he wasn't silent. When I say he didn't talk, I mean he didn't reveal anything when he did.  He wasn't evasive, you wouldn't call him forthcoming. He was another one who listened more than he spoke. He asked questions. He told jokes that we thought of as Big Pop jokes but are more commonly known these days as dad jokes. He passed along stories he read in the newspaper and he explained practical things that had his attention at the moment, like fixing a toaster or painting the trim on the porch. But he left it up to my grandmother to do the real work of carrying on conversations, and she was glad to oblige. She had a real Irish gift of gab and a born storyteller's love of an attentive audience.

The result of this was that I knew her in a way I never got to know him. She was happy to let us in on what she was thinking and feeling. He kept his feelings and thoughts to himself, confiding only to my grandmother in private and Mom Mannion, to whom he was devoted, as was she to him. So whatever I know about him that isn't based on observation and conjecture, is what my grandmother and Mom Mannion told me, and Big Nanny had a habit of embellishment and projection, while Mom Mannion has always been reluctant to talk about other people, making it a lifelong habit to treat their business as their business, even if whatever she might reveal isn't the least bit scandalous, unflattering, embarrassing, or shameful.

I'm taking the long way to tell you that Lowell Thomas was Big Pop's favorite journalist.

At least, I'm pretty sure he was. Mom Mannion told me he was one Christmas when I was in college and looking for a present for Big Pop. On her recommendation, I bought him a paperback edition of Thomas' autobiography. But I couldn't tell from his reaction when he opened it if he was pleased just because it was a gift from me or that he was pleased that that book was the gift. He said thank you sincerely but he didn't say anything along the lines of  "Lowell Thomas! He's terrific!"

But I trust Mom Mannion to know her own father's tastes, and Thomas was just the sort of journalist Big Pop would have liked because Thomas was best known for his travelogues and Big Pop always dreamed of travelling and the only reason he didn't live a life on the road---and aboard ship and in the air and on the trail and, if he'd had the chance, on horseback, muleback, and camelback ---was that Big Nanny was a homebody and thought a trip up to their trailer at Saratoga Lake for a weekend was foreign travel.

The farthest he was ever from home was Key West where the Army Air Corps sent him for training---as a mechanic, not a pilot. He was supposed to deploy to Europe for D-Day but, returning late from leave, he fell from the platform at the train station running for a departing troop train and broke his neck. Fortunately, it didn't leave him paralyzed but it took him a year to recover and he served out the war in a hospital bed in Washington, D.C. After that, the farthest travelled from Albany was Syracuse, where his job in the New York State Tax Department took him several times a year, and once to Ohio to visit cousins in Columbus. According to Mom Mannion, he bought the trailer he and Big Nanny made their home on their weekends at the lake intending to haul it in extended vacations across the country, but, to his wistful disappointment, once it was settled in at the campground at the lake he only hauled it one more time, to another campground nearby.

That's what Mom Mannion told me. I never heard him express any longing for the open road himself or regret that the regular limits of his travels was pretty much thirty miles to the north.

I also never heard him mention Thomas.

Now...I'm working under the assumption that you know who Thomas was. That's not necessarily a tenable assumption. Depends on how old you are. According to Mitchell Stephens, the author of The Voice of America, a new biography of Thomas---the first and only biography of Thomas, Mitchell claims---"Most Americans under 65 do not recognize his name." I'm one of the few who do, I guess. And it's only because of Big Pop or, rather, Mom Mannion.

Whether or not Big Pop did live his life dreaming of faraway places with strange sounding names, Thomas did live much of his on the road, on the sea, in the air, on the trail, and on camelback or at least he covered the exploits of someone who made his reputation for waging guerrilla war sometimes on camelback. Thomas became famous making T.E. Lawrence world-famous.

If you don't know of Thomas directly, chances are you know him roundaboutly, a fictionalized version of him, at any rate, from Lawrence of Arabia. The photojournalist played by Arthur Kennedy is based on Thomas. Kennedy was forty eight when he made the movie, though. Thomas was about half that age when he met Lawrence.

At twenty-five, Thomas was definitely a young man on the make. In 1918, he came to Europe and then to the Middle East with a varied resume as a newspaperman, college professor, and law student, having assigned himself the job of covering the war as a filmmaker. In Jerusalem, he met Lawrence, recognized a good story, and arranged to follow him into battle in the desert. The rest, as they say, is history:

In the 63 years he lived after first meeting Lawrence, Lowell Thomas' contributions to twentieth-century American journalism--on radio, in newsreels, on television---would be as significant as anyone's. Much of the distance between a wild "Hey, sweetheart, get me rewrite" Chicago-style journalism and the sober, Olympian "And that's the way it is" journalism of Walter Cronkite was covered by Lowell Thomas. Thomas became one of the handful of individuals who might claim to have been the most creative and most successful American journalist of the twentieth century. For a decade or two of that century, he was the best-known American journalist---his voice as familiar as anyone's through his nightly radio newscast, his face, with is neatly trimmed mustache, easily recognizable as that of the on-screen host and narrator of the most popular twice-weekly newsreels.

And Thomas never stopped racing hither and yon: to Europe and the Middle East; to India, Afghanistan, New Guinea and, among countless other places, Tibet---then closed to outsiders---where he met with the young Dalai Lama right before the Communists marched in..

His memoir sometimes reads like the Perils of Pauline: an airplane in which Thomas his riding makes a crash landing; a large, angry crowd is about to go after him and his fellow foreigners; bullets whiz by or penetrate his hat. Mention these incidents to those who knew him and they smile. "He liked a good story," they'll say softly. But Thomas was in all those early, rickety airplanes---when air travel was still brand new---and did visit an extraordinary number of out-of-the-way, even dangerous places...

...as much as anyone, Thomas helped acquaint Americans in the "American Century" with the world in which they were coming to play such a large role.

Here’s an interesting side note. Although Thomas made a documentary about Lawrence and wrote a best-selling book as a follow-up, he made Lawrence and himself famous on the stage where it looks like Thomas invented the format for newspaper and magazine websites. Without the auto-launches and pop-us:

But there can be no argument as to how Lawrence actually did come to the attention of the world--- including most of his compatriots. The vehicle was a show combining narration and music with slides and documentary film footage. The show was conceived, reported, written, narrated and produced by Lowell Thomas---more than a year after he met Lawrence. Thomas thought of it it as "a wholly new and spectacular form of entertainment." The genre? Part travelogue, part theater, part newsreel, part proto-documentary. It was also, by some definitions, the first multimedia work of journalism. And the star of Thomas' production---seen in slides and film shot in Jerusalem, Arabia, and, secretly, London---was "Lawrence, the Uncrowned King of Arabia."

Thomas, says Mitchell, “functioned, often enough, as America's eyes and ears." I wonder how much he saw and heard on Big Pop's behalf.

I don’t know how Big Pop became a fan or, for that matter, how much of a fan he really was, or what about Thomas he was actually a fan of. He and Big Nanny were not moviegoers when I knew them. Thomas wrote fifty-one books, but Big Pop was not a book reader. In fact, I’m pretty sure he never read the book I gave him. Thomas was a ubiquitous presence on the radio, but I don’t remember there being a working radio at their house when I was growing up. They had one at the lake so maybe he listened to Thomas there.

But Big Pop was born in 1910. He’d have been a kid and a teenager when Thomas was becoming famous for his documentaries in the 1920s and a young man in the 1930s when Thomas was making all those newsreels and building his radio career.

So I like to imagine him, sitting in a movie theater or rapt before the console radio, and saying silently to himself, “Some day. Some day…”

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The Voice of America: Lowell Thomas and the Invention of 20th-Century Journalism by Mitchell Stephens is available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon.

Dean & Him: A Love Story

Posted Monday morning, August 21, 2017.

Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in the gray suits Lewis said made them look like what they were, “two stumblebums getting paid a load of cash.”

I have three personal letters from Jerry Lewis. I got them when I was a kid. Some cynics said they were form letters, but I knew better.

He sent one to me and each of my friends Phil, Janey, and Sandy every summer we held a carnival for Jerry's Kids.

Phil even got to meet him once. Phil was our leader the first year we held a carnival and he was invited to the local TV station when they hosted one of Jerry's telethons. The practice was for Jerry himself to host the national broadcast from L.A. or New York or Las Vegas, I forget which, and big name movie and TV stars would join Jerry to make appeals and take phone calls. Then at intervals they’d cut away to local stations and the locals would do their bits with local celebrities making appeals and taking calls. Some big name show business types would be sent out across the country to show up on the local station broadcasts. One year Bob Denver and Alan Hale---Gilligan and the Skipper---came to ours. But I didn’t know how it worked the first year we held our carnival. I thought the national telethon was broadcast by our local station, and Jerry was in town for it. So I believed Phil when he said he met him.

I forget why I didn’t see it or, rather, didn’t see it not happen. Our family might have been away on vacation. Maybe Phil said he was on late, after I’d have gone to bed. Whatever the reason, I believed Phil. But I wasn’t jealous.

I had my letter.

Below is a post I wrote in 2008 when I was reading Lewis’ memoir of his partnership with Dean Martin, Dean & Me: A Love Story. It really is a love story and Lewis tells it unironically---but honestly---as one. It’s actually one of the best show biz memoirs I’ve read. The post,consequently, is more about Martin and Lewis than it is about Lewis and in fact more about Martin than it is about Lewis. Tell you the truth, Lewis was never one of my favorites, even back when he was writing me letters. Nothing to that. Just one of those things. I just didn’t think he was as funny as Dick Van Dyke or Red Skelton when it came to physical comedy.

Weird thing to me, though, re-reading the post, is my claiming not to have seen The Nutty Professor. That’s nuts. Of course I’d seen it. Same with Cinderfella. Seems they were on TV all the time when I was young. Must have been a typo and I meant The Bellboy. Unless I meant I’d never seen it all the way through. Which is likely. There’s only so much Jerry Lewis I’ve ever been able to take. Anyway…

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

August 13, 2008. So I'm reading Dean & Me: A Love Story, Jerry Lewis' memoir of his ten year partnership with Dean Martin, at the part where they're just beginning to hit the big time, which they did pretty fast after they paired up, and I reach this passage and have to hold up.  Lewis is recounting how he'd announced to Martin that they needed a change in the act:

"We've got to work in tuxes," I told my partner.

I might as well have told him we had to work naked.  "Tuxes??" he said.  "Why?"

Up to that point we'd been performing in gray street suits with matching four-in-hand ties.  We could have been borrowed from Florsheim and no one would have noticed.  "Because," I said, "If we don't, then we'll look like the act that opened in Atlantic City---two stumblebums getting paid a load of cash.  We're getting a bundle, and we have to look like we deserve it. An audience can see anybody on the Bowery wearing a gray suit---and lying in the gutter, yet.  But when a comic takes a fall in a thousand dollar tux...that's funny!   Don't ask me why, but I know what I'm talking about."

I'd said the magic words: Dean knew I knew. When Mike Fritzel and Joey Jacobson, Chez Paree's owners and two great guys, heard what we planned, they called us into their office. Joey said, "I've just made arrangements for both of you to be fitted for high-class tuxes made by Pucci on Michigan Boulevard---only the top of the line tailor in the country!"

When the fittings were done, we were convinced that when these tuxes were finished, we were going to see work like we had never seen it before.  And since we were booked into the Chez Paree for twelve weeks, it was certain the great Pucci would take his time getting the tuxes made.  Meanwhile, Dean and I continued to work in our gray street suits, at the same time reporting back to Pucci every week for further fittings.

This went on for seven weeks, and---

Hold it right there, Jer.

Seven weeks?

Multiple fittings?

Wow.

These must have been some tuxes.  I'm amazed and impressed when Irv at Men's Warehouse after just a flick or two with the chalk can hand me back a suit in a couple of days and the cuffs on the pants aren't so long I step on them.

Got me thinking.

I've confessed here before, I'm a fashion disaster waiting to happen. I save myself by having a look I adopted when I was in my twenties and sticking to it, and if I have to dress up, I'm usually saved from embarrassment by the fact that like most men over thirty-five I look better in a gray street suit and a tie than I do in anything else.  But I could look better.

A lot better.

So I started wondering what it would be like to own a tailor-made suit.

What would it be like to own a tailor-made tux?

What would it be like to need a tailor-made tux?

What would it be like to live the kind of life Martin and Lewis were living when they needed their tailor-made tuxes?

What would it have been like to have been them?

Ok, Lewis I don't wonder about being so much.  I can get by happily without the admiration of the French.  But Martin...

What would it have been like to have been him in his prime?  To have been that good looking, to have been able to sing like that.  To have been able to sing like this.

I'm not envious.  Just curious.  Which is why I'm reading Lewis' book.   Friend of mine at work got me thinking about this, because she was wondering the same thing.  She started wondering about it after she found a clip from a movie Martin made with Tony Curtis in 1960 called Who Was That Lady?.

My friend was both appalled and entertained by the scene.  She was appalled by the sexism, but she was caught up in how much fun everybody seemed to be having, even the Coogle Sisters, and especially Martin. "There's a ton of joy in that scene," and much of it is provided by Dino.  He is so smooth, so at ease, that she wondered how much of his character was the real him.  Must have been great to be him, if that's him, she said, to have had such a huge life like that.

Then she thought it over.  On the other hand, she said, maybe it stunk to be him.  What if he wasn't anything like the character he played in movies and in his nightclub act?  How hard that would have been, having people thinking all the time you're someone you're not?

I said I didn't know much about Dean Martin's private life and self.  I think that's odd too.  I know an awful lot about performers and artists I don't like and admire nearly as much.  Without having read much about them, their biographies have somehow gotten into my head.  But with Martin it's as if he managed to hide himself from whatever imps and goblins pass along all the gossip and tittle-tattle we pick up about celebrities without trying or caring.  I told my friend that I think I read once that Martin was the least like his Rat Pack persona of of any of them but I don't know in what ways or to what degree.

So that's why I'm reading Dean & Me. If anybody knows what it was like to have been Dean Martin in his prime, it's Jerry Lewis.

What was it like?

Lonely.

According to Lewis.

Sad in the end.

Dean Martin, according to Lewis, was a great comic and straight man because he never took himself seriously.  But this quality wasn't modesty, not really, it was detachment, and it carried over from his private self to his movie and stage self. Dean Martin just wasn't all that interested in Dean Martin. This was a virtue and a curse. It allowed him to play the straight man to Lewis. He could give way to Lewis' antics without any hesitation or jealousy (although he did set limits), he could stand back a little and just love what his partner was doing and it was probably through Martin that audiences learned to appreciate what Lewis was up to. Without Martin there as a filter, Lewis would have been just a raving nut.  This same detachment was Martin's strength as a serious actor when he and Lewis parted ways. In all his movies, Martin gives way to his co-stars. He's always the straight man.  Even when he's the ostensible lead, he plays second fiddle.

The only movie of his I can think of in which another actor gives way to him is Rio Bravo. John Wayne was another generous performer.  Whatever you think of him or his talent, you have to admire the way he was always willing to play straight man to his co-stars.  Big as he was, he somehow always made a lot of room on the screen for everybody else.  In Rio Bravo, he steps back in every scene he's in with Martin.  Must have been an interesting challenge for the director, Howard Hawks, getting Martin over his instinct to defer to his co-star.  How do you fill a screen with both your leading men doing their best to ease their way to the corners of a shot, each trying to make more room for the other?

In his private life, this detachment and his instinct for self-mockery as a method of self-effacement kept him from becoming too full of himself and turning into the kind of world class jerk Frank Sinatra became.  It might have kept Sinatra from being an even bigger jerk, at least when Martin was around, because, according to Lewis, Martin was one of the few men Sinatra truly admired and deferred to and whose lead he would follow.

But it also created an emotional drift.  Martin was never wholly committed to anything or anyone.  If you're always standing apart from your self, you're also always standing apart from the people and the things you love.  It's like distance in a mirror.  A reflection in a mirror is always exactly as far away from the mirror's surface as the the actual object being reflected which means that if you stand next to the actual object the reflection will appear to be twice as far away from you as the mirror, the distance to the glass plus the distance "within" the glass.  If you stand apart from your self the people you love are pushed exactly as far away from that self as you're standing.  You create a distance that is a long way to go to cross.  Too far to reach across, perhaps, and after a while even the people who most want to reach across it will have to give up and walk away.

________________________

I never realized how young Jerry Lewis was when he and Martin teamed up. In his early twenties. And, although, in their act and in their friendship, Martin took on the role of big brother, in matters of business and comedy he deferred to Lewis, trusting Lewis' judgment and Lewis' talents and brains to see them through.

Like with the tuxes, which they didn't like, by the way.  They felt stiff in them.  Cramped their style.  They had new tuxes made in L.A. when they went out to Hollywood to start making movies.

Which brings me to something else I'm wondering about.

How good are any of those movies?  I think I've seen only two of them and I saw both of them on TV when I was a kid.  Scared Stiff and The Stooge.  The Stooge is probably why I think I have any idea what their nightclub act was like. Did any of what made them such a great nightclub act carry over onto film? If I was going to start watching their movies to find out, which one should I start with?  Which ones do I follow up with?

And Martin alone I know. I've seen most of his best movies and several of his less than great ones, although Who Was That Lady? was new to me, and I've always been a fan of Tony Curtis.  Operation Petticoat made me a Curtis fan and a Cary Grant fan at one blow.  Also gave me a bra, and a girl going braless under a man's denim shirt, fetish at a very early age.  Nevermind. What I'm saying is that I would have thought I'd have heard of a movie starring Tony Curtis and Dean Martin.  But I have seen I enough of Martin's other movies----Rio Bravo, of course. Some Came Running.  Bells Are Ringing.  Not to mention the Matt Helms---to know he made some good ones.  But did Lewis?   Hard to believe, but think I've only seen one of them, The Family Jewels, and I didn't see that one under the best of circumstances.  It was at a birthday party for a kid I wasn't really friends with and I didn't know anyone else at the party.  Also, his parents showed it as the second half of a double feature after a Tarzan movie in which the main female character got eaten by a lion.  All Tarzan found of her when he arrived too late to save her was her shoe.  Upset me. Made it hard to enjoy The Family Jewels. I kept worrying that a lion would come along and eat Donna Butterworth. Or Jerry Lewis would play yet another zany character.

At any rate, I've never seen The Nutty Professor.  Or The Disorderly Orderly.  Or Cinderfella.  Or...you get the point.

Should I bother?  Would  I like them?  Would I get them?

Or are they too French?

Boston by way of Japan

Posted Saturday morning, June 10, 2017.

And people will tell you Twitter is a waste of time.

One of my favorite artists is the 19th Century Japanese painter and illustrator Hiroshige, and thanks to Twitter pointing me to this gallery at Kenga Rex, I just spent the last couple of hours immersed in his work, starting at the Kenga Rex website and moving on from there to Wikipedia and beyond. I wasn’t counting but I must have looked at over a hundred paintings. It made me nostalgic and long to be…back in Boston.

What? You thought I was going to say Japan? How could I be nostalgic for Japan? I’ve never been there. But Boston’s where I discovered Hiroshige, in the Museum of Fine Arts’ Asia collection. I spent a lot of time at the MFA during my four years in Boston. I don’t remember which day it was but if memory serves, one morning a week admission was free. The Asian wing was my favorite part of the museum. It was cool and shadowy in there but not at all gloomy or dim. There was lots of maple woodwork and it all glowed and I thought the intent was to give the impression of being inside the paper houses and shops depicted in the paintings. It was just a pleasant place to be. But those paintings were a revelation to me. They were beautiful, vivid, bright with color, and funny. The ones that riveted my attention, anyway. They were mostly scenes from everyday life and I was happy to see that everyday life in Japan in the 17th, 18th, and 19th Century struck painters as comic. But what most caught my eye and stirred my imagination were what I thought of as Hiroshige’s people-scapes---his landscapes, seascapes, and street scenes seemed to me to be less about the land, the sea, and the streets than about the tiny figures of people making their way through them. It was a busy, merry little world even in the rain and the snow.

I was also surprised to learn that those painters, Hiroshige in particular were favorites of some of the French impressionists and post-impressionists. The effect of this was to make me appreciate both the French and the Japanese painters more. I’m not sure why or how, exactly, except it helped me identify with their paintings, to see life as I knew it in what had been merely…well, works of art. Museum pieces to be admired and studied. Suddenly, they were the stuff of life. And what’s more, when I walked around Boston I began to see the place as it might have been seen through the eyes of a Hiroshige.

Ok, that’s as much John Updike as art critic as I can channel. Couple more paintings, then I’ll send you over to Kenga Rex.

Here’s a Hiroshige street scene:

And here’s one by the French impressionist Camille Pissaro:

The Road to Versailles Louveciennes. Camille Pissaro. 1869. Via Wikipedia.

As my dear sainted grandmother would say, Get the picture?

Ok, to view the gallery at Kenga Rex, follow the link to Vision of 19th Century Japan, 20 Best Artworks by Hiroshige.

Dirty sexy bible stories

Mined from the notebooks, May 28, 2017. Posted Friday, June 2.

Lot and His Daughters by Francesco Hayez.

Following up on my post, All the idiots, two by two: The bible’s a strange book to take as the literal word of God, the first two-thirds of the Old Testament particularly. Taken at face value, it’s an anthology of folk tales, fairy tales, myths, legends, just-so stories, fables, poems, prose poems, and historical narratives that all seem to share a single theme: people stink and they’re stupid, as well as being rather randy and bloody-minded monsters in their treatment of each other. The ones who set themselves up as kings and tyrants are especially randy, bloody-minded, and monstrous. God appears regularly to meddle, usually with fatal results for the heroes as well as the villains and much collateral damage among the innocent bystanders. Somehow all his meddling---and mass murdering---adds up in the minds of many Christians to proof that the universe is ruled by a benevolent deity who has the best interests of his “children” at heart.

But much of what’s in there is storytelling for storytelling’s sake, although again with the shared theme that people stink and they’re stupid as well as being rather randy and bloody-minded monsters towards one another. And there doesn’t seem to be any moral to these stories. Take the story of the Levite’s concubine. I did once, actually. Back in grad school. It was one of the best stories I wrote in Iowa. I turned it into a Hawthorne-esque morality tale set in the wilds of upstate New York in the 17th Century. I called it “Van Zandt’s Whore”. The fiction editor at the Atlantic told me he couldn’t publish it under that title. I offered to change the title. Then he told me he couldn’t publish it because it was too long. I offered to cut it down. That forced him to tell me he couldn’t publish it because although he thought it was a good story, it wasn’t good enough for the Atlantic, maybe I should try the New Yorker. I’d hold a grudge but he tried to publish two other stories of mine---neither of which were biblically inspired or at all Hawthorne-esque---but it his boss who told him that although they were good stories they weren’t good enough for the Atlantic. Him I hold a grudge against. Or I would. But he’s eighty years old now and hasn’t edited the magazine since 1999. He was succeeded by Michael Kelly.

Kelly was killed in Iraq before he got a chance to turn down any of my stories.

So it goes.

That’s a literary allusion. You might not have caught it. I’m that subtle. It’s amazing the Atlantic never published my stuff. Or the New Yorker.

By the way, I did try the New Yorker, many times, and I was told pretty much the same thing by Roger Angell when he was the fiction editor there. Good stuff, but not good enough for the New Yorker, maybe I should try the Atlantic.

Anywho…

Another of those strange stories that seem to be in there for storytelling’s sake is the story of Lot and his daughters and what happened to them after they escaped from Sodom. It’s one of the stories Mr Schick didn’t have us read in our sixth grade religion class. Probably for the best. If I’d read it back then it might have become one of my favorite bible stories for all the wrong reasons. It has been a favorite story among painters though. For all the wrong reasons that are the right reasons when put on canvass. One thing the bible has been good for: inspiring artists who wanted to paint their models naked and get the pope’s blessing while they were at it. Francesco Hayez, for example. He painted the painting up top.

And Rubens...

I prefer the Hayez, but only because I think it’s truer to God’s word.

Salman Rushdie explains the marriage of Samantha and Darrin Stephens

Posted Sunday night, March 26, 2017.

This is the kind of question that keeps fans of TV shows up at night: Why was Darrin such a pill about Sam using her magic?

I wasn’t really a fan of Bewitched. I don’t remember watching it regularly when I was a kid. I’m not sure we Mannion kids were allowed to. It was on pretty late on a school night. Thursdays at 9. I know I was watching the night Martin Luther King was killed. I remember going into the kitchen to tell my parents after the news bulletin, I felt like I was fulfilling a solemn and very grownup duty.

Most of the episodes I saw I saw as re-runs during the days when I was home from school sick or it was a rainy day during a vacation. It wasn’t a show I looked forward to, more one I enjoyed mildly while waiting for a real favorite to come on. Dick Van Dyke, Andy Griffith, Gilligan’s Island, Get Smart, The Beverly Hillbillies, My Favorite Martian, or The Addams Family or a good game show like Password. I watched those shows for their own special sakes but with the hope that today they'd show one of my old favorite episodes again. I didn't have any favorite episodes of Bewitched. The episodes I enjoyed best featured Aunt Clara, Doctor Bombay, and, especially, Uncle Arthur---he was played by Paul Lynde, after all.

I didn’t like any of the episodes with the second, fake Darrin except the ones that included Doctor Bombay or Uncle Arthur.

There were no episodes featuring Aunt Clara and the fake Darrin. Dick Sargent took over for Dick York in the sixth season. Marion Lorne who played Aunt Clara died in 1968 after the fourth season. She won a posthumous Emmy that year.

At any rate, I don’t recall being particularly bothered by Darrin’s priggishness about Sam’s magic. But I was aware that it did bother some fans and I did wonder about it myself. I understood why he didn’t want her “help” designing and pitching his ad campaigns (He did, however, value her advice and suggestions) and why he didn’t want her to magic away living expenses. But it seemed mean that he expected her to do the housework and cooking by hand and puritanical that he wouldn’t let her treat them to a secret night out on the town in Paris or a weekend getaway to Hawaii. It made sense that he would want her to be careful never to be seen using her magic. (And there was good reason to worry she would be, considering their pathologically nosy neighbor Gladys Kravitz. Gladys gave snoops a bad name.) Basically, Darrin was afraid of witch-burners, figurative and possibly literal, coming after his wife and daughter.

Later, I learned there’s a feminist reading of the show and that Samantha Stephens was a crypto-Second-wave feminist. Her witchcraft was symbolic of all the ways she was superior to Darrin and his mortal male colleagues and Darrin’s objection to her magic making and insisting on her sticking to homemaking like all the other guys’ wives was the patriarchy at work keeping women in their subservient place. Sam’s sneaky and clever ways to practice her magic despite him and then convince him to go along and not mind or even admit to the wisdom of her “disobedience” were subversive acts. The joke was on the husbands who were watching the show with their wives and would look over at the woman they were tricked into imagining as a closet witch and wonder what secret “magic” they possessed and what schemes to put their magic to work they were cooking up.

Wives, of course, identifying with Samantha, would start wondering why their husbands wouldn’t let them use their magic.

Both husbands and wives and the children watching with them would wind up rooting for Sam to rebel and for her rebellions to succeed.

I could see this, although it wasn’t until college that I was presented with the idea. I can still see it but I’m not about to go looking at old episodes for examples.

When I was a kid, though, I’m pretty sure that after a few cursory thoughts I shrugged it all off and just accepted the sitcom logic at work. All TV marriages had their trouble spots and the contention over when, how, and why Sam should use her magic was the Stephens’. It was the premise of the show. It’s what set up and drove the plots of each week’s episode. If Sam was free to practice magic openly it would have produced different plots and Bewitched would have been a different show.

But like I said, Bewitched wasn’t one of my childhood favorites. I don’t have any significant feelings about it, not even nostalgic ones. It’s important to me only because of that memory of Martin Luther King’s death and because my first high school girlfriend looked like Elizabeth Montgomery. (No, that was my second girlfriend who looked like Scarlett Johansson, although it’s better to say Johansson looks like she could be her daughter. At the time, she just looked like herself to me. But my first girlfriend’s resemblance to Montgomery was noticed and remarked upon. She didn’t see it herself. She thought she looked more like Jane Fonda. Sunday in New York-Barefoot in the Park Jane Fonda, not Klute Fonda and definitely not Barbarella Fonda. And she wasn’t wrong.) I don’t have any desire to watch old episodes. I didn’t think much about it back then and I don’t think about it much except accidentally when somebody or something reminds me of it and gets me started. That happened tonight, obviously. And the somebody who got me started was...Salman Rushdie.

I just started reading Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights and came across a passage that gives the answer or, at least, an answer to the question. Darrin doesn’t want Samantha to use her magic because that would mean she’s a witch and he did not fall in love with and marry a witch. He fell in love with and married her---the girl he supposed her to be because that’s the girl she led him to believe she was. From the point of view of the folks at home, Darrin was demanding that Sam repress the most wonderful parts of her nature in order to live a lie. From Darrin’s point of view, he was asking her to be her true self and be true to that self and to him.

Rushdie’s novel opens in Moorish Spain in the year 1195 CE with the story of Ibn Rushd, a physician, philosopher, and early scientist who marries a genie. He marries her not because he dreams of genies. He doesn’t believe in them. But despite evidence, he doesn’t realize she’s a genie---jinnia is the correct word, a female member of the Jinn---a princess among the jinn, in fact, because she doesn’t let on and he “being a man of reason...did not guess she was a supernatural being”.

Ibn Rushd and his jinnia wife, who calls herself Dunia, keeping her jinn name secret, are poor because he’s been disgraced and is living in anonymous exile. Dunia could of course make them rich by magic, granting him a wish he doesn’t know he could ask for but she doesn’t. The narrator anticipates our question...

Why did the jinnia princess not cry Open at the door of a treasure cave and solve their financial problems at a stroke?

And answers for us:

Because she had chosen a human life, a human partnership as the “human” wife of a human being, and she was bound by her choice. To have revealed her true nature to her lover at this stage would have been to reveal a kind of betrayal, or lie, at the heart of their relationship. So she remained silent, fearing he might abandon her.

So maybe that’s the key to Darrin’s obstinacy. The lie at the heart of his and Samantha’s relationship. She didn’t tell him she was a witch before they got married because she knew from long, sad experience that humans hated and feared witches and she was afraid he would break up with her. Unlike Dunia, however, she can’t keep her own secret.

I’d have to watch the pilot to see if Samantha confesses because her conscience won’t let her continue to pretend or because her meddlesome and intrusive family just make it impossible for her to keep her secret. Probably it’s both. But whatever her reasons for owning up, Darrin is right to feel deceived and even betrayed. It would have been understandable if he’d demanded a divorce on the spot. Of course, then there’d have been no show, but it wasn’t out of the question for him to consider it. His making her promise not to use her magic is his price for not leaving her.

It would also have been understandable if he’d gone into denial.

Witches aren’t real therefore Sam can’t be a witch therefore she shouldn’t act like a witch.

Instead, he tries to understand and cope. But he’s still within bounds to think she isn’t a witch anymore and not because she married him and he doesn’t want her to be a witch. Because she chose to leave the world of witches and warlocks and stop being a witch herself. That’s why she met Darrin. He’s not wrong to think she doesn’t want to be a witch and that in marrying him she promised herself she’d given that life up. And she does try or at least seems to want to try. But she’s a character in a sitcom and the plot requires that she can’t give up witchcraft.

As far as I recall, she didn’t often use her magic for the fun of it or to solve every and any problem that came along. Mainly she had to resort to it to undo trouble and mischief caused by her family or by characters and creatures from her pre-Darrin past butting into her married life, the equivalent of old boyfriends and friends who hadn’t grown up and wanted to drag her back into arrested adolescence with them. I forget how old Samantha was supposed to be, but she was the witches’ equivalent of twenty-something, several years hundred years old---she was a teenager at the time of the Salem Witch Trials, I think---and had quite a past to catch up with her. Her magic wasn’t her true nature expressing herself. Magic was a tool like any tool a desperate and resourceful heroine might reach for in a moment of danger and distress, and the skill with which she put that tool to work not the tool itself was the expression of her resourcefulness, intelligence, and pluck. When the trouble was cleaned up, she went cheerfully back to living her new ordinarily mortal life, generally to her family’s disgust, disappointment, and dismay. It wasn’t Darrin who didn’t respect her as a person in her own right. It was her mother Endora and the rest of the lot who expected her to be what they wanted her to be.

The exception was Aunt Clara. He love for Samantha was completely accepting and uncritical. She loved Darrin and he loved her, exasperating as she could sometimes be. Not only that, she liked visiting her niece’s home because it was a home for her. She came there to escape into normalcy.  In her old age her powers, apparently never great to begin with, were waning and she was losing whatever little control of them she once had. Back in the witches’ world she was seen as incompetent and bumbling. But when she was Sam and Darrin she was just taken for herself, their lovable and loved if slightly dotty Aunt Clara.

I suppose you could argue from that, along with Sam’s apparent contentment with a life in which she’s defined as Darrin’s wife and Tabitha’s mother, that Bewitched was as conservative and conformist as any 1950s sitcom. I see it another sign of its very 1960s subversiveness. The Stephens household was a haven for what we self-congratulatory folks here in the 2010s would regard as a contemporarily liberal ideal of a modern family as being put together ad hoc and being whatever the people who make it up make it, as if we invented the idea. Accidental families are at the ending of every Dickens novel. Home, in Dickens’ world and in the Stephens’ house, is where kind and like hearts gather.

I’ll save the uneasy place of the unhappily closeted Uncle Arthur for another post. But if he was at home anywhere it was with Samantha and, grudgingly, Darrin, who, grudgingly, not only put up with him but accepted him as a part of his family.

Darrin provides Samantha with a human home and in that home she is free to be the person---the human, not the witch---she wants to be. He’s sexist and patronizing and too much a man of his times about it, but he’s not wrong to see himself as helping her escape into a life of her own choosing and devising. Together they succeed in this, just not on the terms he thinks he set at the beginning of their marriage.

The very important difference between Ibn Rushd and Darrin Stephens is that Darrin is a decent-hearted and loving human being. Ibn Rushd is selfish, self-involved, and self-absorbed. He loves Dunia but abstractly and he doesn’t appreciate her. She is young (jinnias, like witches, don’t age like humans), incredibly beautiful, and sexually voracious. But he takes in her beauty without being much moved by it, reacts to it as his due, in fact, because a man of his brilliance and renown is owed a beautiful wife, and in bed he finds her as much an overly demanding nuisance as a wildly exciting sexual partner. The real basis of his loyalty to her is her loyalty to him. What he loves most about her is that she’s an adoring audience for his philosophical musings and lectures.

In the end, Ibn Rushd does abandon Dunia, without ever learning her secret. He leaves her with hardly a thought or a trace of regret to pursue his own, separate ambitions when the Caliph recalls him from exile.

Darrin, on the other hand, who loved and appreciated Samantha from the start, grows to love and appreciate her more as, despite his wishes and her best intentions, she fails again and again to keep her promise. He’s always grumpy about it but time and time again he realizes that her magic is her specialness. It’s not her being a witch herself that he minds. It’s the trouble that follows her that drives him crazy, and he knows that that trouble isn’t (usually) her fault. It’s her meddlesome family that constantly upends his life and hers. And in that he’s just another situation comedy husband tormented by an interfering mother-in-law and the wacky neighbors, and dependent on his sensible and loving wife to get him out of jams.

At the end of many episodes, he winds up echoing Ralph Kramden, saying in his own fashion what Ralph says to Alice, “Baby, you’re the greatest!”

So there you have it, class, another example of how a cheesy sitcom can give as much insight into human nature as the best literary fiction.

But while I’m at it…

You knew I wasn’t done, didn’t you?

While I’m at it, here’s something else I’m wondering about. Why was Bewitched on so late at night? Nine o’clock was past most little kids’ and even elementary school age kids’ bedtimes. What was it about the show that persuaded the network to schedule it as if it wasn’t fare for the whole family but something parents would want to watch after they’d put the kids to bed? I don’t remember noticing when I grew old enough to notice that the show was particularly sophisticated about sex and adult relationships like The Dick Van Dyke Show surprised and delighted me by being. Rob and Laura’s sex life was integral to the show’s subtext. Plots revolved around it and not just theirs but their friends’ and neighbors’ too. They lived in Cheever and Updike Country, after all. The possibility that someone would make a mistake---or a conscious and thoughtful choice---that would ruin people’s lives was often in the mix. It was the Mad Men era and the Petries and the Drapers were living parallel lives on opposite sides of the Hudson River. The difference being, of course, that Rob and Laura were good people and Don and Betty were not. Rob and Laura were lucky in their inherent characters and in having found each other, and they knew it and appreciated and cherished their luck. But they were still human and Carl Reiner and his team of writers never let us forget it.

But not only did the Stephens live a life parallel to the Drapers’, Darrin had Don Draper’s job. He moved in the same circles. He’d have had to deal with the same people or the same sort of people as tempted and corrupted Don and Don tempted and corrupted in his turn. and that would have included the same greedy and stupid clients, greedy and conniving clients, greedy and morally bankrupt clients, scheming and unethical co-workers and rivals, pliant secretaries, and ambitious and amoral models and actresses. But it seemed only the clients ever entered the picture and they weren't morally bankrupt or all that greedy and stupid, just obtuse and and resistant to change and too focused on their companies' bottom lines. Darrin's challenge was simply to get them to see the merits of the ad campaign he'd designed for them, while Don faced the additional challenges of avoiding being used by them for their own corrupt and corrupting purposes and using them to further his own unscrupulous ends.

Meanwhile, it wasn't just the show business types they met through Rob's work on The Alan Brady Show who filled the Petries’ lives with glamour, sex, and romance. Back home in New Rochelle their circle of acquaintance included many other young and attractive married couples like themselves. That was the defining fact of the suburbs in the 1960s that Updike took advantage of in his fiction and in his own life. Adultery was apparently a community sport in Ipswich as well as Tarbox. Adultery was in the air in New Rochelle. That doesn't seem to have been true over in Connecticut where the Stephens lived.

The only neighbors Darrin and Samantha interacted with were the Kravitzes and they’d gladly have done without their attention. And as far as was ever shown---or I ever saw---their only human friends were the decidedly middle-aged Tates, Darrin's boss Larry and his wife Louise. I wonder if the irony ever crossed the mind of Mad Men’s creator Matthew Weiner that Don and Darrin both had distinguishedly handsome, prematurely white-haired bosses who were also their best friends. But Roger Sterling was a cad and Larry Tate was a gentleman. His affection for Samantha was fatherly and he would never have gotten drunk and made a pass at her in her own kitchen. Meanwhile, Louise was a model of stability and wifely conformity, too sensible, conventional, and dull to cause herself or anyone else except her husband any trouble, and the only trouble she caused Larry was fallout from the typical situation comedy wife’s habit of not taking her husband as seriously as he took himself, interrupting him at work to make him deal with minor problems at home, and spending money he would rather went unspent. Neither of the Tates was the type to inspire or encourage impropriety in their younger friends or to be inspired to it themselves by the examples of misbehaving younger friends.

As for Samantha and Darrin themselves, they were an affectionate couple but nowhere near as sexy as Rob and Laura. But Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore were singers and dancers. They knew how to move with sensuous energy and grace. Poor Dick York suffered from crippling back pain that eventually forced him to quit the show to be replaced by the bland and diffident and nearly asexual Dick Sargent, while Elizabeth Montgomery was pregnant three times during the run of the show. Two of her pregnancies were worked into the story---I suspect a lot of people forget that Tabitha eventually had a baby brother---which meant that the costumers and directors didn’t have to try to hide the fact but also that Samantha’s role as a young mother was more visually established than was Laura’s. And while Mary Tyler Moore was often dressed to accent her figure and show off her legs and made up to bring out her spectacularly gorgeous eyes, Montgomery was more often plainly and almost dowdily dressed like the ordinary young suburban housewife and mother she---and I mean both Montgomery and Samantha---was supposed to be, which I suppose served a thematic purpose but downplayed the fact that Montgomery was as beautiful as Mary Tyler Moore.

Even when she got the fun of playing Sam’s wild cousin Serena, her attractiveness was hidden. Serena’s free-spiritedness was expressed as kookiness and a childish determination to misbehave rather than a young woman’s desire to rebel, and her mod fashion choices were accordingly those of a little girl playing dress up. She outfitted herself wildly, which is to say comically, but not in a way that suggested true wildness. Serena was willing to let it all hang out but "it all" didn’t include any sign of sexual adventuresomeness. She didn’t like Darrin and wasn’t attracted to him so there was no chance she’d cause trouble for Samantha in that way. Serena was a clown and Montgomery was just clowning around when she played her, and clowns aren’t sexy..or funny, for that matter.

What I’m getting at is that it seems to me that Bewitched was comparatively tame family entertainment so its later time slot strikes me as odd. Was it simply due to the exigencies of scheduling or did I miss something I would catch if I bothered to go back and re-watch the show? Was there more subtext than I remember? Were there more episodes like the one in which Endora brings a statue of Venus to life in order to tempt Darrin into betraying Samantha? Were there more guest appearances by starlets like Francine York who looks to be obviously naked under her carefully arranged drapery?

Maybe Salman Rushdie has the answer to that one too.

Back to reading.

Oh, by the way...

Again, you knew I wasn't done, didn't you?

By the way, Tony Nelson had a simpler and better reason for not wanting Jeannie to use her magic. He was less scrupulous about it and it was easier for him to shrug it off or go along when she did because he only ever knew Jeannie as a genie and he didn't expect her or need her to act "human." But he needed her to be more careful than she herself saw the point of being. He knew that if she got caught it would mean the end of his career as an astronaut. Actually, he had two good and simple reasons. The second was he didn't want to be her master. Jeannie being a genie he rescued from captivity offered herself to him as essentially a slave and he would not at all comfortable with that. It might seem hypocritical that he let her stick around, accepting her devotion and her help while maintaining she was free to go anytime she wished. But he knew that if she left she could easily wind up someone else's slave, someone who would have no qualms about exploiting her.

How’s that? Salman Rushdie didn't help me with that one. I thought it up myself, when I was a kid watching I Dream of Jeannie in re-runs on days I was home from school sick and Bewitched wasn't on.

Now, back to reading.

How to be a columnist like Jimmy Breslin, according to Jimmy Breslin

Revised Friday evening to include more quotes from Breslin, because what was I thinking leaving all that good stuff out?

Mined from the notebooks, Wednesday night, March 22, 2017.

He was no good, and he could prove it. Jimmy Breslin in 1970. Photo by Michael Evans, courtesy of the New York Times.

Breslin’s gone, as you probably heard.

I didn’t get to know of Breslin as a columnist. To me he was a book writer. Can’t recall for certain what was the first book of his I read. You’d think, Mets fan that I am, it’d have been Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? But I have no memory of it. Just about every book I bought or was given when I was a post-Hardy Boy reading kid lives on the bookshelf at the Old Mannion Homestead, but that’s not among them. Maybe I read Pop Mannion’s copy, if he had one. If he did, it’s lost. But if it wasn’t Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?, it was surely The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.

I still have that one. I remember feeling very grown up when I bought it with my allowance money. I also remember Mom Mannion’s frown of disapproval when she saw what book instead of the latest Allistair MacLean I’d bought. I don’t know how it was on her radar that she knew it was something I probably shouldn’t be reading at my age. Come to think of it, it was probably the movie she was aware of and she’d read a disapproving review in The Evangelist, our diocese’s weekly newspaper. I don’t know why she didn’t make me hand the book over.  I’m guessing the reason she didn’t was  the Catholic magazine she subscribed to, St Anthony’s Messenger, which I remember as being a little more hip than The Evangelist, was less censorious.

Breslin would have appreciated Mom’s quandary.

The next of his books I read was How the Good Guys Finally Won which I remember as being one of the best books on Watergate going. Charles Pierce remembers it that way too:

Pierce, getting ready to quote Breslin:

And his Watergate book, How The Good Guys Finally Won, an account of the downfall of Richard Nixon as seen from the office of then-Speaker Tip O'Neill, is one of the most underrated studies of those events, and certainly the most entertaining, but with gleaming edge to it when it was needed.

Consider, for example, Breslin's description of the hiring of John Doar, a hero of the Kennedy Justice Department when civil rights workers were being killed in the South, as lead counsel for the House Judiciary Committee's investigation of Nixon's crimes. Breslin was sharp enough to see what Doar's hiring would mean. You can hear the bell tolling away in the background.

Breslin, quoted:

And so John Doar came to Washington. Melvin Laird assured people in the White House that Doar was a fine choice. "He will not find anything if there is nothing to find," Laird said. "We couldn't ask for anything more." Which was a proper determination, providing that Richard Nixon was more or less innocent, as Laird at the time believed. The one who knew differently, Nixon, said nothing. He should have. For John Doar believes in everything Richard Nixon does not. And John Doar is a fearsome opponent.

Breslin as a columnist I got to know later, like I said. But again it was through a book. The collection called The World According to Breslin. I did read some of his work in its natural environment, newsprint. Our local paper ran his columns occasionally. This started after Son of Sam made Breslin more famous or infamous by association. I remember one he wrote in the summer of 1979 particularly, and I remember it best for a single sentence. Skylab’s orbit was deteriorating and it was coming back to earth, in pieces as it broke up and burned up re-entering the atmosphere 945 years ahead of schedule. People down below began to wonder where those pieces would land and worried it might be on top of them. Breslin hoped so. Well, he hoped pieces would come down on New York City and make hash out of certain people. He made a list he thought the world---the part of it where he lived and worked, at any rate--- would be better off without. He put himself at the top of the list. He felt he deserved to be hash.

“I’m no good and I can prove it,” he wrote.

That line has been cracking me up for almost thirty-eight years. I use it seriously about myself. Most people don’t believe me, if you can believe it. But it’s a fact. In fact, I’m thinking of making it the new tagline for the blog.

Breslin’s list includes people who were notorious in the day but I’m guessing only the names of Billy Martin and Truman Capote resonate today. If Skylab had waited just a couple more years to begin its descent and Breslin made his list sometime in the 1980s there’s a name would've made the list that resonates today, although I wonder if at the time Breslin would have foreseen lasting fame for the bearer of it. Actually, first time Breslin mentioned the guy he didn't use his name. He referred to him as "a young builder named Junior with a Big Ego."

Breslin despised Donald Trump from the get-go.

At any rate, I was thinking I should re-read one of Breslin’s books in his honor. Not The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. Table Money. It’s another novel. A fine one. About Irish working class types in New York City. It’s brutal. It’s beautiful. It’s down in a box in the basement and I don’t know which box and don’t feel like searching for it at the moment and beside, I should read something new, new to me, something of his I haven’t read. That’s what I decided the other night upon hearing the news he was gone. I put The Good Rat on reserve at the library. It arrived today. I started it tonight. It’s about the trial of a pair of cops who'd been moonlighting as hitmen for the mob. Breslin wasn't looking forward to covering it. He didn't think there'd be much in the way of material for a column. He didn't foresee a book coming out of it.

I was hesitant about this trail from the start. These criminals held their secret meetings at a bar next to a golf course. If you look at how mobsters live today, you would say middle class and be right. The late, great Queens defense attorney Klein the Lawyer once said on behalf of some beast, "How could he commit a crime? He lives in a house." Middle class drowns excitement wherever you run into it. And the idea of cops who use their badges to murder depresses me. It it dreary and charmless and lacks finesse. It promises no opportunity to marvel, much less laugh.

Then he heard the chief witness for the prosecution, the good rat of the title, begin his testimony.

Then the trial starts and I am pulled out of my gloom. An unknown name on the prosecution witness list, an old drug peddler, a lifelong fence, steals the show and turns the proceeding into something that thrills: the autobiography of Burton Kaplan, criminal. Right away I think, Fuck these cops. I have found my book.

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At this time we point out that Kaplan required no help from mobsters in any of his business ventures, legal or not. He made millions selling marijuana, for example, and virtually none of it went to to gangsters. He was a big earner for the Lucchese Mafia family in many businesses, though, and everybody was afraid of bothering him. Some associates believed he could have them killed. Mafia danger is the illusion of Mafia danger. Also, mob families couldn't move in on him because they didn't know how to do what he was doing. He was in crime as a business, not an underworld dodge played on street corners and alleys. Gangsters can't do what he did because it requires effort and thought. Kaplan ran legal garment businesses that made great money and let implied threats do the heavy lifting. Gangsters can manage private sanitation pickups or union organizing with violence, but Burt's schemes required actual work.

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...Now, after doing so much evil, he is at last committing what he believes is an atrocious, unforgivable act.

Throughout the trial Kaplan refers to himself by various street names for an informer. He is asked what he means when he says this.

"A stool pigeon is a rat. Just like me."

Burt Kaplan's voice looses eagles that swoop and scream and slap against walls. He carried his loyalty to the Mafia almost to the end, until he believed there were leopards about to pounce. At the last stroke of midnight he turned in his claws.

Judd Burstein, one of Kaplan's lawyers, says, "He is probably the last true believer in the code of the Mafia, the omerta." He is about to become what he despises.

The trial took place in 2006, but Breslin reaches back in time from time to time to reminisce about tough guys he covered in his youth. In the process, he writes about the earliest days of his own career as a columnist, which began when he was assigned to cover the sentencing of a mobbed up union boss named Tony “The Pro” Provenzano. Maybe you heard of him. If you did, it might be because Breslin turned him into words other people have been unconsciously quoting and paraphrasing ever since, thinking they’re just saying what things are when they’re really relating the world according to Breslin:

Because I came from Queens, which nobody in the history of New York newspapers ever wrote about or even saw, I was reputed to be streetwise and tough. Which was untrue. I didn’t fight. I chased stories, not beatings. But knew where to find people who were somewhat less than our civic best, and so editors clung to the illusion. At the old Herald Tribune, they asked me one Thursday night if I could cover the sentencing the next day of Tony Provenzano in federal court in Newark. He was the Teamsters’ second to Jimmy Hoffa and had been convicted of extortion. They really wanted to get Tony Pro for pushing somebody down an elevator shaft, which he sure did. The reporter who’d been covering the trial had written about Tony’s two wives, who in unison called for him to be injured.

Breslin went. A number of things about Tony the Pro riveted his attention, one of which was his pinky ring. Provenzano was proud of it and liked to show it off while pretending he was doing anything else but.

I wrote about it all, including the ring. At the newspaper this was regarded as exceptional. Reporters had written about tough guys before, but not about their jewelry. There was a sudden new respect for me. I knew exactly how to take it. I announced I was great. Big JB Number One. It happened you needed no extra ability to do such a story. It was all there, like an order in a store being placed on the counter in front of you. A moron can pick it up and go home. Just write down what they do and say. But I declared that it took tremendous courage and talent to do the story. I had to contend with murderers. Why shouldn’t I boast? I wasn’t out of some Harvard or Princeton that gets people jobs on their school name. I attended John Adams High School, Ozone Park, Queens, the full five years. Was I nervous about the mobsters? You want to be afraid of something, be afraid of being broke.I remember John O’Hara wrote me a letter. I made sure everyone was looking when I threw it on the floor. “I don’t need him.” Garson Kanin also wrote. “Who is he?” I flipped that one away too. I then went out into the night for a thousand drinks. I went everywhere. I walked into the Copa like a heavyweight contender…

Later, when David Berkowitz sent me a letter that became famous, I was asked why the dangerous fruitcake wrote to me.

I said, “What are you, crazy? Who else would he write to?”

Exactly, the point. Who else? Who else could tell the dangerous fruitcake’s story? Who else could tell any New Yorker’s story? Who else would you want to?

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Pierce’s appreciation of Breslin includes appreciation for another of Breslin’s novels, World Without End, Amen. Story of a disgraced New York cop who travels to Ireland to forget and winds up drawn into the Troubles by his estranged father, a gunman for the IRA, a fantasy set in an alternative universe because, as you know in our universe, only Muslims can be terrorists.

Pierce’s post is a dual eulogy. He writes in praise of Chuck Berry too. Not Chuck Berry the guitarist. Not Chuck Berry the pioneer rock and roller. Chuck Berry the wordsmith, the near-poet Pierce credits along with Breslin with re-inventing American English. To use a Berry-ism, motorvate on over to Esquire to read the whole piece.

"And the Academy Award for Best Performance as President of the United States goes to...": Donald Trump at the Oscars. Scene 3

Friday, March 10, 2017.

“There is no mercy in a country that turns its back on those most in need of protection…”: Massachusetts Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy III taking House Speaker Paul Ryan to task at a hearing before the House Committee on Energy & Commerce on the Republicans’ bill to repeal and sort of replace the ACA. Wednesday, March 8, 2017.

This is the third of four parts. Part one is here. Part two here.

I think of Joe Kennedy III as my Congressman. It’s irrational. It’s nostalgia at work. There’s a part of me that still lives in Boston. It’s only a little saner than the parts of me that live in Dickens’ London and Hemingway’s Paris. But at least I did once live and vote in Boston. Tip O’Neill was my Congressman back then. That was a long time ago. Kennedy was born the first year I was in town. The districts have been redrawn since then. I can’t tell for sure from the map but I think at least one of the apartments I lived in is in his district. It at least includes the old neighborhood of the church where his grandfather and great-uncle Jack were baptized and, when I went to church, and I went to church back then, not regularly, but more often than you might think---I was dating a good Catholic girl at the time---that was my church. St Aidan’s. Bobby and Jack’s pictures hung on the wall behind the baptismal font. It’s gone now. Mostly. Swallowed up in a condominium complex. If you want an idea of how that came about, see the movie Spotlight. The Boston Archdiocese had some legal bills to pay. But it’s still standing there in my memory as the church it was. Mass is still being said. I’m still dating that girl. I still get to Fenway on Saturday afternoons in summer and pay $3.50 to sit in the right field bleachers and cheer on Dewey Evans and Wade Boggs and Jim Rice---I told you it was a long time ago. I still work in the bookstore downtown and walk across the Common every morning to get there with my coffee mug steaming. If home is where the heart is, Boston’s home. So, ridiculous as it is, I claim Joe Kennedy as my Congressman and the other night he made me and all his constituents, actual and imaginative, proud with his stirring rebuke of Paul Ryan for calling killing the ACA along with a lot of people who are going to lose their insurance a “mercy.”

"I was struck last night by a comment that I heard made by Speaker Ryan, where he called this repeal bill 'an act of mercy.' With all due respect to our speaker, he and I must have read different Scripture…The one I read calls on us to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to shelter the homeless, and to comfort the sick. It reminds us that we are judged not by how we treat the powerful, but by how we care for the least among us. There is no mercy in a system that makes health care a luxury. There is no mercy in a country that turns their back on those most in need of protection: the elderly, the poor, the sick, and the suffering. There is no mercy in a cold shoulder to the mentally ill. This is not an act of mercy. It is an act of malice."

My heart leapt as I watched. There was no hope Ryan would feel the sting. A man with no heart can’t have a change of heart. But it was good to hear the words spoken. Particularly satisfying to hear that last word applied. But I knew as I was watching that I was as much moved by who was speaking as by what he was saying. The Kennedy name still lights a fire in me.

I mentioned in the second post of this series how the whole time I was growing up and for more than a decade into my adulthood Democrats around me were hoping for the second coming of JFK. I was one of them. At some level I still am. For a second the other day I thought I saw him.

The truth is I don’t know how proud I’d be to claim this Kennedy as my Congressman if he really was my Congressman. My sense is that he’s doing a good job and he’s a real up and comer. But I don’t read the Boston papers except to follow the Celtics and the Red Sox and I suspect my sense that he’s the real deal is more a matter of my hoping that he is.

The Kennedy name is no guarantee of political skill or success or even of being on the right side of an issue. Joe Kennedy III’s father Joseph Kennedy II was a pretty good Congressman during the twelve years he served in the House but I don’t recall he did anything to greatly distinguish himself. His uncle, Robert Kennedy Jr, is distinguishing himself as an anti-vaxxer kook these days. His aunt Kathleen Kennedy Townsend did all right by herself as lieutenant governor of Maryland, as far as I know, but that’s as far she went. His cousin Patrick, his uncle Ted’s son, had something of a mixed career; whatever potential he had he self-sabotaged thanks to his various addictions to alcohol and drugs. Ted’s other son, Ted Kennedy Jr, is just getting started as a member of the Connecticut State Senate but he’s something of a late bloomer at fifty-five. Given how many of them there are, there are probably plenty more members of the extended clan involved in politics in one way or another. But right now Joe III is the only one making a national reputation for himself and I can’t help hoping he’s the one and so, for a moment---one, brief shining moment---that’s who I saw him as.

Saw being the operative word.

I wasn’t just carried away by what I heard. It was also what I saw. His words were persuasive but his looks gave them force. The family resemblance is strong. Briefly I saw the three of them. His grandfather and his great-uncles. Robert, Ted, and Jack.

I caught myself.

I caught myself in the middle of telling myself a story about this Kennedy that was really about those Kennedys.

It was a story I wanted to hear. Needed to hear. And it wasn’t based on the facts of the moment but on memories and nostalgia, strongly Influenced by my having recently seen Jackie and the biography of Bobby I’m currently reading.

This is something we all do all the time. We make up stories based on what we already know or think we know and tell ourselves those stories while we are supposedly paying attention to what’s happening before our eyes.

The question then becomes what are we really paying attention to---what are we really seeing as opposed to what we think we’re seeing? The answer is a lot of things going on inside our own heads, much of which we’re not conscious of even as we’re “seeing” it. Unless we work hard not to, in most situations, what we’re paying closest attention to is ourselves.

It’s high near impossible to leave ourselves out of our thinking. It’s our fundamental bias. We tend to take our own word for things, usually without knowing that’s what we’re doing, which is why we don’t take it into account when forming impressions and making judgments. We tell ourselves stories and believe them completely to the point that the story is more real than reality and no contradicting stories will shake us out of our belief.

This explains why Trump’s voters are having such a hard time admitting they made a mistake in voting for the lunatic. They’re still telling themselves the same stories that allowed them to vote for him in the first place, the stories in which he appeared as “Donald Trump” the tough-minded, common-sensical boss America needs to make itself great again and not as Donald Trump the raving, racist egomaniac who doesn’t know how to do anything but hurt people and break things. And make money while he’s at it.

I think it also explains why so many members of the political media who should have known better---who did know better---didn’t see that raving, racist egomaniac doing his damnedest to pretend he wasn’t that racist, raving egomaniac in his address to Congress last week.

As I said in Scene 2, they saw what they wanted to see for the sake of the story they wanted to tell, Trump turning around his Presidency with one great “Presidential” speech. But they saw something else, and it was that something else that enabled them to see what they wanted to see for the sake of that story. They saw what they were used to seeing under the circumstances whenever a big commanding figure appears in the well of the House of Representatives before an assemblage of Senators and Congressmen and Congresswomen and other high government officials, flanked by the Vice-President and the Speaker of the House, against the backdrop of the American flag.

They saw the President of the United States.

Who they forgot for the moment was Donald Trump.

Fade out on Scene 3. Follow the link to Scene 4.

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Here's my review of Jackie: Mrs Kennedy against Death.

This is the biography of RFK I'm reading, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon by Larry Tye. It's available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon. Please help this blog keep chugging along. Buy books!

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Try to see him and not them.

Mandated. Chapter One: The Sorrows of Young Lance Mannion and the Republican Health Care Plan

Posted Wednesday, March 8, 2017.

Portrait of the Blogger as a Less Than Happy Young Man: That’s me in the glasses on the right,looking soulful while eating a cookie at a reception after Uncle Merlin’s graduation from Boston University a hundred years ago. That’s Uncle Merlin with his back to the camera on the left. His grandmother and mother are sitting at the table between us. A nice day and I had a good time even though I was generally miserable those days. But at least I had the satisfaction of knowing that if I’d choked on that cookie I could have gone to the hospital without worry because I had my own health insurance. And I wasn’t even mandated to.

When I was twenty I dropped out of college.

The college I was no longer attending disagreed on the technicalities. According to them, I flunked out. And I guess technically I had. But I didn’t see it that way. In the middle of the semester my sophomore year I stopped doing the work and stopped going to class. I heard from friends this perplexed several of my professors who thought I was a good student and on my way to earning A’s in their classes. But I’d just been going through the motions for a while and then simply couldn’t see the point of it anymore. Nothing was interesting. Nothing was fun. Nothing seemed worth the time or the trouble. I spent most of my time reading the library. I had no intention of coming back anyway so I just quit. I just didn’t go through the formalities. That was the beginning of the most miserable two years of my life.

I was probably depressed but it didn’t occur to me and I’d have denied it anyway. I knew from depression. My grandmother suffered from it terribly. I thought all depressed people suffered the way she did, unable to bring themselves to do anything except sit in a chair and stare into space or weep silently for hours on end. I could do things. I did things. I did lots of things. I did them mostly without enthusiasm or enjoyment but I did them. And I had a plan. I blamed my unhappiness on having gone to the wrong school and I made up my mind to get into the right one. Boston University. So I got a job. Two jobs, actually, one to pay for my upkeep, the other to pay for classes at Albany Stare where I went part-time to repair my GPA and make myself presentable as a potential transfer student. This didn’t leave me a lot of money to play with. But I didn’t mind. I was unhappy but I was busy and I was doing something I hadn’t done in my life so far---paying my own way. I felt independent, responsible, and like I was getting somewhere. Back on track, at any rate.

Part of paying for my upkeep was paying for my own health insurance. I don’t remember if this was my idea. Probably not. Probably Pop suggested it because I was no longer automatically on his insurance. There was no requirement that insurance companies cover children over eighteen. He was allowed to keep his kids on his policy while they were in college. I think it’s likely I had two options. Pay Pop whatever extra his insurance company charged him to keep me on his policy or buy my own. That there was a third option, going without health insurance, either didn’t occur to me or struck me as out of the question. I was twenty and felt invincible but I knew I wasn’t and I wanted to be able to see a doctor or go to the hospital whenever life inevitably and routinely proved my lack of invincibility.

I can’t tell you the details of the policy. My bet would be I never really knew them. Probably I let Pop pick it out for me. He wouldn’t have let me buy a shitty policy but almost certainly it provided only the most basic coverage and I’d have been in trouble if something really serious happened to me. It was from Blue Cross Blue Shield, I remember that, and I remember being pleased about that. I thought Blue Cross was the best insurance company going, the way I thought Ford made the best pickup trucks and Hyatt ran the best hotels. I was a sucker for their advertising. But I can still picture the paper ID card and remember the little surge of pride every time I opened my wallet and saw it in there. The sight of it assured me I was a responsible and independent grown-up now. For the life of me, though, I can’t remember if I ever had to take it out to use it. Seems likely I’d remember if I had, considering how many buttons I’d have busted when handing it over to the receptionist at the doctor’s office and how disappointed I’d have been when it didn’t earn me the pat on the head I’d have expected---”You’re carrying your own health insurance? My, aren’t you a responsible young man! So unlike other young men your age. Are you dating anyone? Would you like to meet my daughter?”

At any rate, I carried that card for two years. When I got into BU I went back on Pop’s insurance, stayed on it through grad school (His must have been a generous insurance company or, more likely, his employer, the State University of New York, was a tough negotiator on behalf of its professors.) When I left Iowa I bought my own insurance again for the year I was out of school and living off a fellowship. Then I want to work teaching and I’ve been covered ever since.

Now, obviously, this little stroll down Memory Lane was inspired by the Republicans’ finally releasing what they call their health care plan---since it doesn’t include the costs or mention how many people are going to be stripped of their insurance, it’s not so much a plan as an advertisement for one. The first teaser trailer, so to speak.  But what does it really have to do with what’s going on now?  Virtually nothing.

This is just a fragment of my autobiography. A story---practically just an extended anecdote---about me and only me. And it happened a long time ago. The world has changed. Health care has changed. The only lessons I’m comfortable drawing from it are ones about who I was way back when from which I can infer some things about who I am now and how I got this way.  Basically, all it is is background that explains why I’m unsympathetic to young single people who are mad that they are required to buy health insurance or pay a penalty on the grounds that they’re young and invincible and it’s unfair to make them buy a product they don’t need or want.

First, I want to say to them, you aren’t invincible, and sooner or later life’s going to prove that to you, and, second, when it inevitably does, when you walk out in front of a bus or fall off a cliff or discover that young people can get cancer, who’s going to pay for it after the hospital and the doctors have taken every penny you have and sent you back to live in your parents’ basement? We are! The rest of the costs are going to be passed along to us directly and indirectly.

This isn’t just me being a grumpy old man. I’d have made the same argument back when I was twenty, although back then it would have been as much a boast about my own good sense and personal responsibility. (I’d have counted on nobody pointing out that if really had any sense and was a responsible a young adult I’d have still been in school and on my father’s insurance and not have had this particular reason for boasting.) But my point would have stood and still stands: Nobody is ever perfectly free of responsibility to others and no personal choice is completely personal. We’re social beings, we can’t survive outside society, and that makes us intimately involved in each other’s lives. Whatever I do affects you. Whatever you do affects me. Things are not simply ok to do because we might think it’s not anyone’s business but our own.

“Who am I hurting?”

“You want a list? How much time have you got?”

But there are too many things I don’t know that I need to know before judging. I don’t know how much my insurance cost. I don’t know what it covered. I don’t know if my policy was the nearly worthless type that would have been cancelled right away under the provisions of the ACA and if I could have afforded the equivalent of the better policies now required because I don’t know how much money I made with my two jobs. I don’t know off the top of my head what the cheapest policy for a young single person costs today. I don’t know how much money the young people complaining make. I do know that the ones who are complaining are either over 26 or their parents for one reason or another don’t have insurance themselves. It would be nice to think that everyone over the age of twenty-six has a job with benefits that include health insurance or is making enough money they can afford to buy a decent policy for themselves. But that’s simply not true. That’s why we need an affordable health insurance program. It’s why we need national health insurance. It’s why we need national health care!

If I’m going to lecture young people on what they should do based on what I did when I was their age then I should know what it really was that I did when I was their age. Memory is not a good basis for judgments of any kind. Not only do we forget more than we remember, we misremember more than we remember accurately, and often that’s because we need to misremember. We select memories that serve our interests at the moment, the main interest of the moment being our vanity. We actively edit memories even in the process of remembering. “When I was your age…” is usually the opening salvo of a lie.

And it’s not only the case with old memories. We do it with memories from yesterday, this morning, an hour ago.  We misremember in the process of forming a memory. The fact is that most of what we think we know about ourselves and the way the world works is based on fictions we’ve invented as we go or made up afterwards to make sense of what’s happening in a way that comforts us. Basically, we don’t understand our own lives any better than we understand other people’s lives because we don’t do a good---or honest---job of self-observation and analysis.

A lot of what I don’t know is knowable, even information from four decades ago. It’s possible that at the bottom of some box in Mom and Pop Mannion’s attic I could find my copy of my actual policy or the check stubs from my monthly payments. My tax returns from those two years might be up there too. Someone at Blue Cross could probably tell me that the likeliest policy a twenty year old single male would have bought at the time and how much that cost and what it covered. It’s even possible that somewhere in their archives is their copy of my policy. I could look it all up...if I had the time and the staff and the inclination and the reason. But I have none of those because…

I’m not a United States Congressman. It’s not my job to know any of this stuff. I’m not making policy and enacting laws that affect the lives of millions of people. It’s one thing, then, for an old coot like me to complain about kids today based on how I think the world used to be. It’s another thing for the likes of Jason Chaffetz to tell people who can’t afford health insurance that they could if only they’d give up their iPhones.

End of Chapter One. Follow the link to Chapter Two: Problem is we don't know what we think we know.