Thoughts on Thanksgiving, 2023

The trees are naked and vulnerable, not full and proud as they were only months ago. Summer trees make me think of British gunnery sergeants with their chests proudly puffed out. Winter trees make me think of that stone corpse writhing in agony in Pompeii, twisted limbs, trying uselessly to protect himself from the fiery ash falling from the sky. However, this, ironically, makes me think of the most beautiful thing I experienced while living in Italy. 

I had taken it into my mind that I wanted to write a screenplay. Yet, since it was the very early seventies, nobody knew much about such a thing although everybody had advice. After listening to a variety of opinions, I decided the best thing to do would be to go live some place where they didn't speak English. I spread a map of the world out on the floor and went through damn near every city in the known universe from Abu Dhabi to Zanzibar before deciding on Florence. Why Florence? I had staged managed for Edward Albee just a few years prior at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, and so I knew enough Italian to ask for the men's room but not enough to entertain anything serious like, e.g,  criticism of my screenplay. Hey, it was 1972. You didn't know any more than I did. 

So - my ambition at full court press - I jumped on Icelandic Airlines, trained down from Luxembourg, got an apartment, and moved in with all my dreams intact. Once one got used to the constant aroma of horse manure, each step and every street was charming. It was as if I'd been painted into a work of art - Sunday In The Park With Stephen. I was there in the grand tradition of glorious ex-patriotism, subject to few rules but my own. 

Since I've been a gym rat all my life, I figured there had to be one in Florence, and there was, basically, right around the corner. Nothing fancy. More like a small garage. Ratty work out clothes. No cruising. Just a few guys pumping vintage iron and babbling incessantly. Point is: in order to get to the gym I had to pass by a building called the Academia. Who cares? Right? Well, folks, the Academia had one and only one inhabitant: Michelangelo's David. Nowadays people need to book tickets months maybe years in advance for the opportunity of spending maybe an hour with the David, yet I got to see him every day, casually, walking by, dodging inside, a minute or an hour, my choice, for a year. 

I became addicted to my visits with him, his warrior grace, the way he dominated the space around him. His beauty itself was lethal. I'd see that penetrating stare focus on a point in the distance, studying something crucial, the enemy, his height, his girth. I'd see the round stone in his free hand and wonder about its weight, wonder which river he got it from, wonder if he used special stones for special purposes or shaped his own, wondered which one would kill Goliath? What must he have been thinking? I'd do his monologue. "Goliath's helmet has a flaw above the brow, and, if I can penetrate that flaw, I've got him." His sling is over his shoulder. He seems calm and pensive. Is he calculating trajectory? Wind factor? Distance to target? His is not the face of an innocent. 

Celeste/Isele by Stephen H. Foreman

 https://iselemagazine.com/november-2023/

Isele Magazine - a classy and elegant bunch - has just published my short story, Celeste. Please access it through the above address. Thank you.

Thoughts on Veteran's Day

I could have been killed and nearly was. Two mornings ago. The day began well, a bit early for me because I needed to drive an hour to a ceremony honoring veterans at Middleburgh Elementary where my good buddies, the twins, James and Michael Clark, aged seven, second grade, asked me to be their honored guest. Could I say no? There were maybe a hundred other vets there from all the branches. This is a world I'm not normally in, so I was surprised to see just how moved I was by the outpouring of pure feeling. James and Michael were thrilled, and so was I. A fine way to start the day.

And then I headed home.

I was not impaired in any way, hadn't even yet taken my normal morning meds, and yet, one moment I was almost home, an instant later flying off the road, into the woods, plowing through thick scrub with a tree coming smack at me. Deep mud - that much maligned substance - slowed me down and saved my life.There was no other car involved, no person, no animal. Just me and what little was left of my Subaru. Tore the front to shreds. No bags deployed. Ribs vaguely bruised but roaring luck intact. 

I could apply street theology to all this. What's the take-away? Had I been saved for some higher purpose? However, that's not my bent. And yet. I had, in a manner of speaking, been saved,even if the agency was thick mud,so what am I gonna do about it? Not much more than I'm doing already. Just keep on truckin'. Workin' on my stuff. Gettin' it out there. Like always. And yet. It seems as if I ought to have some vital take-away from such an experience, some visceral adjustment other than maybe my driving days came to an end against that tree, that maybe I am older than I thought I was when I set out that morning. Maybe it's that simple. "I grow old, I grow old, I wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled." That simple. 

The Next Day

Just a bit ago this evening I was having some fine time with my five year old grandson, Dorian. He's learning to read now, and it's a pleasure to point out a word and have him tell me what it is. Pirate. Penguin. Magnet. Volcano. We also went through a delicious book utilizing sound technology to play Beethoven's 5th and teach about the instruments. He now knows the difference between a cello and a bass, an oboe and a bassoon. So, I got to thinking, completely off tangent, Can you be in a State of Grace if you don't believe in God? Doesn't it depend on how you define it? I tend towards the secular - a feeling of sheer delight in being alive, thrilled to be doing what I'm doing this very moment, a connection to the most modest of inanimate objects. The pen in my hand was once crude oil was once the guts and bones of creatures that lived eons before I ever picked it up, was some sort of vegetation before that. I might be holding Triceratops in my hand right now, or a fern. If you want to connect this to God, go ahead, but I don't wish to complicate matters. It's so simple. I'll take sheer delight. Leave it that way.

So, there is a take-away, although nothing I haven't taken away before. I wish the following words were mine, but Kurt Vonnegut gets the credit. 

"I urge you all to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur at some point, "If this isn't nice, what is?"

Morgan - Ruby Tire

My father died on the night of the first seder, 1963, the second semester of my junior year at Morgan. I'd been a produced playwright for two months, both at home in Baltimore at Morgan and in New York City, a production somehow wangled by Dr. Waters Turpin on stage at Colombia University Teacher's College. He was, my father, I think, a closet comic, who was always impersonating guys like Berle and Gleason and Jackie Leonard. "Son, one of these days you're gonna find yourself, and, when you do, you're gonna be awfully disappointed," was a favorite. Also, "I guess you're not gonna be a bum after all," said in a W.C.Fields accent with his arm around my shoulders back stage opening night. 

Reuben Henry Foreman ran a business called The Ruby Tire Company, or, in Baltimorese, Rooby Tar. He turned threadbare used tires into the semblance of new ones through a process called retreading which evolved out of existence with the advent of a brand new tire cheaper than a used one (which, essentially, a retread was regardless of the way it looked). Ruby Tire was on Fremont Avenue just up from Baltimore Street in southwest Baltimore, the poorest section of the city, all Black, 360 degrees, everywhere you turned except for Ruby Tire, the package goods across the street, and Louis the Greek's restaurant on the corner. Oh, yes, and Jake the Tailor, just the other side of the alley, who sat in the window of his shop Indian fashion while he sewed with needle, thread, and thimble six days 'til closing. Every man who worked for Ruby Tire was Black as well: the Carey brothers, Jimmy and Lou, twins; Vernon Graves; Zebediah Fullwood; Claude Crocket; George Brown; Gainwell Haines aka Sporty...Sporty and I used to go down to the corner grocery and, for a quarter, buy a slug of bologna, a thick slice of onion, and a roll plus a Royal Crown soda. Then we'd sit on the sidewalk outside Ruby Tire, our backs to the wall, and munch away. I first began working for Ruby Tire at the age of eleven until my father died when I was twenty-one, some weeks six days out of six. These men were a part of my upbringing.

Ruby Tire could well be a memoir of its own, so what does it have to do with Morgan? Call it prep school. The difficulty with writing about Morgan, as I've said so many times before, is because the experience seemed so normal. Now, I've come to the conclusion that Morgan seemed so normal because Ruby Tire seemed so normal. I never questioned whether these men were better than me or worse than me or even that different from me. They were just guys who worked for my father like I did. From the point of view of an experienced octogenarian, of course, I now see the difference, but I didn't then. Except for my Marine Corps tour, until my father died, Ruby Tire was an integral part of my life, more days than not. My brother and I fixed flats and stacked rubber like everybody else. But, before my junior year was over, Ruby Tire was at its end.

Two months after my father's death his partner declared bankruptcy throwing the business up for auction. The plan was nefarious. Partner declares bankruptcy. Business goes to auction. Auction goes to rich in-laws who buy it back debt free and unencumbered by a partner's obligations to the surviving family. In other words, our family would be completely cut loose from the business...unless...I...bought...it...back. A beloved uncle said he'd put up the money if I wanted, and went with me to the auction as did two dear friends from Morgan, Jean Wiley and George Barrett, both now dead as is my uncle, of course. 

Auction day was a hot one in mid summer. It was held in the alley bordering the business and attended sparsely. Uncle Milton was to my right. Jean and George to my left. The auctioneer stood on the roof of a car (That's what I remember) and began his spiel. Suddenly, there was a price tag attached. A ridiculously affordable one. A set up. Unless I bought it. The countdown began. "Do I hear..." My uncle said, "Do you want it?" "Do I hear..." "Do you want it?" Did I want it? Steve's Tire Town? "Do I hear..." Did I want... "Do you want it?" Did I want it? No, God damn it, I don't want it. Didn't want it. Let the bastards have it. I don't want to drop out of school. I don't want to drop out of my life. Let the bastards have theirs, and I'll have mine. "Sold," bellowed the auctioneer, and that was that.

Thoughts Engendered By A Friend's Curiosity

 A friend, when he discovered I rarely watch film and television, asked with shock, "What do you do all day?" It's a monastic existence, I admit, but still rife with anticipation. How many miles to go before I sleep, and what will I do with them? As my friend, Mr. Priestly, said, "I have always been delighted at the prospect of  a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning." 

So, I got to thinking: how does this writer spend his day? I have no meetings, script conferences, no long term planning sessions. Phone calls are few and mostly unanswered. Not yours, of course. I'm talking hucksters and scam artists, although if they were truly artists they would have caught me. Details. It's all in the details. Pay attention. So many details take up so much time that the day passes without knowing where it went. (We joke about watching paint dry, but what could be more Zen? The sound of one hand clapping? Really?) Just suppose you believed that all the earth and everything in it were sacred, so much so that every step you took was taken on hallowed ground. Every step. Everything you smelled and touched. Just sayin'. Everything you saw and heard. Suppose you believed that every pebble, every beetle, every mote of dust were somehow sacrosanct? Chris Hedges, a radical journalist with whom I currently disagree, said the point is, "To tie the most mundane moments of existence to the eternal mystery of the cosmos."  I think about the Buddhist monk whose words taught me to "chop wood, carry water." How to transform the most basic of tasks. To do what you do and not do anything else but that. To pay attention. Just stop and think it through. To follow the connections. To grasp that one is a part of all this. It takes thought and attention to detail and that takes time but time passes and so does the day. Is there always magic waiting somewhere behind the morning? Of course not, but there is always that possibility. 

And so I spend my day kind of meandering from one moment to the next, dawdling as much as I want, establishing the flow, or so I try. And try. And try.

The Buddha was sitting under his tree when a horseman raced by.

    "Where are you going?" asked the Buddha

    "Ask my horse," answered the rider.        

Morgan - A Girl I Once Knew

1962

    I remember her walk. I'd be sitting in the student union when she'd come in, smile, and walk over to me. She had a wonderful walk -- slow and easy, fluid, without a hint of effort. She'd walk over to me and then we'd sit there and talk, about nothing much.            

    Marion Tyree was in the Ira Aldridge Players, the school's drama society. Now that I was sort of a playwright, so was I. I don't remember what she did in the group nor do I remember how we met, but being in the club broke down barriers, and we began to talk. Her voice sounded so pleasant with just a hint of a southern accent. She was slender and very dark. I was Jewish and pale as a biscuit. We must have had crushes on each other, but I remember being with her was like a slow canoe ride across a lake rather than the turbulence of shooting whitewater. I don't remember being on guard for rocks, but I imagine I was, and I imagine she must have been, too. After all, it was 1962 in a city that slanted south. She was Black, and I was White. Yet, I don’t remember an issue, nothing fraught, no sense of anything we shouldn’t have been doing, no conversations I couldn’t have had with someone else. We were still children of the fifties, innocent and pristine. It was enough to simply sit together in the student union between classes and just talk.

    Somewhere in here Dr. Turpin, mentor to the drama society, producer and director of my play, a fine man to whom I owe the beginning of my writing career, told me he'd made arrangements for the play to be produced in New York. The Ira Aldridge players, cast and crew, would be headed for the bright lights of Off-Broadway on stage at the Columbia Teachers College way uptown but a bite of the Big Apple nonetheless. Marion and I would be hundreds of miles from our hometown. We never spoke about it, but I doubt that was lost on either of us. This is what I remember: not a lot about rehearsals or performance but a taxi ride with Marion Tyree down to Greenwich Village to see Jean Genet's "The Blacks'' starring a young actor named Louis Gossett. Another couple shared the cab with us: a friend and fellow student from Morgan, another Marine as I had been, Reg Kearney, and his date, a coed from Barnard. I still don't know how he managed to pull that one off in the limited time we were in the city, but he did. Reggie had hit his trifecta: she was zaftig, white, and Jewish. Reggie was in heaven. All four of us were in the back seat, so I sat as close to Marion as I'd ever been. I cautiously put my arm around her, and she settled in. Nestled in. It was a small move and gentle, and felt so right. After the show (which was electrifying) we walked to a restaurant, and, for the first time, we held hands, right there, out in the open, we held hands. At first I thought every set of eyes in New York City was on us, and then I realized none were. We held hands and walked to the restaurant, and I was happy. I was a produced playwright, and I was holding hands with Marion Tyree.

    When Marion’s grandchildren were grown she told them about me. “He was a white boy,” she said. “No, grandma, no,” they screamed. “And he was Jewish,” she said. “Grandma, no,” they yelped in disbelief. Then came the kicker.” And he was a good kisser, too,” she said, and laughed when they squealed and went wide-eyed. “Oh, no, grandma, you didn’t!” “Yes, I did,” said Marion, totally delighted with their reaction. At that moment she became a legend to her grandchildren who couldn't conceive of grandma ever doing such a thing. But we did do such a thing, and it has become a cherished memory.

    If I had been born a ship I would have been a fishing trawler. My nets were out trawling for stories long before I even knew I wanted to tell them, countless details hauled around for years like heavy cartons of old books I could not leave behind. Thoughts and people; smells, colors, sounds. It’s not clear when things began to sort themselves out, but, when they did, Morgan was such a story. Marion Tyree was such a story, a story I will happily tell ‘til my gums dry up and my mouth withers away. It was all so nice and easy. We saw a play. We were hungry. We walked down the street looking for a place to eat, and we held hands. 

                                       THE END

Morgan - Northwood

Northwood theatre was a segregated movie theatre in a segregated shopping center six blocks from campus. Students couldn't eat in the restaurant, try on clothes in the store, nor take a seat in the movies. Mostly, it didn't matter: the food was terrible, and the clothes were out of date, but the movies, that was a different story. Even if all there were to see were Doris Day and Rock Hudson, that was date night, and everybody wants to go to the movies, especially one that was six blocks away. 

The student president (I believe his name was Reggie Louis) called a meeting of student leaders and proposed Morgan State spearhead an action to integrate the Northwood Theatre. Picketing, of course, but also trespassing, i.e., the possibility of arrest. We had to be prepared for that. I wasn't. A decision I regret to this day. I'd picket and do anything short, but I wasn't ready to get arrested. I was still tethered to my family in such a way that the idea of an arrest pumped fear into my guts, not so much of the police, but having to deal with my family's disdain and displeasure. I was in the process but not yet ready to completely sever my ties. I remember the shame I felt when I told Reggie Louis that my arrest was out. He said he understood, however, had I been he, I would have thought much less of him than before he admitted he didn't have the cojones to go through with it. I did picket (and never felt so naked in all my life), but an arrest was out. Dozens of students, many friends of mine, went to the slammer but not this one. It's one of those things in my life that if I had it to do over...you know what I mean.

Onward.

One big irony. Well, actually, two. Northwood Theatre was owned by the father of a friend of mine at the time, not a close friend, but a guy I sometimes hung with. His name was not Albert so I'll call him Albert. Al was always bugging me to take him with me when I went to parties at Morgan. I rarely went to parties myself, and I damn sure wasn't about to take him with me when I did go to one. Here his father wouldn't let them in, but Albert wanted to party. Draw your own conclusions. Once he saw me on the picket line that was pretty much the end of our relationship. I managed to navigate all my different worlds rather smoothly, going from one to the next simply doing what had to be done while there, but there were some relationships that had to be severed. 

About this time, Freedom Rides were being taken along the Eastern Shore, arguably the most racially hostile part of Maryland. Freedom Riders were integrated groups of Blacks and Whites who chartered buses in an attempt to integrate the restaurants, bars, bowling alleys, and other businesses in the area. The buses always faced hostility from white mobs, often met with outright violence. Firebombing a bus full of passengers was a favorite. One time an African diplomat, royalty in his own country, was refused service. He was not a freedom rider, only a diplomat (a prince, actually) in a private car headed to Washington, D.C. When the owner of the restaurant was told of this man's stature, his response was, "He looked just like any other nigger to me." Well, a girl I was dating at the time thought this was the funniest thing she'd ever heard, made her laugh so hard she damn near screamed, damn near peed herself she thought it so funny. I can still hear her. It was repugnant. I can't remember what I said or even if I were so disgusted I said nothing at all,  but I do remember turning and walking away, never to see her again. How dare she? How dare anybody?

I said there were two ironies. Here's the second one: the mayor of Baltimore was the father-in-law of my cousin. Legend has it that, after weeks of student protests and arrests, he strode into that theatre, pointed his finger at the owner, and ordered, "You will integrate this theatre now." And the waters calmed. And the Northwood was integrated." Such is legend. It made it seem as if it were the mayor's command - Moses parting the sea - and not the three weeks of blood, sweat, and tears endured by the students that broke down that barrier and integrated that place. No politician did this. No white saviour. Morgan did. It was an act of devotion and determination pulled off by a student body determined to be polite yet determined not to budge.