Today I am on the road to College Park, by way of Baltimore, to meet up with my lovely daughters. We are road-tripping together to Virginia to attend a wedding this weekend, so I will be off the radar for a few days. I hope my dual personality will fill in the blanks while I am incognito.
Have a great weekend and keep the faith!
*Gaily bedight, a gallant knight” is the first line of the poem “Eldorado” by Edgar Allan Poe. It always makes me want to “ride, boldly ride”.
Saturday, by the way, is Walt Whitman’s birthday–May 31, the last of the amazing birthday month of May!
I will be out of town, so I thought I would give you a little W.W. today so you can think ahead and plan your celebration.
I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured and never will be measured.
I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!)
My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods,
No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,
I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,
I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange,
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooking you round the waist,
My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.
Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.
It is not far, it is within reach,
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know,
Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.
That extra day just makes a huge difference. Saturday and Sunday were filled with the usual activities: Estate sale-ing where I found this vintage needlepoint pillow
“He’s just a dandy-lion”
and this little garden armadillo with a broken ear and tail.
I went grocery shopping and the boy came over to borrow tools. I went to church, did yard work and laundry. Then the boy and daughter #3 came over for a Memorial Day bar-b-que on Sunday night.
We sat outside and drank beer. Then ate inside–James Beard’s steak and onion sandwiches that were one of my mother’s specialties.
We had a fun evening (and cake). If you are wondering, we had our Memorial Day bar-b-que a day early, because they were going to the Cardinals game on Monday. It was the 5oth anniversary re-match World Series game with the Yankees (can you believe it’s been 50 years?!) and everyone got a World Series replica ring.
On Monday I read leisurely and then proceeded to clean out the bookshelves in the den. Quelle dusty job. I moved some books around and made many, many trips to the basement and to the second floor. I found some books that daughter #2 might like to add to her shelves and I found some others that can be moved to the give-away box. In the cabinets below the bookshelves I rearranged and straightened the photo albums. I threw some stuff away like all our VHS tapes of recorded from TV Miami Vice episodes. I found a few long-lost gems, but a lot more things that are in the why-have-I-kept-this-all-these-years category. I was in a clear-it-out mood. Zut alors! The corner looks nice and refreshed.
While I was doing this I half-watched some rather schmaltzy war movies on TCM, including The White Cliffs of Dover (1944) made during WWII with Irene Dunne. They pulled out all the propaganda stops with this one! It was enjoyable though, because Irene Dunne is always good and it had the MGM line-up of supporting stars including Frank Morgan (the Wizard of Oz) who personified the all-American American. When the American troops arrived to save the day in both WWI and WWII while the band played Sousa, even I got a little misty-eyed.
But it being John Wayne’s birthday, I had to cleanse my palate with something better.
Today is Memorial Day and also John Wayne’s birthday!
You can watch war movies all day on TCM. Twelve O’Clock High (1949)–one of my favorites is on tonight, followed by another great one, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).
Or you can choose to watch John Wayne movies.
Either way, have a good day and take some time to remember the men and women who died while serving in the U.S. armed forces.
Here is a great rendition of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, written by Julia Ward Howe in 1861 to the tune of “John Brown’s Body”:
Have you ever read all the lyrics to this wonderful hymn? Well, here they are:
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal”;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.
He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is Wisdom to the mighty, He is Succour to the brave,
So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of Time His slave,
Our God is marching on.
(Chorus)
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah.
Our God is marching on.
And here is a special prayer from the BCP for today:
ALMIGHTY God, our heavenly Father, in whose hands are the living and the dead; We give thee thanks for all those thy servants who have laid down their lives in the service of our country. Grant to them thy mercy and the light of thy presence, that the good work which thou hast begun in them may be perfected; through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord. Amen.
This Friday has been a long time coming–what a long week! But we have a three-day weekend coming up, so it’s all good.
FYI May has been a big month for birthdays already and this weekend we have two more favorites: Bob Dylan (May 24) on Saturday
and Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25) on Sunday!
Those are two great reasons to celebrate this weekend! One good way to do so would be to re-read Self Reliance, which I have been meaning to do–how about you?
“Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance
Another way would be to watch No Direction Home (2005)–a film chronicle of Bob Dylan’s evolution between 1961 and 1966 from folk singer to rock star. Directed by Martin Scorsese, it uses archival footage and recent interviews to tell the story of the illusive Bob, who refuses “to be simplified, classified, categorized, or finalized”. And why should he be? He is, like Emerson and those other guys mentioned above, a “pure and wise spirit,” both great and misunderstood.
Dylan and Emerson are certainly on the same page. Here’s Bob:
‘Trust yourself Trust yourself to do the things that only you know best Trust yourself Trust yourself to do what’s right and not be second-guessed Don’t trust me to show you beauty When beauty may only turn to rust If you need somebody you can trust, trust yourself’
How Emersonian can you get?
So enjoy your weekend and trust yourself. Eat cake.
“Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom. Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything, but the alpha and omega. An end in itself.”
Gabriel Garcia Marquez– Love in the Time of Cholera
Today is the birthday of James Maitland Stewart (May 20, 1908 – July 2, 1997) — an American film and stage actor, known for his distinctive drawl and down-to-earth persona. He was a Boy Scout, a Presbyterian and a Princeton graduate. He wore tweed jackets.
He was also a bomber pilot in WWII, flying 20 official missions over Europe. Stewart was one of the few Americans to rise from private to colonel in four years.
He continued to play a role in the U.S. Air Force Reserve after the war, reaching the rank of Brigadier General. After 27 years of service, Stewart retired from the Air Force on May 31, 1968. He was promoted to major general on the retired list by President Ronald Reagan.
He was always one of my favorite movie actors, starring in several of my all-time favorites: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), How the West Was Won (1962), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Rear Window (1954). But he also was in some lesser known films that are also favorites: Harvey (1950), Dear Brigitte (1965), The Rare Breed (1966). I always liked him as “Buttons” the clown in The Greatest Show on Earth (1952).
Jimmy with Charlton Heston and a very cute dog.
They don’t seem to make ’em like Jimmy Stewart any more, at least out in Hollywood. No one comes to mind anyway. So I will toast JMS tonight and perhaps dust off Harvey. What do you think?
How was your weekend? Mine was relatively quiet and low-key. No socializing, no trips downtown, no eating out. Just a lot of puttering about in the house and garden. The weather was lovely–cool and sunny.
The OM and I attempted to go to the boy’s play-off game, but we went to the wrong school. We drove around the Priory campus wondering where everyone was. It never occurred to our befuddled minds that it was, indeed, a HOME game. We surrendered and went home. C’est la vie.
I contemplated staying in bed and reading on Sunday morning, but I went to church because I remembered that I had given the altar flowers in memory of my parents and my friend Irene. They were very nice.
The church does not list, thank you…but I guess I do.
One of the readers was a scion of what we used to call a “socially-prominent” flyover family–does anyone say that anymore?–who makes a practice of wearing old baggy blue jeans to church. Furthermore, he looks like he has been wearing the same pair all week while driving his tractor around the south forty. I suppose we should be happy he tucks his shirt in. He has the flowing locks and facial hair of someone who would have fit right in with Bedford Forrest at Shiloh. I don’t know why this always bothers me, but it does. I mean, c’mon.
Besides the regular sermon, there was a children’s sermon given by our choir director to a group of younguns who scampered up to the chancel to sit on the floor and listen attentively. At the end he led them in song and they were adorable and quite amusing. They cheered me up. There is one little girl who can answer every question posed and belts out every hymn like a mini Martha Raye. If this child doesn’t grow up to be something special, I’ll eat my hat.
In the afternoon I read outside–a most unusual and lovely pastime.
In conclusion I should note that seventy-nine years ago, at the age of 46, T.E. Lawrence, better known as “Lawrence of Arabia”, was fatally injured in an accident on his motorcycle in Dorset. Six days later (on May 19) he died.
Lawrence on his Brough Superior SS100
He was buried in Dorset. There is a memorial in the very old Anglo-Saxon Church of St. Martin
and a memorial bust in the crypt of St.Paul’s Cathedral.
I will leave it to my dual personality, who has read a lot more than I about T.E. and has visited his resting place, to write about him sometime, but I thought we should take note of his passing.
He was a gallant soldier and a Christian gentleman and more than worthy of a toast to that effect tonight.
*T.E.L. I had this quote on my senior page. It could be my mantra.
Today is the birthday of Henry Jaynes Fonda (May 16, 1905 – August 12, 1982)–star of stage and screen and progenitor of one of those film dynasties they have out in Hollywood. He was baptized an Episcopalian (although raised as a Christian Scientist) and an Eagle Scout.
He is not one of my all-time favorites or anything, but I always liked him and his wonderful midwestern voice. He reminds me of my father, without the glasses.
Fonda, as you know, had quite a long and celebrated career culminating in finally winning an Academy Award for Best Actor for On Golden Pond in 1982. He played an old, befuddled man and was hardly acting, but oh well. I’m sure Warren Beatty, Burt Lancaster, Dudley Moore, and Paul Newman, who were also nominated that year, understood that that’s how Hollywood operates–right?
He made some of his best movies with John Ford, including one of my top-ten favorites, My Darling Clementine (1940) which I wrote about here. He was on quite a roll with Ford with Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940), then with The Fugitive (1947), Fort Apache (1948) and Mister Roberts (1955). Many actors had a hard time working with Ford, but I remember hearing Fonda say that making a movie with him “was like going to summer camp.” Clearly Ford treated him differently. I would love to know why. The results of their collaborations were excellent, so, whatever.
My Friday Pick for you then is to watch one of Henry Fonda’s movies tonight and raise a glass to old Hank. For me, it will be My Darling Clementine.
I should also note that May 18 (Sunday) is the birthday of country singer George Strait, aka Strait the Great.
So it wouldn’t be a bad idea to dust off Pure Country (1992). (I know you have a copy. If not, I’m sure it is on YouTube. Or running in a loop on GAC.)
One of my favorite memories is of the boy when he was around 9 or 10 years old, sitting in the giant mulberry tree in our yard, singing at the top of his lungs:
All my ex’s live in Texas,
And Texas is a place I’d dearly love to be.
But all my ex’s live in Texas
And that’s why I hang my hat in Tennessee.
Just thinking of that made my day! Happy birthday, Henry and George!
*Wyatt Earp says this in My Darling Clementine. [The response to this question is: “No. I’ve been a bartender all me life.”]
According to Wikipedia, “memory is the process in which information is encoded, stored, and retrieved. Encoding allows information that is from the outside world to reach our senses in the forms of chemical and physical stimuli. In this first stage we must change the information so that we may put the memory into the encoding process. Storage is the second memory stage or process. This entails that we maintain information over periods of time. Finally the third process is the retrieval of information that we have stored. We must locate it and return it to our consciousness. Some retrieval attempts may be effortless due to the type of information.”
I have been thinking about memory a lot lately. Probably because that pesky “retrieval” process is becoming such a pain.
Perhaps recently experiencing a reunion has made me more than usually aware of this. People remember different things and they remember those things differently.
Class Day rehearsal–I am so “in character” as my pater. As I remember it, I was awesome.
Also, looking back over my years as a mother, I realize that so much of my children’s “wonder years” are a blur. A real blur. If it weren’t for snapshots, would I remember anything?
I think I need to make more of an effort here. Take some notes. I need to be more intentional about thinking.
Here’s Frederick Buechner on the subject:
“The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.” (A Room Called Remember)
I think our culture is becoming less and less intentional about thinking. Everything is presented in a shorter (and shorter) format. Our brains bounce back and forth from subject to subject. Focusing is hard. What will the result of all this be I wonder?
Today I am on the road to College Park, by way of Baltimore, to meet up with my lovely daughters. We are road-tripping together to Virginia to attend a wedding this weekend, so I will be off the radar for a few days. I hope my dual personality will fill in the blanks while I am incognito.
dual personalities 