Marley Was Dead, To Begin With

A Christmas Carol

A few years ago, I was at the semi-annual booksale at the Portland Public Library and I found this copy of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. The book was in ok shape (it has been repaired with scotch tape)and I don't think I would have bought it if I hadn't opened the cover and found the history of annual readings. The former owner of the book was Alice E. Thornton and, oddly enough, I have bought other books that have belonged to her at book sales and in shops in town. The card she used as a book mark indicates that it was a gift to her from Marian Heseltine. I tried a Google search on Alice, but didn't find anything . . . not much of a surprise. Seeing these dates, year after year, mostly, just sets in motion reflections on my part. Why the breaks, of course? I wonder when she started reading this to her children, if she ever did? The clear writing throughout the 30's giving way to the shaking writing of the 80's? (There is one more date - December 30, 1930 - on the back flyleaf.) This list of dates is another tangible reminder of year upon year rolling forward. To read a book is to absorb the author's place and time and ideas. Do books themselves absorb the environment around them over the years, listening from their place on our shelves? I wonder how old she was when she received the book? Did she always read it by electric light? Where was it moved to over the years? Or did it stay in house until it was packed up and donated to the Library? It does not appear to ever have been part of the circulation. I started adding my own readings in 1995 and have read it six times so far.

The story kind of grows on you, I must admit. I haven't read much Dickens, but there is a breezy kind of writing style and use of colloquial speech that makes you think. When Scrooge first sees Marley's face in his doorknocker, Dickens says it "had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar". (I thought I read somewhere that a lobster was a name for a furnace, but I can't seem to find my source now.) The story is well known, of course, although I must admit that my introduction was to the Mr. Magoo version.

There have been many other versions,including a Growing Pains version (author comments forthcoming?)

The cold described seems so bitter cold, even by Maine standards. A couple of years ago, I read a book that described what has been called the Little Ice Age, a period of colder than usual weather in the northern hemisphere from the 1650's thru 1850. It included the Year with No Summer (1816). So when Dickens wrote the book (1843), he no doubt would have considered the weather as it was. Even as later as the 1790's, ice fairs were held on the frozen Thames - something that does not happen now.

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you,
and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations--
such is a pleasure beyond compare.
~ Yosida Kenko ~

Things That Piss Me Off
Ok, I know that motion picture production companies feel compelled to create those little video signatures at the beginning of movies so we know who made the movie. (and how come it take four or five production companies?) but how come after I have sat through three or four of those little video brands, do I have to see the SAME company names roll by on the credits??

No Promise Except Integrity

Birthday Events
So Dawn and I had a good old fashion date in the city for my birthday. We started off with dinner at the Roma Cafe. I think I had been there years ago with some Catholic Charities folk at Christmas time. Good meal and wine but we ate in the dining room downstairs and it was , really, like eating in someones home dining room. There were maybe ten or twelve other people, tops, and you just felt as if you had to talk in a whisper. What did we talk about? I probably bitched about work, didn't I? how uninspiring. Dawn was, as usual, elegant and beautiful in that calm, unadorned way of hers. Uxorious . . . look it up.

Afterward, we went to see Juanito Pascual at One Longfellow Square , at Dawn's suggestion. Why would she make such an unusual musical choice, you might ask? Well, go to the website. I don't think she was disappointed. You know, I used to have a long, thick mane of hair too . . . Actually, I had had a craving for flamenco over the last few weeks for some reason and it was a perfect night. His playing is superb . . . just perfect! It hearkened back to my brief visit to Spain in '75 as a High School Senior. Pascual played his own compositions, which were traditional in structure, I guess, but sounded very modern to me. The rest of the quartet was great, especially La Conja, in spite of her cold. She sang a bit and danced a mesmerizing flamenco, especially from maybe twelve feet away. How does she beat out a different beat with each foot?

The funny part was the two couples sitting in front of us. About our age, give or take: typical Cumberland Foreside/ Whole Foods/Beaners-but-we-don't-hunt types. You know know who I mean. Well, first they get into trouble because they insisted on setting their drinks on the stage in front of them. (Apparently beer on a stage is against the law in Maine.) Then, when La Conja got up to dance, one of the guys had his feet up on the stage! (the stage area is maybe 10' by 14' - if that, pretty intimate, in other words.) The coupe de grace was when she began to dance. Ever watch a flamenco dancer dance and clap out their rhythm? It is a beat that is beyond you or me. So our friend in front of us began to clap along, you know, to encourage her. Well, she gave him the stink eye and a curt nod pretty quick - while never missing one of a thousand beats a minute, it seemed- and he stopped. Okay, this isn't a Freeport hootenanny and barn raising, dude! (What would we do if we didn't have people to make fun of?)

A great evening of live music, good food and the company of a remarkable woman (in spite of her not being able to dance flamenco.)

Grampie Letter

As a follow on to my birthday, here is a letter my Grandfather wrote me and I have kept:

Nov 30, 67

Dear Mark
I wish I knew how to write a good letter to a ten year old boy, you are learning a lot of things that were unheard of when I was a boy We hope you will be able to take advantage of them. Everything has changed so much since I was a boy, but we did have the opportunity to help change a lot of things and I expect you will too, and I know they will for the most part be better for everyone. My advice to a ten year old in the years ahead to balance, play, work and love in your daily life and one will be happy and prosperous . . . Say hello to Mom and Dad, Kay and Gig - and a happy birthday to you.
Grampie and Gramie

My middle name is Orin and I am named after my maternal grandfather. We all have family talismans and one of ours is about the letter my grandfather wrote me when I was ten and he was 73. Born in Aroostook, he had migrated to Seattle before the First World War. he enlisted there and served in the 110th Infantry Division as a corporal. After the War, he stayed in the West until 1930 when he returned and started a seed potato farm in Westfield. He Served two terms in the the Maine State Legislature, beginning in 1950. I may have more to say on our family later. Mom gave me an album of photos that I'll be scanning and getting up over the next few weeks.

Back to the letter . . . .'For the most part'? I wonder what he meant by that? Of course those years were very different - we were bogged down in a hopeless military quagmire, threat of nuclear annihilation from a rogue country and worried that the environment would not sustain another generation . . . . no wait that would be . . . like . . . now. Then again, for someone who had fought in the Great War and farmed his way out of the Depression, the 60's must have been frightening indeed. Not so much for me (more 'Wonder Years' and less Woodstock). Could he or I even imagine what the next forty years would bring? I don't think so. In some ways, it must have been comforting for him to know that whatever shit was coming down the pike wasn't going to be his problem.

I often think about that myself. I know that Commercial Street and the State Pier will all be under water in a hundred years, of that I have no doubt, but that won't really be MY problem, will it? I am not saying that global warming isn't important and I realize that climate change and America's Imperium are important issues for me as well as my children, but there is some consolation in thinking, "I did my bit and it is time for the next generation to take up the banner." I just wonder if that bit of equivocation on his part might reflect a belief that he had carried the family fortunes forward to this point and was ready to set the burden down.

A piece of family ephemera I keep in the fireproof box is this card from his second term campaign in the Maine State Legislature. ( Breanne, in case you ever wondered where your eyebrows came from). Holy cow! Who proofread this? For years I thought this read 'No Promise Except Integrity' . . . I took that as a watchword - I would have sworn that was what the card said.

But now, it is as if I have read this for the first time, as I type 'No Promises Excepting Intergrity'. Well, maybe he was ahead of his time . . . this reads like a Russian translation of a Google upload of Japanese Anime. Hmmm.

Be that as it may, he served with honor as a citizen soldier and legislator and bought a new Buick when the potato harvest was good. And did, in his own small way, change his world forever.

Poem on my Birthday

For at least twenty years of so, on my birthday, I have read Dylan Thomas's "Poem On His Birthday". When I turned 40, I was troubled to realize that I had outlived him. As poet, I always hoped to 'be a writer' and it was the driving force in my early life from my teens through college. Even the choice of the ministry early on in college was, in part, the thought of a career that would support a writer. Only later did I come to realize that you either write or you don't. I was never much concerned with being published; I just craved the freedom to consider and express ideas. Well, more on that someday I suppose. But at a certain age, you begin to look at what your heroes had accomplished by your age and reflect on your own success's (or failures). I am beginning to think about the same thing with respect to sailing (how many years do I have left that I could physically handle a boat? Ten? Fifteen?). Part of the impetus for this blog is to address the question, where the hell did all the years go?

Ok, Ok, let's just get to the poem. Thomas is an uncracked cypher to me. Some poems you can read in a single sitting and just get (that would certainly be anything I have ever written, I suspect) and others you read and read and puzzle about. I read somewhere that they found 60 or 70 pages of notes for his last poem on which he had written perhaps twenty lines, something like that anyway. (I know the Literature Majors are already howling in the depths of their philistine-populated Hell, sorry) Dylan Thomas cries out, in my mind, to be read out loud and to be read drunk or stoned (I have done both on previous birthdays). So each year, sitting alone in my sun-filled living room, surrounded by my books; a glass or red wine or scotch; maybe a pipe of some heady leaf (legal or illegal), I would roar out this poem to " whatever gods may be" . This was (and is) my exultant word-drunk ritual at birthday time; and like any ritual, not fully comprehended . . . pointing outside itself . . . cracking the heavens and pulling us beyond.

This is the end of the poem . . . go read the rest, preferably on your birthday. No pipe today, but a good glass of Famous Grouse and a clear, icy cold afternoon before the first snowstorm of the winter. And thoughts of my friend who celebrated his birthday yesterday in Paris.

Yet, though I cry with tumbledown tongue,
Count my blessing aloud:
Four elements and five
Senses, and man a spirit in love
Tangling through this spun slime
To his nimbus bell cool kingdom come
And the lost, moonshine domes,
And the sea that hides his secret selves
Deep in its black, base bones,
Lulling of spheres in the seashell flesh,
And this last blessing most,

That the closer I move
To death, one man through his sundered hulks,
The louder the sun blooms
And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults;
And every wave of the way
And gale I tackle, the whole world then,
With more triumphant faith
Than ever was since the world was said,
Spins its morning of praise,

I hear the bouncing hills
Grow larked and greener at berry brown
Fall and dew larks sing
Taller this thunderclap spring, and how
More spanned with angles ride
The mansouled fiery island! Oh,
Holier then their eyes,
And my shining men no more alone
As I sail out to die.