A 50^th Class Reunion Of The Mind-With Sam Lowell’s Trials And Tribulations In Mind-Take Two

A Sketch From Frank Jackman

Of course Jack Dawson attended the 50^th anniversary class reunion of his Class of 1964 at North Adamsville High, a school located some miles south of Boston for those who like to know geographic locations (although on this subject, this reunion thing, the location could have been anywhere since every high school has a graduated class each year and hence fodder for reunion memories because inevitably some energetic classmates will gather their forces and put one together). Now Jack was not much for such events, he had gone to his tenth reunion only because his first wife, Kathleen Clemens, had been a fellow classmate and insisted they go to show off the fact that class sweethearts could stay the course (they had been the subject of a photograph in the Magnet, the class yearbook, proclaiming them by vote of their fellows-class sweethearts). That did not stop her, them, before twenty rolled around from going her way, and he went his. He had failed to attend his fifth reunion which is the one that he really was interested in since he was pretty far away, out in an outpost near Pleiku up in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Somehow Sam Lowell, his old corner boy hang-out friend from the corner at Jimmy Jack’s Diner, had convinced him that since this particular anniversary would be the last effective time that the old gang would be reasonably likely to get together short of assistance, short of having the thing in a nursing home or some such place that he needed to go. So Jack and his second wife, Natalie, not a fellow classmate but met at work in Hingham when he was working for General Dynamics went to the affair and according to Jack had a pretty good time. Had a good despite the fact that Sam Lowell did not attend, had as Jack did not find out until later not even been on the same coast having been lost in the rain in Big Sur at the time. But I am getting ahead of the story, Jack’s story of the reunion and a bit part for Sam and his trials and tribulations.           

Maybe the Sam part is not necessary to tell the reunion story but Jack, well, really Natalie, thought that the reunion part would not make sense without telling why Sam was not at the Marriot Courtyard Hotel in Rockland (the one fast by the Plymouth River not the one just off Route 3 which is just for tired travelers) on the night of September 27, 2014. See Sam back in the fall of 2013 got very North Adamsville High patriotic (that was the way that he put the matter) since he had been brought face to face with the old town after many years of statutory neglect (his term) due to a series of family-related deaths combined with a certain nostalgia for the old gang as he had never attended a reunion ever, said he left the dust of the old town high school behind after graduation. More than attending though is that Sam decided that he would help organize the event since that was the trajectory his life had taken, he liked to organize events, usually political not social as in the reunion but he had talked himself into believing that the organizing principles for both were the same (and as it turned out they were although principles of organizing were not the source of why Sam was spellbound on September 27, 2014 in front of some Jack Kerouac-etched snarling ocean at Big Sur singing sutras to ancient memories and not in Rockland). So through the magic of modern communications technology, mainly the Internet and e-mail he had been able to contact Delores Knight (nee Reilly), whom he did not know and who had stayed in the old town along with several other women, some of whom he knew, who either lived in the old town or nearby and who had put on most of the previous reunions. Sam had used a search on Facebook where he found both Delores’s name and a notice that a Class of 1964 reunion committee was being formed by some classmates. He told Delores he was in.                 

Delores and her women friends had also put together a class website as part of their organizing efforts, something that would not have been a practical possibility even as recently as the previous 40^th anniversary reunion and that site is where things started to (and finished up) getting dicey (although Sam later was a pains to explain it was not technology that did him in, no, just old-fashioned human understandings, rather misunderstandings. Of course the easier way to communicate with a large body, maybe the only way, with about four hundred remaining classmates (something like seventy had passed on) who over fifty years have been strewn all over the planet (although a remarkably large number for an increasingly mobile society still lived within fifty miles of the old town) was to establish the website as people heard about what was up through other sources, including “snail mail.” The reunion website once people logged in provided each classmate with his or her own profile page and had other common sections which allowed people to talk to the class individually or collectively. Sam not totally savvy about all aspects of the new technology, although enough as he said to stay half-way computer literate, very definitely had an idea to write some screeds (Sam’s word) to the collective body and see what floated. You know stuff like who you hung out with back in the day (his piece on that subject was titled The Intellectuals or the Jocks? and you can get a flavor for what he was thinking about writing from that example alone). That was part of what Sam considered his role as a member of the committee (the only male for a while by the way until Jimmy Jenkins joined).

One of the first classmates to response to the setting up of the website and logging on was Melinda Loring who back in the day had been nothing but a “fox” as the expression went then who also was very smart, a social butterfly too. Every guy with any pretensions to style and grace was half in love with her, including Sam (Jack as well but don’t mention it to Natalie). Melinda however was back in the day also known as stuck-up, unapproachable, so Sam (and most guys) never did anything about his half-love (except pine). But apparently Melinda a hot-shot professor at State U. had learned a few things in the world (and had been twice-divorced, a big learning curve experience) and so she responded to one of Sam’s pieces with a comment, a positive comment which started a blizzard of e-mails between the pair. And that simple exchange had started it, started Sam and Melinda at 68 to what they could not do at 16.

There is no need to go into all the gory details of their short stormy relationship except to state that hard fact since this is about Jack’s take one the reunion but the relationship was short, a few months during the late winter and early spring before the reunion. What Sam figured out after some reflection later was that at 16 or 68 holding a fire-burning relationship together was nothing but tough work, and speaking for himself he was just not mentally up to the task, up to her everlasting planning their very moment from then on. (He would admit that Melinda was right about his attempting always to stay in the present and not even talk about the future.) Now the way things worked out at the end, the way Sam and Melinda bitterly broke up with plenty of mutual recriminations, too many for what turned out to be a fling, and far too many for the shortness of the affair, precluded one or the other of them from going to the reunion. See the number of people who were planning to attend had by the time the ticket sales closed was somewhat less than one hundred (that did not include spouses, companions, etc.) and the room that was reserved for use was rather too small unlike some cavernous Boston hotel ballroom so there was no way that Sam and Melinda could avoid each other, something Sam was desperate to do. So he unilaterally decided (he and Melinda were not on speaking terms, civilized speaking terms any way) since she was a veteran of these reunions and he had never attended he would defer to her on the issue.

Jack was not happy about the situation when Sam explained his decision to him one night over drinks at the Café Blanc in Cambridge where Jack had just finished up an all-day conference sponsored by his high-tech company.  Jack was left that evening feeling that Sam was leaving him high and dry on something that Sam had made a big deal out of doing. He certainly was not happy at the idea that he as a known Sam friend would have to explain why Sam was not in attendance after Sam had made a big splash on the website with his little sketches. (Sam had also written, in response to one female classmate’s plaintive plea that she was fearful about going to the reunion alone, a comment on the website that he too was afraid since this was to be his first reunion but that he was determined to go and many people had responded favorable to the comment, and a few had decided to go on that basis.) He told Sam that he was going to tell them he did not know what had happened and Sam pretty much agreed that was the best tack, especially if as expected Melinda decided to go to the reunion.              

So with Sam’s “girl” woes as a drag on the evening let’s get to Jack’s observations on the event. Naturally the Marriott Riverside in September was a lovely location, the ballroom used actually cozy for the size crowd that was gathering and the buffet and liquor okay (other than a wine toast buying liquor was on one’s own hook, the inevitable cash bar which Jack played out buying half the guys in the place a drink that night before he and Natalie left). The committee had decided to have a DJ playing old stuff from their school days, not too fast since everybody had lost a step or two, hell, maybe seven step so no twist or wiggle-warble stuff to have everybody crying for their acupuncturist or chiropractor but nice Teen Angel, Earth Angel, Johnny Angel stuff to get weepy over. Other dance stuff from their parents’ generation, you know Frank Sinatra Shadows In The Night stuff which was old hat and the cause of many family radio and record player disputes back in their youth but sounded better these day and mercifully danceable. One of the classmates, a profession singer, Jim James, sang some songs when the DJ took a break. Jack thought Jim whom he had known slightly in high school in a study hall did a good job and while he could see where Jim would never have made it big, his voice was too reedy for those times, he would have made a decent living working the lounge act scene (hell, he had listened to some guys even when he was late night half-drunk drawing big money who did not sound nearly as good as old Jim).

But enough of the descriptions of the place, the quality of the food, or the entertainment since Jack had been to a million weddings, retirement parties, workplace parties, and other highlight moment events to know that whatever the occasion they all are basically the same. What intrigued Jack (Natalie too) was that other than Melinda Loring whom he had met when the thing with Sam had been in full bloom in the spring, and who obviously had been drinking well before the seven o’clock start time in anticipation that she would have to face Sam he did not recognize very many of the classmates despite the fact that Sam had told him that several of the women on the committee, including Delores, except for some weight gain (which he smart boy kept to himself even from Natalie) looked pretty much like back in the day. Sam had been too kind. By the way on that Melinda thing Jack had not realized that Sam was actually keeping his decision on not going to the reunion to himself and when Melinda asked him about half-way through the night where Sam was, asked with an evil look, he said he did not know. And Jack actually did not know “officially” until Sam came about a week later and emailed him that he had gone to Big Sur on the Friday before the reunion. Had as well to symbolically add insult to injury, although Melinda would never know this to be injured by the knowledge, had taken his second ex-wife, Laura, out with him and they were having something of a rekindled romance.            

Jack thought more than once that night “thank God for name tags” since he would have been hard-pressed to name names without that aid. Jack although nothing but a Jimmy Jack’s Diner corner boy along with Sam, Frankie Riley, the leader, Jimmy Jenkins, the late Peter Markin (he had been found face down in dusty Sonora down Mexico way with two slugs in the back of his head after a drug deal had gone awry back in the 1970s needless to say the murder was never solved), and a cast of rolling in and out boys, also had been connected with many of those in attendance that night through sports, the school newspaper or the senior dance committee and still came up short on recognition. Funny, Jack thought to himself, that at the tenth reunion he was able to remember almost everybody without benefit of name tags but the forty years since then had done their damage, had made him who had taken some effort to keep himself in shape, although with less hair, a full-grown beard and a slight paunch wince at all the talk of surgeries and other medical conditions.    

His dismay started right from the first moment practically when he was greeted at the door by Delores who had been made the designated greeter, a role she had played before in previous reunions, whom kind Sam had obviously given a pass to on the weight issue no question. (Jack when he mentioned Delores and her appearance to him later only found out then that Sam had never actually physically been present in the same room with a number of the committee members, including Delores, who lived with her husband in Florida most of the year, since a lot of the work was done through e-mails and such, a nice bow to modern technology.) A big fat guy then came up to him to greet him and it turned out to be Timmy Lally the famed quarterback of the Warrior football team who back then had been pretty thin. Another, Muffy (real name) Sullivan, Timmy’s girlfriend and head cheer-leader in the old days and the queen of the social butterflies had taken a turn for the worse with almost white blonde dyed hair and a cane. Jack though he was going to be able to go chapter and verse on old-time memories with all those that he knew from the old days at the reunion but he found himself just getting depressed as they inevitably told their seemingly endless mandatory medical histories when he asked about their health. And he wound up grinding his teeth at the incessant talk of grandchildren and strangely not of their children which is what he liked to talk about since he kept his own grandchildren, all four of them, at arm’s length). He mentioned to Natalie that he could have gone to an AARP meeting and found the same amount of conviviality. As it turned out Jack and Natalie left an hour before the event was to close up, at around ten, and he was glad of it although they had been enjoying themselves and later would reaffirm that that had a certain amount of fun despite the silly banter. Here is why they left though. Before glad-handing his way through to the coat checkroom once Jack had decided they had had enough he had suddenly turned red, very red not from embarrassment but anger, an anger that had been building all night, anger at Sam for leaving him in the lurch like that, leaving him to sift through some pretty broken dreams. Damn Sam.           

 

In Honor Of The 96th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-Take Two –A Child Of The Revolution

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

 

He was a child of the revolution, the big old Bolshevik Revolution that had enveloped Russia couple of years back, back in November 1917 (new calendar, new like everything else that was good happening in that formerly benighted land although there was plenty that was still bad, bad as human experience could fathom going on), if anybody was asking. And if while you were asking you wanted a name to attach to that child then Boris Yanoff (or Yanov, if you like), all of sixteen but already with a couple of revolutionary years under his belt. See Boris had lost his father in one of those ill-advised Russian Army advances against the Germans on the eastern front, maybe at Tannenburg, or some place like that and around that time so he would tell everybody that had been the place where his father fell defending the Czar, the bloody bastard Czar.

The upshot of that father death was that Boris had travelled to Moscow from his wretched family farm in Omsk to find work in the textile mills that were in need of help to supply the huge needs of the Russian in advance, or retreat, mostly the latter. Hell, that family farm thing was really a joke it only barely a garden plot, and the crops wouldn’t show up half the time and all that but he was done with that he was a working now, a proud young worker.

Boris, like a lot of fourteen -year old coming to the city, any city but particularly Moscow, was kind of a hayseed, kind of a know-nothing kid when he came to get that factory work. But he was a fast learning, fast learning how to operate the machinery but also to figure out where he stood in the world, his new working class world. So when the Bolsheviks in the textile plant in the summer of 1917 started going on and on about the wretched war, about how the Czar and now the bourgeois government, some coalition between socialists and capitalists, wanted to stay in the damn war, wanted to let the big landowners keep their land, wanted to let the factory owners keep their blood-stained profits he was all ears. It was icing on the cake when one Bolshevik rank and filer whom he worked with got him going by saying that if he went with the Bolsheviks that would help avenge his father’s cruel death for no reason out in some forgotten Czarist killing field. So Boris was in, read the newspapers, and, more importantly joined the factory defense committee and learned how to shoot, shoot for real, not that silly goose pop gun stuff back on the farm.

Then the day of reckoning came. November 7, 1917 (again new calendar to herald a new era). He had heard through the factory grapevine that the Bolsheviks had risen in Saint Petersburg and had declared the Provisional Government null and void, the war null and void, and the big landowners and capitalists null and void and in their place the Soviets, the workers, peasants, and soldiers councils, the people’s voice. Right after that his factory committee was put on notice that they would try to take power in Moscow and while Saint Petersburg’s had been relatively bloodless they, he and his comrades, had a hell of fight, a bloody fight where he lost more than a few shop mates, before they could declare the Moscow Soviet.

As he sat at his bench reading a much passed copy of Pravda now in early March 1919 he thought about that bloody fight, about how he had joined the Red Guards after that, had been called up a couple of times to go out on the outskirts of Moscow and defend the city against the White Guard bastards who were trying to take the land and factories back. No way, no way in hell not after what he and his father had been through in Old Russia. Now they, his Bolshevik comrades, were going to hold a conference, and international conference, where the idea was that what he and his comrades had done in Russia would get done all over the world.

That idea, that idea of other countries getting their soviet power and then helping poor Russia appealed to him. He was not so sure about Lenin, although he was the head of the government and  he had heard him speak in Red Square after the government had moved here to Moscow when things got tough but he read where Trotsky was all for this Communist International and was going to speak at the conference . And if Trotsky and his fighting phantom train mates were for it then it must be okay. He kind of got a lump in his throat when he thought about that, about how, for once, he was among the first to be fighting for that new world that got him motivated in1917. Yes, he was a child of the revolution and he hoped juts that minute that he would see it through to the end…           

 

Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night-When Prince Love Loved In The 1967 Summer Of Love-An Encore

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

 

“Jesus, I never thought I would get here and here I am in San Francisco all in one piece standing at the foot of  Russian Hill where all the ‘hippies’ were hanging out before they went over to Golden Gate Park a few months ago and ‘blew their minds, really blew their minds from what somebody had told him about the trendy electric kool-aid acid tests, taking hits of powerful psychedelics like LSD in Dixie cups filled, for the unwary or those who preferred to pay homage to their childhood delight with name your flavor Kool-Aid, cool, ‘ Joshua Breslin (a.k.a. Prince Love or Prince, and hereafter so identified reflecting the mania for the sometimes off-the-wall monikers to go with the new sensibilities of the age, to break out of the slave names as some clever wit put it with tongue in-cheek), late of Olde (very old to hear him tell it) Saco (Maine) High School Class of 1967, but just now of youth nation, youth nation descending on friendly, friend-sized, go West young man (and woman), go West, heaven said to his boon companion of three days, Benny Buzz (real name Lawrence Stein, Brooklyn High School of Science, Class of 1967), also currently of youth nation. It was Benny Buzz who, having the vast experience of having been in ‘Frisco for a week now, and having “been up the hill,” a few times already who guided Prince Love to the foot of Russian Hill  in preparation for, well, for his first summer of love experience. No, not the  eternal teen summer of love at some beach, camp or vacationland amusement park where boys ogle girls (and they back, maybe) but the long expected jail break-out from the squares, from the cradle to grave plan every step of your life world, and from the hassles, man, just the hassles.      

Yes, Prince Love, could write the book on hassles, hassles followed by man, or not. Just a few week before he, having just graduated from Olde Saco High, had a “job offer,” a job working as a janitor in Shepard’s Textile Mill, yeah, the ones who make those “boss” cashmere sweaters the girls are all crazy for these days. Crazy for in winter anyway because right now warm suns, California, Denver, hell even Maine suns, require nothing more than some skimpy top, shoulders showing, and a pair of shorts, short shorts depending on the legs or vanity. His father, Prescott, a longtime employee of the mills, the lifeblood of Olde Saco just then, “pulled a few wires” to get him the job for the summer before he went off to State U in the fall. Last year, last year when he was nothing but a raw hang out in front of the Colonial Doughnut Shoppe on Main Street (officially U.S. Route 1) with his boys (and occasionally girls, but only for a few moments while they picked up their orders) he would have jumped with both feet, maybe with both hands and feet, at the job to get some money for college.          

But that was then and this is now, as they say. Now, or rather the now just a few weeks or so before he got to the foot of Russian Hill, he had received word through that mysterious youth nation grapevine that parents, squares, cops, and authority guys were frantic to figure out, but who, in the end, were  clueless  about,  of a “great awakening”  that was going on in ‘Frisco. That news fed, fed deeply, into the wells of the discontent Prince Love was feeling about his own desire to break-out from the squares, from the cradle to grave plan every step world, and from the hassles, man, just the hassles mentioned before. The grapevine, by the way, was not all that mysterious. Some young, long-haired, wild-looking guy dressed in a blotted multi-colored shirt (later he found out such things were called “tie-dyed,” an interesting process that was popular among the kind of back to nature, and if not back that far then maybe to some simple agrarian society, crowd who were beginning to ad hoc come up with new ideas about how to clothe, feed and transport youth nation and get away from the rat race plan every step ways) from the West Coast had come east to see his grandparents who lived on Olde Saco Beach a few miles down the road and had run into Prince Love at the doughnut shop when he was looking for some joe and cakes to tide him over before a walk on the beach and told him about what was happening on the West Coast. Simple as that, okay.     

That information, those pressing on the brain existential jail-break things that he was feeling press against his brain, and well, the cold hard fact that he had just broken up with his girl, his long time high school honey, Julie Cobb, were what drove him to seek the road west. Simple as that. Well not so simple, really, because, if the truth be known, Julie left him for another guy, an older guy who was already working in the mills (not Shepard’s but Cullen’s, the high society linen-makers), had some dough, had a boss 1964 Mustang and, most  importantly, wanted to get married, and pretty soon too. That was the sticking point between the Prince and Julia, the conventional marriage game thing that had been going on in the town since, since, well Prince didn’t know but it was pretty common. Here was the drill. Graduate Olde Saco, work in the mills, get a couple of bucks, get married, get a tiny house on Atlantic Avenue, maybe,  have two point six children, throw in a dog or two cats, and then finish up whitewashing that picket fence in front of the house with the grandchildren.

No sale, not for Prince Love. He was going to college, leave the dust of that old town behind, and make a name for himself at something before he settled down in not-Olde Saco, maybe, maybe on the settle down part but juts then he had the wanderlust, had it bad. And from what he had heard along the way on his way west, and since he had arrived in San Fran a lot of people were feeling, wondering, groping for some answers just like him. And, yeah, just like them the Prince was looking to try some dope, listen to some far out music, grab some cool chick to shack up with, and really leave that home town dust behind before going back east for the fall semester of school.                

Now you are filled in, a little, on the what and the why of Prince (and Benny Buzz who however had been right then leaving Prince to go see a man, well, go see a man about something, let’s just leave it at that)  being on Russian Hill, that classic San Francisco hill mentioned a while back.  A hill not previously known to first time Frisco Prince, although maybe well-known to some ancient Native American shaman delighted to see our homeland, the sea, out in the bay working its way to far-off Japans. Or to some Spanish conquistador, full of gold dreams but longing for the hills of Barcelona half a world away.

I just remembered, you know everything, everything except how Prince Love got here which is not a big deal since he took some dough he had  originally saved up for college and used it for the Greyhound bus fare to get him here. Not for him the hitchhike road like the old time beat “beats” craved to get what they called the feel for authentic America which the Prince just slightly drenched with the end of the “beat” minute had to laugh at since according to guru Jack Kerouac’s book On The Road which he had finally read the previous summer old Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady was blazing about one hundred and ten miles per hour so the whole thing was a blur. Beside he didn’t need the hassles, man, the hassles first of Mother Breslin going crazy over the idea that he son would be some “jungle” hobo just like one of her cousins and didn’t need the hassles from weird guys picking up lone guys in Winnemucca or a place like that and then trying something funny. Not for him either merry prankster buses driven by mad monk zen masters in the heated western night since he had heard of nobody going west like that, heard the yellow brick bus road was mainly a California thing then (although not for long after the news of the summer of love filtered through the grapevine).

But this too Well, come on now, not everybody got every piece of news, especially in Podunk Maine, about the ways west, VW bus west, stick out the thumb west and that there were people, your kind of people, ready to pick you up and take you down the road a piece. Even back up on super-highway interstates to pick up a fellow youth nation straggler left on some desolate stretch fair game for hungry police eyes. Besides, after about a two-day bout with his parents about not taking that summer job, using the dough for college for such foolishness (to quote his everywoman mother), and other assorted arguments, family arguments started back in childhood, he had promised them to take the bus west. Let’s just say hassles, man, hassles and be done with it. Now we are done with the past.

Right then though, after saying a few things in parting with Benny Buzz after Benny had “scored” (you figure out what in summer Frisco ’67) about catching up with each other later, as he started walking up the hill toward the entrance to the mini-“people’s park” that was about half way up Russian Hill Prince spied a tall young man, maybe a few years older than him although such things were always hard to tell with making guys look older beards, the trauma of three-day drug haggards, and glazed looks.  He was, at second glance,  tall but not as tall as Prince, lanky, maybe not as lanky as him either and from the look of him with his drug stews diet having taken some additional pounds off, and some desire for pounds as well,  not really normally lanky.  Dressed, always worthy of description in 1967 ‘Frisco, male or female, in full “hippie” regalia, faded olive drab World War II army jacket, half-faded blue jeans, bright red bandana headband to keep his head from exploding, stripped checkerboard flannel shirt against the cold bay winds, against the cold bay winds even in summer, and nighttime colds too, and now that we are on the West Coast, with roman sandals on his feet).

And to draw the eye more fully to the scene this guy is sitting with two foxy looking young women. One, the younger one, maybe a high school student, blonde, blue-eyed, slender, short shorts belying West Coast origin,  and de rigueur practical road-worthy peasant blouse. A poster child for San Francisco summer of love if he ever saw one, and of his own feverish Maine night teenage desire summer or winter of love now that Julia was past. The other women, who called herself  Lupe Matin just then although the Prince found out later from the lanky guy that she had run through several monikers previously, a college student for sure , dark-haired, dark-eyed, slightly voluptuous, seemingly a little out of place with her male companion completed the entourage. (Her real name, Susan Sharp, Vassar College, Class of 1966, and “trying to find herself.”)  

Prince cast several glances at that regal company, nodded slightly, a knowing nod eyes fixed as was the fashion just then, and then turned around and asked to no one in particular but kind of zeroing in on the blonde (yah, he had a thing for blondes, see Julia was just that same kind of waspy blonde, minus the tan and year-round sunshine, that he fell for, fell for hard and fast), “Got some dope, for a hungry brother?” The male, who Prince would later come to know as “Far-Out” Phil (Phillip Larkin, North Adamsville, Massachusetts, Class of 1964), looked at him in a bemused manner (nice touch, bemused, right).  Except for shorter hair, which only meant that this Prince traveler had either not been on the road very long or had just recently caught the “finding himself” bug he could have, thought “Far Out” to himself,  been his  brother, biological brother.

That line, that single Prince Love line, could have been echoed a thousand, maybe ten thousand times that day along a thousand hills (well maybe not that many in San Fran), aimed at any small clot of like-minded spirits. And Phil sensing that just that one sentence spoke of kindred said, “Sure, a little Columbia Red for the head, okay?” And so started the long, well hippie long, 1960s long anyway, relationship between one Phillip Larkin and one Joshua Breslin.  And the women, of course.                  

That sense that Far Out had that he and Prince Love were kindred had been based on the way that the Prince posed that first question. His accent spoke, spoke hard of New England, not Boston but farther north. And once the pipe had been passed a couple of times and the heat of day started getting everybody a little talkative then Prince spilled out his story. Yes, he was from Olde Saco, Maine, born and bred, a working-class kid whose  family had worked  the town mills for a couple of generations, maybe more, but times were getting hard, real hard in those northern mill towns now that the mill-owners had got the big idea to head south and get some cheaper labor, real cheap. So Joshua, after he graduated from high school a few weeks before decided, on a whim (not really a whim though), to head west and check out prospects here on the coast for later use after college. Josh, now fully into his Prince Love persona finished up his story by saying, “And here I am a few weeks later sitting on Russian Hill smoking righteous dope and sitting with some sweet ladies.”

The Prince was just being a little off-handedly flirtatious as was his style when around women, young or old (old being thirty, tops), aiming his ammunition in general but definitely honing in on the blonde, the blonde now identified for all eternity as Butterfly Swirl (real name, Kathleen Clarke, Carlsbad High School, California, Class of 1968). (Phil, by the way, never ever said what his reaction to that last part of the Prince’s spiel, the flirtatious part, which seemed, the way it was spoken, spoken by Phil in the re-telling, filled with menace. Girl-taking menace. Well, old North Adamsville corner boy Phil menace would have felt that way but maybe in that hazed-out summer of love it just passed by like so much air)  Naturally Phil, a lordly road warrior now, on the bus now, whatever his possible misgivings, invited the Prince  to stay with them, seeing as they were practically neighbors back home. Prince Love was “family” now, and Butterfly seemed gladder than the others of that fact.            

And of course, family, meant home, and home for Far Out, Butterfly Swirl, and Lupe Matin meant the now locally famous (West Coast local, okay) yellow brick road bus now known as Captain Crunch’s Crash Pad (after the owner of the bus, and “leader,” whatever that meant, of the expedition). Prince Love, from the first night, not only felt that he had found a home, a home that he never felt he had in Olde Saco but that whatever happened out here he would survive. And as more dope-filled pipes were passed that night, and as the music played louder into the sea-mist bay night, and lights gleamed from all directions the Prince grew stronger in that conviction. Especially when Far Out Phil, acting out of some old testament patriarchal script, came sauntering over to The Prince around midnight and whispered in his ear, “Butterfly Swirl wants to be with you, okay?”         

And that night the Prince and Butterfly Swirl were “married.”

Poet’s Corner- Claude McKay-If We Must Die-In Honor Of The 96^th Anniversary Of The Communist International- Take Five

 

 

…they had heard that a group of White Guards, a first detachment on horse, maybe from the dreaded mercenary Czech Legion that were running amok from Siberia to the Urals, paid for by who knows who, some said the English some said the French, they were all paymasters for counter-revolution once the Bolsheviks had taken and were bent on keeping Russia Soviet. Or worst, and each of them shuddered knowing the reputations and knowing too the deeds, before Petrograd, before Moscow and on the Don, maybe the dreaded Cossacks, who needed no outside pay but only their  Ataman’s word to bend contemptible peasant heads to size, and who took no prisoners, none, were heading their way, heading right for their line of defense in the city ready to take back Kazan for the asking, so those Whites thought. Kazan fallen then the road to Moscow lay wide open and perhaps the end of the Soviet experiment in that dragged on second year of hellish civil war. But Commissar Vladimir ( assigned that title because he, a little more literate, a little cooler under pressure, than the vast bulk of  lumpish peasants, mostly, including him, from Monsieur Orlov’s land around Omsk, who had signed up to fight and to die for the land, their land from what they had heard, was listened to by that mass unlike the city boy reds) and his band of comrade brothers, five in all, (and one sixteen year old sister, one stray Red Emma, they called her who learned of revolution and sex, young love smitten sex even in war-torn Kazan  with young Zanoff, in that exact order while in their company and proved as fierce a fighter both ways, according to that same Zanoff, as any man), the last remnant from the old Orlov estate who survived the bloody endless Czar war  swore, swore a blood oath on their tattered red flag, the previous day that they would retreat no further, that here was their stand, their last stand if necessary, but no more moves away from Moscow.     

It had not always been that way with them, not even with Vladimir, not by a long shot. They had all farmed, like their fathers going back eons before them, the same fruitless task (for them) on the land for Orlov, the richest landowner in Omsk, and never lifted their heads when the Social Revolutionaries had come before the war and during that last revolution, the one back in 1905, with glad tidings (and before them other city radicals, narodniks or something like that, had spoken to their fathers and grandfathers). They just shoveled the dirt, kept shoveling, and kept their heads down.

Then the war came, the bloody world war as it turned out, somebody had called it the Great War as if to mock all those who had fought and bled, half of the youth of Europe bled in the damn thing, and the Czar’s police (Orlov’s really but in the name of the Czar so the same thing once the peasants saw the Czar's standard at the head of the force) came and “drafted” them into some vast ill-fed, ill-clad, ill-armed peasant force which proved no match for the methodical industrial-sized Germans as they were slaughtered by the millions in and around those foul trenches.

And still they kept their heads bent, Vladimir and his four Orlov surviving farm brothers the only healthy alive ones left from the twenty-two that had started out from Omsk in the summer of 1915. Kept them bent until the February Revolution in the winter of 1917 stirred things up although they held to the front line trenches even then since no one told them not to leave and in the fall of 1917 they had just followed their fellows out of the trenches and went home. Not the first ones out, nor the last but just out. Went home to farm Orlov’s land again they figured complete with bent heads, again.  Even when the Bolsheviks took power in November and decreed the land of Orlov’s theirs they kept their heads bent. It was not until Orlov, his agents, and his White Guard friends came back a few months later and took the land, their now precious land, theirs, that they roared back. And Vladimir and the rest had joined one of Trotsky’s red brigades passing through on a recruiting drive. They had moved here and there as the lines of battle shifted but mainly back, mainly retreats or break-ups since then and hence the blood oath, and no more retreats. The peasant "slows" in them had been busted, busted good. 

Just then a messenger came to their line, a messenger from the river in front of Kazan, from the wind- swept Volga. The message said that Trotsky himself , Trotsky of the phantom armored train rushing to this and that front, seemingly everywhere at the same time, that had put fear in the hearts of whites and reds alike, had decided to fight and die before Kazan if necessary to save the revolution, to save their precious land. Vladimir and his comrades, including Red Emma, Red Emma who if the truth be told despite her tender years of sweet sixteen was the best soldier of the lot, and should have been the commissar except those lumpish peasants would not have listened to her, reaffirmed their blood oath. They were not sure of Lenin, thinking him a little too smart, and maybe he had something up his sleeve, maybe he was just another Jew, he looked the part with that bald head of his, but stout-hearted Trotsky, if he was willing to die then what else could they do.  If they must die they would die in defense of Kazan, and maybe just maybe somebody would hear of their story, the story of five peasant boys and a pretty red-hearted city girl as brave as they, and lift their heads and roar back too….    

[Vladimir, Vladimir Suslov (whose grandson, Misha, would become a high Soviet dignitary in the 1980s) also deserves some additional mention so one does not get the impression that the local communal commissars had dug deep into the bottom of the barrel and he was all they could come up with from the loutish lumpish peasant mass that decided, decided almost just yesterday, that they should first raise their heads and then actually go out and fight for their land, come hell or high water. No Vladimir, even as a child was a leader of the boys, the peasant boys who spent more time avoiding work and hiding in the woods than bending to the plow. And contrary to his stolid appearance (added to, and aided by, those miserable years in the trenches) which endeared him to his fellows, made him appear older than his thirty years, he was a good reader,  and could write some, including fancying himself a minor peasant poet. Like he told the political commissar of his unit one night when things had dusted up it paid to NOT appear too much brighter than the fellows or else you would be treated like poor Red Emma, Nana, who actually had the heart, the heart of a red warrior princess. And so Vladimir led, led by just being a little ahead, being a little bit better able to read maps, and work with people and get his fellows out of more than a few scrapes. Of such men revolutions flourish, for a time. Then the grandsons, the Mishas, come along and think they have done it all themselves. ]  

 [Red Emma, real name Nana Kamkov, deserves a better fate that to be written off as some play thing for some loutish peasant boy, Grisha  Zanoff by full name, no matter how Red Army brave he was just that moment and no matter how peasant handsome he was, and he was, to Nana’s eyes. Nana had come off the land as a child, as fate would have it Orlov’s land, when after the last revolution, the one in 1905, the government encouraged capitalist exploitation of the land in order to break down the backward-looking peasant communes. Her parents had abandoned the land and had travelled to live in Kazan and her father had set up shop as a locksmith, a good one. Nana had gone school and had been an outstanding student if somewhat socially backward (she had not been like the other girls boy-crazy) and desperately wanted to become an engineer although the family resources precluded such a fate.

One day in the summer of 1917 at the height of the revolutionary fervor she ran across a Bolshevik agitator in Kazan (later killed in Kiev fighting off some White Guards in that location from what she later could gather) who told her, young impressionable her, aged fourteen, no more, that if the Soviets survived she would be able to pursue her engineering career, hell, the Bolsheviks would encourage it. From that time she had been a single-minded Red Guard soldier performing many dangerous tasks until the Whites threatened Kazan and she was trapped in the city and had joined Vladimir’s remnants as a result. And there she spied Grisha among his soldiers, loutish, foolish Grisha, although handsome she admitted. Perhaps it was the time of her time, perhaps she still had a little foolish schoolgirl notion to be with a man just in case things didn’t work out and she was killed, or worse, executed but one cold night she snuggled up to the sleeping Grisha and that was that. She was teaching him to read better and to think about things just in case they weren’t killed, or worse executed. Practical young woman, very practical. And so young Nana enters the red pantheon, and maybe she would drag Grisha along too.]               

 

If We Must Die

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Writers’ Corner  

In say 1912, 1913, hell, even the beginning of 1914, the first few months anyway, before the war clouds got a full head of steam in the summer they all profusely professed their unmitigated horror at the thought of war, thought of the old way of doing business in the world. Yes the artists of every school the Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists/Constructivists, Surrealists or those who would come to speak for those movements (hell even the Academy spoke the pious words when there was sunny weather), those who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society and put the pieces to paint, sculptors who put twisted pieces of metal juxtaposed to each other saw that building a mighty machine from which you had to run created many problems; writers of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress,  humankind had moved beyond war as an instrument of policy and the diplomats and high and mighty would put the brakes on in time, not realizing that they were all squabbling cousins; writers of serious and not so serious novels drenched in platitudes and hidden gazebo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing words that man and woman had too much to do, too much sex to harness to denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and by having half-virgin, neat trick, maidens strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, not the stress and strife of the tattoos of war marches with their tinny conceits; and poets, ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they would go to the hells before touching the hair of another man, putting another man to ground or lying their own heads down for some imperial mission. They all professed loudly (and those few who did not profess, could not profess because they were happily getting their blood rising, kept their own consul until the summer), that come the war drums they would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist worlds and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels. They would stay the course.  

And then the war drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, poets, beautiful poets like Wilfred Owens who would sicken of war before he passed leaving a beautiful damnation on war, its psychoses, and broken bones and dreams, and the idiots who brought humankind to such a fate, like e. e. cummings who drove through sheer hell in those rickety ambulances floors sprayed with blood, man blood, angers, anguishes and more sets of broken bones, and broken dreams, like Rupert Brooke all manly and old school give and go, as the marched in formation leaving the ports and then mowed down like freshly mown grass in their thousands as the charge call came and they rested, a lot of them, in those freshly mown grasses, like Robert Graves all grave all sputtering in his words confused about what had happened, suppressing, always suppressing that instinct to cry out against the hatred night, like old school, old Thomas Hardy writing beautiful old English pastoral sentiments before the war and then full-blown into imperium’s service, no questions asked old England right or wrong, like old stuffed shirt himself T.S. Eliot speaking of hollow loves, hollow men, wastelands, and such in the high club rooms on the home front, and like old brother Yeats speaking of terrible beauties born in the colonies and maybe at the home front too as long as Eliot does not miss hi shigh tea. Jesus what a blasted nigh that Great War time was.   

And do not forget when the war drums intensified, and the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they, other creative souls made of ordinary human clay as it turned out artists, sculptors, writers, serious and not, musicians went to the trenches to die deathless deaths in their thousands for, well, for humankind, of course, their always fate ….            

The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story of Love and Betrayal in World War I

 

by Ben Macintyre, Samantha Bruce-Benjamin (Goodreads Author) (Editor)

The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story of Love and Betrayal in World War I 3.62 of 5 stars 3.62  ·  rating details  ·  194 ratings  ·  31 reviews

In the first terrifying days of World War I, four British soldiers found themselves trapped behind enemy lines on the western front. They were forced to hide in the tiny French village of Villeret, whose inhabitants made the courageous decision to shelter the fugitives until they could pass as Picard peasants.

The Englishman�s Daughter is the never-before-told story of t In the first terrifying days of World War I, four British soldiers found themselves trapped behind enemy lines on the western front. They were forced to hide in the tiny French village of Villeret, whose inhabitants made the courageous decision to shelter the fugitives until they could pass as Picard peasants.

The Englishman�s Daughter is the never-before-told story of these extraordinary men, their protectors, and of the haunting love affair between Private Robert Digby and Claire Dessenne, the most beautiful woman in Villeret. Their passion would result in the birth of a child known as �The Englishman�s Daughter,� and in an act of unspeakable betrayal, a tragic legacy that would haunt the village for generations to come.

Through the testimonies of the villagers and the last letters of the soldiers, acclaimed journalist Ben Macintyre has pieced together a harrowing account of how life was lived behind enemy lines during the Great War, and offers a compelling solution to a gripping mystery that reverberates to this day. ...more

Free Chelsea Manning-President Obama Pardon Chelsea Now! 

 

I Hear The Voice Of My Arky Angel-Once Again-With Angel Iris Dement In Mind

 

SWEET FORGIVENESS (Iris DeMent)

(c) 1992 Songs of Iris/Forerunner Music, Inc. ASCAP

Sweet forgiveness, that's what you give to me

when you hold me close and you say "That's all over"

You don't go looking back,

you don't hold the cards to stack,

you mean what you say.

Sweet forgiveness, you help me see

I'm not near as bad as I sometimes appear to be

When you hold me close and say

"That's all over, and I still love you"

There's no way that I could make up for those angry words I said

Sometimes it gets to hurting and the pain goes to my head

Sweet forgiveness, dear God above

I say we all deserve a taste of this kind of love

Someone who'll hold our hand,

and whisper "I understand, and I still love you"

AFTER YOU'RE GONE (Iris DeMent)

(c) 1992 Songs of Iris/Forerunner Music, Inc. ASCAP

There'll be laughter even after you're gone

I'll find reasons to face that empty dawn

'cause I've memorized each line in your face

and not even death can ever erase the story they tell to me

I'll miss you, oh how I'll miss you

I'll dream of you and I'll cry a million tears

but the sorrow will pass and the one thing that will last

is the love that you've given to me

There'll be laughter even after you're gone

I'll find reason and I'll face that empty dawn

'cause I've memorized each line in your face

and not even death could ever erase the story they tell to me

Every once in a while I have to tussle, go one on one with the angels, or a single angel is maybe a better way to put it. No, not the heavenly ones or the ones who burden your shoulders when you have a troubled heart but every once in a while I need a shot of my Arky angel, Iris Dement. Every once in a while when I am blue, not a Billie Holiday blue but maybe just a passing blue I need to hear a voice that if there was an angel heaven voice she would be the one I would want to hear.    

I first heard Iris DeMent doing a cover of a Greg Brown tribute to Jimmy Rodgers, the old time Texas yodeller, on Brown's tribute album, Driftless. I then looked for her solo albums and for the most part was blown away by the power of Iris’ voice, her piano accompaniment and her lyrics (which are contained in the liner notes of her various albums, read them, please). It is hard to type her style. Is it folk? Is it Country Pop? Is it semi-torch songstress? Well, whatever it may be that Arky angel is a listening treat, especially if you are in a sentimental mood.

Naturally when I find some talent that “speaks” to me I grab everything they sing, write, paint, or act I can find. In Iris’ case there is not a lot of recorded work, with the recent addition of Sing The Delta just four albums although she had done many back-ups or harmonies with other artists most notably John Prine. Still what has been recorded blew me away (and will blow you away), especially as an old Vietnam War era veteran her There is a Wall in Washington about the guys who found themselves on the Vietnam Memorial probably one of the best anti-war songs you will ever hear. That memorial containing names very close to me, to my heart and I shed a tear each time I even go near the memorial when I am in D.C. It is fairly easy to write a Give Peace a Chance or Where Have All the Flowers Gone? type of anti-war song. It is another to capture the pathos of what happened to too many families when we were unable to stop that war. The streets of my old-time growing up neighborhood are filled with memories of guys I knew, guys who didn’t make it back, guys who couldn’t adjust coming back to the “real world,” or could not get over no going into the service to experience the decisive event of our generation.

Other songs that have drawn my attention like When My Morning Comes hit home with all the baggage working class kids have about their inferiority when they screw up in this world. Walking Home Alone evokes all the humor, bathos, pathos and sheer exhilaration of saying one was able to survive, and not badly, after growing up poor, Arky poor amid the riches of America. (That may be the “connection” as I grew up through my father coal country Hazard, Kentucky poor.)  

Frankly, and I admit this publicly in this space, I love Ms. Iris Dement. Not personally, of course, but through her voice, her lyrics and her musical presence. This “confession” may seem rather startling coming from a guy who in this space is as likely here to go on and on about Bolsheviks, ‘Che’, Leon Trotsky, high communist theory and the like. Especially, as well given Iris’ seemingly simple quasi- religious themes and commitment to paying homage to her rural background in song. All such discrepancies though go out the window here. Why?

Well, for one, this old radical got a lump in his throat the first time he heard her voice. Okay, that happens sometimes-once- but why did he have the same reaction on the fifth and twelfth hearings? Explain that. I can easily enough. If, on the very, very remotest chance, there is a heaven then I know one of the choir members. Enough said. By the way give a listen to Out Of The Fire and Mornin’ Glory. Then you too will be in love with Ms. Iris Dement.

Iris, here is my proposal, once again. If you get tired of fishing the U.P., or wherever, with Mr. Greg Brown, get bored with his endless twaddle about old Iowa farms or going on and on about Grandma's fruit cellar just whistle. Better yet just yodel like you did on Jimmie Rodgers Going Home on that Driftless  CD.