Lance Mannion

Alpher, Bethe, Gamow: A Greek alphabet of famous physics professors I have known...of

Mined from the notebooks Tuesday, April 23, 2019. Posted Wednesday morning, April 24. Revised and corrected below, Thursday morning, April 25.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Hans Bethe at the blackboard at Cornell in 1967, around, I’d guess, fifteen years after the young RPI physics major Pop Mannion attended one of Bethe’s seminars. Photo courtesy of the Department of Physics at Cornell University.

“Bethe is an odd figure, large and clumsy with an exceptionally muddy old pair of shoe. He gives the impression of being clever and friendly but rather a caricature of a professor; he was second in command at Los Alamos, so he must be a first-rate organizer as well.” ---from a letter by Freeman Dyson dated September 25, 1947, collected in Dyson’s autobiography in letters, “Maker of Patterns”.

I wonder if Pop Mannion would have recognized Freeman Dyson’s description of the great Nobel Prize-winning physicist Hans Bethe. It’s from a letter Dyson wrote in 1947, when he was a doctoral student at Cornell and Bethe was his professor. That was at least around five but maybe ten or even fifteen years before Pop himself met Bethe.

Pop counted Bethe as one of his teachers. It was a minor point of pride with him. Minor as in he kept it in perspective. Bethe taught at Cornell. Pop earned all three of his degrees---Bachelors, Masters, and Ph.D.---at RPI. But at some point in his career as a student, Pop took a week-long seminar with Bethe. I can’t remember exactly when. My impression has always been it was when he was an undergrad. That would put it in the early 1950s. But it might have been while he was working on his masters. At that point, Pop was running the computer department at GE’s atomic power lab (and, incidentally, managing the department’s softball team to the company championship.) That would put it in the late 50s or early 60s and Pop would have been around thirty years old. I like thinking it was when he was a degreeless student, no more than twenty. It’s hard for me to imagine Pop as a college student. Not because he was “born older” like George Bailey. He was. But that’s not the point. It’s simply that he didn’t tell us many stories about that part of his life that didn’t include the girl he was dating at the time, and Mom Mannion wasn’t in college with him, or the United States Air Force, which had him in its ranks as an ROTC cadet. His post grad career I remember because he worked on his Masters and Ph.D. at night and on weekends when I was a little kid and that meant he often wasn’t at home when we Mannion kids wanted to play with him, he was at class or in the library or lab at RPI, and when he wasn’t there he was working and studying at his desk in his “den”, not to be disturbed. The other thing about his seminar with Bethe I can’t recall is where it was held. Bethe might have visited RPI. He might have visited GE. But I like to imagine Pop went down to Cornell when he was an undergrad because Pop lived at home when as an undergrad and I like picturing him making his first long trip away from home. Like I said, having taken that seminar with Bethe was a minor point of pride for him, and he didn’t crow about it. What he was prouder of---well, vainer about, as much as Pop allowed himself a vanity---was the joke he got of it.

Pop also counted George Gamow as one of his teachers, along with Ralph Alpher, who was a friend and a colleague at GE. Gamow he knew through Alpher. It’s more accurate to describe both as mentors. But it was better for the joke to call them his teachers. Here’s the joke:

Pop liked to tell people the list of his physics teachers was so long it ran the whole twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet, starting with Alpher, Bethe, Gamow.

His jokes were usually funnier than that.

He was proud of the joke, but he wasn’t satisfied with it. It bothered him that he didn’t have any famous professors whose names could be used for a pun on Omega.

Think about it.

I took my copy of “Maker of Patterns”, Freeman Dyson’s “autobiography through letters” with us on our trip up to the Old Mannion Homestead to celebrate Easter with Mom Mannion and various friends and relations. I’d have taken it up to show him if he was still with us, expecting of course that he already owned it himself. “Maker of Patterns” would have been a perfect gift for his birthday, which is coming up on Saturday. That’s why I’m convinced he’d have owned it already. Pop had a habit of buying himself books that would have been perfect birthday, Christmas, or Father’s Day presents for him. It was frustrating. But he didn’t do it to be perverse. He bought books for himself regularly---too regularly in the opinion of Mom Mannion, who had to find a place for them all. If it was left to Pop they’d have piled up in the living room to the point that eventually they have walled him in in his favorite reading chair and eventually one of the towers would have toppled and crushed him where he sat reading his newest acquisition. It was one of his indulgences, of which, like his vanities, he allowed himself few. But if, wonder of wonders, on the off-chance he didn’t already own it, I’d have gotten a kick out of showing him the series of letters Dyson wrote to his family in the late 1940s when he was a doctoral student at Cornell and Bethe was not only his teacher but the head of his dissertation committee. And I’m sure Pop would have especially enjoyed this story, because it includes as a character another physicist he greatly admired:

Dyson writes:

The event of last week has been a visit from [Rudolf Peierls, an old physicist friend of Bethe’s who’d, at about the same time as Bethe, escaped Hitler’s Germany to England where he’d become one of the leaders of the British nuclear bomb project] who has been over here on government business and stayed two nights with the Bethes before flying home. He gave a formal lecture on Monday about his own work, and has been spending the rest of the time in long discussions with Bethe and the rest of us, at which I learn a great deal. On Monday night the Bethes gave a party in his honour, to which most of the young theoreticians were invited. When we arrived we were introduced to Henry Bethe, who is now five years old, but he was not at all impressed. The only thing he would say was “I want Dick. You told me Dick was coming, and finally he had to be sent to bed, since Dick...did not materialise. About half an hour later [Dick] burst into the room just had time to say “so sorry I’m late. Had a brilliant idea just as I was coming over,” and then dashed upstairs to console Henry. Conversation then ceased while the company listened to the joyful sounds above, sometimes taking the form of a duet and sometimes of a one-man percussion band.

The one-man percussion band was---you guessed it---Richard Feynman.

Richard Feynman with students at a coffee hour at Caltech’s Winnett Center, June, 1964. Photo by Kent McCaulley, courtesy of Caltech Magazine.

It’s possible Pop met Feynman at Cornell. Barely possible. But only if Pop took that seminar with Bethe at Cornell and when he was a freshman at RPI. Feynman left Cornell in 1951. Fact is, however, I’m pretty sure he never met Feynman. He’d have never stopped talking about it if he had. It would have been more than a minor point of pride for him and he wouldn’t have cared if he got a good joke out of it. Feynman was one of his heroes.

So he’d have enjoyed this from Dyson’s letter home, dated November 19, 1947:

“Just a brief letter before we go off to Rochester [New York, about a two-hour drive from Ithaca]. We have every Wednesday a seminar at which somebody talks about some item of research, and from time to time this is made a joint seminar with Rochester University. I am being taken in Feynman’s car, which will be great fun if we survive. Feynman is a man for whom I am developing a considerable admiration; he is the brightest of the young theoreticians here and is the first example I have met of that rare species, the native American scientist. He has developed a private version of the quantum theory, which is generally agreed to be a good piece of work and may be more helpful than the orthodox version for some problems. He is always sizzling with new ideas, most of which are more spectacular than helpful and hardly any of which get very far before some newer inspiration eclipses them. His most valuable contribution to physics is as a sustainer of morale; when he bursts into the room with his latest brain wave and proceeds to expound it with lavish sound effects and waving about of the arms, life at least is not dull.”

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Updated and corrected Thursday morning, April 25, 2019 because DAMMIT! there are holes in my memory that need to be plugged: The Alpher, Bethe, Gamow joke wasn't Pop's. He appropriated it---from Gamow. Gamow wrote a seminal paper on the Big Bang with Alpher, who was his doctoral student at George Washington University, and he added his friend Bethe's name so that it would always be cited as Alpher-Bethe-Gamow. The paper was published in 1948, when Pop was in high school. But Pop read it, although probably not when it was published, and of course understood it and appreciated its ramifications, as well as getting a big kick out of the joke, which he told me about and explained to me when I was just out of grad school and reading Richard Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", one of my and Pop's favorite books. I'd asked him in he'd met any of the physicists mentioned in the book. That's when he told me about taking the seminar with Bethe and about the paper and the joke and his connections to Alpher and Gamow and how he liked to tell people about the paper, the joke, and how the joke could be applied to his own resume. Pop never took credit for somebody else's work or their jokes.

As it happens, Pop's connection to the Manhattan Project and the making of the atomic bomb and probably initially to Bethe was through his boss as GE, Richard Ehrlich, known to Pop and Mom Mannion as their good friend Dick but to us Mannion kids as Dr Ehrlich and someone we had to be on our best behavior around when he visited our house, although I remember him as a kindly, avuncular, and always broadly smiling man. Dr Ehrlich had worked under Bethe at Los Alamos, amd since Dr Ehrlich and Mrs Ehrlich were regular dinner guests at the Mannion Homestead, I can claim one degree of separation form the bomb dropped on Nagasaki and isn't that special? But it makes it likely that Pop took that seminar from Bethe when he was working at GE and not when he was a student and that it was held in Schenectady. One other thing about Dr Ehrlich. His influence on Pop was political as much as professional. He was the chair of the local Democratic committee when we moved to Niskayuna and he recruited Pop to run for town board. Pop got skunked that time out. But he learned valuable lessons that he put to work when he ran for supervisor a few years later.

All this came back in a rush last night when Mannionville stalwarts Joel Hanes and Kaleburg reminded me in the comments here and Facebook pal Neil Calkin reminded me over there about Alpher-Bethe-Gamow. Thanks, old chums, for calling attention to the paper and to my incipient senility.

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“Maker of Patterns: An Autobiograhy Through Letters” by Freeman Dyson is available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon.

Another of Pop Mannion's favorite books by about science was Gamow's "One Two Three...Infinity". He cherished his first edition copy all his adult life. It was published when Pop was in high school so it may have been the first adult science book he owned. His affection for it wasn't just nostalgic either. He thought it was a classic of its kind and recommended to everyone as the best introduction to scientific and mathematical thinking about how the world works. He might have known this, but if he didn't it would have done is heart good to find out it's still in print. "One Two Three...Infinity" is available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon.

Pop would also recommend Feynman's "What Do You Care What Other People Think?"

A madness in March Madness

Mined from the notebooks, Tuesday, April 9, 2019. Posted Thursday, April 11.

University of Cincinnati Bearcats guard Jarron Cumberland (No. 34 in white) defends against University of Iowa Hawkeyes forward Luke Garza (No. 55 in black) in their first round game of this year’s NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament, Friday, March 22, 2019. Hawkeyes won 79-72. Garza is not the Iowa player whose over-zealous father made me mad and provided the fodder for this post. Screenshot courtesy of CBS Sports.

I wasn’t ready for March Madness. I’m still barely over the January Jitters. Who won? I didn’t watch. I didn’t watch any of the Final Four either. Or the Elite Eight. Or the Sweet Sixteen. I stopped paying attention when Old Father Blonde’s alma mater Villanova lost to Purdue in the second round. All my rooting interest was gone. I don’t fill out a bracket. I look over the list of teams that are in it and pick a few favorites, usually the Catholic schools---the only times of the year I feel like a good Catholic are Christmas and now---and a couple of attractive underdogs. Liberty was not an attractive underdog. Then as the tournament progresses, I’ll learn about a player who is a true student-athlete and hop on the bandwagon of his school. I also root for the schools that are in and of themselves good stories and come accompanied by interesting characters with their own good stories, like last year when Sister Jean prayed the Loyola Chicago Ramblers into the Final Four. Ramblers gave her a ring, by the way. I didn’t know they gave out Final Four rings. This year I didn’t find a player, a story, or a character to root for, no underdog won me over, and the the Catholics all went early. Every year I try to root for Iowa. I got my MFA from there, after all. Two of the best  years of my life I spent in Iowa City. George Raveling was the coach then and I was impressed by him. Their star player Brad Lohaus went on to play five seasons in the NBA. Two with the Celtics. B.J. Armstrong arrived the year after I left. So did Kevin Gamble. Gamble played six seasons with the Celtics. So you’d think I’d have at least a strong, nostalgic rooting interest in the Hawkeyes. But for some reason my heart’s never truly in it. This year my heart was dead set against them.

[Editor’s note: The reason I don’t mention the names of the father and son below is I don’t know much about the father and haven’t turned up much about him on Google. All I have to go on is what the TV announcers said. If you’re a fan, you’ll probably know who they are. If you don’t and really want to know, they’re easy to find via a quick google. But my quarrel here is with a type not any particular individual.]

First round. Game against Cincinnati. Late in the second half. Iowa’s down. Cincinnati’s been playing them tough. Camera cuts to the father of one of the Hawkeye players in the stands. He’s on his feet. You can tell by his expression this game means too much to him. He’s yelling. Not cheering. Not shouting words of encouragement. Yelling. He’s mad. At the team. At his son. I can’t make out all he’s saying but it’s probably not anything Iowa’s coach Fran McCaffrey isn’t telling his players. Probably includes some stuff isn’t telling them because it’s obvious and he has specific instructions he’s trying to give. The father’s too caught up in the moment, but I suspect he’s too caught up in every moment.

The announcers have done their homework. They’re ready to tell us all about him. He has four sons, all were sports standouts from early ages. The son playing for the Hawkeyes is the youngest. He’s considered the most talented, the one with the best chances of having a stellar pro career. One of the announcers characterizes the father as describes the father as having been “aggressive” in his coaching of his sons when they were growing up, and he tells a story to illustrate.

The father tried to go to all his sons’ games when they were kids. That often proved logistically impossible. One time, he had to miss one of the Hawkeye player’s brother’s little league games to go another brother’s game. When he arrived after to pick up the first brother at the field, he saw he was unusually dejected. Kid was down on himself because he’d had a tough time at the plate. Father turned the car around, drove back to the field, and ordered the kid out of the car. He took a bat and a bag of balls out of the trunk and gave them to the kid. I imagine him dropping the bag and bat at the kid’s feet. The drop is more of a throw. Practice your swing, he said. Hit a hundred of these. I’ll be back in an hour. And he drove off. The announcer told that story as if it was funny. His broadcast partners chuckled along with him. What a character, they seemed to agree.

I don’t find him amusing.

I know this guy from my own little league days when I watched two different coaches humiliate their own sons in front of the whole team for not being as good a player as they wanted. I know him from my time as a coach for Ken’s soccer team. He’s a familiar type.

Aggressive isn’t the word I’d use.

Abusive is more like it.

The words the announcer might have wanted to use are “tough” and “demanding”.  But there are all kinds of ways to be tough and demanding without being punishing and and cruel. For instance, a tough and demanding father might have stayed there and thrown a hundred pitches to his son right then. He might have said Let’s work on your swing while it’s still in your mind what you need to fix. He might have waited until the next morning, if it wasn’t a school or a work day, or until the weekend it it was, and then thrown him two hundred pitches. He might have waited and made a point to be at the kid’s next game and see for himself what was what before deciding the kid needed aggressive coaching from him. And then taken him out for some batting practice if he thought he needed it.

It’s hard to know what to do when your kid is blessed with an extraordinary talent. My sister has agonized over this since her daughter was four. My niece is an extraordinarily talented ballet dancer with not just the talent but the charisma and discipline to be a star with a major professional company. How hard do you push your children to make the most of their gifts? There are parents who don’t push hard enough. There are, however, too many who push too hard.

The father played college football. He had one glory year. It might be he thinks he’d have had a better career if his own father had been harder on him or if he’d been harder on himself. It might be he just lets himself get carried away sometimes and he’s otherwise a great dad. But, human nature being what it is, it’s more likely he’s the type of sports parent who use their kids to make up for their own perceived failures and frustrated dreams of glory and fame.

When I think of parents like that I think of these lines from James Wright’s poem “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”:

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home,
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.

It’s not just sports parents in working class towns in the Midwest, as the college admissions scandal has shown.

There are probably players for Cincinnati with abusive parents in the stands or at home. It’s not something I hear get talked about during games: how many star athletes are where they are because their parents bullied them to it their whole lives.

Stage mothers are a cliche, but they're real---stage dads too---and they do harm. Sports parents are just as real. It's a curse to be born with talent to parents like that. A worse curse is to be born without talent or with minimal talent to parents like that.

Like I said, the Bearcats were playing the Hawkeyes tough. Cincinnati had the lead at the half. The teams traded leads most of the second half, but Iowa pulled comfortably---but not decisively ahead---with a few minutes left to play. Cincinnati had pulled back to within five with 17 seconds left. But Iowa took over the ball, sank a pair of free throws, and that was all she wrote. Hawkeyes won 79-72.

I can’t say this game and this guy soured me on the tournament. When the game ended I was mad. Mad enough at that guy I was half-determined to root against Iowa in their next game against Tennessee. But by the time that game rolled around, Villanova had already fallen to Purdue, and I was done caring. By last night I’d almost forgotten the men were still playing. Too much real sports has my attention. The baseball season’s started. Pro basketball’s entering its playoff season. The Celtics are in it. The Nets are on their way. The Mets are off to a good start.

By “real sports” I mean sports in which adults are paid for making their employers rich.

I’m ambivalent about college sports as it is. The country is full of real student-athletes with the emphasis on student. The schools they play for take care they get an education the same as they take care of their student-scientists, student-artists, student-doctors and lawyers and teachers and business majors. Some of these schools send student-athletes to the tournament. The Catholic schools have a good record of doing this. But even though they earn degrees they’re still exploited and undercompensated. Many of the schools don’t bother to see their players even get the college educations the NCAA claims is the only compensation the schools need to give these kids.

It didn’t help that Sunday night Oliver Mannion showed us John Oliver’s report from 2015 on the money-madness behind the madness of March Madness. The clip is below. It’s long. Twenty minutes. Here’s a passage from Dave Zirin’s review of the segment in the Nation that will give you enough of a sense of it for now:

If you haven’t witnessed John Oliver’s scabrous, side-splitting shreddage of the NCAA, stop reading for twenty minutes and watch. You will cackle, reach for the nearest stone, and while still joyously bent over, throw it in the general direction of the NCAA’s $85 million headquarters in Indianapolis. Oliver launches a merciless, unassailable argument that the NCAA and their multibillion-dollar machine of nonprofit amateurism is nothing but hypocritical rot. His portrayal of a truly “authentic” videogame deemed “March Sadness,” involving hungry, exhausted players, narcissistic, rageaholic coaches and administrators making snow angels in piles of money, should be watched as a precondition of filling out a bracket.

Yet there is a non-satirical sadness in seeing John Oliver so thoroughly dissect the hypocrisies and odious, sulphur-smelling injustices of the NCAA, because while perhaps never done as hilariously, it has also been done, and done and done again....It recalls arguments made for years by sports columnists like Kevin Blackisone, coaches like Jerry Tarkanian, and an endless line of former NCAA athletes who found themselves used up and tossed aside. In fact, an entire generation of activist athletes, from 81-year-old Bill Russell to 26-year-old Richard Sherman, have argued that the system is unjust. Even the man who founded the modern NCAA, Walter Byers, the executive director of the NCAA from 1952 to 1987, once said, “The coaches own the athletes’ feet, the colleges own the athletes’ bodies, and the supervisors retain the large rewards. That reflects a neo-plantation mentality on the campuses.” The argument against the NCAA is such an entrenched part of the public record, the burden is on those who dare stick their head above ground to defend it.

Yet the system not only survives. It thrives. The same college campuses where people are presumably taught about the importance of liberty, debate and winning the battle of ideas have evidence right on their campuses that none of these post-feudal intellectual staples are worth a damn outside the ivory tower…”

I’d like to say this is why I didn’t watch the game. But it’s not. I’d like to say I feel virtuous for not watching. But I don’t. I’d have tuned in if Nova or even Gonzaga had been in it or if Sister Jean’s prayers had gotten Loyola back to the tournament and again to the Final Four. All I can say is that I plan to resist temptation next year. I expect I’ll have as much luck with that as I have resisting most temptations.

By the way, I really know who won last night. I had planned to watch, even though I couldn’t work up a rooting interest in one team or the other. My loyalties were torn. I was born in Virginia. Lived there for a whole ten and a half months. Another of my talented nieces attends Texas Tech. She’s a theater major. My other sister has agonized over how hard to push her since she was little.

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And now, bloggage, as our old pal Nancy Nall is wont to append to her posts on her webpage. Nance’s extraordinarily talented student-musician daughter is about to graduate from Michigan. Texas Tech bounced the Wolverines from the tournament in the Sweet Sixteen. I haven’t asked but I don’t imagine Nance or her daughter are all that cut up about it…

To read all of Dave Zirin’s column on Oliver’s report, follow the link to “Why Not Even the Mighty John Oliver Can Shame the NCAA”.

For the whole story on Sister Jean, follow the link to “Sister Jean: how a 98-year-old nun became the hottest property in basketball” by Hunter Felt at the Guardian.

For old times’ sake, here’s the Daily Iowan’s report on the Hawkeyes’ win over Cincinnati: “Iowa betting on itself with NCAA Tournament win over Cincinnati”.

Not about college sports but tangentially related: a long read but a must-read on the admissions scandal, “They Had It Coming” by Caitlin Flanagan at the Atlantic.

And now this, from “Last Week Tonight”:

Andrew Yang, the War on Normal People, and Where Trumps Come From

Posted Tuesday night, March 19. 2019. Updated below, Thursday night, March 21.

Unconventional candidate for the Democratic nomination for President in 2020 Andrew Yang rallies the troops to fight the War On Normal People. Undated photo by Nanette Konig via Yang’s campaign website.

Andrew Yang has been getting a lot of calls lately.

His inquirers — donors, supporters, journalists — usually want to talk to him about robots and free money and something he calls “human-centered capitalism.” But first, they all ask some version of the same thing: “So, who is Andrew Yang?”

And it’s a fair question. Because most people don’t know the answer.

But this week, Yang, an entrepreneur and veteran of the tech industry, became the latest — and, perhaps, least likely — Democratic presidential candidate to meet the requirements necessary to appear in the party’s first debate in June.

It’s quite the coup for an insurgent, little-known 44-year-old running in his first-ever campaign, and it may reveal as much about our current political juncture as it does about Yang himself. The 2016 election blindsided the establishment and blew up its ideas about who can run for office — and it also may have paved the way for another neophyte to wind up on a crowded debate stage, next to a half dozen senators and a former vice president. ---from the Washington Post, Friday, March 15, 2019.

Let’s pretend for a minute that at least half of that crowd won’t have been chased out of the race by June because they can’t raise enough money, I’m not keen on having a debate stage full of candidates standing in a chorus line stretching from wing to wing. I’ve read articles, posts, and tweets by folks who think this will be a good thing for us Democrats. It will show off our diversity and the depth of our bench.

Worked well for the Republicans in 2016, didn’t it?

The debates shouldn’t be a Benetton ad. And with so many people, there’ll be no time for any of them to make any sort of serious points. What are they supposed to do up there then, hold hands and sing “We Are the World”? And yes I know these references are outdated. Forgive me. I’m old. But so’s Biden. So’s Bernie. So’s Warren. And Hickenlooper. And Inslee, although he looks pretty good for 68. We wouldn’t be showing off our diversity. We’ll be showing our age.

I don’t have any real complaint with these candidates as individuals or with just about all the others. Beto’s not wowing me, and the less said about Tulsi Gabbard the better, but other than that…

I’m leaning Kamala because she seems fiercest. My sentimental second choice is Mayor Pete because he strikes me as the smartest and the most serious and he reminds me of Pop Mannion. Booker's third. Then Warren. Then Gillibrand. I’m not real keen on either Biden or Bernie. They’re each on their separate nostalgia trips. Bernie is running a mostly I Woulda Won campaign. He doesn’t realize his moment has passed and he’s done as much as he can to move the debate to the left. Biden has nothing to offer Democratic votes in 2020 except that he was Obama’s VP. Of course I’ll vote for either one if he winds up the nominee. I’d vote for Yang, and with real enthusiasm, I just doubt I’ll get the chance.

I say Bootigieg strikes me as the smartest of the announced candidates, but if he’s smarter than Yang it’s only by a couple of IQ points. And Yang is as full of ideas as Warren with, it looks like, even more detailed policy statements on offer. The big idea he’s been grappling with for years and that drove him into the race to make part of the debate is what to do about the fact that automation is putting more or more people out of work permanently or at least forcing them to take low-skilled, low-paying, no benefits and no future jobs in the service industry. This is a practical version of the philosophic question the poet and essayist Wendell Berry has been asking, What are people for? What do we do when the machines and the computers and the money take over and human beings aren’t needed to generate wealth or even to keep other human beings alive? What do we do when we don’t need each other anymore? This to me is the question of our age because the rich greedy bastards who control the money and therefore the economy and therefore the government have as their answer: To make money for the rich greedy bastards.

We’re here to do that in two ways: by our under-compensated labor and then with our spending what little the owners and bosses begrudge us on over-priced goods, services, and toys. And once we can’t do either, we’re good for nothing. There’s no more use for us. There’s no more point to us. We might as well put ourselves out to sea on ice floes.

The rich greedy bastards think we should best die and decrease the population.

Yang is running to “Put Humanity First.” He has plans for what we can do to give ourselves worth and usefulness instead of letting the owners and bosses throw us away as we become worthless and useless to them, and a key component of his proposed solutions is a universal basic income. At the moment I can’t tell how effective he’d be at putting his solutions to work---that is, I can't tell how good a president he'd be. His background in business, the health care industry, and philanthropy make me think he’d an excellent future Secretary of Labor, but you can’t run for Secretary of Labor.

Maybe Harris and Warren and Booker and Bootigieg and Gillibrand are taking notice.

I hope so.

I do like the title of his latest book,though: “The War on Normal People” . and I just put it on reserve at the library. And you gotta love that his counter to those goddamn red MAGA caps is a navy blue one that says MATH.

Here’s something else I like this about him:

Yang, who lives in New York City and was born upstate…

Upstate means way up the Hudson River, a hard left at Albany, and fifteen miles over on the Mohawk to Schenectady.

My home town.

Well, close. I grew up on its suburban border---the houses right behind the old Mannion homestead are in Schenectady and so were most of the stores we walked to or took a bus to shop. My grandfather worked at the GE plant downtown. And it may be Yang’s father did too.  It’s more likely, though, that he worked at the Research Lab, which is in my hometown, and there he might have known Uncle Merlin’s father. The Yangs might very well have lived in our hometown along with hundreds of professionals---scientists, engineers, accountants, and managers---who worked for GE, including Pop Mannion. [Note: Neither Yang’s Wikipedia entry nor his own campaign website give his parents’ first names or mention where he grew up. Neither say whether his father, who worked at IBM as well as GE, was with GE before or after IBM, whose main research center is right across the Hudson from here in Poughkeepsie, or how long he worked for either. Andrew might have lived in the Schenectady area for a very short time after he was born and spent his formative years in this area. His website doesn’t even mention his father’s connection to GE.] Yang is far too young for me to have known him. He was four years old when I left town for good. But before he went into academia, Pop ran the computer department at GE’s Knolls Atomic Power Lab. KAPL’s campus is next door to the Research Lab’s but they might as well be in different counties. Both do classified work for the Feds and they’re kept apart not just from each other but from the surrounding neighborhoods by guards, and dogs, and barbed wire. [Ok, I may be exaggerating about the dogs and barbed wire. But not about the guards, and there were definitely fences that were high and forbidding if not topped with razor wire. Rumor had it they were electrified though.] So the two sets of scientists and engineers didn’t cross paths at work. But they mixed socially, and given the way circles of acquaintance are drawn, Pop might have known Yang’s father too. Not through work though.

Yang Sr is probably a good deal younger than Pop or Merlin’s dad---in fact, he’s likely closer to my age than to theirs. Uncle Merlin’s father’s career at GE and Yang’s might have overlapped. But Dick Merlin was in ceramics and Yang was a physicist and he might not just have worked on a different floor, he might have worked over the fences and past the guards at KAPL. If he did, he very likely arrived well after Pop left. They still might have known each other, however, if not professionally then through their involvement in the community. As town supervisor, president of the historical society, and a member of the library board and the many other organizations and clubs he was involved in that made him the least retired retired man in upstate New York, Pop knew practically everybody in the area.

This is a long-winded way of saying, there’s a good chance there’s only one degree of separation between me and Andrew Yang and I get a kick out of that. Not enough of a kick to make me want to vote for him in the primary. Like I said, I probably won’t get the chance anyway. He’s going to be on the debate stage and he may even last through to the early primaries, but he’s not likely to still be in it when New York’s primary rolls around next spring. Still, I’m rooting for him to at least put up a good fight.

But it’s this bit in the opening of Reis Thebault’s profile of Yang that sticks in my craw:

It’s quite the coup for an insurgent, little-known 44-year-old running in his first-ever campaign, and it may reveal as much about our current political juncture as it does about Yang himself. The 2016 election blindsided the establishment and blew up its ideas about who can run for office…

Who can run for office?

There are rules?

I mean beside the only two the Constitution sets: candidates have to be thirty-five when they take office and they have to be natural born citizens?

Once more with feeling.

The wonder isn’t that we have someone like Donald Trump in the White House. The wonder is we didn’t put one there sooner.

Kooks, scoundrels, knaves, villains, and fools have run for every office since there have been offices to run for, including president. A few of them have been their party’s nominee. A few of those have been elected President. Howard Schultz’s way wasn’t paved by Donald Trump. It was paved by Ross Perot. Trump’s way, meanwhile, was paved by Strom Thurmond, George Wallace, Pat Buchanan, and Sarah Palin.

“Unconventional” candidates have come along from time to time, candidates like Yang with no political office on their resumes and whose professional backgrounds would not at first glance have seemed to have prepared them for the highest office in the land.  Perot’s one, of course. Pat Robertson. The recently departed Lyndon LaRouche. And for any Democrat over forty the name Ralph Nader has become a proverb and a byword.

But then there was Wendell Wilkie, one of the best persons to have been nominated by either party in the last hundred years, and thank God for him because without him the Republicans might have nominated another unconventional candidate, the fascist and anti-semite Charles Lindbergh.

Thebault is very young. It appears he graduated from college only three years ago. He earned his master’s only last year. But I’m sure he knows all this. So I wonder, if that wasn’t just a throwaway line, what he was getting at? It sounds like a subrosa swipe at Trump but it may also be a knock on his older colleagues not just on the Post’s political desk but on the political beat for all the media at large. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s tired of hearing from those Boomer and Gen X veterans that…

IT WASN’T OUR FAULT!

We had nothing to do with!

It just happened!

It had nothing to do with the way we covered him! He’s simply a genius at manipulating the news cycle.

Who thought he had a chance anyway?

Who knew what he stood for? How were we to know when to take him seriously and when to take him figuratively? What did it matter anyway if he was never going to win? Besides, she was fatally flawed. Inauthentic! Over-prepared! A CLINTON!

At any rate, we won’t make the same mistake again.

But did you see his latest Twitter-tantrum? Isn’t it amazing how he gets away with this shit?

Hope I didn’t give you intellectual whiplash with that transition. But I didn’t really veer off the subject, because I’m imagining Thebault hearing around the office and at lunch and on the campaign trail stuff like this:

Yeah, that’s an interesting question and the universal basic income might be workable solution, but isn’t it socialism? Won’t that cause him problems winning over centrists? And what about him accepting campaign contributions in bitcoin and the fact that Nazis like him? Won’t those things give him trouble with progressives?

Why don’t you write some columns about that?

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

There have been too many of them to call them “unconventional,” but it’s actually kind of odd when you think about it that we’ve elected so many generals president of our democracy. We’ve been lucky that none of those generals tried to president like they generaled. Not even Andrew Jackson, although he was probably the most tempted to. Of course William Henry Harrison didn’t live long enough to face any temptation that way. Neither did James Garfield but it’s likely he would have been the very opposite of tempted that direction. Generaling is something he did during the Civil War because he was good at soldiering the way he was good at everything he put his hand to, including teaching. He’d have probably proved just as good at presidenting, if he’d lived---if his doctors hadn’t killed him. He survived being shot. He couldn’t survive 19th Century American medical procedure. You can read about in Candice Milliard’s excellent “Destiny of the Republic”, if you haven’t already, and if you haven’t, I recommend you get right on it!

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

To read the whole of Thebault’s profile of Yang, follow the link to “Andrew Yang is running for president. Haven’t heard of him? You will soon.” at the Washington Post.

“The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future” by Andrew Yang is available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Updated to reflect the brakes slamming on my enthusiasm: I don’t know how much stock to put in this analysis of Yang’s policy positions. The writer is Jeremiah Johnson, the director of an organization that calls itself without irony the Neoliberal Project. I’d never heard of it before following the link from Mike the Mad Biologist’s invaluable daily digest. But from what Johnson writes, it looks to me that if anybody is a neoliberal it’s Yang, so it’s not promising that the director of the Neoliberal Project thinks he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. What bothers me more, though, is that it appears that Yang is another business person who thinks government can and should be run like a business. This is why we shouldn’t long for more “unconventional” candidates. Making laws is not like making widgets.

But this is an even bigger let down:

Dem presidential hopeful Yang agrees to interview with Ben Shapiro over anti-circumcision stance

I don’t know if I’m more disappointed that Yang is giving legitimacy to that Right Wing attention-whore or that he chose that subject to talk about as his presidential campaign is starting to get traction.

Doubting Thomases

Mined from the notebooks, Monday, August 6, 2018. Posted Wednesday morning, February 13, 2019.

Detail from “The Incredulity of Saint Thomas” by Caravaggio. Circa 1601-1602. Via Wikipedia.

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear…, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.”  After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

But Thomas (who was called the Twin[a]), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came.  So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe...”---the gospel according to Saint John, Chapter 20, Verses 19-31.

The things you learn about someone you loved when it’s too late to talk to them about it.

John 20:19-31, the story of Doubting Thomas, was the gospel reading at Pop Mannion’s funeral mass this morning. [Monday, August 6, 2018] Mom Mannion picked out the readings. She chose his favorite passages, one from the Old Testament, another from the Epistles,as the liturgy requires, and then from the gospels. Pop and I didn’t talk much about religion and before this morning I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what his favorites were. The first reading didn’t surprise me though. Ecclesiastes 3:1-11. That’s the passage that famously begins with the verse “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven…” Pop quoted it in one of his campaign brochures the during his first time go-round as town supervisor. Then second reading, from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, wasn't a surprise either. Everyone likes that one, and occurred to me that my mother chose it because it was one of their favorites. It's read at practically every Catholic wedding, and was probably read at theirs. The gospel reading, though, sat me back in my pew or would have if the church had pews. It sat me back in my chair.

Thomas was---is---my confirmation name!

For those of you who aren’t Catholic, the Sacrament of Confirmation is a kind of a self-rechristening. You receive it when you’re (supposedly) old enough to decide for yourself whether or not you want to remain a Catholic. In some dioceses that’s in 7th grade, in others in 9th. I think there are some places it’s eleventh or twelfth, but that’s not typical. Ken and Oliver were confirmed when they were each in junior high. In the diocese where I grew up when I was growing up it was 4th, which still amazes me. I had a hard time deciding what baseball cards to trade. Matters of theology were beyond me. At any rate, because you’re beginning anew, you get to rename yourself. You give yourself a confirmation name.

Candidates for confirmation are allowed to choose their own confirmation names. It’s supposed to be the name of a saint. The practice has fallen out of favor at many parishes, ours being one of them. Ken and Oliver don’t have confirmation names. The pastor banned them. He never explained why, but my guess was that he was tired of arguing with irate parents of kids he told had to pick another name that there was no St Ashley. And no St Tyler either.

When I was a kid, just about every girl had as their first name or middle name Mary or Marie or a combination---Mary Ann, Mary Beth, Jean Marie, Elizabeth Marie. You get the picture. And by the way, all Reginas are named after Mary too. Mary the Regina. Mary the Queen of Heaven. ---so they tended to get ambitious when choosing and looked up the biographies of the more poetically named saints before deciding. Bernadette. Genevieve. Madeline. Monica. To give you an idea. Mrs M’s confirmation name is Theresa. (Her middle name is, of course, Marie.) The boys, being boys and too lazy and careless to do their homework, stuck with the classics because they required less effort and thought. Matthew. Michael. Stephen. Peter. Paul. Often the name was chosen for them, despite the rule, “suggested” to them by their parents who thought it would be a good idea for their son to name himself after his father or grandfather or favorite uncle. I was a little more diligent.

I did my homework.

I would. I was a sanctimonious little snot eagerly looking forward to beginning my career as an altar boy the next year. You may find this hard to believe but I was very devout when I was a little kid. Thing was, by fourth grade I was already developing...doubts.

I considered Martin. After Saint Martin of Tours. One of my favorite saints. But I went with Thomas. Which sounds as run of the mill as John or Patrick. Until you consider which Thomas I meant.

“Oh, Saint Thomas Aquinas! Aren’t you the young scholar?” the nuns would gush when I told them my choice.

“Nope,” I’d say, smugly. “Not him.”

The nuns would look perplexed.

“Thomas More then?”

“Not him either,” I’d say, growing more smug.

The nuns’ bafflement would continue, until it dawned on them.

"Thomas the Apostle?"

"That's the one," I'd say, as smug as any precocious and full of himself ten year old can get, which is pretty damn smug.

I didn’t choose him to be a wiseguy. I enjoyed the opportunities it gave me to be a wiseguy, but the story of Doubting Thomas was one of my favorite bible stories and Thomas my favorite apostle because I realized that’s how I’d have reacted to the news Jesus was alive and well and had come knocking while I was out. I’d have doubted it too and wanted proof.

I also liked Thomas for having been out. The other apostles were afraid of being rounded up by the authorities and were hiding in that locked room when Jesus appeared to them. (I didn’t think Jesus’ picking the lock was much of a miracle, but I guess he was supposed have walked through the closed door.) Thomas was the brave one who’d ventured out to scrounge up some food and,I imagined, do a little spying.

It helped even more to know that when things blew over and the apostles began their missions, Thomas was the one who ventured farthest from Israel, traveling, preaching, and studying in India.

You’d think Pop and I would have discussed it. Maybe we did. My settling on that Thomas might have been due to his influence. Might even have been his suggestion. I don’t remember. As far as I recall, we never talked about it, then or later.  So when the priest read the passage, I was as perplexed as the nuns were back when.

That was his favorite gospel passage? Does that mean Thomas was his favorite apostle? His favorite saint?

Took a minute for it to dawn on me.

Of course the story of Thomas the skeptic meant a lot to him.

Pop was a scientist.

He had a Ph.D. in physics. His dissertation was on wave theory. His first civilian job was helping to design nuclear engines for submarines at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory where he more or less established its computer department. Seeing the nail holes for themselves and putting their fingers in the wounds is what scientists do!

Like I said, though, I don’t know and now I’ll never get to ask him. But it was the pattern of his whole adult life, as a scientist, as a teacher, as a politician and civic leader, as a neighbor and a friend, and as a father. It was one of his lessons to us: Don’t think you know anything until you’ve examined the evidence. Don’t just take other people’s word for it. Go see it for yourself. Put your fingers in the nail holes.

Or in short, don’t be so quick to judge.

But who would play Broadway Joe?

Adapted from the Twitter feed and mined from the notebooks, Saturday, February 2, 2019. Posted way too early Wednesday morning, February 6.

Best football movie not yet made: New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath leading the Jets to their improbable victory over the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III, January 12, 1969. Photo By Malcolm Emmons USA TODAY Sports Copyright Malcolm Emmons.

Esquire dropped the link to this article in my mailbox Saturday afternoon, way to late for me to watch all twenty-five “Best Football Movies Ever Made” in time to rev myself up for the Super Bowl, as the well-intentioned editors at Esquire were suggesting…

While baseball might be the American pastime, there's nothing more uniquely American than football. Consider this: Men in tights and giant pads crash into each other, all while we cheer along in the stands (or, more likely, at home) and stuff our faces full of snacks and beer. And in the cold! Naturally, Hollywood has taken notice and made many, many films about the sport. From empowering and crowd-pleasing films that will have you jumping out of your seat and cheering, to behind-the-scenes looks at the business and drama surrounding the sport, here are the best football movies ever made.

My first thought when I saw the headline was: “There are enough good football movies for there to be twenty-five best ones?”

I don’t think there are even ten.

This not an assertion I’m prepared to defend on the merits, but it’s one I’m arrogant enough to assert out of bias without backing down in the face of reasoned argument. I’m also happy to assert this next one:

And of the ten best football movies, whatever you’d rank as number one is not as good as number ten on the list of best baseball movies, of which there are really ten---at least.

I should name them? Ok, smart guy. Here, and I actually have twelve...

“Bull Durham”.

“Eight Men Out”.

(This isn’t just a good baseball movie. It’s one of the few that actually showcases good baseball. The actors playing the Black Sox could play!)

“Field of Dreams”.

“Major League”.

“The Bad News Bears”.

“The Natural”.

(Much better than the book. And I will fight you on this.)

“42”.

“The Pride of the Yankees”.

“A League of Their Own”.

(Points off for letting the younger sister get away with a selfish base running decision at the end and trying to force us to think this makes for a happy ending.)

“Bang the Drum Slowly”.

(Not least for its having one of the most moving closing lines in my movie going experience. “From here on in, I rag nobody.”)

“Moneyball”.

(Extra points for the movement of Philip Seymour Hoffman as A’s manager Art Howe’s eyes as he follows the flight of a liner off the bat of one of his players he doesn’t believe can hit. More points for giving Jonah Hill the chance to prove he can really act. Even more points for introducing me to Chris Pratt.)

“Mr Baseball”.

(Not sorry. Selleck.)

To my shame and chagrin, I have never seen “The Sandlot”, which makes the list of many a true fan.

At any rate, Esquire’s list of best football movies includes several good movies---”North Dallas Forty”, “Heaven Can Wait”, “The Longest Yard”, just to name my favorites. “Brian’s Song” is great but I don’t think it belongs on the list because it was made for TV---a few mildly entertaining ones, a bunch of mediocre ones, and some outright bad ones---”Necessary Roughness”? Really? And it doesn’t include “Semi-Tough”, “The Best of Times”, “Invincible”, or “Horsefeathers”, so take it for what it’s worth.

But I like the irony of it including the movie that makes the case that football should be abolished.

I don’t know why there aren’t more good football movies. There ought to be.

Why hasn't there been a movie about the 1969 Super Bowl?

What do you think? Bradley Cooper too old now to play Namath?

Yeah, you’re right. But he'd have been great in his early 30s. He had the smile for it too.

Keanu could have done it, twenty years ago or so, but he'd have needed a smile coach.

Going back in my imagination, say they made the movie in the late 80s or early 90s, how about Nic Cage?

I can see it.

Go back far enough, and Namath could have played himself. Why not? Jackie Robinson did it. Babe Ruth too. But could he act? How was he in “Norwood”? The New York Times’ Howard Thompson didn’t think much of the film. He saw it as a Glen Campbell vehicle and thought the movie wasted him. Namath had a small part that sounds from Thompson’s cheerfully sarcastic review as though it gave him nothing to do but grin and fondle good-looking young women who didn’t mind being fondled by a guy who grinned like Joe Namath.

I didn’t see it. I wanted to see it because it was based on a novel by Charles Portis and I had just become a Charles Portis fan, thanks to ‘True Grit”. But for some reason I missed it. Judging by Thompson’s review, I’d bet it was in and out of the theaters quick. Back then our local movie houses had just the one screen. But there might have been another reason.

Even though it was rated G by the film board, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops gave “Norwood” their own rating of A-III...

Corny but entertaining Glen Campbell vehicle following his misadventures after military service as he innocently transports some stolen cars to New York, has a one night stand with a pretty hippie in Greenwich Village, meets Kim Darby on a bus and brings her back to his Southern home along with a midget and a performing rooster. Campbell's fans will enjoy the romp, though some may be put off by the salty dialogue and tasteless but brief situations.

A-III means the bishops thought it was suitable for adults only. I’ll tell why that’s relevant in a minute, although you can probably guess.

Namath was the star of another movie that came out around the same time in which he fondled and grinned at Ann-Margret. “C.C. & Company”. That appears to have bombed too. Vincent Canby recommended it as the movie to recommend to friends who wanted a recommendation for a “good bad movie.” Gene Siskel gave it no stars.

I didn’t see that one either. It was rated R. I was too young to go to R rated movies on my own and Mom and Pop Mannion were particular about which ones they’d take me to. “MASH”, “Patton”, “Slaughterhouse Five”, and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, those are the only ones I remember seeing with them.

Actually, with Pop. Mom Mannion stayed home with my younger brothers and sisters while Pop took me and my brother Luke.

Come to think of it, I’m surprised she let Pop take us. She read the diocesan newspaper. She would have known what the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops thought about each one of them. “Patton” got an A-II rating from the bishops---suitable for ”adults and adolescents”---but they gave “Butch Cassidy” an A-III---”adults” only---and “M*A*S*H” and “Slaughterhouse-Five” A-IV ratings---“limited adult audience, films whose problematic content many adults would find troubling.” Mom was a more conscientious Catholic than Pop. But I guess she trusted Pop to make better judgments regarding our moral education than the bishops. Considering it was Pop and considering what we came to know about the bishops, she was right to.

You know who’d have been better as Namath than Namath? Donald Sutherland. M*A*S*H showed he could fake it pretty well on a football field, although Elliott Gould had the arm. He had the mustache too, so maybe he’d have been a good Broadway Joe.

Come to think about it, there’s enough football in “M*A*S*H” you could argue it should be put it on the list.

I could argue it, anyway.

“All right, bub, your fucking head is coming right off.”

*******

“His ringer spotted our ringer.”

*******

“Oh my God! They shot him!”

“Hot Lips, you incredible nincompoop, it’s the end of the quarter.”

*******

Sorry. That is all. Back to who could play Namath in the movie...

Among today's stars...Chris Evans?

Adam Driver!

He’s got the nose.

I’ll think some more on it.

Meanwhile, Jeff Pearlman’s “Football for a Buck” could be the basis of a good movie, although it would make an even better TV mini-series. And Namath makes a cameo appearance. Namath at forty and retired. So you could have Bradley Cooper play him. He probably wouldn’t want to. What’s the point of playing Joe Namath if you don’t get put on pads and throw a football?

The real casting challenge would be Donald Trump.

Remember, the USFL existed only from 1983 to 1985, so we’re talking about the not-quite-yet-forty, pre-weaved, pre-oranged, slim, and---at least to many women’s eyes, and many men’s too---handsome Donald Trump.

I’m thinking Ryan Gosling. Or Ryan Reynolds.

You know who would work? Maybe even better?

Domhnall Gleeson.

Go ahead. Look at him as General Hux in the Star Wars sequels. Try to ignore the uniform and the big speech to the troops in “The Force Awakens”. It’s too on the nose.

His father, Brendan Gleeson, would make a good present-day Trump.

Another movie that not just should be made but needs to be made---the Colin Kaepernick story.

Kap could play himself.

If not, my vote’s Michael B. Jordan.

My vote’s for Michael B. Jordan to play everybody these days.

Even Joe Namath.

He’d be great, don’t you think? And he wouldn’t need a smile coach.

But I guess we’re still a long way away from that ideal of color-blind casting.

R.I.P Joe Papp.

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…

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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.

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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.