Yeah, Cowgirl In The Sand-With Neil Young (and Crazy Horse) In Mind-Take Two

Yeah, Cowgirl In The Sand-With Neil Young (and Crazy Horse) In Mind-Take Two  

By Sam Lowell

[I come by this remembrance of Zack James not directly but through my friendship with his oldest brother, Alex, with whom I had been a corner boy in our old growing up hometown of North Adamsville south of Boston. A corner boy for those not in the know since you do not see such sights around small towns and urban neighborhoods anymore was a guy who hung around with other guys at some variety store, pizza parlor, bowling alley or some such place with a corner for a young man, young men, to stand against on weekend nights when cash, cars, and cuties were as sparse as hen’s teeth, maybe sparser. Alex and I had been brought together in ninth grade in high school by a mutual friend the late wild man Peter Paul Markin known as “The Scribe” back in the day and the three of us and a few others were bosom buddies for several years before we went our separate ways.     

I recently reconnected with Alex around the commemoration of the Summer of Love, 1967 which San Francisco and other places is making a big deal out of in its 50^th anniversary year after he had come back from a trip there, a business trip, and tried to get all the old corner boys still standing together to honor the Scribe. He had seen an exhibition at the de Young Museum there called the Summer of Love Experience and had flipped out. His idea was to put together a book of remembrances in honor of the Scribe and had contacted his youngest brother Zack, a writer, to edit and spruce the thing up.

The reason for the book of remembrances?  See the Scribe is the guy who went out to San Francisco during the early spring of 1967 and after a few months came back and got a bunch of us, Alex and I included to go back out with him. The Scribe wound up in the hellish Army the next year, and would serve in Vietnam which fucked up his sweet short life for the few years he had left after that experience but Alex and I stayed for a couple of years. While Alex and I were cutting up old touches he mentioned this story about Zack just so I would know a little about his youngest brother who way too young for me to even remember when we were corner boys. Sam Lowell]   

****** 

Zack James when he was younger, much younger back in the early 1960s younger, now too for that matter was, well, how can we put it, maybe women-addled would be best. Ever since the end of high school, the beginning of college except for one short period he had always had some kind of woman relationship to confuse his sweet ass life (he hadn’t been very successful in high school too shy and too poor to make a hit with any of his female fellow high-schoolers so the end of high school seems the right place to start his women-addledness [sic, I assume]). Of late that streak had taken a sudden stop his latest flame of the past few years, Loretta, had flown the coop, had given him his walking papers, had decided that they had drifted too far apart, that she wanted to find herself, see who she was and what she would do with the rest of her life. Fair enough although the pain of her departure for parts unknown left a big hole in his heart, left him bereft for a while. But had also given him time to see what he was about, where he wanted to head.   

A lot of what Loretta had said about the need for her to cut Zack loose was dead-on, was right as she had been usually right about what ailed Zack. He always found himself behind the curve when it came to what Loretta was thinking about, what he was able to reflect in the lonely hours that he had recently spent in the house they had shared together over the previous several years. Had had to agree that the last year of so as his health had declined with some fairly serious medical issues which had required that he take some medicines that seem to pile up on each other and had made him, well, grumpy and cranky, a grumpy cranky old man if the truth be known especially as those medical problems dove-tailed with his turning three score, turning sixty to not be cute about it. Had made him aware as never before of his own mortality and instead of taking it easy, instead of increasingly relaxing, instead of being at peace with himself, instead of trying to put out “the fire in his head” he was more driven than ever to find his place in the sun, to have his life have meaning at the end. As to his relationship with Loretta he had let himself drift apart, left her unattended, and okay left her to seek her own newer world.

During some of those lonely hours in that desolate house which creaked eerily to his ears Zack began to think through his whole life, who was he kidding his whole relationship with the women who had festooned his sweet ass life, had made life bearable for him. What he had found out, was trying to think through is that he really needed, very much needed the companionship of a woman, and if it was not going to be Loretta, hell, she essentially left no forwarding address all he had was her cellphone number so she could be anywhere, then it had to be somebody else. Rather than go right out and jump into the “meat market,” that is what they called it when he was younger and if they had a different name for the process it was still the same ordeal he decided that he had better take stock of himself and where he has been, and what he wanted out of a relationship now. Any reflection on his apart about failed relationships, and there were plenty, always, always, always led him back to the “cowgirl in the sand,” always led him back to Mariah Welsh, back when he decided  he wanted his first serious relationship.      

That “cowgirl in the sand” was no cute inside joke and it still pained Zack to even think about Mariah and how she led him a merry chase in that one summer, the summer of 1976, they had stayed together. See Mariah was actually from the West, had grown up on a big cattle ranch just outside of Cheyenne out in Wyoming country and had some certain set western ways for a young woman of twenty. He had met her down in Falmouth, down in the Cape Cod area of Massachusetts about fifty miles from where he lived, down near the beach in the summer of 1976 just after his sophomore year in college. He had been renting a place with several other fellow college students for the summer who were as dedicated to partying as he was and that was that. He had actually seen her a couple of times on the beach at Falmouth Heights near where they had rented the cottage and thought that she looked very fine in her skimpy bikini (then skimpy which today would be considered modest) but was not sure how to approach her. One day he decided to go up and invite her to the weekly weekend party that his cottage put on and see what happened. (That weekend party almost literally true as the party would start early Friday afternoon and end at some Happy Hour bar early Sunday evening inevitably a few people, including Zack, would carry over until Monday or Tuesday if the spirit moved them or they had some hot date that kept the fires burning that long).

As Zack approached her she had brought him up short when she saw him coming and shouted out “Here comes the boy who had been checking me out, checking out my shape as far as I could tell and who knows what else he was thinking about, but was afraid to come up and say hello.” Yeah, that was the kind of girl, young woman, Mariah was all through that hot summer relationship. She claimed one night when they had gotten better acquainted that unlike uptight people from the East Coast people from the West, from cattle country, were more plainspoken, less hung up about speaking out about what they wanted-or who they wanted. Needless to say Zack and Mariah spent the rest of that afternoon talking about this and that, mostly dreary college stuff since Mariah was also a student at the University of Wyoming studying art. (She was an exceptionally good artist, had drawn a couple of charcoal drawings of him which he had kept for years afterward even when he was married to Josie, his first wife, and Josie had asked who had done them and he had foolishly told her and he had to hide the damn things. Josie had later when they were separating torn the works up-yes, it was that kind of breakup).

As they talked Mariah made no bones about showing off her very fine body, slender, small but firm breasts which he was attracted in woman, well-turned long legs and thin ankles, blondish brown hair, sea blue eyes and a wicked smile that would melt butter on a cold day. They made that primal connection that said they had something to do together what it would be who knew but something.

Mariah had told Zack that she had come East with a couple of her college girlfriends since none of them had ever been east of the Mississippi and had been thrilled when they first saw the ocean, had frolicked in the waves and one girl had almost gone under when a sudden riptide which they were totally ignorant of started pulling her down. But that scare was soon over since the girl had allowed herself to drift until the current subsided. They were staying for the summer over on Maravista a few blocks away from the beach (and maybe half a dozen blocks away from Zack’s cottage) in a tiny cottage in back of the landlord’s yard which he usually let out to students who worked in the restaurants and such places for the summer. As the hot tanning sun began to fade a bit by four Zack then popped the question of whether she and her girlfriends were up for a party that weekend. All Mariah asked about though was would there be booze and dope there. When Zack answered yes Mariah said they would surely, her word, be there and she had better not see him talking to some other girl when she arrived. Bingo.

That booze and dope stuff needs a little explaining since Zack and his fellows were all under official drinking age (as were Mariah and her friends at least in Massachusetts) so they “hired” an older guy who was living with a bunch of his older friends up their street to “buy” for them and he would get a big bottle of liquor, usually scotch, as his service charge. The dope thing was a little more problematic since dope, marijuana, maybe some speed when a connection could be made, were not that widely used then by the youth fresh college generation he hung around with although that movement was beginning to build up a head of steam. At that time “booze heads,” representing a more working class ethos and “dopers” were at loggerheads something that would get settled out later. Jazz, one of his roommates at their cottage and at school, had connections in Cambridge and so they never lacked for dope although more than a few girls would back off once they smelled the dope and didn’t know what the hell they were in for. So Mariah already was ahead of that crowd.      

As they were getting ready to part company after Zack gave Mariah his address and had told her to come by anytime on Friday afternoon or later Mariah told him to wait a minute until she put her street clothes on and they could walk off the beach together toward her car (Zack had walked over to the beach since he unlike several of his roommates did not have a car and was driven down by Willy another roommate). Zack was shocked, mildly shocked anyway, when Mariah put on her blue jean shorts, a frilly lacy cowgirl-type blouse, and, get this, her cowboy boots, and her cowgirl hat what he would later find out was called a Ladies’ Stetson. She looked like she had just gotten ready to go to the rodeo, or the state fair. Something told Zack that this was going to be an interesting ride indeed. Mariah must have sensed that because as they approached her car for her to leave she asked Zack whether he liked her outfit, and then said in her plain spoken Western way, “Maybe you can play cowboy with me if things work out.” Giving Zack a soft sexy look like if things worked out she would give him a ride he would not forget. Whoa!                            

That Friday evening Mariah and her two girlfriends arrived, guess what, dressed up very similarly to the way Mariah had been dressed as she and Zack left the beach a few days before which caused a sensation, a sensation at the novelty of the garb in Falmouth in the summer and also that the two girlfriends were “hot” as well. Zack fortunately was alone when they entered (he had earlier been talking to Cissie, an old flame whom he figured to rekindle a flame with that night since he had frankly given up the idea that Mariah was going to show, it would not have been the first time, or the last, some young thing had promised the moon to him and never showed up. Mariah came right over and asked if he had a joint, a joint she said to calm her nerves, make her feel good among the party-goers all of whom were eying her the guys for obvious reasons the women also for obvious reasons if they were with a guy.

Zack called over to Jazz who delivered a huge joint from the bag of dope he had “connected” with only that afternoon which made Mariah eyes widen and after taking a few “hits” said to Zack “You may be playing cowboy tonight after all.” In that instance her statement proved not to be true because she got so “wasted” that she fell asleep but the next night’s party, or really a continuation of Friday’s party she and Zack got it on in one of the empty bedrooms upstairs (not his room, the room where he had all his possessions, but nobody was particular about such arrangements when a “hot” date needed a place to put her head down).                         

What struck Zack about Mariah (beside that Western plain-spokenness that he was not used to with the local girls, mostly Irish girls who descended on the Cape with as the saying went “ten dollars and their virtue” and left with both intact or standoffish WASPish girls from the better colleges who were sometimes more trouble than they were worth in trying to get next to them if you were not seriously looking to be upward mobile after your college hijinks) was how sexually experienced and into doing sex she was even that first night when she did a lot of stuff that most other girls he knew were not into, like giving a good blow job. When they talked about it later Mariah told him that those cowboys out in the West, the ones who worked for her father broke her in early at thirteen and she liked it, liked it enough to read books in high school about various sexual positions and practices from a manual. (It turned out to be the Kama Sutra, the ancient Indian bible of sex for those who are clueless).

So for several weeks that summer Zack and Mariah were what would be called an “item” today, were almost inseparable. Went to the beach, partied, had great sex (mostly based on her knowledge and Zack’s willingness as a subject) and Zack assumed would find some way to continue their relationship at summer’s end. When that time came though Mariah told him straight out that theirs was a summer fling and that she was heading back to school in Wyoming and back to her boyfriend. The night they parted though, despite Zack’s futile pleading that they stay together some way and then giving up when she cut him off which she said was also a Western way, she gave him a parting sexual bout that he still remember forty years later. Yeah, Zack was women-addled, always was being played by them. Praise be.         

Yeah, Cowgirl In The Sand-With Neil Young (and Crazy Horse) In Mind-Take Two

Yeah, Cowgirl In The Sand-With Neil Young (and Crazy Horse) In Mind-Take Two  

By Sam Lowell

[I come by this remembrance of Zack James not directly but through my friendship with his oldest brother, Alex, with whom I had been a corner boy in our old growing up hometown of North Adamsville south of Boston. A corner boy for those not in the know since you do not see such sights around small towns and urban neighborhoods anymore was a guy who hung around with other guys at some variety store, pizza parlor, bowling alley or some such place with a corner for a young man, young men, to stand against on weekend nights when cash, cars, and cuties were as sparse as hen’s teeth, maybe sparser. Alex and I had been brought together in ninth grade in high school by a mutual friend the late wild man Peter Paul Markin known as “The Scribe” back in the day and the three of us and a few others were bosom buddies for several years before we went our separate ways.     

I recently reconnected with Alex around the commemoration of the Summer of Love, 1967 which San Francisco and other places is making a big deal out of in its 50^th anniversary year after he had come back from a trip there, a business trip, and tried to get all the old corner boys still standing together to honor the Scribe. He had seen an exhibition at the de Young Museum there called the Summer of Love Experience and had flipped out. His idea was to put together a book of remembrances in honor of the Scribe and had contacted his youngest brother Zack, a writer, to edit and spruce the thing up.

The reason for the book of remembrances?  See the Scribe is the guy who went out to San Francisco during the early spring of 1967 and after a few months came back and got a bunch of us, Alex and I included to go back out with him. The Scribe wound up in the hellish Army the next year, and would serve in Vietnam which fucked up his sweet short life for the few years he had left after that experience but Alex and I stayed for a couple of years. While Alex and I were cutting up old touches he mentioned this story about Zack just so I would know a little about his youngest brother who way too young for me to even remember when we were corner boys. Sam Lowell]   

****** 

Zack James when he was younger, much younger back in the early 1960s younger, now too for that matter was, well, how can we put it, maybe women-addled would be best. Ever since the end of high school, the beginning of college except for one short period he had always had some kind of woman relationship to confuse his sweet ass life (he hadn’t been very successful in high school too shy and too poor to make a hit with any of his female fellow high-schoolers so the end of high school seems the right place to start his women-addledness [sic, I assume]). Of late that streak had taken a sudden stop his latest flame of the past few years, Loretta, had flown the coop, had given him his walking papers, had decided that they had drifted too far apart, that she wanted to find herself, see who she was and what she would do with the rest of her life. Fair enough although the pain of her departure for parts unknown left a big hole in his heart, left him bereft for a while. But had also given him time to see what he was about, where he wanted to head.   

A lot of what Loretta had said about the need for her to cut Zack loose was dead-on, was right as she had been usually right about what ailed Zack. He always found himself behind the curve when it came to what Loretta was thinking about, what he was able to reflect in the lonely hours that he had recently spent in the house they had shared together over the previous several years. Had had to agree that the last year of so as his health had declined with some fairly serious medical issues which had required that he take some medicines that seem to pile up on each other and had made him, well, grumpy and cranky, a grumpy cranky old man if the truth be known especially as those medical problems dove-tailed with his turning three score, turning sixty to not be cute about it. Had made him aware as never before of his own mortality and instead of taking it easy, instead of increasingly relaxing, instead of being at peace with himself, instead of trying to put out “the fire in his head” he was more driven than ever to find his place in the sun, to have his life have meaning at the end. As to his relationship with Loretta he had let himself drift apart, left her unattended, and okay left her to seek her own newer world.

During some of those lonely hours in that desolate house which creaked eerily to his ears Zack began to think through his whole life, who was he kidding his whole relationship with the women who had festooned his sweet ass life, had made life bearable for him. What he had found out, was trying to think through is that he really needed, very much needed the companionship of a woman, and if it was not going to be Loretta, hell, she essentially left no forwarding address all he had was her cellphone number so she could be anywhere, then it had to be somebody else. Rather than go right out and jump into the “meat market,” that is what they called it when he was younger and if they had a different name for the process it was still the same ordeal he decided that he had better take stock of himself and where he has been, and what he wanted out of a relationship now. Any reflection on his apart about failed relationships, and there were plenty, always, always, always led him back to the “cowgirl in the sand,” always led him back to Mariah Welsh, back when he decided  he wanted his first serious relationship.      

That “cowgirl in the sand” was no cute inside joke and it still pained Zack to even think about Mariah and how she led him a merry chase in that one summer, the summer of 1976, they had stayed together. See Mariah was actually from the West, had grown up on a big cattle ranch just outside of Cheyenne out in Wyoming country and had some certain set western ways for a young woman of twenty. He had met her down in Falmouth, down in the Cape Cod area of Massachusetts about fifty miles from where he lived, down near the beach in the summer of 1976 just after his sophomore year in college. He had been renting a place with several other fellow college students for the summer who were as dedicated to partying as he was and that was that. He had actually seen her a couple of times on the beach at Falmouth Heights near where they had rented the cottage and thought that she looked very fine in her skimpy bikini (then skimpy which today would be considered modest) but was not sure how to approach her. One day he decided to go up and invite her to the weekly weekend party that his cottage put on and see what happened. (That weekend party almost literally true as the party would start early Friday afternoon and end at some Happy Hour bar early Sunday evening inevitably a few people, including Zack, would carry over until Monday or Tuesday if the spirit moved them or they had some hot date that kept the fires burning that long).

As Zack approached her she had brought him up short when she saw him coming and shouted out “Here comes the boy who had been checking me out, checking out my shape as far as I could tell and who knows what else he was thinking about, but was afraid to come up and say hello.” Yeah, that was the kind of girl, young woman, Mariah was all through that hot summer relationship. She claimed one night when they had gotten better acquainted that unlike uptight people from the East Coast people from the West, from cattle country, were more plainspoken, less hung up about speaking out about what they wanted-or who they wanted. Needless to say Zack and Mariah spent the rest of that afternoon talking about this and that, mostly dreary college stuff since Mariah was also a student at the University of Wyoming studying art. (She was an exceptionally good artist, had drawn a couple of charcoal drawings of him which he had kept for years afterward even when he was married to Josie, his first wife, and Josie had asked who had done them and he had foolishly told her and he had to hide the damn things. Josie had later when they were separating torn the works up-yes, it was that kind of breakup).

As they talked Mariah made no bones about showing off her very fine body, slender, small but firm breasts which he was attracted in woman, well-turned long legs and thin ankles, blondish brown hair, sea blue eyes and a wicked smile that would melt butter on a cold day. They made that primal connection that said they had something to do together what it would be who knew but something.

Mariah had told Zack that she had come East with a couple of her college girlfriends since none of them had ever been east of the Mississippi and had been thrilled when they first saw the ocean, had frolicked in the waves and one girl had almost gone under when a sudden riptide which they were totally ignorant of started pulling her down. But that scare was soon over since the girl had allowed herself to drift until the current subsided. They were staying for the summer over on Maravista a few blocks away from the beach (and maybe half a dozen blocks away from Zack’s cottage) in a tiny cottage in back of the landlord’s yard which he usually let out to students who worked in the restaurants and such places for the summer. As the hot tanning sun began to fade a bit by four Zack then popped the question of whether she and her girlfriends were up for a party that weekend. All Mariah asked about though was would there be booze and dope there. When Zack answered yes Mariah said they would surely, her word, be there and she had better not see him talking to some other girl when she arrived. Bingo.

That booze and dope stuff needs a little explaining since Zack and his fellows were all under official drinking age (as were Mariah and her friends at least in Massachusetts) so they “hired” an older guy who was living with a bunch of his older friends up their street to “buy” for them and he would get a big bottle of liquor, usually scotch, as his service charge. The dope thing was a little more problematic since dope, marijuana, maybe some speed when a connection could be made, were not that widely used then by the youth fresh college generation he hung around with although that movement was beginning to build up a head of steam. At that time “booze heads,” representing a more working class ethos and “dopers” were at loggerheads something that would get settled out later. Jazz, one of his roommates at their cottage and at school, had connections in Cambridge and so they never lacked for dope although more than a few girls would back off once they smelled the dope and didn’t know what the hell they were in for. So Mariah already was ahead of that crowd.      

As they were getting ready to part company after Zack gave Mariah his address and had told her to come by anytime on Friday afternoon or later Mariah told him to wait a minute until she put her street clothes on and they could walk off the beach together toward her car (Zack had walked over to the beach since he unlike several of his roommates did not have a car and was driven down by Willy another roommate). Zack was shocked, mildly shocked anyway, when Mariah put on her blue jean shorts, a frilly lacy cowgirl-type blouse, and, get this, her cowboy boots, and her cowgirl hat what he would later find out was called a Ladies’ Stetson. She looked like she had just gotten ready to go to the rodeo, or the state fair. Something told Zack that this was going to be an interesting ride indeed. Mariah must have sensed that because as they approached her car for her to leave she asked Zack whether he liked her outfit, and then said in her plain spoken Western way, “Maybe you can play cowboy with me if things work out.” Giving Zack a soft sexy look like if things worked out she would give him a ride he would not forget. Whoa!                            

That Friday evening Mariah and her two girlfriends arrived, guess what, dressed up very similarly to the way Mariah had been dressed as she and Zack left the beach a few days before which caused a sensation, a sensation at the novelty of the garb in Falmouth in the summer and also that the two girlfriends were “hot” as well. Zack fortunately was alone when they entered (he had earlier been talking to Cissie, an old flame whom he figured to rekindle a flame with that night since he had frankly given up the idea that Mariah was going to show, it would not have been the first time, or the last, some young thing had promised the moon to him and never showed up. Mariah came right over and asked if he had a joint, a joint she said to calm her nerves, make her feel good among the party-goers all of whom were eying her the guys for obvious reasons the women also for obvious reasons if they were with a guy.

Zack called over to Jazz who delivered a huge joint from the bag of dope he had “connected” with only that afternoon which made Mariah eyes widen and after taking a few “hits” said to Zack “You may be playing cowboy tonight after all.” In that instance her statement proved not to be true because she got so “wasted” that she fell asleep but the next night’s party, or really a continuation of Friday’s party she and Zack got it on in one of the empty bedrooms upstairs (not his room, the room where he had all his possessions, but nobody was particular about such arrangements when a “hot” date needed a place to put her head down).                         

What struck Zack about Mariah (beside that Western plain-spokenness that he was not used to with the local girls, mostly Irish girls who descended on the Cape with as the saying went “ten dollars and their virtue” and left with both intact or standoffish WASPish girls from the better colleges who were sometimes more trouble than they were worth in trying to get next to them if you were not seriously looking to be upward mobile after your college hijinks) was how sexually experienced and into doing sex she was even that first night when she did a lot of stuff that most other girls he knew were not into, like giving a good blow job. When they talked about it later Mariah told him that those cowboys out in the West, the ones who worked for her father broke her in early at thirteen and she liked it, liked it enough to read books in high school about various sexual positions and practices from a manual. (It turned out to be the Kama Sutra, the ancient Indian bible of sex for those who are clueless).

So for several weeks that summer Zack and Mariah were what would be called an “item” today, were almost inseparable. Went to the beach, partied, had great sex (mostly based on her knowledge and Zack’s willingness as a subject) and Zack assumed would find some way to continue their relationship at summer’s end. When that time came though Mariah told him straight out that theirs was a summer fling and that she was heading back to school in Wyoming and back to her boyfriend. The night they parted though, despite Zack’s futile pleading that they stay together some way and then giving up when she cut him off which she said was also a Western way, she gave him a parting sexual bout that he still remember forty years later. Yeah, Zack was women-addled, always was being played by them. Praise be.         

Ruth’s Remembrances-With Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture Show” In Mind

Ruth’s Remembrances-With Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture Show” In Mind

By Guest Film Critic Lance Lawrence   

[Regular readers of this blog (and of the on-line American Film Gazette) can be excused if they are a little perplexed about this posting or at least the title of this posting since it appeared her in its original form a month or so ago. The reason that the piece is getting what I would call an encore performance is that the writer, Lance Lawrence, who has placed occasional pieces here in the past, felt that he had short-changed Ruth Snyder by writing her off as just another frustrated middle-aged dame going through an inevitable mid-life crisis down in nowhere Texas and had latched onto the first male than gives her a passing glance.  Here the glance was by a younger guy, hell, she was robbing the cradle since he was still in high school, still wet behind the ears. Wrote her off too as just another backwoods Texas gal doing what generations of Texas women have done before her and instead let the youngster, Sonny, the inevitable Sonny or Bubba or Mac of the Texas panhandle, steal her thunder. Lance hopes that this revised edition reflects better on the virtues of this hardy Texas woman who might have come up the hard-scrabble way in the West Texas night but who has some virtues in the clutch maybe formed out of that hard-scrabble existence. Peter Markin]      

Ruth Snyder had all the prejudices of any West Texas girl growing up in the hard-scrabble Great Depression of the 1930s when money had been scarcer, maybe more so, than hen’s teeth. Had all the so-called secrets of such girls as well. She had been Anchor City born and raised out in the places where the oilfields out-numbered the number of residents. As part of that Anchor City (silly nautical name for a town out in the middle of Blue Norther country but there you have it. Legend had it that some restless Yankee sea captain who had had enough of the sea had founded the place and in a fit of nostalgia named the town that rather than after himself like half the foolish towns like Houston, Austin, Johnson City, and Galveston in the state).

Prejudice number one, aside from not allowing the “colored” to get a toehold in the town but that was usual all over the South and not Anchor City-bound, was drilled into her by her hard-shell Pentecostal parents who had gotten religion when West Texas was “burned over” in the Third Awakening, third Texas Awakening and that was marriage was forever. Forever meaning until one or the other of the two contracted parties kick-off. Not before. (As to that “colored” prejudice Ruth had played with Ella Speed the daughter of a black woman who took in washing in the small Negro-town section which her mother resorted to when she was too sick to do it herself but that ended well before puberty when such race-mixing was frowned upon. She never in public or private expressed hostility to the black race although she stuck to the “code” like everybody else in town. There had in any case been few Negros in town since the days in the late 1920s when the KKK strung up a couple of Negro men allegedly for touching white women.)          

So Ruth Snyder, not the prettiest girl in town, not by a long shot, in fact rather plain like some Grant Wood painting of some woe begotten up against it farmer and his drag on the household unmarried daughter with no prospects, pure prairie plain which was in man-short West Texas (marrying man-short West Texas the other kind, the women of easy virtue, the whorehouse kind in oil fields male Texas as everywhere were plentiful enough) good enough with proper household training to get a man. (She was a good-housekeeper and cook little good it did her in the end.) But get this Ruth Snyder, Plain Jane Ruth Snyder snagged herself a football player, Tom Snyder, who starred for the Anchor City Hawks before heading to Texas A&M and a short career made shorter by a crippling knee injury. Who would have figured that Tom in those brave football days would court Ruth Snyder. Ruth would soon after their marriage come to try to figure that one out herself. Tried to figure out that all Tom wanted from a woman, no, a wife, was to just keep his house clean, his socks darned and his rifles well-oiled. While Tom in very West Texas good old boys fashion would head out with his fellow good old boys and proceed to get well-oiled in another way or two.     

Married at just short of twenty years of age Ruth was now reaching that funny quirky time, forty. Things had only gotten worse between Tom and her as time went by and especially after several serious campaigns by alumni Tom had cornered himself into being both the football and basketball coach at old Anchor City High. Thus not only did Ruth suffer the pangs of loneliness during his weekly hunting and fishing trips but for well over half the year he would be too busy with his coaching to pay even minimal attention to Ruth. Not a good thing, not a good thing at all for somebody who was entering funny quirky time.  (Although she did not lack for female friends around the neighborhood something inside her made her keep her distance, keep things to herself which she committed only to her diary or expressed in her finely wrought poetry which kept her afloat on those lonely long weeks alone.)  

One of the things that was required of a coach’s wife in those days, those early 1950s days when all the way from kid sandlot football to University of Texas University all Texas was aflutter in football was to attend the Friday night games. Ruth unlike other mothers and wives rather enjoyed watching the game which had been part of the reason that she had grabbed onto Tom with both hands when he first asked her out those many years before. Of late, this season, this season of her reaching forty she found herself looking rather longingly at the young men on the field and thinking of those days when her own heart had been all aflutter when she spied Tom Snyder doing his pre-game warm-ups. In particular this year, this 1951 year when the team was pretty poor even by Anchor City standards she was drawn to two players, Duane, Duane Wilson, and Sonny, Sonny Burgess. Not because they were any great shakes as football players, they seemed to be in way over their heads when matched up against any decent teams but because they had similar physiques to her Tom’s when he was a star (the years of good old boy-dom had not been kind to Tom and he was now a certified member of the pot-bellied, sloughing forty something guys who could not have gotten out of their own ways if something had come up to startle them). Here’ the point though our Ruth started to have certain “improper” fantasies about those two young men. Yeah, that funny quirky forty thing.     

Ruth also knew that Duane had this thing, this crush on Jackie, Jackie Germaine, the head cheer leader who in that day, in her day when she was younger, and her now was nothing but a cock-teaser, a femme or whatever they called such “come hither” to be sliced and diced girls. She would lead him a merry chase, make him cry “Uncle,” literally since in the end he volunteered like a good West Texas young man back then to join the Army to get the taste of Jackie out of his system. Got his ass hauled to frozen Korea when hot war was afoot there to freeze his brain over to forget her. (As Duane told Sonny in one of his few, very few, candid and reflective moments before he shipped out for the unknown future he would never totally short of the grave get Jackie out of his system and years later would say the same thing even when by that time she had been married three times, had a parcel of kids and even at the high side of forty was making guys make sophomoric fools out of themselves). As he told Sonny he would rather just then face the red hordes in Korea than to see her with another man. That “another man” in the space of a few short months between the end of high school and going off to college entail screwing Duane, screwing rich boy Randy, his friend Tom, who wanted to marry her, Adonis one of her father’s wild-cat oil riggers, hell, even Sonny which is where Duane and Sonny’s friendship since elementary school was sorely tested. Yeah thought Ruth who would get her information about the younger set, older set, every set from Jennie who ran the Last Chance Café one of the few reasons to stop in the pass through town who had the dope on everything happening in town. 

      

So Ruth almost by default kept her eye on Sonny Burgess, looking for a way to get to him in a proper manner, at least for public consumption. As it turned out Tom, her no bullshit husband who was the vehicle for bringing Ruth and Sonny together. Out of pure laziness or cussedness, take your pick. One day Tom asked Sonny to take Ruth to the nearest hospital in Waverly some fifty miles away in order for her to check up on some “female” problem she was having. Tom’s reason for not taking her himself was that he was too busy with basketball practice to do so. The lure for Sonny was that Coach would get him out of classes for the remainder of the day. The trip started out uneventfully enough with Sonny doing chauffer duty-and acting strictly in that manner. After getting Ruth home safe and sound though she asked him if he would like something to eat. Sure, like any growing kid, any teenage kid. Nothing happened that day but between whatever mother hunger mother-less Sonny had and whatever real man hunger Ruth had a few weeks later they would met at the annual town Christmas Party (the same party where the perfidious Jackie blew Duane off for some party with Randy and reportedly “played the flute” with him the universal high expression for giving a blow job) and gave each other such looks that when Ruth asked Sonny if he would take her to her doctor’s appointment the next he answered with yes without hesitation. And so Ruth and Sonny would start an affair, an affair of the heart which would last on and off again for several years. Tom either never found out about it or didn’t care if he did know which hurt Ruth at first blush when she had been half doing that affair to make him jealous. That open secret though would keep the customers at the Last Chance Café going for many months once Jennie retailed the story. Funny nobody took umbrage that Ruth was bedding a young man half her age. But here is where we get into Ruth’s knowledge of the West Texas girl-woman prejudices. The reason that the Ruth-Sonny affair, was the hot topic for only a few months was that Ellie, Jackie’s mother had started an affair with a young oil well driller, Rufus Wright, employed by her husband. So Ruth was just following West Texas girl prejudice. What do think about that.        

The Intellectuals Next Time-With Leslie Howard, Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis’ Film Adaptation of Robert E. Sherwood’s “The Petrified Forest” (1936)In Mind

The Intellectuals Next Time-With Leslie Howard, Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis’ Film Adaptation of Robert E. Sherwood’s “The Petrified Forest” (1936)In Mind               

DVD Review

By Film Critic Sandy Salmon

The Petrified Forest, starring Bette Davis, Leslie Howard, Humphrey Bogart, from the play by Robert E. Sherwood, 1936

The 1930s were a tough time all around. Tough for hungry mouths and wandering nomads during the Great Depression that sucked all the everyday air out of society. Made a lot of crazy things happen like the rise of right wing populism, you know, the Nazi, fascist, nationalist, ethnic cleansing crowd who wreaked havoc on an unsuspecting world then and their grandchildren and great grandchildren are prepping up for a revival here in the early part of the 21^st century. It was a time of retreats, mostly, certainly a time of retreat for the intellectuals, at least those intellectuals who believed that something close to human perfection with the rise of the machine age to create greater leisure and time for thoughtfulness could happen before the millennium. They got those hopes battered first by the deeply disturbing  horrors of World War I which decimated the flower of that generation and then by the popular reversions to blood and soil, allegiance solely to the tribe and the struggle of the survival of the fittest (this time not with clubs but with guns and death-wielding high tech destruction capacities). The film under review, the adaptation of the Robert E. Sherwood play The Petrified Forest set in, well, the ancient Petrified Forest out in Arizona when only the hearty (or weary) survive takes a candid look at the defeat of the intellectuals and the disturbing reemergence of the survival of the fittest doctrine writ large and writ in a way that old Charles Darwin would have been horrified by back in the 1930s.           

The plotline is simplicity itself when you think about it. Alan, a disillusioned vagabond intellectual, a writer, played by Leslie Howard, kind of drifting along in a world that he no longer recognizes as his home finds himself in a diner on the edge of the forest where a bright young writer-painter, Gabby, played by Bette Davis, is wasting away as a waitress in her father’s business and daydreaming about heading to France to be reunited with her cultivated mother. Problem: she has no dough or nobody give her the dough and so she stagnates out on the edge of the world.  He, and she, immediately sense they are kindred spirits but there in those times nothing that could be done about it. Additionally Alan has had all his dreams punctured and he is just playing out his string.           

Enter Duke Mantee, played by rising new start Humphrey Bogart, a deadeye gangster who is on the run from every police agency in the area for having created every possible act of murder and mayhem in his time. He holds the denizens of the diner captive awaiting some frill to meet him there before they head south of the border. While he is waiting Alan hits upon the bright idea that the best way that he can help the smitten Gabby is to have Duke kill him so that Gabby can claim his insurance policy and start a new life. After some off-hand negotiations Duke agrees to do the job. No sweat off his brow, all in a day’s work. When the coppers come to get him Duke does his dastardly deed while using some customer-hostages as human shields to get away. Alan symbolically dies in Gabby’s arms knowing that his act, his gesture, will insure her future. Insure maybe, just maybe that the next time the world turns in on itself in a fit of hubris that the intellectuals will not retreat like he did. Yes, the intellectuals next time.        

All Eyes Are On Frog Pond Golf Course This Weekend

All Eyes Are On Frog Pond Golf Course This Weekend

By “Sports Editor” Si Lannon 

[This site has not generally over the past several years given much space to sports at any level. You can get all the sports you want at plenty of locations and on all kinds of media 24/7/365and then some. We did attempt several years ago to provide space for Larry Rodgers now with the on-line Sports At A Glance during a couple of college football seasons with his predictions about the placement of the top 25 teams in the big-time football area but with the coming of a truncated version of the playoff system (still based on some Top 25 formula to pick the final four top teams for the two-round playoff) a lot of the steam (and fun) of picking the Top 25 any given weekend had gone out of that effort.    

Si Lannon, normally a guest film critic and occasional music one as well is a nut for golf if you can believe that of an adult man, a very adult man, in this day in age. An otherwise mature and solid citizen chasing after a little white ball that never did anybody any harm in order to put said ball in a hole this size of a coffee cup. And they say that destruction of perfectly good grasslands, sandy beaches and a harmless fetid pond or lake passes for fun among a certain set. Si asked, no, begged, me to let him have a go at a short piece concerning a local club tournament that he was interested in writing about to stretch out his range he was bold enough to tell me. His winning argument though, a surprising one, a surprising one when he told me the number of people chasing white balls that did nobody any harm, was that some twenty-five million Americans give up rational thought at least once a year to play the game. Here is your shot at glory Si. Fore! Peter Paul Markin]      

Forget Mayweather-MacGregor (after all a tightly-wired ready to spring professional prizefighter, a pugilist, should beat some sorry street tough with kickass legs hands down), forget Warriors-Cavs (after all how hard is it for nine feet tall guys to bump into a fruit basket placed ten feet above the parquet), forget the Super Bowl (of whatever Roman numeral after all they are only playing to kill time between commercials), forget the World Series (after all how hard can it be to hit a 95 mph fastball to the heavens), forget the Stanley Cup, (yes forget it since I don’t know a damn thing about the game except most of the guys should do three to five years not minutes for their thuggery), and forget holy of holies, the four golf Majors (after all how hard is it for guys to go begging hat in hand to FedEx, Audi, Firemen’s Insurance, et. al for a nice paycheck for finishing tied for 26^th in some goof tournament). Yes, forget all those “fake news” sports because this weekend, this weekend as sunny summer begins to turn autumnal (nice word, right) in New England all eyes will be on the Frog Pond Golf Course nestled in the sleepy Hollow Village section of post-doctoral heavy Cambridge for the annual winner-take-all four-ball team net club championship.         

For those not in the know either about golf or various ways to pass the time like four-ball this format begins with the qualify round to winnow (nice word again, right) the field down to sixteen two-man teams (it could be distaff members as well but none appeared in the lists this year) who were able to hang on after a nail-biting eighteen holes of best ball (the best score by one of the members of the team counting on each hole) using eighty percent of each team member’s handicap (for example a 30 handicapper, a high handicapper, would get twenty-four strokes toward the team’s net score, not gross, that is for those professional players waiting in line for their hand-outs). Those sixteen teams go mano a mano against one another in match play (for example the number one team goes against number sixteen and so on) with the loser eliminated until third week when the final two teams standing fight a battle to the death for the justly coveted and well-deserved championship. Again for the unknowing the treacherous uphill road to victory once the teams square off will be based on the handicap of the best player in the foursome. For example if twenty is the lowest handicap then, say, a twenty-four handicapper would get four shots in tow for the match. Those would be determined by the four hardest holes on the course as listed by the scorecard. Say a player on one team gets a five but “gets a stroke on the hole” which means four then that person would win the hole if say each opponent had a five. If they had four then the hole would be halved-no blood. This madness, and some days it is shear madness that would ensnare even the best minds at Apple or Microsoft, goes on until the eighteen hole unless the match is shortened once a team cannot win. Say a team is down three with two holes to go-done-the match is over and the losers get to hang their heads low and try to avoid eye contact with others out on the course so they don’t have to publicize their abysmal defeat on that long endless road back to the clubhouse and further snarky looks from the flea-bitten denizens around the clubhouse bar most of whom did not make the qualifying cut.     

Get this, unlike those beggarly professionals each participant forks over twenty dollars US (or its equivalent in pounds sterling, stray Euros, francs, no that is no longer current, pesos, silver, spare change or Monopoly money, should that last one as the name of a game be italicized). And the sixteen qualifying teams get to fork over ten dollars US for a cash pool (or its equivalent in pounds sterling, stray Euros, francs, no that is no longer current, pesos, silver, spare change or Monopoly money, should that last one as the name of a game be italicized). Simple except for that eighty percent stuff that requires a handy computer to figure the numbers especially when you have a decimal involved. That and the unspoken eternal vigilance necessary to make sure the opponents who are capable of any crime up to and including murder, murder most foul in their misguided quests for glory play by the rules. (We will leave the rule book for the aficionados and move on.)                    

The first round of matches begin on a cold granite gray early morning Sunday at normally placid Frog Pond (where beside the dissolute seemingly homeless golfers you can find misbegotten dog-walkers screaming at their charges to behave, pitiful ancient joggers plodding along about three miles an hour and assorted younger health nuts doing bizarre twists and turns on the leafy tree-lined road adjacent to the golf course) but I don’t really give a damn about those so-called mano a mano matches since the two teams I have decided to feature here should have “walk-overs.” What I want to look at is the “prelim”-the match-up between the two teams which should meet after a grueling three weeks in the final pairing. Come brisk Saturday morning all eyes will be upon the team of Robert and Kaz pitted against Zhou (no relation to the late former Chinese foreign minister I don’t think although maybe that team could use some of his luck since Zhou reportedly was never on the losing side of a faction fight inside the Chinese Communist Party which took some doing) and Sand-Bagger Jackson. The battle of the century, the clash of the titans, the fight to the death for glory and fame hardly are superlatives enough to describe this impending show-down.    

On the face of it, “off the form” as they say in horse racing (that’s another forget sport while I am at it-how hard is it for fast horses to run fast and what of it) this practice nine should be a “walk-over” for the first named pair. Robert-Kaz under the leadership of what more than one commentator has called the redoubtable Monsieur Roberge the mercurial Kaz shot his best round of the season as that team won the very lucrative qualifying medal and the number one seed (hence facing the number sixteen team and thus “walk-over” is an appropriate way to name the other team’s fate. Moreover the wily Frenchman (via Quebec) Robert is coming off a sparkling fourth place performance in the well-regarded City of Cambridge Quota tournament (no, not immigrants in sanctuary city Cambridge but a complicated to the novice format based on total points which need not be explained here now) and Kaz (nobody seems to know how to get pass those first three letter orally or in writing and so universally Kaz) had a very respectable semi-final finish in the individual net match play club championship earlier in the sun-bleached summer. For the other team Zhou had won a match play format in the spring but everybody knows that is ancient history come the fall and the hapless Sand-Bagger is coming off a lackluster tie for fourteenth in that aforementioned Quota tournament and has been a bust all season. (A couple of seasons ago to show how easy it is to fall from the mountain top Sand-Bagger was being favorable compared to Byron Nelson, he of the record eleven straight PGA championships, when he was winning everything in sight but that too is ancient history in the “only as good as your last round” world of competitive golf. The scuttlebutt in the club house then among the touts, con artists and junkies swapping lies around the ancient highly polished mahogany bar was that Sand-Bagger would have to play all future tourneys with a single club- a nine iron. Yes, how the mighty have fallen.)    

Still I am willing to bet six, two and even that it is not wise to count old hard-bitten warriors like Zhou-Sand-Bagger out. I’ll put my money where my mouth is and bet a fiver on that proposition.

The President Of Rock And Roll- Chuck Berry’s “Hail, Hail Rock and Roll” (1987)-A Music Film Review

The President Of Rock And Roll- Chuck Berry’s “Hail, Hail Rock and Roll” (1987)-A Music Film Review 

DVD Review

By Associate Music Critic Lance Lawrence 

Hail, Hail Rock and Roll, starring Chuck Berry with a big part for The Rolling Stone’s Keith Richard and appearances by a number of rock and roll legends like Linda Ronstadt, Eric Clapton, Etta James, directed by Taylor Hackford, 1987 

Earlier this year (2017) when the legendary “first wave” rock and roller Chuck Berry passed away I startled a number of my colleagues by declaring Chuck Berry the first black president here in America.  (That “first wave” meaning present at the creation 1950s times not the later 1960s revival with the British Invasion led by the Beatles and The Rolling Stones which also lifted Mr. Berry and others back to the limelight from those who worshipped that earlier sound in Europe after it had faded almost from view in America except among a few aficionados.) Of course my frame of reference was not directly political since we all know that Bill Clinton was the first “black” president but rather that Chuck Berry was the first president of rock and roll, the thing that counted for the young back in the 1950s.   

At that time not only had I startled some colleagues with that little bombshell but I apparently nettled the regular music critic here (and at the on-line American Music Gazette) and my boss, Zack James, when I argued that while Elvis may have been the “king” back in the day Chuck was the Chief. Here is what I said there:

“I am one who, belatedly, has come to recognize that Elvis (I don’t think I need to mention a last name but if you need one just ask your parents or grandparents and you will get your answer in two seconds flat) was indeed the “king” of rock and roll. He took, as Sam Phillips the legendary founder of Sun Records and first finder of Elvis in old Memphis town who has been quoted many, many times as saying, the old black rhythm and blues songs and put a white, a white rockabilly, face on the genre and made the crossover in a big way. So I will not argue that point with Zack. Will not argue either that Elvis’ act, those swirling rotating off their axis hips make all the girls, hell, all the women sweat. Point Zack.                          

“But see I am a good republican (with a very purposeful small ‘r”) and as such I believe that the “divine right of kings,” the theory that Zack is apparently working under was discredited a few hundred years ago when Oliver Cromwell and his crowd took old Charles I’s head off his shoulders. And while I would have wished no such fate for the “king” his influence other than for purely sentimental reasons these days is pretty limited.

“A look at this CD selection will tell a more persuasive tale. Sure early Elvis, Good Rockin’ Tonight, Jailhouse Rock, It Alright, Mama spoke to 1950s teenage angst and alienation read: lovesickness, but beyond that he kind of missed the boat of what teenagers, teenagers around my way and around Zack’s older brother’s way, wanted to hear about. Guys wanted to hear about anyway. Cars, getting girls in cars, and hanging out at places like drive-in theaters and drive-in restaurants looking for girls. In short thoughts of sex and sexual adventure. This may seem kind of strange today. Not the sex and sexual adventure part but the car and drive-ins part.

“Those were the days of the “golden age” of the automobile when every guy, girls too, wanted to learn how to drive and get a car, or at least use the family car for those Friday and Saturday night cruising expeditions for which we lived. (I hear anecdotally all the time about 20 somethings who don’t have their driver’s license and are not worried by that horrendous fact. Could care less about car ownership in the age of Uber and Lift. Madness, sheer madness).  Cars for running to the drive-in to check out who was at the refreshment stand, cars for hitting “lovers’ lane if you got lucky. For that kind of adventure you needed something more than safe Elvis, safe Elvis who made your own mother secretly sweat so you know where he was at. Say you found some sweet sixteen, found some sweet little rock and roller, say you found that your parents’ music that was driving you out of the house in search of, say you were in search of something and you really did want to tell Mister Beethoven to hit the road. Needed some help to figure out why that ever-loving gal was driving you crazy when all you really wanted to worry about was filling the gas tank and making sure that heap of your was running without major repairs to cramp your style.             

“Take a look at the lyrics in the selections in this CD: Maybelline, Sweet Little Sixteen, Sweet Little Rock and Roller, Nadine, Johnny B. Goode, Roll over Beethoven. Then try to tell me that the man with the duck walk, the man with the guitar from hell, the man who dared to mess with Mister’s women (hell we have all been beaten down on that one since Adam’s time, maybe before) one Chuck Berry didn’t speak to us from the depth of the 1950s. Hail to the Chief.”     

     

I made my case before I had watched or rather re-watched the music film under review the Keith Richards-inspired Hail, Hail Rock and Roll centered on the life and times of Chuck Berry (until 1986) and two concerts he gave in honor of his hometown Saint Louis from where he started out to change the music landscape of the young. This film I will force-feed if necessary to one Zack James, boss or no boss, to put paid to the “controversy” around who was who the “king” or the “president”

Naturally the film had to deal with the central question of the expansion of rock and roll from its rockabilly and rhythm and blues beginnings. So naturally as well the question of race in the beginning to heat up start of the black civil rights movement days came to the fore as it did in every aspect of social life in segregated America. As for music Sam Phillips thought he had one answer-get a white guy to swing and sway like a black guy and make all the women, white women now, sweat. And Sam was right. But as fully documented here one Chuck Berry had an idea that he could do the reverse slam-dunk cross-over with lyrics and a back beat that the sullen 1950s red scare Cold War benighted teens with discretionary money to spend would gravitate to. And Chuck was right. Right even as the black and white kids broke down the barriers between them in any given concert or dance hall. Once again hail to the Chief.

[That Saint Louis concert produced many great Chuck Berry performances of his greatest hits both by himself and by his guest artists. Beyond Chuck’s outstanding performances stand-out work was done by the guy who inspired the guy who thing Keith Richards being Keith Richards one of the greatest guitarists around and Etta James. But for my money Linda Ronstadt stole the show with her booming rendition of Chuck’s Back in the U.S.A.]  

The Not So Pretty Finish-With Etta James’ “Please, No More” in Mind

The Not So Pretty Finish-With Etta James’ “Please, No More” in Mind

By Hank Jones

“No more, no more,” had become Shep Wilson’s new mantra once he got over his rage against his long-time companion, Sarah Long, after she had set him adrift, had as she said “moved on” to fine herself whatever that might have meant when she uttered the ugly words of separation one night and then the next day was gone, leaving no forwarding address and only the thin reed of a cellphone number and e-mail address to remember her by. It had not been like Shep had not known it was coming, or could see it coming since Sarah had been making noises about leaving, and under what conditions, for a couple of years prior to that sneaking out the next day door. And maybe she was right to make a clean break, although in his heart of hearts Shep knew he was only fooling himself, only acting out of his version of male alleged indifference which had been part of the problem between the pair for the past several years.

Shep kept trying to think through what he could have done differently, where he had fallen down bad enough to make her leave. And make him take up her chant of “no more” (not really put that way by her since she would have used more gentile language that fit her persona but that was the way that it rang through this latest fire in his head and that was the way he was trying to think the matter through). He knew that he shared the blame, shared in the debacle of their love, had lost that magic that held them together for so many years, and that the little saying that she had had in sunnier times about how they had been so much in love in those early years and though it would continue forever. And in the early days, hell, up until the last few years that love had been as genuine as any emotion that he held dear. Then a whole series of events, a whole personal deluge of troubles laid him low, and had made him a grumpy old man. The last month or so, maybe two months he had tried to take stock of himself (and of her role in their decline after all as she admitted she could have signaled him more concretely about what was ailing her, what make her say her own “no more”). Had tried to put, as he constantly told her against all odds, to put his best foot forward. Unfortunately it had been too late.     

After Shep thought about those early days when they were so in love, were so sympathetic to each other, fed off each other’s needs, faced the wicked old world as a pair of waifs, soul mate waifs was the way she put it one time early on, sipping on a little light wine to numb himself a bit against the emptiness in his heart, he tried to retrace where he had fallen down (her shortcomings were her business now and so he looked at the lonely world through his future path and  how he could become the “new” Shep, get rid of that mantra of “no more” into a better place). 

Shep had never been much for reflection, never much to think how his actions, or better his omissions, would affect Sarah, would make her withdraw, make her close her heart to him. Had dismissed at least in his on fire head much of what she would speak of when she was seriously trying to signal him that things had dramatically drifted downhill. Would not take the signals about getting help, psychiatric help foremost, that she first gently and then more insistently tried to get him to undertake. Saw that as her New Age Cambridge background thing that she was forever trying out (and to his mind without much success but he kept that to himself especially as she seemed more and more to withdraw into that world as she got more distraught about them and as well about her place in the sun, about who she was). 

Funny, Shep thought to himself, in the end, or rather toward the end, in one of those previous downhill moments he had agreed to go with her to couples counselling (they had tried that route about twenty years before but both had been dissatisfied with the counsellor who seemed to be more interested in what she had to say than what they had had to say). Funny as well that he, not she though, and if he had been wise enough to see what that meant he could have seen what was coming, he felt that the then current counselling, and the counsellor, was a worthwhile endeavor every week (Sarah, before they decided, or rather she decided, to discontinue the work, had told him that she thought the counsellor was “championing him” because, as a gregarious type in such situations he had the better of it against her more quiet and thoughtful responses which tended to be short, if to the point.)         

Shep’s troubles really had started with the advent of his medical troubles, with what he called “the poking and prodding” of the medicos, a few years before. Yeah, he knew growing older, getting to be an old grumpy man, meant that health issues would surface, would especially as he reached his seventh decade (he knew first-hand as well from his friends of similar ages that this was the “deal,” the real deal). Shep had prided himself on keeping a semblance of fitness, of keeping himself heathy as measured by very infrequent visits to the doctor’s office and of not feeling sick most of the time except for an occasional cold. Then the deluge, first trouble with breathing and eating necessitating an endoscopy which found some problems, and medications. After that bladder problems associated with his smoking many years before according to the urologist, more medications, and then more recently the final nail in the coffin (his expression as stated to Sarah many times and a silly foolish thing to say), the early discovery of bladder cancer after a scope should unusual inflammations. More procedures and more medications.       

One day Shep just erupted, started yelling at Sarah, started to approach her for which she would later say she stood in fear of physical danger he seemed so out of control (not at the time though as she thought that saying anything would only enflame him further). After a few minutes he settled down, because something of the old Shep, but the line had been crossed. Shep swore he would stop taking the medications since they seemed to be making him more aggressive, more sullen, and angrier. As it turned out one of the medications was reacting poorly with another one and had aided in Shep’s angry responses to the world-and to Sarah.   

If the medications, if the health issues were all that there were Sarah pointed told Shep before she departed she could have worked around that. What she could not work around was what Shep called one night the fire in his head (not helping that inability to “work around” were long-time, long-held issues around Sarah’s own worth, around who she was, around what was she to do in the world now that she too was retired, issues which had plagued her since childhood). In the end that “fire in his head,” that not being “at peace” with himself was the way she expressed her take on the situation was what made something snap in her psyche. Shep, as he would admit to himself in a moment of candor several weeks after she had gone, had reacted to his health issues and graceless aging rather than getting more rest and taking it easier in life had true Shep form driven himself even harder in order to leave what he told Sarah was his mark on the wicked old world. The snapping point for her was that he seemed indifferent to her needs, seemed to be in a world of his own, and had begun again to question every move that she made like he did not trust. In a final stab to his heart she had told him that her own increasing medical problems were being aggravated by his foul behavior(after being fearful of doing so since she still worried about his anger if she did tell him this hard truth).       

So this was Shep’s sad demise. Or could have been but one night a couple of months after Sarah left he woke up one night and said “no more.” No more acting like a crazed maniac, no more fruitless search for some netherworld place in the sun. He had read a book, a book on meditation that Sarah had left behind talking about the benefits of doing such a therapy, backed up by scientific evidence. (Shep was not sure that Sarah had not left the book behind on purpose since she, like in a lot of things around his well-being, had mentioned his doing meditation on numerous occasions in the past.) So Shep started practicing the art, had real trouble at the beginning in focusing away from his two million “pressing” forward that day issues and living in the moment. But as with many things when he gets “religion” Shep is still at it after a month. His mantra, his focus term, not surprisingly “no more.”    

[Shep would wind up meeting Sarah in a Whole Foods grocery store in Cambridge several months later and remarked after telling him she had spent the previous several months in California that he seemed calmer, seemed to have lost some of that fire in his head, and seemed more at peace with himself. Had said also that they should keep in touch now that  she was back in town and that he wasn’t such a maniac (her term for his previous late innings conduct). So who knows. All Shep knows is that he wanted “no more” to do with the old Shep).