People change

My choice of images with which to begin this blog posting was the basest kind of self-indulgence, rooted in the deepest nostalgia.

And I freely confess that nostalgia is a vice of mine, no less than alcohol, food and gambling are to some other people.

The image of Rod McKuen that appears above (and I realize that most of you don't remember Rod McKuen, which is the reason I'm writing this) is the cover of an album he made for Warner Brothers Records in 1969, Rod McKuen at Carnegie Hall. Billed as his "birthday concert," it was a live album of his songs and readings. Four sides, what was called a "double album" in those days.

For my 16th birthday on Oct. 12, 1971, I asked for, and received, this album. I still have it somewhere.

For that same birthday I was taken to a Rod McKuen concert at the San Diego Civic Theater. After the concert was over, I hung around among the Q&A crowd. Asked a question. He wasn't giving autographs, but I waited around the theater exit after that, and when he came out, I went up to him and shook his hand. I was newly-minted 16. "Mr. McKuen, I just want to thank you, because it was you who got me started writing poetry two years ago," I said to him.

"That's good, don't let anybody stop you," he replied.

He was a star. His fame was superlative. If you had given almost any American a word-association test in 1971 and said, "poet," the response would have been "Rod McKuen."

Women carried his books around in their purses. He was commissioned by popular magazines to write cycles of poems. People like Frank Sinatra recorded his songs.

And now almost nobody remembers who he is. He's in his late seventies now. He wears a beard, and looks a bit like George Carlin did just before he died. I hope that doesn't mean we're about to lose McKuen, even if the world forgot about him years ago, and I myself, by the time I was 17, no longer thought as much of his poetry as I did a year earlier. (By then I was hooked on Dylan Thomas.)

McKuen wrote many songs that were quite famous in their day, including Seasons In The Sun and Jean from the film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie starring Maggie Smith. Smith won an Oscar for her performance in that film. McKuen was nominated for an Oscar for the song, but lost out to Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head, a song Burt Bacharach had written for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid the same year.

One of McKuen's many songs was entitled People Change.

And here, in which you will re-read much of what I just wrote, is a preview of my own novel-in-progress. What follows is an excerpt from a telephone conversation between the protagonist of my new novel and his recently-ex girlfriend:


“People change,” Olga remarked.

McCarver laughed. “You know what you just said? You couldn’t possibly know. But you just gave me the title of a song by Rod McKuen, and it couldn’t have popped out of your mouth at a more appropriate time. McKuen wrote a song called People Change.”

“Who was he?”

“Yeah, almost nobody remembers him anymore. Hard to believe, but in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies, his name was practically a household word. He was a singer—with a terrible voice, though, very gravelly—and a songwriter who also wrote this treacly free-verse poetry that was very easy to read because it didn’t try very hard to be poetry. It was just thoughts, meandering thoughts, usually about failed love affairs. Women were suckers for this stuff; they love ‘sensitive’ men. Housewives carried his books around in their purses. If you asked any American in the early seventies to name a poet, ‘Rod McKuen’ would probably be the name you’d hear. He was perfect for that blow-dried era. I used to have some of his books. Lonesome Cities. Fields of Wonder. Some of the books were actually based on his record albums. Lonesome Cities was also an LP record, released in 1968 I think. Magazines like Women’s Day commissioned McKuen to write poems for them. He wrote a song, Jean, which was featured in the movie The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie starring Maggie Smith. Jean was nominated for the Oscar in 1970 for Best Song, but was beaten out by Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head from the score that Burt Bacharach wrote for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. All of this is apropos of nothing of course, except when Wayne Breedlove and I were teenagers, Rod McKuen was our idol. I used to check the Lonesome Cities LP out of the public library and listen to it by the hour when I was, oh, 15. Believe it or not, my big birthday present for my 16th birthday was being taken to a Rod McKuen concert here in Baltimore. Wayne’s and my early poems sounded just like McKuen’s, as did those of every wannabe poet in the United States in those days. Now he’s almost completely forgotten. But he was plenty big in his time. I was with Wayne when I heard my first Rod McKuen album, The Single Man. Queasiest bunch of self-pity-fueled hogwash you ever heard. We loved it. We wanted to be just like him.”

We did, too.

Now, with that by way of introduction, I get down to my real subject, which is how people really do change.

What follows is a list of things about me that have changed during my life. I used to be this, used to be that, used to like this, used to eat that...don't anymore.

I'll bet you're the same way. Because people change.

Make your own list. Share with me. As the Greeks used to say, "Know thyself." I had an argument along these lines just the other day, with a friend who refused to see the usefulness of examining the past. Only the present matters, she insisted.

Which is the same as saying that a room at night looks better with the lights off. Sure it looks better with the lights off; You're not looking at anything. I won't quote that wheezy saw of George Santayana's about how those who forget the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them, but I think there is more to be learned from the past than just remembering where you got the cuts and bruises. Wordsworth said the child is father to the man; what better way to know the man, or woman, than to remember the child?

What better way to know thyself than to reflect on how different your today self is from the self you used to know? (Or, as another of McKuen's songs had it, The World I Used To Know?)

Here are some ways in which I have changed over the years. Make your own list and share.

1. When I was 25 I was a big fan of Bruce Springsteen's. I can't stand him anymore. I think if I saw him coming down the street now, I'd go the other way.

2. When I was eight, I loved ketchup on scrambled eggs. Not now.

3. I was a bed-wetter as a child. God, I hope that doesn't come back in old age. It did to my father.

4. Like all baby boomers, I grew up watching television. Thousands of hours of it. You couldn't pay me to watch TV now.

5. When I was in college, I thought Japanese women were the most beautiful women in the world. I haven't necessarily abandoned them, but they've been supplanted by Russian women. (That could be because I've never lived in Japan, but I have lived in Russia.)

6. When I was 12 years old I dreamed of being an astronomer. By the time I was 15 I had realized that someone who can just barely manage long division is not going to be an astronomer. That ambition deflated quickly.

7. At ten I bridled at being told to go to bed. Now I don't have to be told.

8. Like most novice drinkers, when I was 19 I thought rum-and-coke was a great drink. Kids like alcohol, but they like it sweet. The thought of drinking rum-and-coke now is almost enough to make me heave.

9. In high school I thought that T.S. Eliot was a great poet, and that W.H. Auden and William Butler Yeats were jokes. After one semester of college I had reversed that judgement 180 degrees.

10. At 20 I had a thick, full head of hair. At 53 I look like Arnold Schoenberg.

11. When I was a child, any and all talk of lawns, gardens and that sort of junk on the part of adults would make my eyes glaze over. Now I'm thinking about when I should plant my tomatoes. (Hint: next week.)

12. At 15 I used to sit up at night worrying about death. Now I just take another drink and go to sleep. As the guy said in the movie Manhattan, "I'm alive, I'm alive. When I'm dead, I'm dead."

13. As a youngster I was bored silly by jazz. I love it now.

14. I used to be afraid of girls. Now I'm afraid of women. (Probably more than I am of death, come to think of it.) Now, don't start screeching "misogynist," all you "feminists" out there. We all fear what we don't understand, and I gave up on understanding women years ago.

15. The exception that proves the rule: at 10 I used to get in trouble for reading library books when I was supposed to be doing my arithmetic. Stuff like that still happens -- I will still shirk what I'm supposed to be doing in favor of what I like to be doing.

16. When I was a teenager I loved the short days of fall and hated the spring. Now I love the spring and, although I still rather like the short days of fall, now they make me think of mortality more than what they used to make me think of, e.g. the holidays.

17. I used to love to go to the movies. When I was a kid, 50 cents got you a feature film on a big screen, and a cartoon. Now $11 gets you a feature film on a screen the size of someone's garage door, preceded by 15 minutes of commercials. Pass.

18. When I was young a snootful of alcohol would prompt me to call someone on the phone and bend their ear. Now, with each successive drink I take, the telephone becomes a repellent, not an attraction.

19. I used to love the play Inherit The Wind, in fact I did a cutting from its courtroom scene for speech tournaments when I was on the speech squad in high school. Now I regard it as simplistic, two-dimensional, manipulative and generally second-rate.

20. I was raised, like a lot of Americans are, sort of nominally Protestant. My parents' attitude was, any church more-or-less is okay as long as it isn't Catholic. In fact my parents (neither of whom went further than high school) encouraged me to despise and look down my nose at Catholics. When I was 19 I became Catholic. I haven't been anywhere near a church in years now, Protestant or Catholic, but I don't look down my nose at anyone (except New York Yankee fans.)

And now.......before I sign off, let me leave you with this thought, something to ponder the next time your local surplus store is having a special on gas masks:

A few years ago one of my doctors told me (and I don't know where he heard it) that when you sit down on the toilet to have a bowel movement, most of what you pass is not, in fact, food waste.

Most of it is stuff you have inhaled.

Say goodnight, Gracie.