The Red Shovel

Out in the yard at 6:45 this morning, after the Obama Oslo speech, I was trying to shovel  a path to the car so we could keep a 7:30 date with the eye surgery center. The snowfall two days before had made it tricky from the garage, up the incline, to the road so last night I parked outside for an easier getaway.

Suddenly, unbidden, there was Ricky, a neighbor, with her red shovel.

“Just back from the gym,” she said, “and I saw your lights. I figured you guys were going someplace — then I saw you out here so…”

Together we made a path to the car, the two shovels making fairly easy work displacing the entrapment of snow. Ricky brushed aside my thanks, and the ease she had rendered to my snow-sore back. “Hey, I’m happy to help out.”

This, too, I thought, is the American way.

James Levine’s back

Can’t help commandeering part of a note from a friend, John Citron, received today.

“We had tickets for the Boston Symphony Orchestra for four concerts covering all nine Beethoven Symphonies. Unfortunately, James Levine, the conductor, and incidentally Ellen’s cousin, had back surgery and was unable to conduct — so we turned back our tickets and canceled our hotel reservations.”

What a magnificent near miss! A occasion I’d given much to have encountered.

But guess what? I happen to have all nine symphonies on the player in our Subaru, even as we speak — the iconic von Karajan version, no less! Goose bump time.

Memories

Just got in the mail, from John Citron in Cape Cod, a 1978 International Fact Book for the old advertising agency conglomerate Norman, Craig & Kummel, of which John was a top official and I, head of the NCK outpost in Trinidad.

Reminds me  that I was Managing Director; that NCK (Trinidad) Ltd had billings of $2.2 million,  a staff of 31 and 26 clients including Aspro Nicholas, Berger Paints, Colgate-Palmolive, Nestle, Playtex, Royal Bank of Canada and Singer.

The fact book listed affiliated agencies around the world and it was good to see old faces, including Ed Roncarelli, a Canadian of Italian descent, and whose younger brother, on a return visit to Italy, was promptly conscripted into the Italian army; Mike Woodward, once manager in Trinidad, later in Madrid, with whom we spent time, and with whom we visited Segovia and Aranguez; and Inigo Bugalal, from the Puerto Rico office, who recommended a small hotel in Rome when we were in Europe for a conference, and found that, miraculously, we were within easy walking distance of St. Peter’s, which we visited on Palm Sunday that year.

Incredible, those days, and great the friendship with John who also once mailed us, no doubt at great expense, the metal nameplate of our agency office at 25 Queen’s Park West in Port-of-Spain, and which now greets us each time we drive into the garage.

Skye

Skye wrote today saying that her book, Barbados, has been published and is on Amazon. So she has joined Lolita and Janice as published authors. I knew that she’d been having assignments in Barbados but had no idea that she’d been putting together a publication. Good for her.

Angela and the elk

The elk story put us in mind of the episode in Zimbabwe, years ago.

Elle said that Ed, a relative, was driving home from work with his crew when they ran into an elk — or vice versa. They pulled off to the side and got out to drag the animal off the road.

That was when a car came by and slammed into the elk, flinging the animal against the poor fellow, smashing him against his truck, inflicting all kinds of damage.

In Zimbabwe John and Angela were driving along at night when they ran into a parked vehicle that didn’t have tail lights, severely damaging John. Angela managed to get out of the car, going around to the driver’s side, to help him, when a car careened into her.

People managed to get John to the hospital in a dazed condition and he was only aware, when he regained consciousness, that his wife had been killed back there at the scene of the accident.

Ed was luckier. He merely had a broken ankle, broken rib, dislocated shoulder; a vertebra in disrepair, and bleeding from his brain.

I want, therefore I am

I brought back a cache of books from San Diego and I’ll have a problem with space, but I was particularly happy with two of them, lucky finds: Spies of Warsaw, by Alan Furst, and a new book about Proust.

I first read abut Furst in a Bookmarks magazine some time ago, and wasn’t looking for his book, but stumbled upon it. Bookmarks made him out to be special and I found him to be in the Eric Ambler vein. Upon reading him in Santee I found him to be nimble, breezy and steeped  in European history of the period between the wars. I’ll be looking out for him now.

The Proust book is by Patrick Alexander, of whom I’d never heard. The title is Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time. A Reader’s Guide to The Remembrance of Things Past. And it is proving a remarkable read.

Alexander is not given to befuddling Proustian sentences and is orgnized. His introduction tells you the book is layered in three sections.

Part one gives you  brief overview of Remembrance, describing the main story and the major themes; a summary of the whole novel in less than 600 words — a protean feat — and a synopsis of the plot in each of the seven volumes. Part two has descriptions of the major characters and part three gives you a brief biography of Proust himself.

And with a nice touch he ends it all with internet resources to help you continue the Proust learning process. You can start with http://.www.tempsperdu.com, which I looked up and found to be resourceful. He mentions addresses of reading and discussion groups in New York, San Francisco and Boston. He even includes related Paris walking tours.

I confess to not getting enough of Remembrance. I remember Cliff Sealey ordering me the set long ago in Trinidad. I suppose even when I get hold of the spoken version of Remembrance and become steeped in it, Proust will still beckon.

To take in all that Proust put into his stuff you have, let’s face it, to take on a regular study program. Or, like Phyllis Rose, devote a particular period of time to properly doing him in, and you would be lucky if you end up, like her, with her book, A Year of Reading Proust.

And as she herself says, on page 71, I want, therefore I am.

It takes time

Not far from where I live there is empty desert space between Snowflake and Holbrook, and a prime location for wind farms.But there is objection on the grounds, as some would have it, that these windmills are unlovely and would mar the arid landscape.

Turns out the Dutch, with whom one inevitably associates windmills, once didn’t want to have anything to do with them either, according to Alain de Botton in his delightful book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.

He tells us that “these early industrial objects had originally been felt to have all the pylons’ threatening alien qualities, rather than the air of enchantment and playfulness now routinely associated with them.” The early windmills were even denounced from the pulpit and, in some cases, burnt to the ground.

Ah, but enter the great painters of the Dutch Golden Age. Moved, he tells us, by “their country’s dependence on these rotating utilitarian objects,” they started including them in their canvases. The windmills were thus rehabilitated in the eyes of the Dutch people, to the point where, in time they came to be identified with their country, as were tulips and wooden clogs.

I related this evolution to our Dutch-born neighbors and they recall that from what was once thousands of great wooden windmills in Holland there now were perhaps only about 200, and they have become like national treasures.

And now, to complete the story, the Dutch landscape is dotted with these new, mechanical windmills, which some people in our area don’t want in their midst. It takes time

“R” is for what?

Julian Bond got into trouble, some time back, for mentioning what he called the Taliban wing of the Republican party. Maybe he was on to something. After last month’s frothings and Joe Wilson’s spectacular lack of couth during the president’s address to Congress last night, one has to wonder.

But all the hysteria had an up side: it signaled that I myself should make an effort not to be extremist, and is urging me to find out more about the principles driving what I supposed to be the ideals of those fellows.

There must be some sanity somewhere behind this parade of refuseniks and I ought to know something about it, for my own sanity. Lately I have got two books to help in this regard — Mark Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny and, for balance, Sam Tanenhaus’ The Death of Conservatism.

Levin is billed as “conservative talk radio’s fastest-growing superstar” and a New York Times bestselling phenomenon,” and Tanenhaus is the editor of the New York Times Book Review and the Week in Review section of the Times.

We’ll see. But it is no good, for anybody, should the Taliban take over: and for now they certainly appear to be in the ascendency.

A sane voice

Here, to rinse  the bile from the last blog, is the  droll purveyor of A Prairie Home Companion, Mr. Garrson Keillor, on a serious note.

Keillor was asked the following question in the Proust Questionnaire feature of this month’s Esquire magazine: Which living person do you most admire? And here is his answer.

My president, a heroic figure — also good-humored, pretty smart, elegant, and if the rest of the world thinks he typifies America, I don’t mind at all.

The hope and the prayer

In just six months we have gone from euphoria at Obama’s ascendancy, when it seemed the U.S was entering an era of enlightenment, to charges of death panels, the president as Hitler, Death to Obama signs, the birther lunacy and the rise of right wing militia — all in a violent and spectacular denial of our supposedly better angels.

What is “my America” coming to is the anguished cry. What, indeed.

But the birthers are perhaps even more dangerous than the amassing of guns  because, perhaps unknowingly, they provide a missing link to the guns — the deadly link of motivation.

Behind the simple notion of Obama being non-American, or un-American, is the more sinister idea that he is an imposter, not president of the United States. At this stage this disavowal is, if you will, playing itself out on a surface level. But pushed to the extreme, this disavowal of an American president can morph from an idea of rejection into an action of rejection.

And we’ve seen the rejection of an American president before. We’ve seen it happen at the Ford Theater in Washington. We’ve seen it happen over the Grassy Knoll in Dallas.

The hope — and the prayer — is that Barack Obama will be given a chance to complete his program of renewal for America before the subconscious, or subliminal, instinct of the birthers can ever come to pass.

Janice’s book is out!

Congratulations are in order. Janice got her  story published so we now have another published writer* in the family –  I definitely have to catch up.

Lisa and the Light Dancer, a story for children, came out recently and we were thrilled when daughter Holly called to say it was on Amazon. The book is  based on the belief that  most children have a sense of right and wrong but sometimes it needs a little nudging to tap into their own child wisdom.   She dedicated  the book to  three kids from next door, “for the joy they bring.”

And if this wasn’t enough, Janice is  now working on a novel, set mainly in Trinidad, but also taking you to England and Arizona.

Janice is a retired advertising executive and has written ad copy as well as travel and newspaper journalism. Pittsburgh born, Janice spent most of her life in Trinidad before we moved to Arizona.

We’ll keep you posted, for sure.

* Lolita Hernandez.

Red Stripe

Have you noticed? One of the beers the President will have on hand for the Crowley-Gates summit at the White House this week will be Jamaican Red Stripe, one of two beers Professor Gates is said to be partial to.

Red Stripe, like reggae, does seem to get around. Even here in Show Low, population 11,000, you can avail yourself of this Jamaican at the local Walmart  and Safeway. But never a Carib.

The Beer of Trinidad simply doesn’t make it. Besotted, apparently, by oil, the good people of Trinidad seem to see export mostly in crude terms, and methanol, too, with little more than lip service to tourism, and to Carib.

Last month, in Trinidad, I was confronted by the local elixir and, in a fit of nostalgia, actually took a picture of a Carib bottle to bring back to Show Low.

It was a fine morning in Blanchisseusse, taken there to the home of prominent architect, Ken Holder, by our host to share in what you can easily imagine as a postcard Trinidad Sunday morning.

Ken’s pavilion is on a hill overlooking the sea, with waves crashing on the rocks below on cue, the sea visible through a broadwalk among the foliage.

There were Glasgow and Greenidge paintings on the walls and, on the table, black pudding, bake and fruit among the generous offerings, with coconut water, bottled now, and with the possibility of an endless supply to temper your scotch.

And on the deck overlooking the ocean a breeze barely ruffled the huge umbrella presiding over the table around which were lively Port of Spain accents, inflected with a little French, and a visiting Belgian.

True, I haven’t printed the Carib picture since my return, but, in the prevailing spirit of things, I propose a toast, with my imaginary Carib, to Crowley, Gates, the President — and to rapprohment of some sort.