Foreman's Birthday 12-23-1940

Sometime in the 50’s, probably around the time I failed high school for the 3^rd time, my father said to me, “Son, one of these days you’re going to find yourself, and, when you do, you’re going to be awfully disappointed.” I think he was joking. But the facts were it didn’t seem as if I’d ever get through school, and I was floundering around like a three legged pig in a cess pool.  Eventually I did graduate but not before doing penance in summer school where I was the only Jew on a gentile campus in a foreign neighborhood. I took to wearing a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes folded into the short sleeve of a white t-shirt in an attempt to pass. This cigarette/t-shirt mode belonged to gentile guys who went to vocational school, sported ducktail haircuts, and lived in dangerous neighborhoods, places like Pig Town, where only a few years earlier pigs still ran through the streets to the slaughterhouse, or Sparrows Point where the steel mills stood. At that time in Baltimore, Maryland, a Jewish kid wouldn’t have been caught dead in anything but an oxford button down shirt, preferably blue but white would do. If I had worn that get-up to summer school, along with the khaki trousers, weejun loafers, and argyle socks that defined the rest of the uniform, I might as well have hung a sign on my back that screamed: “You’re right. I did it. I killed Him.”

The previous paragraph is in darkened italics because I don't know what to do with it. Memoir is much on my mind these days, today especially as it's my birthday, so obviously that's where the paragraph belongs. Beginning? Somewhere in there? Or nowhere at all? More importantly, if you were cruising through a bookstore skimming first paragraphs, would you go on to the second? OK. Try this.

In January of 1963 all things seemed possible. Kennedy was still alive. So was my father. Civil Rights were simmering, but Black Power was not yet a battle cry. “We Shall Overcome” was our anthem. Those of us who sang it did so with our arms around each other and rocked gently. Alcatraz closed down, and Martin Luther King wrote his letter from a Birmingham jail. Sam Cooke sang, “A Change Is Gonna Come”. Dylan wrote, “Blowin’ In The Wind”. At the time, I was a student at Morgan State College in Baltimore, Maryland, an all Black school, where I was the only white male. I had been born and raised here in a city as southern as any other, yet Morgan’s student body could not be classified as radical, nor could I. Those kids were there to get a piece of the American pie, as was I. The coeds wore pillbox hats a la Jackie Kennedy, kid gloves, and carried proper purses. The men wore sport coats and ties, wool sweaters, and carried very professional looking briefcases. I continued to carry my books tucked under my arm, Hardy Boy’s style. Students spoke of “Martin” and “Malcolm” as if they were familiars, and early in 1963 came the time Morgan joined the movement and proper students risked jail time in order to integrate a whites only movie theatre just off campus, a theatre that was, coincidentally, owned by the father of a friend of mine, wealthy Jews who lived in the Golden Ghetto of North West Baltimore. My family lived on the northernmost fringe of that ghetto, not rich but certainly Jewish.

Which paragraph would coax you into reading more? This is not a trick question. It doesn't need an answer.

So, my birthday. If I were an octopus I couldn't wrap my arms around the fact that it's been sixty years since my Bar Mitzvah. Three score years! Do the math. I've already lived more years than I'm going to live. There's the math for you! (I can hear Lewis Black angrily yelling those last four words.) "There's the math for you!" I feel I should have something wise to say at this juncture, something profound, maybe even poetic. Really, I'm just glad to still be here. I'm not yet finished growing into myself.

A story.

Years ago, I mean, years ago, I sold my first screenplay to a man named Jennings Lang, a major great white shark of that era. That script, "The Hunting of Pink Mountain Tinney", never got made but it did get me a three picture deal, and thus began my career in this business. At some point after the deal was made Jennings and I were having lunch ("doing" lunch, I know), and I thought he was complementing me on the action sequences, and the man got me feeling like I was a big time screenwriter. I said something to that effect -- some dumb shit brag about my ability to do action -- something to that effect -- and when I shut up Jennings said to me, "I didn't buy your script for the action sequences. I bought it for the love story."

Some lessons y'gotta keep on learning.

Morgan: Why I Went There In The First Place, And Why I Never Went Any Place Else

I had never planned to stay there. I certainly had never planned to go there. After all, only colored people went there. But I was white. And it was in the south. The fifties were only yesterday. My Uncle Frank cringed when he heard their music. "Goddamn jungle..." he'd mutter. OK, since I had never planned to go there, and I had never planned to stay there, what was I doing there? In the Spring of 1962, Morgan State College, Baltimore, Maryland, had a student body of  2,600 students, all but two of them -- a nun and one eccentric co-ed -- Black. For a Jewish boy coming of age in this era there were three non-negotiables: circumcision, Bar Mitzvah, and a college diploma, preferably in law, medicine, or orthodontia. These three were existential imperatives. The Hebrew trifecta. Without them a male child did not exist as a Jew.

 I should have had my college diploma in 1962 having graduated high school in 1958. though I tripled my degree of difficulty by flunking out three times. I got an A in English, a C in philosophy, and an F in everything else, including ROTC and phys. ed., rebelling against authority being one of my strong suits. Given this, reasons still remaining murky, I enlisted in the Marine Corps. Once on Parris Island my Drill Instructor bellowed in my face, "Why do you want to be in my Marine Corps, maggot?" "Sir, because it's safer than being at home, sir!" The words just came blurting out. Home life had been precarious to say the least. My DI's expression was one of utter disdain. "Get outta my sight, maggot!"  he sneered.

I trained as a combat engineer, and now once again walked civilian streets with few skills except how to break down an M1 rifle and put it back together again at night, blindfolded, in the sand. This is not a skill easily transferred to civilian purposes. What now? I thought about going back on active duty, but authority -- remember that one? -- still not my strong suit. What else? Drug store clerk? Produce manager at the A & P? Custodian at the local country club? Jews didn't do these jobs!

A neighbor, a white woman, worked in the Dean's office at Morgan and suggested I give it some thought. Dean Whiting, Dean of Students, was a reasonable man. Call him. I did, and without any memorable thoughts on a hot June day found myself crossing the quad to the administration building. It's bright white Grecian columns blinded me. I remember squinting to see and the feeling of my legs climbing the steps. Once inside the coolness of the interior settled around me. Summer school had not yet started. The halls were empty. I was probably wearing desert boots so my crepe soles made no sound. Neither did anything else. The quiet of an empty warehouse. Where was the dean's office? OK, there it is. Straighten up. Let's do this.

Dean Whiting wore a sport coat, tie, and really gentle smile. His office was full of books. I felt at ease in a way I never feel in a room without books. I don't trust you unless there's a stack of books on the floor beside your chair, preferably, each one about something else. I can't remember the details of our conversation but the upshot of it was that he allowed me to enroll in two courses for summer school, both English, I'm sure. The idea was that if I did well he would consider me a provisional student meaning I'd be allowed to enroll in a regular semester for four courses, twelve credits. We'd go on from there, see where we're at, what we'd do. Well, I knew exactly what I was going to do. I was going to ace those courses, all six of them, because, of course, since Morgan was a colored school it was an easy school. I'd score good grades then transfer to a good school, a white school. That was the plan. However, when the time came for me to transfer -- I had scored five A's and one B -- something had changed. I didn't consider myself politicized (I doubt I even thought about it), but Rosa Parks had refused to stand up, Negro college students from North Carolina had refused to leave a white lunch counter, and Malcolm was called Malcolm on campus even though most of the Morgan community did not want a separatist nation. Martin Luther King was Martin. Most students at Morgan were working towards a piece of the American pie, and the faculty, all of whom had attended schools like Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, and Yale, returned to the community and dedicated themselves to help their folks do just that. The campus was vibrant in ways I had never before experienced. Black Power hadn't yet appeared but it was on its way. Stokely was making himself known. Black Power, when it finally surfaced, made perfect sense.

The true magic of it all was Morgan's faculty. Encyclopedic knowledge delivered with the passion of a preacher. The profs were hungry to do it, and the students were hungry to get it. It seemed every lecture was a Ted Talk. I was beginning to know things, and the more I knew the more I wanted to know, the more I did know, those delightful subtleties that come with rigorous, creative thought. I read James Baldwin's "Another Country" and understood it. Morgan was not an ideological campus -- it was an intellectual and creative one -- still, I read slave narratives, was introduced to characters like Marcus Garvey, writers like Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Zora Hurston, Charles Chestnutt-- the entire Harlem Renaissance -- James Weldon Johnson's brilliant, "God's Trombones", and Chaucer's tales; the poetry of Phyllis Wheatley and that of Emily Dickenson; Richard Wright, Bigger Thomas, Hawthorne, Hester Prynne; the art of Romare Beardon; the frescoes of Giotto; the music of Scott Joplin with a whisper of John Cage. The point is: I learned twice as much as I would have at a "good" school.

The point is: I stayed, grew, and graduated.

Graduate school at Yale was next.

A Fulbright was awarded.

I did just fine.

Me 'n' Huck

"Reports of my demise were greatly exaggerated," said Huck Finn (or something like it) as he watched his own funeral from the rafters of the church. Well, all week long the neurologist repeated I'd had a stroke, a "hemorrhagic event" she called it (nothing at all like an academy award or a Bar Mitzvah), so all week long I dreaded the idea that Depends were in my near future. However, when the hospital finally did a blood work up (a little thing they'd neglected) it turned out that I had an unchecked urinary tract infection that seeped into my bloodstream and caused septicemia, blood poisoning. This displays the same symptoms as a stroke but a stroke it ain't. Keep your Depends. I'm outta here. And one day later I was.

I'm home now in the place I love most in this world, getting stronger every day and feeling like my old self. Something I learned this week: one can become old very quickly, overnight, my friends.One way to stave this off is to drink tons of water. Must stay hydrated. For years my kids have been telling me to drink more water, that coffee and beer wouldn't cut it. OK., kids, so now I'm a believer. Here comes the corny part: I feel like I've been given a gift. I could have died but I didn't. Instead, I learned that toughing it out in the old ways worked well enough when I was younger, but if I'm going to live long and heartily as the tough, old bastard I'd like to think I am, I'm going to have to change my ways. Suddenly, staying alive and healthy has become more important to me than another cinnamon roll. Discipline, a concept that had become quaint, is required. There's nothing cute about a crotchety old man. Come on, ref, lemme go another round and let's see what I can do! What's more important about another Baby Ruth bar that eclipses the love I have for family and friends? Yes. There. I said it. Love. I didn't mind being irresponsible when I could get away with it. Can't no more. Whenever I do shuck this mortal coil, I want it to be after a long, loving run. Nothing is more important than the people in my life. This week has shown me that. Nothing.

So now it's August, and I'm thrilled to be here. 'Til mid-October there's no place on earth more beautiful. Still warm and temperate, but now you see the occasional maple leaf turned copper-red in the grass, and there is a crispness in the air, a hint of Fall. Jamie and I picked wild blueberries yesterday. The trees are chock full of apples, a boon year for them. A large bough from our crab apple tree in the back came down in a wind storm. I never like to lose part of a tree, but this branch is filled with apples. Every evening a young buck in velvet comes to feed from it. My kids are fine. Dear friends have come through. Jamie is seeing to it that I drink more water.

Hang in there, buddy, I got a bet on ya! Here's the clincher: other people do, too.

I'm Still Alive, & I'm Not a Vegetable

Was working in my garden last week on my knees tying up tomato plants when I keeled over and could not get up. I felt no pain but I remember feeling really curious as to how I got there, and since my closest neighbor is a good quarter mile away, I was going to have to stay there unless I could get up. Which I could not. So I rested and rearranged myself, shifted my weight, and, at some point, got myself back to my knees. Getting to my feet was the harder part, like being buffeted by waves at the beach. I don't remember how long it took to get there but finally I did. I knew my feet were under me because. I could see them there but I felt so off-balance like a sapling waving to and fro in the wind. I kept thinking if I can only get to the house, drink water, and lie down. Chan, our close friend later called me a semper fi curmudgeon. I say, "Whatever it takes." I don't remember getting there but I remember being there, lying down, and answering the phone because I could see it was Jamie checking in like she usually does. Right away she knew something was wrong. "J," I said, "I'm just too tired to talk," whereupon she promptly called our neighbor down the road, Mike, who got to me pronto and phoned the local paramedics. Good thing, too. One hour later an ambulance got me to the emergency ward in Kingston. "When was the last time you ate?" I couldn't remember. "How do you feel?" I was asked. "Fine. Just tired." However, my vital signs did not say fine: blood pressure way up; pulse way down. I wasn't fine, not at all, but the fact that I was sick would not sink in. Huh? Sick? Me? I'm just really tired. Need sleep. Want to go home. "Sorry, buddy, you've had a stroke. Oh, shit. "Why don't I feel anything?" I asked myself. "Because you're out of it," came an answer, although I can't remember where the answer came from. But I couldn't handle simple questions, like what's your phone number? And I kept falling asleep before the person asking ever finished the question. Oh, holy shit, I allowed. I guess I've really come down with something. "Can I go home tonight?" I asked. It was about 10 pm. I think. Not sure. What I am sure about is someone said, no, we're waiting for a bed to open. The thought occurred to me that the housekeepers were waiting for someone to die and free up a room. At some point orderlies with a stretcher appeared, but I couldn't manage to get on it. They lifted me on and took me upstairs. I think it was about 3 in the morning. Can't remember.

Stay tuned.

33 Years -- August 12, 2013

The CIA calls it "tacit reasoning": the almost magical way of intuiting where things are going or what something means, the ability to sense hidden agendas and actually draw accurate conclusions. How do we know what we know? We've never been in this situation before nor have we met the other person before just now, yet our brains quickly make a series of tentative judgments in order to reach a conclusion. Tacit reasoning.

Love at first sight. Tacit reasoning. The door opened, and there she was -- Jamie -- the woman who would become my wife. We had yet to exchange word one. A second ago I had never known she existed, but I felt a jolt to my system that told me something important had just happened. It was a July 4th party, thirty-five years ago, at a friend's apartment to watch the fireworks over Santa Monica  Bay. I was sitting on the floor leaning back against a sofa with a brandy in my hand when my friend opened the door and let her in. I remember her smile. That was the first thing. She was an actress and projected one so large it could be seen from the last row of the balcony. I was paralyzed, literally afraid to move and probably wouldn't have had my friend not brought her over to introduce us. In my mind she looks now as she did then. She sat down on the floor opposite me and thus began a conversation that has continued for decades.We married two years after that and began a life that has lasted all this time, created a family, struggled with our careers, sometimes it seemed struggled with everything, and yet here we are, the two of us, still holding hands while we sleep. Each of us now has white hair but a little less of it. We're not as impetuous as we once were. We often veer away from the fall line that once seemed so attractive. There is no longer a rush to get down hill. There are other ways to get around.

So what's next? I don't know. I never did. I truly never fathomed just how good life could be. I know it now, and some part of me knew it then. What I know now is I am still excited at the prospect of Jamie coming through the door. But it is a quiet excitement, nothing raucous. We no longer tear each other's clothes off, but we have found peace in each other's presence.

Thanks, J. I love ya.

Catch & Release

Some of my best friends are fly fisherman (Two happen to be Jewish, but that's inconsequential). One, dead for decades now, was an ungainly guy -- big bellied with gangly arms and legs, and eyes that fixed you sure but seemed to come from two different directions. However, put a fly rod in his hand and he became pure grace. The line he looped backwards and then slipped forward was balletic, elegant, breathtaking, even gentle. His ability to place the fly exactly where the fish would take it was a joy to watch. I say "watch" because I am not a fisherman. I don't like fish so see no point in catching them. My friends practice "catch and release" -- catch them; let them go -- but again I see no point in causing a creature panic just for the fun of it. It doesn't know it's going to be let go. It thinks it's going to die. However, as I was staring into the creek that flows in front of my house it occurred to me that I do practice catch and release, only in my own way.

Robert Frost said that a poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of anger, a homesickness, a love sickness. It is never a thought to begin with. When I walk my woods and stare at rushing water I have no words either. I listen to all the birds singing with no goal to capture them on a list. I don't care what they're called. I just want to listen. I have no thoughts but I do have a lump in my throat. I do have yearnings. My job (if one can call what I do a job) is to capture these feelings by putting words to them, to craft them and allow them to float free of me, to bring them to the attention of someone else, to share them. In this way I keep my thoughts from dying with me. I don't believe in any mystical after life experience. I believe the here and now is all I've got. Except for the words I choose. If I choose them properly they will live on beyond me. I catch my feelings, distill them, and craft a spell that sends them on their way, to you, I hope. When I write a book or a screenplay external factors, lots of them, are involved. But these blogs are written for the pure pleasure of writing them, for the freedom I felt as a little boy rolling down a grassy hill and smelling spring onions as I mashed them on the way. Of course, having spent my life as a professional writer I do believe in an audience out there somewhere. I don't believe writers who profess not to care what other people think of their work. Of course, I care, but these blogs are not written for the same reason as the work for which I sometimes get paid. They begin as a lump in the throat, not a pitch, not a log line, not a query letter. For me they begin as something deep and mysterious. They come from somewhere and must mean something, but I don't know what until I catch them, process them, and let them go. The mystery, however, never goes. I continue to believe in the deep and mysterious, but only in all too rare moments do I catch a whiff of what it is. Only then.

My Bucket List

Ah, me! Can't ignore those tell-tale signs one minute longer. My meal invariably winds up on my shirt. Whoops, my fly is open. I'm driving down the road when I suddenly realize I don't remember where I'm going or even where I am. My handwriting has gotten so scribbly that if I handed it to the clerk at a Chinese laundry she'd give me three shirts with starch. I say "Huh?" a lot. Fine. I get it. I've already lived longer than I'm going to live. What is there left to do that I haven't yet done? Well, I'd like to eat an entire lemon meringue pie without having to chase it with a dozen Tums. I'd like to see the Yankees play the Red Sox at Fenway Park. I'd like to win a Tony. I'd like to see old friends. Other than that there's not too much left that I want to do. It's been a great life, and I've packed a whole lot into it. So, that leaves me with the Phucket List -- those things I don't give a good goddamn about no more no how. The guy behind me thinks I'm driving too slowly? Kiss it, buster. Safe sex? I guarantee you it could not be safer. Standing in lines? No way, not even for the hottest ticket in town, especially for the hottest ticket in town. You think I'm not hip? I'm not. So what? I will never ever own a smart phone, I-phone, android, whatever. It's taken me a lifetime to get over feeling dumb, and I'm not going to go back to feeling stupid now. What else? I refuse to multi-task. For millenia religions have preached the mystical state of union, of one-ness, of being present in the moment. Be Here Now. So, at this stage of the game I'm going to trust a corporate shill who preaches doing at least three things at once, preferably, seven or five or six or ten? That's actually the first thing on my list. No way will I talk on the phone at the same time I'm checking my bank balance, texting, streaming a video, and making a list for the market. Come to think of it, I'm not going to text at all. That leaves me with the concept of Authority although authority figures have been a problem for me ever since. I've tried to cover it up.You're an authority? Prove it. Or lose it. This inability to hide my disdain has plagued me for a lifetime. There have been isolated situations in which I tried, but the sneer which appears on my face is a dead giveaway. I think I'm smiling and giving rapt attention. But, completely on its own, my upper lip curls. My eyes narrow. Contempt is the operative word, and now, finally, at this stage of the game, I no longer care to be polite at all.

Last year a huge buck collided with my front end and turned my car into an accordion. It was mating season, and he'd been so focused on chasing a doe he forgot to look both ways, or any way. The insurance company classified my car as a "rolling total" which meant it still went forward if you gave it gas. It took me two weeks to get another vehicle. In the meantime, I wasn't about to drive my junker any where except I ran out of food and was forced to motor to the market. I bought supplies and headed home at thirty miles per hour with my blinker lights flashing. A state policeman pulled me over. I was pissed. Who needed this? You know that maddeningly slow, cocky walk they do from police cruiser to your driver's side window? By the time he got there I was not one bit happy. "License and registration," he said.
                        "What'd I do?" I wanted to know.
                        "License and registration," he repeated with an edge to his voice. Hey, if you're asking for my credentials I have the right to know what I did. Besides, he was so young he looked like he was still in high school. So,
                        "What'd I do?" I repeated. He pushed his face closer to mine and asked,
                        "Do you have an attitude?"
                        "No," I said with a half grin, "I'm too old to have an attitude."
But, the bald truth is, I still do.