Homage To Bratfisch

I have now been driving a taxicab in suburban Washington, D.C. for slightly more than nine months. I took it up last summer because I needed money. I still do it for that same reason. Believe me, I don't do it for kicks, although surprises -- good and bad -- do come up. Last October I picked up a fare, an actually quite-attractive 34 year-old woman, extremely drunk, who decided on the way home that she wanted to have sex with me. Right there in the cab. At 4:30 in the afternoon. Well ... that probably would have landed us both in jail, and another alternative, taking her to the Sleazebag Arms Motel, could have landed me in jail by myself when she sobered up later and, embarrassed, decided to file rape charges. So, like the ever-vigilant compromiser and paranoiac that I am, I gave her my business card and said, "If you still feel like doing this after you sober up, give me a call."

She never did.

I have learned a few new things since I took up the trade of hack, such as the fact that, with the possible exception of birds and snakes, there are no two more natural enemies in the world than cab drivers and the police.

This, by the way, has a long and venerable tradition behind it. I just finished re-reading a wonderful book about fin-de-siecle Vienna, Frederic Morton's A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889. Of course the central event of the narrative is the double-suicide at Mayerling of the Habsburg Crown Prince Rudolf and his girlfriend Mary Vetsera. But one of the key players in the drama was Rudolf's personal horse-cab driver, Bratfisch, and Morton describes his activities with a few asides thrown in, not the least factoid of which is that the horse-cabbies of Old Vienna had just as adversarial a relationship with the cops as their modern counterparts, to the point of building insulting "cop-snowmen" during Fasching at which, it being the carnival season, the police had little choice but to smile.

Those Viennese cabbies (bless their hearts) were as contemptuous of the censor as they were of the police. When government censorship clamped firmly down on any account of what really happened at Mayerling, the crackdown including confiscation of foreign newspapers that carried details and rumors the Emperor did not want his subjects talking about over their coffee, Old Vienna's cabbies got busy smuggling foreign papers in, then hiding them under the seats of their cabs and letting the curious read them ... at a price of forty kreuzer for ten minutes.

The city where I drive is served by three cab companies. Between the three of them they have roughly 700 cabs. And since many of us are on the road for twelve to fourteen hours a day, we are highly-visible, highly vulnerable (and highly numerous) targets for cops with quotas to meet.

The police department's hack office has three officers. Two of them are actually not bad fellows; the third is a total jerk.

Someone needs to sit this guy down and tell him that he does not have the most prestigious job in the police department. I mean, he isn't Head of Detectives. In terms of sheer prestige in police work, getting paid to jerk cab drivers around might rank right up there with mopping out the toilets. But this character takes himself very seriously, and he loves nothing more than watching some cabbie either cringe in fear before him or get mad and start cursing, giving him an excuse for further deviltry.

Just the other day this guy followed me into a Metro station. I was about to drop off a fare. He was probably bored, just wanted to yank someone's chain to brighten up his own morning. Anyway, the moment I had dropped off my fare and was pulling out of the Metro station he flashed his lights at me and pulled me over. He demanded to see my manifest. All cab drivers are required to keep a written log known as a manifest. You have to write down where you picked up each fare, what time it was, where you dropped them off, what time you dropped them off and how much the fare was. Some of the guys are very lackadaisical about keeping their manifests. I'm fairly punctilious about mine, if a bit sloppy. I didn't want to sit there in the middle of the Metro parking lot scribbling and blocking traffic, so I decided I would enter the fare I had just dropped off a short time later when I was out of the flow of traffic.

But having just seen me drop off a fare, (and looking for an excuse to yank some cabbie's chain) this clown pulls me over and demands to see my manifest, after first wagging his finger at me over a dented bumper on my cab (which one of his two colleagues had dismissed as no big deal months earlier.)

He jumped in my shit because I had not immediately entered the fare I'd just dropped off into my manifest the second she left the cab. "The law says you gotta enter that fare in your manifest the moment the customer leaves the cab," he harrumphed.

What absolute ballroom-bananas bullshit, as Hemingway might have said. I mean, as chickenshit goes, this crap ranks right up there with the self-important Safeway store clerk who proudly nails a customer for taking one extra packet of saltines with his salad-bar lunch.

All the cabbies in town utterly loathe this guy. This week when I went into the cab company to pay my weekly stand dues, (we're all independent contractors; we pay the cab company for using its infrastructure and the cab stands around town) another driver who had seen this cop pull me over, watched the whole thing, gave me a twenty-minute lecture about how much he detests this particular cop. I told him that I personally never argue with the guy; I just smile, take his bullshit and walk away. It's the best policy, really. In the early Mel Brooks movie The Twelve Chairs, which takes place in Russia right after the Bolshevik revolution, a fracas breaks out in which Ron Moody clobbers a cop. Raffish Frank Langella admonishes him firmly: "Don't EVER hit a policeman!" Well, "don't argue with a policeman" is also a good idea, because they like it when you do. Especially if you're a cab driver. Because cops really do have a special hard-on for us Gypsy Hacks who serve The Insomniacs, to paraphrase Tom Waits. I've come to believe it.

By the way, this particular cop, in addition to having a case of elephantiasis of the ego, is also apparently not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree. (Well, yeah, he hassles cab drivers for a living. If he were playing with a full deck he might indeed be head of detectives.) Last spring when we, the latest batch of cabbies to pass the test, were being processed in, he demanded to see my immigration papers. This guy is so accustomed to dealing with cabbies from places like Somalia, Ethiopia, Afghanistan and Iraq that he just assumed that all cab drivers must come from somewhere else.

"Immigration papers?" I scratched my head. "I was born in Vermont."

I think he got the message. And probably made a mental note to nail me for something, anything, at the first opportunity, to get even with me for making him look stupid for a moment.

Oh, well. Every situation has its ups and its downs, right? Being in business for yourself, for example. The downside:no guaranteed money; you have to go out there and hustle every day. And no benefits: you have to provide your own health insurance, and a vacation is just a week of making no money. But there's an upside as well: you can make your own hours and you can't be laid off. As one who has been laid off more than once, (and fired a couple of times) I can tell you that this last is indeed a plus.

As I'm sure Bratfisch would have agreed. Makes you wonder, though. After he lost the plum assignment of a Vienna cabbie's life, driving the Crown Prince Rudolf around, where he did he go from there?

Somehow I have a feeling he managed. A thick skin and a bounce-back ethos are essential to survival in the cab business.

Hail to Bratfisch. May he be in heaven, outsmarting the local flatfoot, even as we speak.

J.D. Salinger, 1919-2010

J.D. Salinger's obituary was in the Washington Post yesterday. He was 91, the same age my father was when he died.

What a strange dude. (I mean Salinger this time, although my father was also an exceedingly strange dude.)

It seems to me that Salinger was Truman Capote's opposite number. They shared the distinction of publishing one smash-hit book, in Capote's case In Cold Blood, in Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye, then drying up creatively, or at least publishing next to nothing. But whereas Capote lusted after fame, glamor, exotic locales, celebrity gossip, television interviews and a big rolodex of famous names, all of whom he described as his "dear friends," Salinger published one successful book in 1951, then went out and hid in the woods for the rest of life, talking to practically no one. At the time of his death, he hadn't even published a short story since 1965, although the obit did mention that he stayed busy out there in the woods, writing stuff that he intended for publication only after his death. I guess we'll find out about that.

I read The Catcher in the Rye in high school and disliked it, most likely because it was de rigeur for adolescents to admire that book, and I had a contrarian streak in me. Re-reading it many years later, I found Holden's diction rather quaint, and certainly his jaded cynicism, a shocking novelty in 1951, was something of a yawn in the post-Watergate era. But because all adolescents like to think of themselves as alienated and "different" from everyone else, Holden Caufield immediately became an American folk hero. The obit did answer a question for me, which was why my contemporary, Joyce Maynard, who was going to Yale at the same time I was starting college, managed to publish a teenage memoir, Looking Back, when she and I were both all of 19 or so, gaining instant literary fame. Seems she was sleeping with Salinger at the time. Yeah, that would do it all right. Listen to me. I sound like Holden Caufield. Only one man knows why J.D. Salinger withdrew into the New Hampshire woods at age 33 and seldom came out again, refusing interviews, shunning publicity, publishing nothing. Well, that man is dead now, but I'm sure he had his reasons. R.I.P.

Of Smoked Hocks, Winter Nights and Paying It Forward

I posted this on my "food" blog, "Red Wine With Fish," just about a year ago. December is the time of year when hot, hearty soups are on the menu, so here is the story of my best. Winrow cousins pay special attention: this is Grandma Winrow's recipe (more or less):


Years and years ago there was a Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon which began with the voice-over narrator, the incomparable Bill Conrad, proclaiming, "Everybody can do something! For example, Homer Noodleman of Sioux Falls, South Dakota can put six flashlights in his mouth!"

Bullwinkle's special talent was that he could remember everything he ever ate.

Well, I can't remember everything I ever ate, but fortunately I can remember how I was taught to cook some of the things I've eaten, and that's where our story begins today.

I have this friend, Holly Inder. Now, when I met Holly many years ago her name was Holly Brayton, and I'm still inclined to call her that, because frankly, I only met her ex-husband once and the encounter was so forgettable that I can't even remember what he looked like, much less anything he said. Everybody can do something, as Bill Conrad said, and one thing James Inder did very well was blend quietly in with the furniture. So to me, Holly will always be Holly Brayton. I don't really know who Holly Inder was. A mistake, would be my best guess.

With that by way of non-sequitur, Holly and I were talking the other day about split pea soup.

Holly and I met in late 1985, when we were both preparing to go overseas with the foreign service for the first time. Now, Holly was a foreign service brat; she grew up overseas, then went to work in State Department telecommunications when she was in her twenties. Her father had been a telecomm technician during his own career; she was more-or-less following in his footsteps. I was 30 when I joined the foreign service and had never been overseas in my life.

Consequently, Holly has been to a lot of places I've never been. She stayed in the foreign service after I quit nine years ago, and continued to travel.

So when I get an opportunity to whip on Holly a place I've been that she hasn't, well, let's just say it's like taking the trick in a gin game. I like it.

So there we were, talking about split pea soup. Holly says to me, "There's a place in California I've heard about, where there's a restaurant that serves nothing but split pea soup."

"Buellton," I said, with an inward gloat.

"You've been there?"

"Yup. The town is called Buellton, the restaurant is called Anderson's, and yes, split pea soup is the premier item on the menu," I said.

Then, unable to resist savoring the moment a bit more, I added, with just a touch of world-weariness, "Buellton. Yeah, it's right off Highway 101 north of Santa Barbara on the way to San Luis Obispo. I ate there with my dad a couple of times on our way to Arroyo Grande to visit my aunt and uncle. Not far away from Buellton is another tourist attraction, Solvang, a fake Danish village. You can buy all kinds of baked goodies there."

I was lovin' this, as they say in the marketing department at McDonald's.

But I was just warming up.

"Yeah, Anderson's makes some of the best split-pea soup you ever tasted," I told Holly. "I don't know if it's available in other states, but in California you can buy it canned in the grocery store. Yeah, it's good." Then, with a pause for effect, I added, "But mine's better."

Anyone out there old enough to remember Walter Brennan on the old western series The Guns of Will Sonnet will recognize how I savored this moment. Remember the scene where Brennan, as old Will Sonnet, has the following exchange with Claude Akins?

Claude: Ah, you Sonnets. I wish I had the third one in front of me right now.

Walt: You mean James? Now that's a foolish wish, mister. From what I hear, James is the third best shot in the west.

Claude: The THIRD best?

Walt: James is darn good. But he's better. (Jerks his thumb at Dack Rambo, his grandson.) And I'm better'n both of 'em. No brag, just fact.

Yesiree Bob, my split pea soup's bettern' Anderson's. (Spit.) No brag, just fact.

And there's a darn good reason for that. Family tradition.

That is correct. My grandmother taught my mother how to make split pea soup, and my mother taught me. And my grandmother was the best cook who ever lived. Ergo, when I make split pea soup, I'm making it the way my grandmother did, and there's no better. Anywhere.

I can prove it. I did. I told Holly that I had put up a big pot of split pea soup just the day before, and that I would bring her some the next time I saw her. Well, I happened to be going down to Landmark Mall a few days ago to do some Christmas shopping, and Holly doesn't live far from there, so I took a Tupperware container of my split pea soup with me in the car, ran it over to Holly's place and dropped it off.

She called me the next day to tell me that it was every bit as good as I said it was. And that's saying something, because Holly is a better-than-average cook herself, and moreover, one of those women who don't mind admitting when a man can cook something better than they can. When she lived in Guam a few years ago, Holly had a boyfriend named Frank, so she told me, and this guy, an ex-Marine, really liked to cook. When he and Holly weren't canoodling, they were cooking. "But Frank was a better cook than I was," she cheerfully admitted.

Well, I can say this with all confidence: not all of my kitchen experiments turn out well. I really screwed up the mashed potatoes on Thanksgiving this year. But I can say with all confidence that nobody, and I mean nobody, makes better split pea soup than I do. Because when I cook this stuff, my grandmother is looking over my shoulder. Dante, steered through Hell by Virgil, had no better guide than that.

So make a list, run to the grocery store, get out your kitchen utensils, follow these instructions and prepare to go to heaven. But don't forget the Beano.

How good is this stuff? When my father was 90 and we were having trouble getting him to eat anything at all, he would polish off three bowls of this soup if I put it in front of him. That's how good it is.

Oh, by the way, I wouldn't dream of serving split pea soup without cornbread on the side. You know cornbread. In some parts of the east they call it johnny cake. In a future blog posting I'll tell you about the time I introduced a roomful of Russians to cornbread. Anyway, included with my split pea soup recipe is also my cornbread recipe, for those of you who don't mind going the extra mile rather than just grabbing a box of cornbread mix at Safeway.

MY GRANDMOTHER'S (AND MOTHER'S) SPLIT PEA SOUP

Ingredients:

Two 8 oz. packages of dry split peas

1 large onion

4 large carrots

2 smoked pork hocks or smoked ham hocks

Salt

Pepper

Garlic powder

6-8 bay leaves

Soak the dry split peas overnight, or at least for a couple of hours. They will expand, and you'll need to add more water. Then dump them in a soup pot and bring them to a boil. When they come to a boil, turn the heat down low and let them parboil until they're soft, usually 45 minutes to an hour. A whitish foam will arise from the boiling peas. Skim it off and throw it away.

Dice up the pork or ham hock as best as you can and put it in a saucepan with about two cups of water. Start it boiling too, then let it simmer on low until you have soup stock.

When the peas start to get nice and mooshy, drain some of the water out of them and add the soup stock. If you're using smoked pork hock with a bone, fish it out and chop as much meat off of it on a chopping board as you can. Throw the meat in with the peas and stock. Then dice up the onion and carrots and add them to the soup.

Then add the seasonings. salt and pepper to taste, maybe a tablespoon of garlic powder (less if you don't like garlic) and then add the whole bay leaves. Just let the bay leaves float in the soup.

Simmer on low heat for about another hour. Then turn the heat off, cover the soup and let it cool for three hours. When it cools, it will be thick -- almost as thick as soup that comes out of a can, Add as much water as you need to get it to the thickness you like, re-heat and serve. Remove the bay leaves before serving.

One great thing about soup: the more it's re-heated, the better it gets.

KELLEY'S CORNBREAD FROM SCRATCH:

Ingredients:

1 cup white flour

1 cup yellow corn meal

1 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. baking soda

1 cup milk

1 egg

1/3 cup sugar

1 tbsp. cooking oil

1 tsp. salt

Pre-heat oven to 375. Combine all the ingredients in a mixing bowl, whip or mix until you get smooth batter, pour the batter into a greased 8 X 8 square baking pan, and bake for 20-25 minutes. I like to spice my cornbread up by adding such things as salsa, grated cheese, diced jalepeno or bits of bacon. Experiment with your own ingredients, but the basic batter stays the same.

And for making a kitchen smell wonderful, nothing rounds this meal out like a freshly-baked apple pie. I'm back in my mom's kitchen on a November night just thinking about it.

Me voici

Some of my friends have expressed concern over the fact that I haven't blogged in more than two months.

Seriously. Two people have.

God bless both of you, and all of you others too.

My last post, Surfing In The Rain, was about depression.

Well, I'm still working with it. It's an "autumn" thing, although I have always loved autumn. When it gets me, it usually gets me in autumn. You?

Ernest Hemingway was appalled when his erstwhile friend Scott Fitzgerald aired his dirty laundry in The Crack-Up, a chronicle of his, Fitzgerald's, breakdown.

Hemingway thought that this was extremely unmanly. You didn't air your personal problems. You kept them to yourself. Then you killed yourself, as Hemingway did.

Thank God the post-World War II generations have been easier on themselves than the generation born before 1914. My father was born in 1914, and he suffered in silence from depression for many years before death finally delivered him from it.

At the very end of the film Papillon (1973), Steve McQueen, who has been a prisoner on Devil's Island for many years, finally manages to escape by flinging himself into the sea along with a handmade raft. Just before the credits roll, Papillon (McQueen) hollers out his final line. Bobbing in the ocean, clinging to his raft, waiting for the tide to take him to the mainland, he shouts, "I'm still here, you bastards!"

He escapes.

She escapes. They escape. We escape.

We're still here.

Surfing In The Rain

I'm back (after not blogging since July), and I have a serious subject to discuss as summer wanes and the equinox looms.

Show of hands: how many out there have ever experienced depression?

Okay, those of you who were in a bad mood last weekend because you didn't get the promotion you were counting on, or because your lottery pick was one number off the big winner, or were pissed off because your college football team lost, put your hands down.

I'm not talking about being stressed. I'm not talking about being disappointed. I'm not even talking about the blues.

I'm talking about depression. The big "D." The real deal. That thing that keeps you in bed because it arranges things so you don't even want to get up. That thing that immobilizes you against your will, takes your resolve, your concentration. Your hope. Your hopes. Your belief in the future. Your belief in the present. Your belief in anything.

Sometimes takes a life.

I have a former friend who shares my tendency toward falling into the grip of Old Omnivorous, aka Mr. Sad. He calls people who have never experienced depression "civilians."

Okay, I'll go along with that. Depression sufferers are a sort of army, because we fight an enemy that's powerful, unrelenting at times, and sneaky. Oh, boy is Mr. Sad a sneaky bastard. He waits behind the next garbage can, the next tree. He can jump out at you at any moment.

Except with me. I know when to expect Old Omnivorous.

Now.

I first experienced clinical depression when I was a teenager. Of course I didn't know what it was, then. Neither did my parents. They didn't know what was wrong. I didn't know what was wrong. All I knew was that I was a few weeks short of 16 and my life was over. Ha-ha. Well, it wasn't funny then. What do you say about a kid who comes home from school, puts on his bathrobe and sits in front of the television set, sometimes crying, until it's time to go to bed?

That was me: September, 1971.

Mr. Sad has been back to visit me a number of times since, and as was the case that first time, it's always right around Labor Day that he gets off the bus and checks in. I don't know exactly why, but when depression comes to visit me, it's almost always late August-early September when the games begin.

My doctor says he knows the reason why. Some people do tend to become depressed during the fall. Or in my case, when they see it coming.

My doctor knows more than I do, but my problem with that thesis is, for most of my life fall has been my favorite season. How can something you enjoy make you sad?

Well, for some of us, it's hardwired in, and the hardwiring goes back thousands of years. Spring is a time of renewal, autumn of shutting down. Days grow short. "September...November...," as the song goes.

Yes, but when I was growing up, fall was also the time of a lot of fun stuff. My birthday was in October. Then came Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Always something to look forward to. School vacation. Days off. Autumn was fun, once you got past that annoying business of having to go back to school.

But I'm going to be 54 next month. Back-to-school hasn't been part of my life for a good many years. And as we all all know, the older you get, the more the "big picture" intrudes. It's true: at midlife and later, I find that autumn, love it though I may, has become no longer the pageant of fun it was when I was a kid. It's what it always has been: a pageant of glorious, flaming-out color that adds up to one thing: Here Comes Death.

Mr. Sad doesn't come to me every year. No indeed. He has given me wide berths. Sometimes his visits come 10, 12 or 13 years apart.

The thing is, though, the older I get, the more often he shows up, like some sponging relative who's heard that you might have money.

He left me alone last year. I had other things on my mind, I guess.

But the year before last, 2007, I had him hanging around the house, uninvited. I knew he was here because I started listening to Mantovani and Percy Faith. When I, as a music lover, start thinking that anything more emotionally taxing than elevator music is going to be more than I can deal with, something's wrong.

My doctor put me on Lexapro and some other antidepressant. I soldiered through. I even got my act together and dropped 25 pounds.

But between my teen years and 2007, every time Old Omnivorous came poking around my window, almost always about the time of Indian Summer, I simply endured his presence until he went away, usually right after New Year's. Some people's cycles of depression only last a few days. An old friend of mine in this army has these mini-depressions. He's knocked down for two or three days, then he's back up. My cycles tend to last three months. I'm usually coming out of it when the January snows begin to fall.

But the thing is, until two years ago I didn't know what it was like to HAVE help. Sure, I had heard that depression was treatable, but I'd never bothered. I dealt with it by putting myself on routines that bordered on the autistic: turn left, turn right. Put right foot in front of left foot. Go for long walk after work. Return home at fixed hour. Fix dinner.

Crawl under covers and cry. And hope, come morning, you'll be able to get up.

My experience in 2007 was something of a revelation. Help works. Depression does respond to medication.

Shortly after getting that help, I was sufficiently back on my feet, emotionally anyway, to go back to playing my Glenn Gould and George Szell CDs rather than Mantovani's version of Charmaine. (I'm not putting down Mantovani, and Charmaine is a lovely song, especially in his all-strings arrangement. But I'd rather hear it when on an equal emotional footing than when I'm in a state where I feel that its non-offensive soothingness is all I can bear.)

Mr. Sad is poking around this week. I think he took advantage of a very sudden change in the weather here in Washington, D.C. We went from August Steambath to September's dry-air cicada-music literally overnight. It was about a week ago. On Sunday afternoon I was out driving my cab wearing a T-shirt and shorts, my summer cabbie uniform. I came out Monday morning to drive in exactly the same attire, and damn near froze. Overnight, September had arrived. A day early, no less.

With alarm bells on. Something in my brain suddenly said "Ah-ha! Labor Day! GET SAD!" And, fool that I am, when told to jump off the roof, I got out the ladder. Or my brain did.

I wasn't scheduled to see my doctor again until next month. But I called his office on Friday and asked if I could see him this coming Tuesday. I'm going to ask him if he can put me back on the antidepressants. At least until New Year's, when the All Clear traditionally sounds, for me anyway.

And if you're a soldier in this army, whether you're fully aware of it or not, my advice to you is, don't try to do it the way I did for 30 years and tough it out as the Lone Ranger. Help is there. Medication works; take it from me. The blackness CAN be softened to gray, and gray is the color of soft mornings. Soft mornings often become bright days.

The Moon...40 years and counting

This posting is dedicated to my oldest and best friend, James R. Provenza.

Salud, my fellow "future astronaut" of the 1960s.





This month we click past Year 40 of The Moon, Adulterated.

From now until kingdom come, there are footprints on the moon. Lots of them. And junk. Lots of junk. Abandoned pieces of lunar module. Assorted exploratory ordnance. At least one golf ball. One American flag.

God knows what all else. Give our scientists and engineers enough time and they'll make the moon look the way they've made Antarctica look: like a gigantic KOA campground on the day after Labor Day.

But until July 20, 1969, 40 years ago this month, the moon was as pristine and untouched as any other celestial body. Now it's not. The human race has been there. Come back. Repeated the trip. Explored the lunar surface. Dug for rocks. Poked around.

Hit a golf ball.

For you under-40s, that's true. The late Alan Shepard, the Navy commander who became the first American in space in 1961, was also the first -- and so far only -- American, or for that matter citizen of this planet generally, to hit a golf ball on the moon. It was roughly 10 years after his suborbital flight in a tiny capsule perched atop a Redstone missile in May, 1961 that, as captain of the Apollo 14 flight, the third U.S. mission to land men on the moon, in February, 1971, Shepard teed up with a makeshift club and belted a golf ball over the lunar surface.

No one recorded how far Shepard's drive went, but the moon's gravity being one-sixth of the earth's, there's little question but that it probably made one of Albert Pujols' home runs look like a dry fart.

There is no need to re-hash what the space program meant to us little boys of the 1960s. Jim remembers, and so do I. When President John F. Kennedy announced in the same year that Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, and then a few weeks later Shepard became the second, that the United States would make it a goal to land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth before the decade was out, he was by all eyewitness accounts being true to the spirit of his presidency.

"The New Frontier" was the tag-line of Kennedy's administration.

What better expression of that spirit than to soar into space?

And besides, the Russians had already gotten there. It was the cold war. We had to catch up.

We did, in style and across a decade's worth of headlines.

It was, by any definition, a heady time. Kennedy's death from an assassin's bullet, the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement, urban unrest, riots in big cities, the hippie movement, drugs ... everything divisive, controversial and violent that we associate in retrospect with the 1960s, has hanging over it the image that stands above this blog posting ... an American spacecraft coasting over the lunar surface. Men preparing to touch down on the moon. Despite everything that turbulent decade hurled forth that seemed to deny or defy the spirit of The New Frontier, there was always this.

For me, the defining moment of the 1960s occurred just about six months before Neil Armstrong, captain of the Apollo 11 flight in 1969, stepped down on to the moon along with his fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin, as their crewmate, astronaut Michael Collins, stood watch in the command module, orbiting the moon and awaiting their return from the lunar surface.

It was when the crew of the U.S.S. Pueblo, the Navy spy ship that had been seized by North Korea in early 1968, was released to freedom in December of that year. At the very moment that the Pueblo's crew walked out of North Korea and back to freedom, the crew of Apollo 8, one of a series of space missions that set the stage for the great lunar landing mission of the following summer, was in orbit around the moon. Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders were the crew of Apollo 8. Their spacecraft entered lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, 1968.

They took one of the most transfixing and permanently epoch-defining photographs ever taken: the image of the blue earth rising over the moon. Earthrise. It has been reproduced millions of times in millions of places in the years since. Mankind's first look back at the Big Blue Marble. Home, viewed from elsewhere. At the end of a decade that had seen so much noisy and violent disunity, this simple cosmic image of the greatest unity, our unavoidable unity, caused countless moments of stunned, sometimes awestruck reflection. Earthrise was the ultimate family snapshot: there we all were...all three billion of us. Alone in the cosmos, with only each other. For one magic moment, the shouting stopped.

As America and the world watched the crew of the Pueblo walk to freedom, they also watched Earthrise. And then listened to mission commander Frank Borman read aloud, on Christmas Eve, the opening verses of the Book of Genesis.

Ask me to name a moment that defines the 1960s. It's that moment. Not Woodstock, not any image from the horrors of Vietnam or of some grisly and heartbreaking political assassination.

It's that moment: The Pueblo's crew walks to freedom after 10 months in a communist prison as the crew of Apollo 8 takes a quick snapshot from space of the silent, sorrowful earth.

The sixties.

God, I'm glad they're gone. Anyone who wants them back has to be an idiot.

But July 20, 1969 has served for many of us who were growing up during that decade as a counterbalance, if not exactly an antidote, to November 22, 1963, a date that fewer and fewer people I know, especially those under the age of 50, even seem to remember anymore.

Millions of words have been written about how that autumn afternoon in Dallas supposedly crushed the postwar generation's hopes for the future and gave rise to the spirit of cynicism and doubt that would dominate American politics in the decades to come.

I won't go along with any such pat and simplistic view of something as complex as modern history. But I would certainly go along with those who would claim that July 20, 1969 vindicated, in a very large and significant way, the optimism that underlay JFK's public announcement in 1961 that the nation should try and make it happen. For that reason alone, it serves as a historical counterbalance, if not exactly a consolation, for the nation's loss nearly six years earlier.

Many people I know, including many dear friends as I get older, remember neither Kennedy's assassination nor Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon.

We who remember both now face the thinning of our ranks.

Lucky us.

Channeling Travis Bickle?

<


Just kidding with that title, of course. Travis Bickle and I have nothing to do with each other save my admiration for Robert de Niro's acting talents when he was young. And yes, I did mean to cast aspersions on what he's been doing for the past 20 years. If ever an actor decided to sit on his laurels...but never mind. This blog posting isn't a movie critique.

Still, what you see above, right above de Niro in his famous role of the mixed-up New York cabbie in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), is a symbol of my latest hat. That PT Cruiser isn't my taxicab, but my taxicab is a PT Cruiser, the only one in Yellow Cab of Alexandria, VA's fleet in fact.

Yes, I have gone into the taxicab business. What a month and a half ago was a cream-colored 2006 PT Cruiser with woody paneling, which if you ask me just cried out for a surfboard on its roof were it not for the fact that such a thing would look ridiculous rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue past the White House, is now a Yellow Cab.

Alexandria Yellow Cab No. 244, to be precise. And I wish the goddamn dispatchers down there would quit addressing me as "244." What are we doing, a remake of The Prisoner starring the late Patrick McGoohan? ("You are number six!" "Who is number one?") Ah, the nineteen-sixties. What a cheesy decade they were.

"My name is 'Kelley,' not '244!'" I keep yelling at them.

I have only been hacking for two weeks so far, but I've already learned some new things. For example, people just assume that cab drivers know where everything is. I've had people flag me down on the street or pull up next to me in their cars, roll their windows down and ask me for directions to such-and-such a place or such-and-such a street. It's touch-and-go, because I don't actually live in Alexandria and I'm still learning my way around that town, although you'd be surprised how quickly you get to know a town when you're driving a cab in it. Cruise up and down the same streets and avenues for eight to 12 hours at a time and soon you begin to feel like a native.

Last Saturday night I was parked in front of the Hotel Monaco, one of King Street's tonier spots. Now, King Street, for those who don't know Alexandria, VA, especially the lower end of it down near the Potomac river, is Party Central on a Saturday night. It's nothing but restaurants and bars, traffic and more traffic. And it is not a wide street, not by any means. So here I am, parked at the taxi stand in front of the Monaco, standing next to the cab and stretching my legs for a minute, and here, right down the middle of King Street, comes a 50-foot semi-truck-and-trailer rig. How that trucker got that truck down King Street is still a mystery to me, but you can bet the conga line of stalled traffic behind him, backed up halfway to the Masonic Temple, was calling him some choice names.

His passenger-side partner (no doubt they were "running team," as they say in the trucking industry) rolls down his window and asks me, "Hey, you know where Route 1 is?"

These guys were lost. With 80,000 pounds worth of tractor-trailer, right in the middle of Old Town Alexandria. On Saturday night, no less. I didn't envy them. Or anyone in their way. Or anyone right behind them.

"Yeah, that's North Patrick Street," I replied. "And I hate to tell you this, but it's that way," I said, pointing back in the direction from which they had come.

I had to explain it three times before they understood. But I watched in amazement as they went chugging down to the corner of King and Royal, then proceeded to execute the slowest, most painful left turn in the history of trucking, watched by about 200 gawkers. Presumably they understood me, hung another left at Queen and got to where they needed to go, without running over any curbs or tourists.

What else have I learned so far? Well, in the D.C. metro area anyway, people are as surprised as hell when they encounter a cab driver who speaks good English. I picked up a fare last weekend who asked me to stop on the way downtown and pick up his buddy with whom he was planning to party later. When the buddy got in the cab, he immediately dropped his voice very low in talking with his friend. I could hear him thinking: "Who the hell is this cabbie? Where does he come from? What's his native language?"

I whipped out my business card. "Here's my card," I said. "If you need a taxi or a notary public, give me a shout."

"I ... I can't believe it," he said. "A cab driver who speaks English? I haven't had a cab driver in this town who speaks good English in two years!"

"New England born, California bred," I told him. "English is my L1. And by the way," I added for theatrical effect, "go Red Sox."

Maybe he was a Yankees fan and I'll never get any repeat business from him, but I couldn't resist yanking (no pun intended) his possibly-racist chain.

Also, I have learned that, when it comes to taxicabs anyway, people tend not to want to bother with coins. I loaded up my change box with quarters, dimes and nickels in addition to the ones and fives I keep for making change. Not necessary, I found out. Most of my fares will just wave away the coin, round it up to the next dollar, go from there. Which can lead to embarrassing moments. I picked up a lady yesterday, early in the morning. She had two little girls with her. She was taking them to school, but needed a cab to go maybe six blocks.

When we reached her destination the fare was $4.73. She handed me a twenty. I began fumbling around for 27 cents.

"Don't bother with the change," she said.

Don't bother with the change? "But you gave me a TWENTY," I said.

"Oh, no, I meant the coins," she replied.

"Oh. I was just going to say, you're one heck of a tipper!"

We laughed, and I handed her fourteen bucks even.

Last Friday I had a United States senator in my cab. Remember that scene? Senator Palantine? "We Are The People!!??"

You movie buffs will. You others, go get the DVD.

Okay, you politics buffs will want to know who the senator was. Mark Warner, Democrat from Virginia. I picked him up at his home in Old Town and took him to Capitol Hill.

He talked on his cell phone the whole way. But I did engage him in a bit of chit-chat. I decided to yank his chain, because that's the kind of fellow I am.

I pretended not to know who he was. Actually, the truth is that I didn't know who he was until he told me. But when he stepped out his front door, my first thought was, "Congressman or worse." See, he was wearing the congressional uniform: blue sportjacket, solid color tie and khaki Dockers. All male members of Congress wear that uniform.

But when he asked to be dropped on Capitol Hill, "on the senate side," I got sneakily inquisitive. "Do you work for one of the senators?" I asked.

"I am one of the senators."

"Oh, yeah? Which one are you?"

"Warner."

"John Warner?"

"No, Mark Warner."

"Rings a bell, I think. Are you a Republican or a Democrat?"

"Democrat."

We drove along in silence for a few seconds while he checked his voice mail. When he was finished, I said, "Say, what have you guys on Capitol Hill been doing lately? I haven't looked at a newspaper in six months."

"Well, we regulated tobacco yesterday."

"I thought tobacco already was regulated."

"It is at the state level, not at the federal level."

Oh, goody. Another level of regulation. Today tobacco, tomorrow how many slivers of toilet paper you're allowed to use when you go to the crapper.

But I didn't tell him that. I dropped him off, gave him my card, told him to have a great afternoon.

It's all part of being a taxi driver, you know? Keep your customers happy. Be friendly. Smell good. Keep your cab clean.

And don't worry, anybody. I'm not going to go buy a .44 magnum and get a mohawk.

I can't afford a .44 magnum, and I'm too bald for a mohawk.

Memo to the New York Yankees: What Have You Done LATELY?

Before anyone reads this posting, let it be known that I just hung a photograph on my bedroom wall of Joe DiMaggio and Lou Gehrig sitting on the dugout bench together in 1938. "The Iron Man and the rookie."

This photograph was the only piece of baseball memorabilia that survived a horrific kitchen fire in a house my wife Valerie and I owned in Spokane Washington, on January 8, 2007. Everything else I had hung on the walls of that kitchen, including my mounted, autographed color picture of Nolan Ryan, taken on the night in 1989 when he threw his 5,000th strikeout, was destroyed. But while picking through the soaked, charred wreckage of the completely-gutted kitchen, I found this photo of DiMaggio and Gehrig, which I had given my late father as a Father's Day gift some years earlier, lying on the floor in a corner. It was badly covered with soot, but salvageable. I cleaned it up, framed it and hung it over my dresser.

Why would I, as dedicated a Yankee-hater as ever stepped into a ballpark, want a photograph of Gehrig and DiMaggio facing my bed? Not hard, as Robert Graves once said. It's right and morally proper to hate and despise evil empires. And as evil empires go, the Yankees rank right up there with the USSR, which squandered 55 percent of its GNP on military hardware. The GNP of the USSR was probably about the same size as the Yankees' payroll.

But hating evil, as personified by people like Stalin and George Steinbrenner, is one thing. Respecting great players is something entirely else. And Gehrig and DiMaggio were great players. DiMaggio, in fact, might qualify as the third greatest player of all time, behind Ruth and Cobb, or Cobb and Ruth, depending on which side of that argument you're on.

'Nuff said. On to the fun.

I've been driving around reading about the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry for days, owing to the fact that I've been keeping Mike Vaccaro's marvelous book Emperors and Idiots, a history of that rivalry, in my car to give me something to do while waiting out Washington, D.C.'s innumerable (and endless) red lights.

While enduring page after page, chapter after chapter of Yankee strut and swagger and Red Sox agony, I started thinking about the unfortunate, and not terribly accurate overall impression this creates for the average reader who doesn't know much about baseball but who, bombarded with Yankee propaganda from predominantly New York-based news media, is bound to get the impression of the Yankees as a team of unbeatable champions who never lose.

Well, the humiliation that the Red Sox visited upon the Yankees in the 2004 American League Championship Series aside, (and it was truly, madly, deeply a humiliation; not just a defeat, but a crushing of Goliath's testicles by an insolently merry and disrespectful David) and by the way, the bluster of simian Yankee fans who never shut up about the Pinstripes' 26 World Series titles also aside, one intractable fact remains, and I'll go to the mat for it.

The Yankees have spent most of my life in a slump.

I was born in October, 1955. The very year, in fact the very month, that the Brooklyn Dodgers finally managed to beat the New York Yankees in the World Series after all those years of failure. The 1950s were the Yankees' decade, no question about it. Fortunately, not having been born until '55, I pretty much missed out on their glory days.

But, despite the much-vaunted 1956 Yankee "revenge" victory over the Dodgers in the following year, (in which Don Larsen pitched the perfect game which would be the last perfect game pitched by a Yankee until Larsen's fellow alumnus of San Diego's Point Loma High School, David Wells, did it in 1998) The End for the Yankee Dynasty was already in sight.

A premonitory flicker of The End occurred in 1960, when the Pittsburgh Pirates took the World Series away from the Yankees on Bill Mazeroski's famous bottom-of-the-ninth home run in Game 7. It amazes me when I hear people like Billy Crystal, in Ken Burns' famous documentary film Baseball, talk about Mazeroski's home run as if it were somehow unjust, a case of lese-majeste against their eternally-entitled heroes. Au contraire. That was justice, Billy, not its opposite. That was those oh-so-reliable mills of the gods, grinding deliciously away at New York's trademark arrogance.

The Yankees did come back to win the World Series in 1962, against the Giants. That was the October I turned seven.

I took no notice of it. I was only seven, had just attained the biblical Age of Reason. I was even years away from even becoming a Yankee hater.

But that truly was The End, for a long time.

The Yankees would not win another World Series until 1977, the October I turned 22. 15 years. Not exactly a dynasty. In fact in 1966, the year I played shortstop for the South Bay Little League Shamrocks, the Yankees finished dead-last in the American League. Boston ended the season in next-to-last place, one game ahead of them.

The World Series of 1963 and '64, the first two October classics I was old enough to notice, framed the highly-just end of a Yankee dynasty that had begun in 1949, the year New York took the pennant away from Boston in a cliffhanger of a late season (see David Halberstam's Summer of '49, a truly great baseball book.) But by 1963 it was over. First the '63 Los Angeles Dodgers, with the deadly right-left pitching rotation of Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax, throttled the Yankees in four games, and then the '64 Cardinals, fueled by the vicious right-hander Bob Gibson, vanquished them again. And then they were gone, the Yankees. Not to be seen again for a long time.

The Yankees would not even appear in another Series for 13 years.

They won the World Series in 1977, the year I turned 22. They won it again the following year when I turned 23.

They would not win the World Series again until the October I turned 41, 1996. In fact, the last Series in which they even appeared during that 18-year period was 1981, which they lost to the Dodgers.

From '81 to '96 they weren't even there. New York baseball in the 1980s and early '90s, as my book Three Flies Up points out, was all about the Mets. The Yankees were in the wilderness.

Under Joe Torre they had a flurry of successes in the final four years of the 20th century, winning four Series championships between 1996 and 2000. But do the math. I'm 53 now, and since I was seven, the Yankees have won the World Series eight times. Eight victories in 46 years. That's not a dynasty. That's not winning all the time. It isn't even winning most of the time. Yankee fans who gloat about 26 championships are mostly remembering the period from 1920 to 1962.

1962 was 47 years ago. John F. Kennedy was president in 1962. People were dancing the Twist in 1962. Women wore beehive hairdos in 1962.

1962 was a long time ago.

Now, let's move on and take a look at the 21st century, the only one that matters because it's the one we're living in now. The 20th century is history. Gone. Done. Ovah, as big-mouth, hot-air spewing New Yorkers say.

How many World Series titles have the New York Yankees won in the 21st century?

Zip. Zero. None.

"What about 2000!!??" I hear Yankee fans screeching.

Sorry, no. Zero is not a positive integer. The new count begins with "1." The year 2000 was the last year of the 20th century, not the first year of the 21st.

Now that we've settled that, ahem. I ask, how many World Series championships have the New York Yankees won in the 21st century?

Zip. Zero. None.

How many World Series championships have the Boston Red Sox won in the 21st century?

Two.

That's Red Sox two, Yankees nothing. And that's not the score from a Thursday night pitcher's duel, that's the score over eight years of the new century. The new century that wipes the slate clean. They say that after the last pitch of the World Series is thrown, everyone is in last place again until next spring.

Ditto when a century turns. When a century turns, the team that blustered and boasted its way through the previous century, buying pennants because it had more money than some countries, is rated exactly the same as all the other teams. On January 1, 2001, everybody in baseball was in last place. No 21st century World Series rings had been handed out yet.

Since then, Red Sox players have earned two. Yankee players, none.

2004 was the annus mirabilis of the 21st century. It will be hard to improve on from the standpoint of good historical precedents. Because it was the year New York's mouth was slammed shut.

And until the Yankees win a championship in this century, it had better stay shut.

Wagner in Steeltown, USA? Ausgeschlossen.

Today, for only the second time in my career as a concertgoer and opera fan, I walked out of an opera before it was over.

In fact I walked out before it was half over.

In fact I walked out at the end of Act I.

The opera was Wagner's Siegfried, the production that of Washington (D.C.) National Opera.

The last time I walked out of an opera was in March, 1986, when my pal Charlie Berigan and I took to our heels following the second act of Handel's Samson at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The staging was just so downright silly that we decided we'd had enough.

But that time we walked out of purely aesthetic considerations. This time was different. This time I was both disgusted and offended.

I bought my ticket for this matinee performance last September. I waited eight months to see it. Then, on the very morning of the day I was to go to the opera, someone from the Wagner Society of Washington circulated the New York Times' review, written by Anthony Thommasini. It begins like this:

"WASHINGTON — Like many companies, the Washington National Opera is presenting its new production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle in installments over several seasons. But financial setbacks, now everyday news in the performing arts, have forced the company to stretch out the schedule of its “Ring,” directed by Francesca Zambello in a co-production with the San Francisco Opera, much further than planned.

The company’s new “Siegfried,” the third opera in the cycle, opened at the Kennedy Center on May 2, three years after the first, “Das Rheingold.” The “Ring” will not be presented complete until 2013. But this “Siegfried,” seen here on Thursday night, was worth waiting for.

Ms. Zambello and her creative team, especially the set designer Michael Yeargan, are interpreting Wagner’s epic through the lens of American mythology and iconography. The “Ring” is presented as a class conflict between the haves and the have-nots."

Now, if I had seen this review in time, I would have put my ticket for this production up for sale on eBay. I go to the opera to hear music and experience drama, not to be preached at about politics. Especially not Marxist politics. Are these people kidding? There is nothing fresh, innovative or cutting-edge about loading up a Ring of the Nibelungs production with nonsense about "class struggle." It's been done before. Lots of times.

Maybe director Francesca Zambello didn't get the memo, but this is the ninth year of the 21st century, not the 68th year of the 20th.

Evidently New York Times reviewer Thommasini didn't get the memo either, although it shouldn't surprise me that the relentlessly left-wing New York Times would respond to "Marxist" Wagner, even 50 years after "Marxist" Wagner was anything new, the way the New York Times responds to anything "Marxist:" by jumping up and down squealing and hyperventilating like an excited pom-pom girl at a Pop Warner football game.

I went to the John F. Kennedy Center for the performing Arts not knowing quite what to expect. But I had a ticket in my pocket for which I'd paid $102 last year, and I wasn't about to just waste it.

But when the curtain went up on Act I, my worst fears were realized.

God, I wish somebody, somehow would do something about snotty, self-important theatrical directors who feel compelled to take classic works of art and stage productions of them aimed at communicating some political or moral message that originated in the mind of the director, not the author. Some message the director wants the audience to get. Directors should tell people where to stand and whether or not to cry when they deliver their lines. They should not take the work in question and use it as a soapbox for their own political beliefs.

Hence, the set of Act I of Siegfried, a tale set in mythic times among dark forests, with Nordic heroes, gods and giants wielding magic swords and whatnot, resembled the set of the old NBC sitcom Sanford and Son. Mime, the dwarf who dreams of stealing the mythic ring and the hoard of gold that goes with it for himself, is depicted as living in some sort of east Los Angeles junkyard, littered with gas cans, lawn chairs, piles of scrap metal and the bombed-out trailer that he apparently sleeps in. There's an old gas stove in front of the trailer that he cooks on, a la life in a 1930s hobo jungle. (Steinbeck!) As if all of that detail didn't make the "message" heavy-handed enough, looming in the background were gigantic images of an electric power corridor. (Industry!)

How absurd to have Wagner's characters singing about forging swords and slaying dragons on a set that would more appropriately have accomodated rival street gangs going at each other with guns and knives.

As greasy hero Siegfried, and then the god Wotan disguised just as greasily as "The Wanderer," enter and exit during Act I, they repeatedly go to Mime's bombed-out trailer to get bottles of something, presumably good, proletarian beer, out of the refrigerator, from which they swig while they deliver their lines. All this scene needed was Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski in his "wife-beater" shirt, yelling "Stella!"

Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski? As I watched this idiocy unfold, I kept thinking of the first night I attended the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. During the Soviet period of Russia's history, the stage of the Bolshoi Theater was crested, proudly and in full view for all to see, with a gigantic profile of Lenin and a just-as-gigantic red Soviet hammer-and-sickle. Lenin and the hammer-and-sickle have long since been removed from the Bolshoi, as they are no longer anything of what modern Russia is all about.

In terms of sheer subtlety, that picture of Lenin and that hammer-and-sickle were all this production lacked. Perhaps Ms. Zambello contacted the Bolshoi to see if she could borrow Lenin and the hammer-and-sickle, and, given how cutting edge her vision is, she was no doubt shocked and dismayed to find that they had been long since discarded. Too bad for her.

It is almost beyond belief how anyone in the 21st century could take seriously a "Marxist" spin on Wagner, or anything else for that matter that wasn't intended as "Marxist" to begin with. Pretty hard to keep a Bertolt Brecht play non-Marxist, which is probably why you don't see or hear too much of Brecht anymore, but Wagner? Sure, he was one of the 1848 revolutionaries, but that didn't make him a Marxist, and certainly not a Leninist. And it's no excuse at all for muddle-headed aging romantics (I call them "the bald-headed ponytail crowd") who just can't let go of their tie-dyed Che Guevara T-shirts, carte blanche to go on for decade after decade using the Ring to flog a horse that, whether they like it or not, is dead.

for Mr. Thommasini and Ms. Zambello and all of the others who didn't get the memo, the USSR rolled over and died nearly 20 years ago. Even the supposedly "communist" Chinese have embraced their own somewhat bizarre relationship with free-market capitalism. The whole notion of class struggle, of "haves" and "have nots" locked into a quantifiable and scientifically-scannable preordained fight-to-the-death is as hopelessly 19th century an idea as perpetual motion or phrenology. I repeat: are these people kidding? Does anyone, in the year 2009, seriously believe in Marxism anymore, an idea which is no longer even "last century," but now, "the-century-before?"

I'm all for updating Wagner. But while we're trying to be up-to-date, let's keep in mind that some things that seemed "up-to-date" when the Beatles were still making records are anything but up-to-date now. "Marxist" Wagner? This can only be about my fellow baby-boomers' nostalgia for the Woodstock era.

Oops, I've said it. Next we'll see a production of Der Rosenkavalier set at a 1960s hippie rock festival.

Hopefully I'll see the reviews before I waste my money on a seat.

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.

Aujourd'hui le déluge

Pictured at right is one of Washington, D.C.'s tourist attractions, the D.C. Duck. Half-bus and half-boat, You can ride around town on it, and then right across the tidal basin.

If things don't ease up here soon, however, the D.C. Duck might become a mode of commuter transport.

In fact, if things don't ease up here soon, we may all develop webbed feet. WE'LL be the D.C. Ducks.

If you were to visit the nation's capital now, I swear you'd think you were in Seattle. You know, good old rainy Seattle, where they see the sun so seldom that Bill Cosby once commented that when the sun does come out, people look at each other guiltily and ask, "What did we DO?"

Today is Thursday, and I don't think we've seen the sun since last Friday. In the meantime it's been either pissing down or pouring rain down rain steadily. Rain to annoy you a bit, like that persistent dribble that forces you to set your windshield wipers on "every-ten-seconds," and then all of a sudden whoosh--it's coming down like the proverbial cow pissing on a rock.

Last night my wife Valerie was busy in the garage, sorting out things for a neighborhood yard sale this weekend. She wanted me to get my three bicycles out of the way. I put them in the backyard for temporary storage, but was afraid they'd get rained on, so I rummaged in the basement until I came up with the only thing I could find to cover them with -- the drop cloth I use when I paint. Not the best thing, because it's only canvas, with no plastic on either side. But better than nothing. I threw it over the bikes where they leaned up against the back fence.

A few minutes later Valerie came up to me with an old used shower curtain she had found. "Here, this is plastic, it'll cover those bikes better than that canvas drop cloth," she said.

I went out and threw the shower curtain over the bikes. And not a moment too soon, either, because less than five minutes later here it came again, another downpour like something out of the ninth chapter of Genesis.

What is going on here? If this had happened in January and all of this precipitation we've been getting this week had been snow instead of rain, the government would have shut down completely. I'm not kidding. I have lived here in D.C. off and on for years. At the first sign of a winter snowflake, government offices empty out. It looks like the crowd fleeing Godzilla in a Japanese monster movie.

Come to think of it, that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, would it? D.C.'s horrific commuter traffic would get to take a holiday, as would the rampant waste of your tax money on things like invisible sneakers and studies of why fish don't watch television.

I'll tell you one thing, though. All joking about the government aside, this relentless storm system is playing hell with us suburban crabgrass farmers. We have a particularly aggressive species of bluegrass that grows around here. When this stuff takes a nap in the winter, it's just harboring its energies for spring. The grass in my backyard grows so fast that the place looks like the Guatemelan jungle if I fail to mow at least once a week. Now, add all of this rain to that and you have a situation where the grass is growing so fast it looks like it's threatening to overthrow the city.

Remember that Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon about the Pottsylvania Creeper, Bullwinkle's prize-winning flower that grew to monstrous size in minutes...and then started eating people? I think I have something like that on my hands.

So does my next-door neighbor Ted, who came over here last night just as he was preparing to launch a lawnmower assault on his own lawn one more time. He had a great idea.

"I'm gonna buy some goats," he said. "How many goats do you want?"

"I'll take three," I told him. Do I have to provide them with rain slickers?

Ha-ha, of course not.

But I might have to call the D.C. Duck to come rescue them -- and me -- from off the roof if this doesn't end soon.

Sales Resistance 1A

Okay, everybody. Here's yet another chance for all of you to benefit hugely from old K.D.'s extensive experience in the wonderful world of getting ripped off.

When dealing with anyone trying to sell you anything, I offer the following stars to steer by. I guarantee that they will bring you safely into port, and you, the fool, will not be parted from your money:


1. If it sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true.

2. Internet web sites that promise you riches and then ask for a credit card number are always scams.

3. The following Q&A may be a cliché, but you’ll never go wrong keeping it in mind: “When is a salesman lying? When his mouth is moving.”

4. And by the way, things really do break the day after the warranties expire. That’s not your imagination.

5. Never make eye contact with anyone carrying a stack of anything.

6. Ditto anyone carrying a stack of anything who is obviously trying to make eye contact with you.

7. If you see a sign on something that says it’s for sale “as-is,” don’t buy it unless you’re sure you know how to fix it.

8. If you answer the phone and there’s a long silence at the other end, hang up. It’s a telemarketer or a bill collector—the long silence means that the computer which automatically dialed your number is disengaging and they’re getting ready to the put the telemarketer or bill collector through to you. Hang up!

9. Related to #8, caller ID is an essential in the modern world. If you don’t have it, get it.

10. Nobody legitimate sells anything door-to-door anymore. If someone rings your doorbell and tries to sell you something, assume he or she is a crook. Or it might just be the Jehovah’s Witnesses—they still go door to door. But they're usually nice people and at least they’re not going to ask you for a credit card number. Your call.

11. If you put your resume on Craigslist in search of employment, be advised that scammers are actively farming Craigslist for e-mail addresses. If you get an e-mail that purports to be from a recruiter looking to match you up with a job, be very wary. Legitimate recruiters will almost always contact you by phone. E-mail usually means it’s someone trying to recruit sales people or sell you an iPhone.

12. Citigroup is especially aggressive this way, and they will contact you by phone. If you get a call from Citigroup offering you employment in some "management" position,, most likely the job will involve commission sales. Take the call at your own risk.

13. If you’re thinking about buying a new car but haven’t made up your mind yet, don’t just wander up on to a car dealer’s lot. Their salespeople will be on you like ugly on an ape, and your only defense will be flight. Have an escape route planned before you leave the safety of the sidewalk. I find the binoculars-from-across-the-street approach both helpful and safe.

14. If a “career counselor” hands you a service agreement to read and then leaves the room, assume that on the reverse side of it you will find his very hefty fee, not mentioned until that moment.

15. This one is strictly for my former colleagues in the U.S. State Department: never so much as give the so-called Bureau of Diplomatic Security the time of day unless there’s a lawyer present. Those people are looking for promotions, and they’re looking for promotions at your expense. Don’t trust them, ever.

16. If someone is talking to you and he uses your first name three times in one sentence, run for your life. He wants to sell you something.

17. Also, it’s a good idea to keep track of how often that same guy blinks. If he goes for a full minute without blinking, he’s either a crook or a nut. Thus trapped, my m.o. is to say, “Look! a naked lady!” Then when he turns to look, I run.

18. Ask to see the goods, up-front. Take nobody’s word for anything.

19. If you are in fact looking to buy a car, never buy one from a private individual. Always go to a dealer. Even if that Nissan you found on Craigslist looks wonderful, it might have been sitting at the curb or in the guy’s driveway for six months and all of its gizmos and gasmos have deteriorated to the point where it’s just waiting to die.

20. There is no such thing as a legitimate "fat-off" pill. Any product in a bottle that promises to melt fat off you is fake. Some products might indeed suppress your appetite and help you that way, but anything called "Super Fat Magnet" or something of that nature is fake, fake, fake. There is no easy substitute for jogging and meal-replacement shakes.

21. Ronald Reagan said “Trust, but verify.” Well, he had it close. My advice is “Don’t trust to begin with, then you won't have to bother verifying.”

22. If you get an e-mail purporting to offer you a job, and they have the word "Employment" spelled wrong, e.g. "Employement," I'd say that's a safe bet for deletion.

The Angel of Death Strikes Again

Sometimes I get the willies.

Last Friday I was sitting here blogging away, and I happened to mention Beatrice Arthur, who played Maude on TV in the 1970s and later, Dorothy Zbornak on The Golden Girls in the 1980s and early '90s.

She died on Sunday.

Okay, she was 86. Still...

Folks, you are reading the words of the Angel of Death. That's me. I kill celebrities. I don't mean to do it, and as Garfield the Cat once said, I don't know how I does it, I jez' does it.

I have blogged on this subject before. Do a blog search on Eek, I Did It Again, and you will be taken to something I wrote back in the summer of 2006. I was driving on Interstate 90 between Spokane, Washington and Post Falls, Idaho on a standard booze run (the state liquor stores in Idaho have cheaper prices than those in Washington owing to fewer taxes), and I had the radio on in the car. I was listening to a program of popular songs from the World War II era. I began thinking about June Allyson, the petite little blonde movie star of the WWII period of whom they said she was the girl "every boy wanted to bring home to his family." I always thought my Aunt Jessie, my mother's sister, looked a little bit like June Allyson.

The next day I read her obituary in the newspaper. June Allyson's, that is, not my Aunt Jessie. My aunt had already died by then. But Aunt Jessie wasn't famous, just wonderful, so I can't be blamed for that.

You're not convinced. Ha, you're saying. Coincidence. Big deal.

As the French say, uh-uh. Search my blog again: It Ain't Over 'Til The Fat Guy Dies. How about him? Mitchell Rupe, on death row for murder, in Washington state. I haven't thought about this loser in years, not since reading a newspaper story in 1994 about how he had eaten himself off death row. He intentionally got himself so fat that his lawyer sold a Washington state judge the notion that hanging him would be cruel and inhuman punishment. He was so fat, you see, that hanging him might result in decapitation, which would be "cruel and inhuman." Great legal victory for Rupe.

But then I step in. I remember Rupe and his story one morning in 2006 while driving my car across Chula Vista, California ... an hour later I see his obituary in the paper.

This has happened over and over in my life. I'll start thinking about some famous person...and then I find out they quit breathing just about the same moment I was thinking about them.

My friend Diane thinks I have a form of extrasensory perception. I don't know. My own speculation has been that maybe the fillings in my teeth somehow enable me to pick up radio or television signals that go directly into my head, bypassing my ears. (This might explain my ability to recite lines from old reruns of The Andy Griffith Show endlessly.) TV Land broadcasts it; I pick up the signal somehow.

You think I'm crazy? Again, you think it's just coincidence, and that all of these old people are about to die anyway?

Check this out: Marilyn Chambers, the great porn star of the 1970s and former Ivory Soap girl, died on April 12 at age 56. She was a true classic, an American original. I'll never forget the afternoon some of my newspaper buddies and I crowded around the VCR in Vacaville, CA to share in the wonder of her Oscar-worthy performance in the classic '70s porno film Insatiable ("How lovely to have you back in London, my dear!") My journal records that on April 10 I was wondering whatever became of her. Two days later she was found dead in Los Angeles. And 56 ain't that old. I'm 53.

If you're in any way famous, you want to steer clear of me. I have the Evil Eye somehow when it comes to celebrities.

In light of this gruesome talent I seem to have, all of you Barack Obama fans out there ought to be grateful that I'm trying as hard as I can NOT to think about him. I haven't looked at a newspaper in nearly six months. That's why I go out to Dead-or-alive-info.org every couple of weeks or so, just to find out if anyone famous or once-famous has died lately.

By the way, has anyone seen Fess Parker around?

Miscellany

I had my first encounter with evil when I was 15.

It was the summer of 1971. I was visiting a friend in Spokane, Washington.

We were walking around late at night and we stepped into a public restroom.

Somebody had written the following graffiti on the wall:

"A little bird with yellow bill
Perched upon my windowsill.
I lured him in with crumbs of bread,
and then I crushed his fucking head."

Some low-life dirtball apparently thought that was funny. (You know the type of person I'm talking about: the kind who writes on restroom walls.)

I hope he's dead, and I hope his death hurt a lot. I'm putting the world on notice: anybody, and I mean anybody, who thinks cruelty to animals is funny should have his belly torn open and his entrails set on fire before his eyes.

...

I attended a meeting of Washington, D.C.'s Advisory Neighborhood Commission for Ward 5 last night. Councilmember Harry Thomas addressed the gathering. Let it be known that when my neighbor Donald L. Williams asked why the D.C. police are flouting the city's no-cellphone-use-while-driving law, (along with everybody else) he could not get a straight answer out of Councilmember Thomas.

I met Commmissioner Robert King at that same meeting. He looks like James Earl Jones and he's a brother Mason. Good to meet you, Bob.

...

I saw something on the street in downtown Washington, D.C. on Monday that made me wish I'd had my camera with me. It would have been a fabulous photo. A guy was lying flat on his stomach in the middle of the street at the corner of 14th and F NW, half his body down inside an open manhole. The only things sticking out of the manhole were his legs and feet. Apparently he was talking to someone down inside that manhole. God, what a great photo that would have made!

...

This time of year I always kind of miss being in California. May is coming up, just about the best time of year in San Diego. There's nothing quite like a bright, breezy day in May out there on the west coast. I used to love sitting on the porch of my family's ancestral home in Chula Vista on an afternoon in May, the Padres' game on the radio (usually they were losing) and the gentle May breeze ringing the wind-chime that my father fashioned out of an empty wine jug many years ago. Once May is over, though, things get pretty grim. Come June, the area is enveloped almost daily in a persistent marine layer that keeps the sky quite gray. You can set your calendar by it: San Diegans call it "the June gloom."

...

I got an e-mail this morning from Roxanne at Roxanne's Artiques Gallery near the Brookland/CUA Metro station here in D.C. The same Donald L. Williams who couldn't get a straight answer out of Councilman Thomas about cellphone use by cops approached Roxanne yesterday on behalf of yours truly. You see, in addition to all of the other wild n' crazy things in my quiver, I'm also a sometime painter. Donald thought that Roxanne might be interested in displaying some of my art work in her gallery. I e-mailed her digital photos of a few of my canvases, and she inquired as to the media I used. I combine oil-and-acrylic on canvas with pastiche, a sop to the fact that I can't draw worth a damn. And no, I don't do Elvis on black velvet or dogs shooting pool.

...

I was at the Brookland/CUA Metro station the other day, wearing my Boston Red Sox cap. I saw another guy on the platform wearing a Red Sox cap, so I gave him the "Go Sox" countersign. He returned it, then rolled up his sleeve and showed me the beautifully-executed Red Sox team logo that he had tattooed on his left arm. "Red Sox Nation is just amazing," I told him. Later that same day, Donald L. Williams and I got into a whimsical discussion of how we might manage as roommates, should we ever be forced by circumstances (we're both basically destitute) to share space. Answer: Felix and Oscar writ large. "Now, THAT would be a mixed marriage," I said in all seriousness. And it's not because I'm white and Donald's black. There are more serious issues than race here. I mean, can you imagine a Red Sox fan and a Yankees fan living under the same roof? As the Germans say, Ausgeschlossen.*

...

There's a stretch of South Dakota Avenue in Northeast D.C., a residential area, where the average motorist averages 70 mph. The police department keeps records of this stuff. It's the reason they're installing cameras on South Dakota Avenue. I hate these cameras, especially after getting nailed by one myself, trying to beat a red light on Rhode Island Avenue a few months ago. But in a neighborhood where there's a playground, people should not drive 70 mph. Sorry, I'm just an old stick-in-the-mud that way. And I don't even have any children.

...

My pal Chris down in North Carolina gave up bread for lent. He says he's lost 25 pounds. I haven't seen him lately so I'll have to take his word for it. But now that lent is over, I hope he hasn't gone back to the baguettes and the dinner rolls. Chris has a new girlfriend; maybe that will help his resolve. You know the old saying: behind every man successfully losing weight there's either a trainer in a smelly sweatsuit waving a six-foot bullwhip, or a woman reminding him of what wonders weight loss will do for his...uh, stamina.

...

We are now a mere six weeks and change from the Tour de Cure in Reston, Virginia, a cycling event for the American Diabetes Association in which I am slated to ride a "metric century," e.g. 63 miles. I have been steadfastly in training since February, and have received $340 in donations from my friends, which has been generous and for which I am grateful. However some of my other friends who promised donations months ago have NOT coughed up and are steadfastly ignoring my repeated e-mail pleas for redemption. I'm about to give up on this crowd, but let me do so with the immortal words of Beatrice Arthur when she was playing that old bag Maude on CBS television back in the 1970s: "God will get you for that."

...

(Drum roll.) Millions of people have started writing novels; a few thousand actually finish writing them. I'm at work on a novel that I began last June 15 when the aforementioned bread-avoider, Chris, and I returned from attending the 13th International Hemingway Conference in Kansas City. I have given myself a deadline of this coming June 15 to complete this novel. I'm going to meet that deadline, folks. I have written 136,000 words as of yesterday. Meanwhile my pal Tony out in California, who has been working on a novel for about the last four years when he isn't out doing contracting work, has about 200,000 done on his. That's already too long, and Tony knows it. He and I have an interesting reciprocal deal in place, though. I'm a good editor, and when Tony's finished with his manuscript I'm going to cut Fastglass (that's the title) down to size. In return, Tony, an on-again, off-again writer for movies, is going to adapt my first novel, Tower-102 (iUniverse, 2000) as a screenplay.


*Ausgeschlossen--"Extremely unlikely."