April 25,2021

Stay tuned.

Thanks to all of you who do.

Back atcha.

s

AFTER THE FALL #2

 It was a doozy, one sweetheart of a fall. I've been sitting here for an hour trying to find the best description for my "fall". I'm still not satisfied with this one, but there she be. My sweetheart. I've walked that same walk across my front porch hundreds of times, maybe thousands. So, as we say on Passover, why is this night different from all other nights? Yet, unlike Passover, I have no idea. One minute up, the next second down. Irony is that I didn't feel much for another day and a half. Big deal. I'd been through worse. Try Parris Island. Maybe so, but a day and a half later I was sitting with my grandson when a grenade went off in my lower left rib cage. I'd felt this kind of pain only once years before in a nightmare I had protecting my son. Three skinny giants in full length black western style coats were hovering over him. Actually, they seemed like men on stilts. No way were they going to hurt my kid so I took off running, leapt upon their backs, and smashed their heads together...except I leapt out of bed and hit the floor breaking a rib to go along with the torn back muscle from the gym the day before, the one the chiropractor said looked like a salami. Immediately, I thought who in the hell is making all that noise? Some strung out junkie screaming in the street? A mad dog? A tire squealing cop chase? A coyote in a bear trap? It was me! Howling like a gut shot dog. Three days on a morphine drip finally shut me up. This last fall wasn't quite that bad, but it had its moments. I fell back against a screen panel from the front porch and shattered it. With nothing to break my fall, I slid down the tattered screen like a luge run and butt slammed into our concrete porch. 

It wasn't exactly, "Houston, we've got a situation''. More like,"What the f...?" I'd taken worse falls playing king of the hill when I was a kid, or so I thought until that grenade ripped red hot shards of high voltage pain shredding my hip and propelling me to unexpected places. A dose of vulnerability was one of them.

I never felt old before but now I'm beginning to wonder.

As I waited on a rocking chair in our bedroom for Madden to drive me to an emergency ward, such as there are in these parts where you worry they might have to send out for a band-aid. Anyway, I sat there still as the sphinx watching my wife cuddling with our grandson  -  "Good Night,Moon" - two such faces, beautiful and at peace - and I wondered how I'd feel if this were the last sight I would ever see on this earth, or any other earth since my beliefs stop here? And, for an instant, they were. Beauty as Beauty as Beauty. No Vermeer. No Botticelli. Real as Real as Real. An instant. And then there were my brother and sister, uncles and aunts (our moderating influences), cousins catching tadpoles and going to Emerson Farms for ice cream, the dearest of of old friends whom I will never see again, the dearest of the ones I'm still with, the dearest of new ones  on which the bets are still out. And then, Shazam, like the greatest social special effect of all time,  a zoom screen suddenly appeared behind me with everyone's picture in year book style. 

I guess I really don't want to leave anyone.

My buddy from way back at Yale, Dyanne Simon, brought in the  theological angle. Might not that Fall be my eviction from Eden, from that Paradise called childhood where people would hug us when we got hurt or feed us a lettuce and tomato sandwich for a snack or a root beer float on a hot day? 

Was this the moment I was finally barred from the children's playground? My Fall from Paradise? Oh, come on, not even the see-saw? Doesn't invulnerability mean anything any more?

Bob Lemond, Jamie's manager, when he was dying, told me it's not who loves you that really matters, it's who you love. It went to the heart of me - such a beautiful and profound thing to say. Over the years, I heard his words from to time to time, but I never really listened to them as much as I do now.

    

Ooooops! Another one.

I don't know what key or keys I pressed, but, apparently, whatever I did, a whole batch of past blogs got sent out. Ignore them. I'm trying to get a new one out this Sunday, 4/11.

Sorry.

And thank all of you who sent me "get over the fall" messages. Lots and lots of you. Thank you all.

See ya,

Stephen

AFTER THE FALL - #1

 Sorry, folks, I took a fall. Nothing broken but a good discombobulation. Stupid,stupid,stupid. I should have known better, but stupid is as stupid does.

Back atcha next week. Have a good one.

stephen

SPRING march, 2021

Today we discovered tossing stones off the bridge into a roiling creek, muddy with run-off from the melt.  The same mud puddle that was there yesterday was here today, so, of course, we had to jump up and down in it. He's discovering Spring in all its mud and slush, ain't a pretty picture in these parts, but there's a tickle in the air, like when you kiss his belly and his little legs happily kick about. I've never seen this kid walk. He runs, skips, jumps, hops, scrambles, scampers on his toes. His happy dance is life itself. 

Spring is the season when predictability is "What's that?"  Fifty degrees today. Low twenties yesterday.. Rain this morning. Snow flurries tomorrow afternoon. Bridge washed out. Take the long way around. Choice? There is no choice, no short way around. Nature's rules. Ad hoc. This place takes a constitution as strong as whale bone. 

I've always told my children that you can stand anything as long as you know it'll end. Winter has its own whims and wonders, but knowing that Spring is still out there makes it bearable. I heard someone saw robins up on Beech Ridge. I thought I heard a single chickadee down here, but no robins.

Spring is proof that our world is really moving along, even when there's no visible truth to this. Now, we can see it where for months we couldn't, or didn't. Two inches under frozen ground living things are preparing to surface.They'll be ready when the time comes.. Cicadas are down there now. If you thought about it, you knew there was movement,  but looking through the window all seemed frozen and still. Day to day nothing changes, nothing we can see, emphasis "nothing we can see". Basically, we're house bound always with a flashlight close at hand for when a tree comes down on a power line and the power goes out. Fingers cross. May it stay out for only a few hours. My thoughts turn to the willow trees I want to plant this year to control  runoff through a meadow which is slowly turning into a lake. I've been planting and tending a small grove out back - a family grove. An apple tree for my son, planted when he was one year old. A wine-red, flowering crab apple for my daughter after the weeping peas blossom I originally planted proved to be the runt of the litter. It's still there but not the beauty I thought it would be. And there is a pear tree for me and J, the original pair of it all. There is another apple tree, a birch at the entrance, and an oak I planted for my grandson's second birthday as well. This year I found a cherry tree that bears the first season and will go into the middle of the grove with a bench, then I want lavender to surround it so folks can come and sit there in peace, eat cherries, eat apples, pears, and, when the breeze wafts through, take in the aroma of wild lavender. I've asked that my ashes be put around the new cherry tree (which, I hope, will be an old cherry by that time). The real problem will be to keep the resident black bear off the cherries.

I wonder if we are really doing our grandson a favor.  Growing up surrounded by love 24/7, toddling along from one room to another, a room rarely empty, always with someone in it who loves him. Dearly. He goes from one to another, four people always with an A PLUS smile of sheer delight. He is fearless in the cold and snow. He's experienced the cleanest air, the best drinking water, the unadulterated beauty of a mountain creek, moon shadows, owls, and, of course, four horses and those two damn goats.  He stares at our mountains through the windows and yearns to trek through them. "Hold on, Buddy. I'm with you."

However. Are we really doing him a favor? Would it be best to run him through a real life boot camp? Teach him pain and tzorris and "just do it" right from the beginning? Happy hour's over. Toss his ass out of Eden? I've heard that some men, assholes, for certain, actually teach their boys to be bullies.  Dorian Alexander is a mischievous, creative, intuitive, and physically strong kid who understands boundaries. I hope he will use his strength for good. So many people don't, More and more it seems to me, their lies and cockamamie narratives have  taken over our world.  Trump's still in the white house but he wears a Biden mask. Who could possibly believe this bat shit crazy? They could. They are!

No, I don't want my grandson to be one of them, but I want him to have a constitution that enables him to deal with the world as it is without causing it any further damage, as well as to himself. I want him to be able to stand his ground because, in so many ways, he will need to. But I want him to stand his ground on principles that are grounded in a seriously considered assessment of the issue, with a bedrock of kindness and empathy as guides.

You're probably heard me say this before: the most important thing I learned as a young Marine was that I did not want to hurt anybody, yet turning the other cheek was no kind of option. Hand-to-hand combat was my favorite part of training. I've hung around  boxing gyms all my life - the best - Gleason's with Freddie Brown, Wild Card with Freddie Roach, and others scrappy but not so erudite in the University of Advanced Fisticuffs.  I've had struggles with myself which I'd like Dorian to avoid. Good luck, right? 

Please, just let him be good and curious and kind. He is strong and fearless, and he will need to be.

Curmudgeon - 3/14/2021

Let's dispel a myth right now: curmudgeons are not cute. They are unpleasant to be around. They are old farts. They are not adorable. They say nasty things. They have foul odors, small hearts, and they pee every fifteen minutes. Who the hell would ever aspire to be one? Self disclosure: Me. Once. After Jamie asked me, early in our courtship, "What's so cute about that?" In fact, she winced. Hard. With cruel and visceral disdain. It triggered this epiphany: Uh,oh. I'd bought into a stereotype because I fancied it was lovable. Did I need to be loved that much? "Grandpa farted!" Ha, ha. Is that what I want my children and grandchildren to remember when they think of me - "Grandpa sat on his teeth!" Oh, God, no! Shoot me first.

And yet.

I admit to an occasional soupcon of behavior which might well classify as genus curmudgeon, for example, patience, as in none, or wearing cardigans, or cursing when I can't remember something (which is a lot). Dorian, my grandson, has the G-word down pat. Refusing to watch Oprah's interview is not curmudgeonly, but hollering at the screen, "Two words for you, lady. Two words! 'Personal Trainer!' Got 'em? Two words! 'Personal Trainer!'". How do I not want to be remembered? That way.  

We, of Generation Curmudgeon, need to build a border wall to keep at bay creeping "kvetchism". It ain't easy, all those rapists, killers, and drug cartels chipping away at one's defenses, but, big deal, so what, somebody took my phone off my desk for the umpteenth time when I really have an important call to make? So what? Did I really want to talk to HP-InstantInk? Again? So what there's no sugar left in the sugar bowl to jump start the day? So what? Bad for me, anyway. So what if the gas tank is left on empty, it's zero degrees out, and you're 30 minutes from a gas station? So friggin' what? Slow down. Take a losartan.

Warning sign. I normally groan when I bend over to pick something up. Two groans. OK, three. My grandson, going on two and a half, was right there this morning when I bent over to pick up a toy truck off the floor. Bend groan reach grasp groan stand. And this little kid next to me is "doing" grandpa - bend groan reach groan - right there next to me! Bend groan reach groan. Munchkin style.The groans, in particular, were quite adorable. Grumpiness in the face of that smile? Why? Some legacy. Pass.

Most celebrity curmudgeons are humorous and very bright, yet cynicism and sarcasm are their bedrock. Their hands are cold. Not so much Oscar Levant - an irascible show biz personality, composer, author and sometimes game show host who died in 1972. Levant was also a world class hypochondriac as well as one of the funniest people on earth, only he directed most of his ire at himself. When asked on TV what he did for exercise, he answered, "I stand up, fall down, and go into a coma". That's curmudgeon-ism at its finest. No way to compete at that caliber. So, when my threshold reaches the grouse and whimper stage, it's best for me to just get out of the way. Pronto, but with grace, of course. 

Lawrence Ferlinghetti Died Today, February 23, 2021

Lawrence Ferlinghetti died today. Back in 1953, with a $500 investment, he opened what would soon become the legendary City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. Poetry, to him, lived somewhere between speech and a song. He rocketed into the public consciousness with the publication of Alan Ginsberg’s, “Howl”. City Lights became the go to scene for the Beat Generation. When I read Ferlinghetti’s, Coney Island of the Mind, although I was only a pischerka way away on the far coast of Baltimore, Maryland, I fancied myself a Beat poet as well. My first poem, “Love Is A Feeling”, was a coffee house hit. My true mensch of a life-long buddy living in Florida can still quote the thing. I remember the first one dozen words or so, and I’m embarrassed when I think of them.  My then girlfriend, Shelly, with long black hair and heavily made-up eyes walked through the audience with a bread basket chanting, “Bread for the poet. Bread for the poet.” Seven bucks. I thought I was hot shit. Three days later she ran away to South America with a jazz drummer. Never saw her again. He must have been more hot shit than I was.

When I was at Yale I took a course in literary criticism in the graduate English Department taught by Cleanth Brooks, a well known lit-critic I had studied while at Morgan. “When someone tells me they want to be a writer, I ask them why? If they answer, ‘Because I have something to say,’ they’re not a writer, but if they say it’s because they love what words can do, they might just be a writer.” Me? My desert island book has always been Roget’s Thesaurus. I love what words can do, the way they play with each other, the way they sound. I never let a sentence go free unless it sounds right.

My final year at Yale all of the playwrights in my class hustled to take a course in film taught by Michael Roemer and Robert Young, wonderful filmmakers whose recent credit, Nothing But A Man, starred Abby Lincoln and Ivan Dixon along with Moses Gunn, Gloria Foster, Esther Rolle, and Yaphet Kotto, young Black actors, mostly unknowns at the time. I was taken with that film and it spoiled me forever into thinking that’s exactly what a movie should be, in other words, about something. Anyway, I remember crossing the street towards the School of Drama building while the rest of my class passed me in the opposite direction heading for the seminar in film. I was having a hard enough time learning to write a play. I didn’t want to mess with movies.

Nu?

Decades later I sold my first script to Universal and signed a three picture deal. A meeting was set at Universal/Park Ave/NYC with Jennings Lang, the exec who bought it. I had a blue wool suit which I never wore but decided to wear that day. The first words Jennings said to me when I walked through the door were, “I see you wore your Bar Mitzvah suit.” Right then and there I should’ve known better. At some point in our meeting I kvelled about my ability to write action sequences. “I didn’t buy it for the action,” he growled, “I bought it for the love story.” It was years before I finally got it: Write from the heart or don’t bother to write at all.

What follows appears to be a graceless segue, but please indulge me. 

Some of my best friends have been 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 to eat 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 set free. 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 external factors, 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, not a movie star in sight. 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.