***
1
“Something is terribly… terribly wrong, when one person can take away your civil right to vote!” I heard an elected official from California express that outrage recently, protesting the federal judge’s ruling that the Proposition 8 banning gay marriage in California is unconstitutional.
This was a federal official speaking recently, a Republican Senator or Representative. His lack of understanding of the Constitution is shocking. Yes, the voters of California have the constitutional right to vote on how laws are made in their state, and in that state the right to legislate by referendum has been legally established. The Californians who voted in Proposition 8, of course, also had the constitutional right to approve a law reserving marriage for only one man to one woman.
But the federal judge who said that Proposition 8 was unconstitutional had not only a constitutional right but in fact a constitutional responsibility to determine whether or not this new law should be implemented. Once the law suit was brought to him by parties with a legitimate claim that the law would harm them, he had to decide whether or not the law was in sync with the federal Constitution, and he found it was not.
The same was true in 1954 when the U. S. Supreme Court determined that state laws supporting racially segregated public schools violated federal civil rights law and thus were unconstitutional and could no longer be enforced. The Justices had the responsibility to rule one way or the other on this matter, and the case went beyond the decision of the first federal judge – one man – only because the party losing the lawsuit in his court appealed to the higher court.
In other words, in this landmark case fifty years ago, one man was absolutely right – not “terribly wrong” – to make his judgment on a civil rights matter, and the judge in the recent California case was right too. This will continue to have been true if an appeal of this decision on Proposition 8 should be overturned on appeal at some point in the future.
So, it is right for one person to overrule state legislation that in the judge’s view violates federal law. Whether one disagrees with the California judge’s ruling or not, it is wrong or even terribly wrong, for a U. S. Representative or Senator to so mislead the public about the constitutionally mandated processes of our government.
2
I also recently heard a report that when President Obama supported the right of a group of pacifist Muslims to build an Islamic Community Center near the site of 9/11’s ground zero, in which a commentator laughingly said the President “had succumbed to ‘political correctness.’”
At the moment I can think of only one reason that so-called “political correctness” has ever been sought: particular words and phrases, according to the principle of political correctness, are to be avoided in order to support certain citizens’ civil rights, to avoid illegal discrimination against designated groups of Americans.
One familiar example of political correctness is the expectation that no one (at least who is not black) will refer to African-Americans using the infamous N-word. Is it “succumbing to” political correctness to expect of ourselves and others that we will avoid using that belittling and offensive word?
Saying “mailman” to refer to a woman who delivers the mail to your house is another, somewhat less significant example of a violation of “political correctness.” Saying “mail carrier” is just as simple and easy as using "mailman", and "carrier" avoids gender discrimination. Does expecting of ourselves that change of long habit mean that we have fallen victim to some disease, as the term “succumbed” implies?
Saying “he or she” instead of simply “he” in either speech or writing when the person referred to is either female or male, as political correctness recommends, is not necessarily as easy or as simple as in that first example. That makes the principle of political correctness in this case more irksome, causing some understandable resentment. In many instances, on the other hand, when using “he or she” (or the especially inelegant “he/she”) is awkward, such as when the phrase has to be repeated over and over, many have discovered that it is just as simple as using “he” indiscriminately to rephrase the sentence using “they.”
It does seem odd to say that someone is the “Chair” of a committee, instead of the “Chairman,” and we have not found any suitable alternative that I know of. In the context of a committee organization, let us hope that eventually all vestiges of using “chair” only to refer to a place to sit will disappear.
3
But the main point is, the Constitution is the supreme law of our land. For us to belittle or deride its provision for equal civil rights to all citizens is unpatriotic and un-American, whether one is referring to the duties of the Judicial branch of the U. S. government or to the way we speak and write about each other.
***
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Friday, August 27, 2010
Story: The Red Dress of Rome
***
1
Smooth, unbroken curves and turnings, sweeping upward through a golden polyphony of spangled colors, sure balance, and freely flowing rhythm. At the center, a cool and deepening blue, strong calm eyes turning the flow, pouring it inward, rolling it downward, and slowly drawing it back up.
David was also munching a crisp, white and brown cracker. The munching sound echoed comfortably in his mind, lightly touching and turning in his brain like his eyes in the lines of the multicolored mosaic he was staring at.
He let his hand drop again to his side and creep into his pocket, over the half-torn wrappings of the cracker box. He felt as if his movements too were orchestrated and made rhythmical, flowing and balanced by the graceful golds and blues, by the still, showy Christ spreading his hands over the basilica from the mosaic.
David's own fingers swept another cracker to his mouth. The slow crunching, and the warm salty taste intermingled with it, brushed freely through his mind like a vast regal robe sweeping over a slick, dusty floor.
He smiled complacently at himself for thinking of that comparison.
It was not until he felt the stiff corrugated cardboard at the bottom of the box in his jacket pocket that he became himself again and carefully lifted his eyes from the agile grace frozen up there within the edges of the main cupola.
He couldn't tell how long he'd stood there, among the icons, leaning on a wooden rail that circled off the main altar. He'd seen wooden barriers like that all over Rome, directing the big 1963 Easter crowds. He glanced again at the mosaic, and vowed to always have just a little too much wine with lunch before visiting old churches.
It was only recently, he thought pleasantly, that he'd begun to do things like that. He imagined the sodden crackers pouring quietly into the wine he hadn't ordered but drank anyway. And his smile, he thought, spoke languidly for the simple warmth of all his being.
Moving away from the altar, David seemed to glide soundlessly, like an immaterial whisper (he thought), behind the first section of brown wooden-and-wicker chairs. Next to a column, he paused and eyed a fold in the stone, the regular scallops of the robe of a statued saint with his fingers stiffly blessing the wicker chairs. His eyes were hollow and the lines in his face were smooth. David touched the scalloped hem which stood rigid and quiet above the delicate toes. The stone felt cold to his warm fingers.
At the rear of the church was an intricate black-iron stand on which thin white candles had been placed. Some had burned down to tiny stumps, but most had bent forward like old, crooked fingers to lace together a tangled clasp of wax. The flames were little points of light, spangling the misty air.
David turned. The chairs sat humbly ranged on the stone floor. A colony of white statues blessed them stiffly from the columns. The mosaic at the front now seemed to David a tiny, intricate miniature. The scene down the center aisle froze before him like a quaint imitation, shimmering in his mind.
He stepped out the side door.
Rome rumbled to him. The long, wide steps vibrated in the white light before him, and the sun passed through him like a warm breeze in lean, wild grasses.
2
Walking along Via Nomentana. Tall sycamores and tweeting birds. Warm sun and gentle breeze. People scurrying by.
David’s supposed inner gracefulness had gradually dissolved in the rattle and shake of the bus he had found before the Stazione Termini. He had never quite felt that way before and was not sorry it was over now. But he did enjoy things like that sometimes.
Cars zipped by him, and crowds of people, as he idled down the wide sidewalk. All motion within him had stopped, and now his mind was peaceful and silent, he thought, like libraries or empty boxes. (He had never compared things that way before).
But he couldn’t allow himself to move along too slowly; the church might be closing soon since it was Easter Saturday after all, and late afternoon. Soon, he was standing before a small old church building, Santa Agnese, with what his guidebook (which looked like a missal) called the best-preserved catacombs in the city.
Inside the door, it was not a church but a tiny hallway with a table where there were neat stacks of pamphlets. They were in Italian, but David took one anyway. Propped against the wall behind one table leg was a piece of white cardboard on which someone had written in red, not too neatly, “Entrada,” with an arrow pointing to David’s left. He turned that way and crossed to the head of a murky stairway.
He hesitated, and then stepped down the stairs. His heels--now worn down to the nails--made scratching sounds on the old concrete.
At the foot of the staircase was a narrow courtyard, green and quiet in the twilight. There was an organ playing somewhere. At David’s right, there was another, shorter flight of stairs. As he moved toward it, the pale court-light seemed to catch at David’s jacket cuff, and the frayed edge tickled his wrist.
He stood before an apparently ancient wooden door, which was carved and inlaid with mossy silver. One corner of the rich, dark oak had rotted or worn away, and that special church-light David had noticed before - the silver mist, he said, of departed souls and candle flames” - shone through the hole.
Beyond the door, there were several more steps descending into the church itself. The breathy organ seemed reverent in the silence. The room was empty.
David crossed the rear floor, the sound of his footsteps mingling diffidently with the phantom organ tones. There were two small doors on the either side of the entranceway. On one was a card on which the red pen had written in Italian, French, and English: “Catacombs: please wait one minute until the guide returns and a new party is formed.”
Presently, the other door opened, and a man came out: a very clean man, David thought, in a neat gray suit. His face had points all about it, a pointed nose, a pointed chin, and jawbones that pointed out sideways. He had almost no eyebrows at all, and the hair on his head was thin and black and lay smooth on his skull and about his ears. His eyes jumped pleasantly when he saw David standing there, and he came over, walking not at all as if it were a church.
Just in front of David, he hesitated before saying, “Buon giorno.”
David replied, “Buon giorno,” but not without communicating in that way he had learned in France that he had already exhausted his fund of Italian phrases.
The man’s eyes positively danced. “Francesca?” he said, and soon David and he were talking away in French. --Yes, David speaks French, they said, though he is really an American, just studying this year in Paris. --My, didn’t David speak French well for an American, and such a nice-looking young man too! But then the man told David they would have to wait until some other people came to see the catacombs, and went back into his room and shut the door.
The church grew silent again, the organ playing quietly still.
In a moment, the old oak door peeped open, and a sturdy, middle-aged woman, whose skin was light and whose hair was gray, came down the steps inside. She looked shyly at David (who suspected she too was an American) and then went over to read the card pasted on the door across the room. Then an Italian woman about 30 (strikingly handsome, David thought, dark and tall with long black hair) came in with a wiry little boy about eight on one side and an even smaller and darker girl about six on the other.
The man had opened his door again and was standing there watching David before he spoke to the gray-haired lady, who told him in English that she was from Canada and wanted to see the catacombs. David thought that the man looked even neater than he had before. He spoke to the Canadian woman in English and the Italian woman in Italian.
In a moment he had produced a long, thin white candle for each of them. He told David and the others how to hold the candles and lit them, and arranged the visitors all in a line. Somehow he managed to get David at the front. Then he opened the little door with the card pasted on it and led David by the lapel of his jacket (for which David was beginning to feel self-conscious next to the man’s neat suit and the Canadian woman’s simple tourist dress) down a narrow, unlighted staircase made of rotting stones, telling all of them to watch their steps, to be careful, and not to let their candles blow out. He repeated each of his sentences first in French to David, then in English to the Canadian woman, and finally in Italian to the handsome woman and her two children.
At the bottom of the stairs, they found themselves in the catacombs, and the guide began to describe the people who had built them, who had worshipped there, and who were buried there now, his voice echoing softly into the damp clay-stone walls and the shadows waving on them as the candle flames fluttered in the humidity. The air was very cool.
The man led them along, pointing out how tiny the tomb-niches were because people were smaller in those days (especially ones who lived underground, David thought), always repeating each one of his sentences in all three languages and always keeping his hand on David’s lapel because, as he said to David, he knew the way well and was afraid someone might get lost if he were not there to guide them.
Often they would just stroll along gazing down the tall, narrow corridors of crumbling clay, the man telling David how well he spoke French, what a fine-looking young man he was, and asking if he didn’t think the women in Paris were beautiful. Sometimes, the passageway was so narrow that they had to turn sideways and squeeze between the shadowed walls. The guide would then somehow twinkle through quickly, wait patiently for the others, and then take up David’s lapel again, because as he would say again, he knew the route so well.
Once the guide stopped them, had everyone pass his candle forward to him and then had everyone sit down on the cool ground. When he took the candles away from them down the corridor, the walls grew even taller and darker above them. The guide set the candles all around a little chapel far at the end of the narrow passageway, and asked David and the others to try to imagine the early Christians sitting or kneeling there, in single file since it was so narrow, watching a little priest moving about in the tiny chapel down the way. They all watched as the guide moved around putting the candles in the wall holders. A tiny golden cross shimmered in the soft flame-light next to his shadow.
“Monsieur,” the guide had come back and was speaking into David’s ear, “I am here every evening after five, you know. And I like young students like yourself, who are more interested than these tourists.” He put his hand on David’s shoulder, “Come back some afternoon next week (I am here every afternoon after five) and I will give you a personal tour of the family tombs."
3
The morning air was fresh, the sunlight clear and comfortable. David was walking among the pensione and small, below-street cafes along Via Palestro. Rome early on Easter morning was very quiet.
He had returned to his bed early the evening before, just as the city was beginning to glow and smile, gyrating in welcome to the holy day ahead. The French boy and the two law students from Sicily, with whom he was sharing a room, had not returned until two hours before David got up in the morning and began his easy stroll across the city.
He wandered among small, rising streets north of Via 20 Settembre. The streets had been washed, and the morning smelled like mowed grass after a rain. He hadn’t yet seen even one car.
At Via di Tritone, he watched the fountain running over the strong man’s muscular thighs. The water was clear and blue-green at the same time, chirping like mountain streams over cool stones. Beyond, there were several policemen standing guard at the corners and entrances of a large stone mansion. They straightened and clicked their heels as David passed. He smiled slightly and acknowledged the salutation with a courtly nod. He didn’t feel as reckless as he had the afternoon before, not quite as “pleasantly silly” as he would have said. But he still felt free somehow and confident in a way.
He turned north again among steep streets and some steps with iron railings, hearing occasionally the passing of a car on one of the broad avenues nearby. The sun seemed to scrub the little stone buildings leaving them rosy and clean.
Soon he was listening to his heels strike the cobblestones of the alley with the Etruscan restaurant where he might as well have lunch after the service. It didn’t matter. As he crossed the wide Via del Corso he remembered that he had planned to call Alison sometime to say “Happy Easter,” and watched a single little Fiat amble by. The woman inside smiled at him.
He rested a moment at the Mausoleum of Augustus, then crossed the Tiber, and wandered beyond the green park at Piazza Cavour, where people were beginning to move about, and walked on toward the Vatican. He passed a little bakery and stopped in to buy another small package of crackers. He slipped them into his jacket pocket, tearing away the wrapping at the top as he again walked toward the main piazza. The crackers were old and limp, but he was hungry and liked them anyway.
In a small piazza north of St. Peter’s, little groups were gaily strolling and chatting, policemen were directing traffic, and all the tables of the sidewalk cafes were filled with bright people, most of them European.
David stopped in at one of them to call the convent where Alison was staying with other members of the Paris students’ pilgrimage. She was not there, another student had explained. She had left earlier with her boyfriend, who was studying in London that year. David hadn’t known they were planning to be together. She had talked about going to the Forum to read lines from Julius Caesar with friends from the pilgrimage group.
He was on about his third cracker when he wandered between the columns and into Piazza San Pietro itself. Already hundreds of people were there, swinging their legs over the sides of the waterless fountains or sitting around the center obelisk, strolling about in the sunlight, or chewing gum. But the vast circular opening looked almost empty.
At the main entrance at David’s left, vendors had already begun selling their Pope pennants and pictures, their gelati, and their orange, red, and white balloons. Most of them had signs in four or five languages and shouted at everyone in Italian, pointing at the signs and at what they had to sell.
David stepped from under the columns to the gray paving stones. Already, the huge empty-seeming piazza was beginning to jump and move. David started out across the open space, his legs feeling loose and his knees agile under him. It was his “crowd feeling.” He felt them watching him enviously, in his picturesque old jacket and easy stroll, and felt sorry he had shaved off his beard as Alison had wanted him to. He would never have worn it home anyway.
All the people in the piazza seemed to be dressed in red or white cottons, sports-shirts and tourist dresses, with new Kodak cameras hung from their necks and “Festival” written in their eyes. David surveyed them as he strolled by the first fountain; they were quieter than he would have supposed, some of them with their eyes closed and faces turned up, baking in the sun like peasant breads on hot stones. His own camera was old and worn, and folded up small enough to slip into his sports jacket pocket.
He imagined meeting some friend from the Paris school, as he expected he might, and slipped another cracker between his lips. “My breakfast,” he would say to them, and they would admire him and laugh that he could do such unusual things now. Many of the people had bought ice cream from the gelati man since it was so warm.
On the other side of the piazza, David noticed that the people were very crowded, some in a line coming toward him and others in a stream moving the other way. He wandered over and followed the stream moving toward the basilica, trying to behave as if he knew where they were headed.
A row of wooden barriers stretched all the way across the front part of the piazza, still several hundred feet from the basilica. The people moving David along were just able to squeeze around the end of the barriers. Ten yards beyond was a second row of barriers, and twenty yards beyond it a third. David moved with the others up behind this foremost row of barriers, which was only about fifty feet from the basilica. There were hundreds of cameramen with long lenses and television and film cameras, and reporters with recording machines, all hurrying back and forth beyond the barrier testing various angles on the main balcony in the center of the cathedral facade, where a large white cloth had been draped. David found a place just in front of the balcony, where only one row of spectators separated him from the barrier.
He began to stand there quietly, occasionally eating another old cracker. The sun was very warm on the back and top of his head, and especially on his neck, and soon he felt content to stand there watching the reporters and photographers testing various angles, even though he was no longer moving his feet at all and had been walking for quite a long time. After a while he was warm enough to take off his heavy old jacket, revealing to the crowd his comfortable corduroy sports coat with wrinkles in the sleeves and the tear in the cuff he had received from a barbed wire fence he had climbed near Vicenza so that he could hitch-hike on the parkway (which was illegal!). Surely someone should notice that, he thought. He always felt very public these last days, especially in a crowd.
Presently, he began to take note of the people standing nearby. To his right was a bald German man in a gray suit talking to a dark, athletic Italian. They were speaking in English, the stout German quite volubly; and the Italian was laughing and making brief, pleasant replies. The German had his wife there who was short and stout, as he was, and as neatly dressed; she had a small camera dangling from her neck. The Italian man was there with a small son, about five years old, who was always clinging, about his father’s knees.
Directly in front of David were two unmistakable American girls, clean, beauty-treated, sweet smelling and fluffy-haired; and next to them was a tall, thin and fair lady with white hair, who seemed to be quite by herself and who looked about by turning her head in little jerks this way and that. Her eyes had something lively or wild about them, but her features were as precise and delicate as Alison’s.
From under the columns where David had entered the piazza, four or five military bands now marched, each accompanied by forty or fifty soldiers dressed in the same uniform as the band they marched with. All of them marched between the two wooden barriers, behind David and the others with him, separating them from the vast other section of the crowd, which now numbered in thousands, moving and waving in the sunlight like a multicolored wheat crop far, far beyond the last part of the broad entrance avenue. Each band played a brief tune, and then all stood at ease.
The German and the Italian were getting on so well by this time that all around were quite actively, though tacitly, enjoying the conversation. --Yes, it was a grand day, they said. --Yes, the boy was the Italian’s son and they came out to hear the Pope every Easter. --The Germans were here on a pilgrimage with a good many others who had all chartered a bus.
Soon the German man spread his enthusiastic good will to all those standing nearby, by offering to everyone (though not to David who was still some way behind him) a bit of an enormous chocolate bar. That brought the white-haired lady, who turned out to be English, and the two American girls, who turned out to be southern, into the conversation. Later the girls and the English woman moved a little away from the German couple, and the Italian man and his boy and began to talk among themselves.
David tried to think of a nonchalant way to include himself into their cheerful conversation. He briefly considered offering everyone a cracker, but there were only a few left by then.
At that moment, someone made a short announcement over the loudspeaker at the front to the basilica. The English lady wondered what the man had said since she herself did not understand Italian. The Italian man and the German were joking and talking about something else.
David, on the other hand, felt that he had understood. “I believe,” he addressed the English lady, whose eyes fired at him in return, “that the announcement said that the mass will begin at 11:15. I don’t really understand Italian, but I think I understood the words for ‘mass’ and ‘11:15.’” He had learned words like that from reading train schedules and signs on churches and museums.
It was enough to make the others take note of him. The English lady thought he spoke much more like an Englishman than an American, but the American girls seemed rather uninterested. He noticed that one of them had a box camera in her hand with her purse.
The announcement was repeated, and the Italian man confirmed that the mass was to begin at 11:15. David informed them that that was only five minutes away. In a moment, a stream of young man and boys in ankle-length black robes with delicate white lace vestments on top of them appeared from the center door of the basilica (seminary students, the Italian explained). Then a cardinal, similarly dressed except with a little more white lace, came out and began to celebrate the mass at the small altar which had been set up just under the balcony; the seminary students were standing on both sides of the altar and by turns answered the cardinal in Latin and gazed, thunderstruck, at the huge crowd now assembled before them.
Now and again as the cameramen tested various angles on the crowd (a reporter was squatting just to one side of the center aisle between the big-eyed seminary students, setting up a portable tape recorder), members of the crowd would kneel down. The white-haired English lady was at the front and felt conspicuous since she couldn’t see anybody else to know whether or not to kneel down too; she would start to kneel down and then hesitate. David put his heavy jacket on the ground for the German woman to kneel on. When the mass was over and the seminary boys were milling around and looking at the crowd, she gave David back his jacket and thanked him for it. Her husband was wiping his forehead and bald scalp with his handkerchief; he thanked David too.
Even the American girls seemed friendlier after the mass. They were from Alabama. The bands played a little more.
Just then the entire crowd burst into frenzied shouts and applause. A fierce joy, warm as the sun, sprang into sound, as the reporters began running back and forth in front of the seminary students who were beginning to stretch and twist their necks to see the balcony above them.
The heavy maroon curtains there had been pulled open from inside. A minute later, the Pope stepped out in his white robe and his conical, bold-spangled hat. Wild jubilation rang from the crowd. David clapped his hands too. Everybody was shouting and applauding madly. The white-haired lady was jerking her head this way and that. The faces of the American girls were red, and they were bouncing up and down on the balls of their feet. Everybody was smiling and laughing and talking to himself. The women looked like they wanted to hug each other, and David too.
The Pope was waving to everybody with the back of his hands. David felt a drop at the side of his cheek and didn’t know whether it was perspiration or a tear. It was so warm, it could have been either. David could see the Pope’s old smile, and remembered how tired the calm old man seemed in all his pictures.
After a few minutes, everyone got very quiet. The Pope spoke briefly, and no one moved. David didn’t feel like moving. He thought of how strange it all was, how feudal, and how old. In a minute the Pope started saying “Happy Easter” in every language he could think of. Each time he would say it, a different little group would cheer and wave from somewhere, and everyone would applaud. When he said it in English, David, the American girls, and the English lady cheered, and the Germans smiled at them. Then he said it in German and the man his wife cheered, so the others smiled at them. When he said it in Italian, everyone cheered, and the German man thumped the Italian on the back. It was like a football game or a political convention, David thought, where there was a lot of cheering and everybody had a good time.
Suddenly, the Pope said something else, and from under the eaves at the right of the Vatican colonnade, hundreds of white doves flew out above the crowd and into the sky. Then as the Pope spoke again and some people knelt down, the birds flew around and around overhead getting smaller and smaller in the deepening blue, swirling down and around and away...
It was over then, and the Pope went back between the red curtains.
Before David knew it, the bands and the soldiers with them had marched away under the columns again and the crowd was scattering about. The Italian man and his son were gone, and the German and his wife were hurrying away after the bands. The white-haired English lady was walking off to the left, looking this way and that. The American girls had disappeared.
The reporters were all running away, and a few cameramen still tried various angles on the crowd. The seminary students had gone back into the basilica.
Some men came hurrying out and moved some of the saw-horses around. There was a loud squawk as someone let a corner drag on the paving stones. A few people wandered through the hole in the barrier, but most of them went over to the right, where a long line had formed moving into the side door of the cathedral next to the colonnade. It was rather quiet for such a large crowd.
David felt his “crowd feeling” again. He reached under the folds of his jacket which he held draped over his arm, but there were no crackers left. He moved over to one side, his knees feeling weak from walking and then standing for so long. He leaned against the part of the barrier that had been pulled away to one side, facing the obelisk and the dry fountains, the wide piazza and the broad approach avenue, and, far away in the crowd and the sunlight, the bridge.
It was very warm, and David stood there leaning with one foot up behind him on the wooden barrier. He was relaxed and placid, watching the many colors of the people scurrying around. Once he closed his eyes and turned his face up to the sunlight and felt like a fat peach lying forgotten in the light on a bed of damp leaves. When he opened his eyes again some of the color had gone and the people shimmied for a moment.
Pretty soon, he saw Alison walking toward him down the center of the piazza, with a young man talking to her. She was wearing a red dress that David had not seen before. He watched her coming, but she pretended not to see him until they were close enough to speak to him. David enjoyed watching her coming. “Hi, David,” she called.
“Hello there,” David took his foot down but still had his elbow on the barrier’s top bar. He thought his eyes must be glowing.
“Isn’t Rome wonderful!” she was very enthusiastic.
“Rome is wonderful,” David nodded sagely, and made the wrinkles laugh about his eyes.
“David Grosmann, this is Tom McKay.”
They shook hands. David was surprised that Tom, the Great Tom whom Alison had told him about in Paris and on their trip to Spain, was so regular. He was just a nice, clean-cut American boy with blond hair, cut very short. He had a light, tan, triangular face with rugged cheekbones, and seemed very “West Coast.” A nice-looking young man, David thought, with a firm handshake.
They chatted there a moment saying how much they’d heard about each other, and how nice the weather was.
All the time, David was looking at Alison. She had been with Tom now for several weeks, he supposed, and David had already forgotten her gay vitality. She was small and slender with delicate hands and features, dark hair and eyes with long lashes. Her skin was fair, and her mouth thin but tender and sweet...
“We’re going to the forum this afternoon,” she said.
"Yes,” David smiled. “You’re going to read Shakespeare.”
Tom laughed. “You knew about that? She gave it to me this morning.”
She had tiny thin fingers, and her hands were always cool. David remembered that he had given her a birthday gift when they’d had tea together in Florence, a reproduction mounted on wood of her favorite Lippi madonna with her favorite St. Francis quotation on the other side. But she didn’t mention it. She was wearing the black lace mantilla they had bought in Madrid.
“Are there many with you this afternoon?” David asked.
“Some kids from the Vienna school,” Tom said.
Alison’s dress had a small cord which ran around her hips two inches below her waist. The skirt didn’t begin to fill out until just above her thighs. Her little body softly rounded out the abdomen of the dress.
“I’ll be going back to Paris tonight,” David said. “I don’t know exactly what I will be doing this afternoon, wandering around in the sun somewhere, I suppose.” He imagined their asking him to come along with them to the Forum. But they didn’t, and soon they were playfully punching each other at how long the line was for Communion, and telling David goodbye…Tom shaking hands and Alison smiling oddly when David said he’d call her next week in Paris. Then they were walking off, laughing and joking.
The warmth was moving around inside him like smoky winds over an autumn fire. His eyes were full and glowing, but rather tired.
He replaced his foot on the bottom rail of the wooden barrier behind him, taking up again his nonchalant pose with his elbow on the top bar. How cool he must look, he found himself thinking, in his comfortable corduroy coat and his neat black slacks, in his nonchalant attitude in the sunlight watching the crowd in front of him. He was thinking that Tom and Alison would be talking about him now and looking back at him, seeing him from behind leaning that way on the barrier.
He happened to glance around. Their backs were to him, already far away, and Alison’s red dress was mixing quickly into the Joseph-coated crowd.
He watched after them a moment with the sun warming his shoulders and his forehead feeling a little heavy.
“People look much better in the sunlight,” he said.
***
1
Smooth, unbroken curves and turnings, sweeping upward through a golden polyphony of spangled colors, sure balance, and freely flowing rhythm. At the center, a cool and deepening blue, strong calm eyes turning the flow, pouring it inward, rolling it downward, and slowly drawing it back up.
David was also munching a crisp, white and brown cracker. The munching sound echoed comfortably in his mind, lightly touching and turning in his brain like his eyes in the lines of the multicolored mosaic he was staring at.
He let his hand drop again to his side and creep into his pocket, over the half-torn wrappings of the cracker box. He felt as if his movements too were orchestrated and made rhythmical, flowing and balanced by the graceful golds and blues, by the still, showy Christ spreading his hands over the basilica from the mosaic.
David's own fingers swept another cracker to his mouth. The slow crunching, and the warm salty taste intermingled with it, brushed freely through his mind like a vast regal robe sweeping over a slick, dusty floor.
He smiled complacently at himself for thinking of that comparison.
It was not until he felt the stiff corrugated cardboard at the bottom of the box in his jacket pocket that he became himself again and carefully lifted his eyes from the agile grace frozen up there within the edges of the main cupola.
He couldn't tell how long he'd stood there, among the icons, leaning on a wooden rail that circled off the main altar. He'd seen wooden barriers like that all over Rome, directing the big 1963 Easter crowds. He glanced again at the mosaic, and vowed to always have just a little too much wine with lunch before visiting old churches.
It was only recently, he thought pleasantly, that he'd begun to do things like that. He imagined the sodden crackers pouring quietly into the wine he hadn't ordered but drank anyway. And his smile, he thought, spoke languidly for the simple warmth of all his being.
Moving away from the altar, David seemed to glide soundlessly, like an immaterial whisper (he thought), behind the first section of brown wooden-and-wicker chairs. Next to a column, he paused and eyed a fold in the stone, the regular scallops of the robe of a statued saint with his fingers stiffly blessing the wicker chairs. His eyes were hollow and the lines in his face were smooth. David touched the scalloped hem which stood rigid and quiet above the delicate toes. The stone felt cold to his warm fingers.
At the rear of the church was an intricate black-iron stand on which thin white candles had been placed. Some had burned down to tiny stumps, but most had bent forward like old, crooked fingers to lace together a tangled clasp of wax. The flames were little points of light, spangling the misty air.
David turned. The chairs sat humbly ranged on the stone floor. A colony of white statues blessed them stiffly from the columns. The mosaic at the front now seemed to David a tiny, intricate miniature. The scene down the center aisle froze before him like a quaint imitation, shimmering in his mind.
He stepped out the side door.
Rome rumbled to him. The long, wide steps vibrated in the white light before him, and the sun passed through him like a warm breeze in lean, wild grasses.
2
Walking along Via Nomentana. Tall sycamores and tweeting birds. Warm sun and gentle breeze. People scurrying by.
David’s supposed inner gracefulness had gradually dissolved in the rattle and shake of the bus he had found before the Stazione Termini. He had never quite felt that way before and was not sorry it was over now. But he did enjoy things like that sometimes.
Cars zipped by him, and crowds of people, as he idled down the wide sidewalk. All motion within him had stopped, and now his mind was peaceful and silent, he thought, like libraries or empty boxes. (He had never compared things that way before).
But he couldn’t allow himself to move along too slowly; the church might be closing soon since it was Easter Saturday after all, and late afternoon. Soon, he was standing before a small old church building, Santa Agnese, with what his guidebook (which looked like a missal) called the best-preserved catacombs in the city.
Inside the door, it was not a church but a tiny hallway with a table where there were neat stacks of pamphlets. They were in Italian, but David took one anyway. Propped against the wall behind one table leg was a piece of white cardboard on which someone had written in red, not too neatly, “Entrada,” with an arrow pointing to David’s left. He turned that way and crossed to the head of a murky stairway.
He hesitated, and then stepped down the stairs. His heels--now worn down to the nails--made scratching sounds on the old concrete.
At the foot of the staircase was a narrow courtyard, green and quiet in the twilight. There was an organ playing somewhere. At David’s right, there was another, shorter flight of stairs. As he moved toward it, the pale court-light seemed to catch at David’s jacket cuff, and the frayed edge tickled his wrist.
He stood before an apparently ancient wooden door, which was carved and inlaid with mossy silver. One corner of the rich, dark oak had rotted or worn away, and that special church-light David had noticed before - the silver mist, he said, of departed souls and candle flames” - shone through the hole.
Beyond the door, there were several more steps descending into the church itself. The breathy organ seemed reverent in the silence. The room was empty.
David crossed the rear floor, the sound of his footsteps mingling diffidently with the phantom organ tones. There were two small doors on the either side of the entranceway. On one was a card on which the red pen had written in Italian, French, and English: “Catacombs: please wait one minute until the guide returns and a new party is formed.”
Presently, the other door opened, and a man came out: a very clean man, David thought, in a neat gray suit. His face had points all about it, a pointed nose, a pointed chin, and jawbones that pointed out sideways. He had almost no eyebrows at all, and the hair on his head was thin and black and lay smooth on his skull and about his ears. His eyes jumped pleasantly when he saw David standing there, and he came over, walking not at all as if it were a church.
Just in front of David, he hesitated before saying, “Buon giorno.”
David replied, “Buon giorno,” but not without communicating in that way he had learned in France that he had already exhausted his fund of Italian phrases.
The man’s eyes positively danced. “Francesca?” he said, and soon David and he were talking away in French. --Yes, David speaks French, they said, though he is really an American, just studying this year in Paris. --My, didn’t David speak French well for an American, and such a nice-looking young man too! But then the man told David they would have to wait until some other people came to see the catacombs, and went back into his room and shut the door.
The church grew silent again, the organ playing quietly still.
In a moment, the old oak door peeped open, and a sturdy, middle-aged woman, whose skin was light and whose hair was gray, came down the steps inside. She looked shyly at David (who suspected she too was an American) and then went over to read the card pasted on the door across the room. Then an Italian woman about 30 (strikingly handsome, David thought, dark and tall with long black hair) came in with a wiry little boy about eight on one side and an even smaller and darker girl about six on the other.
The man had opened his door again and was standing there watching David before he spoke to the gray-haired lady, who told him in English that she was from Canada and wanted to see the catacombs. David thought that the man looked even neater than he had before. He spoke to the Canadian woman in English and the Italian woman in Italian.
In a moment he had produced a long, thin white candle for each of them. He told David and the others how to hold the candles and lit them, and arranged the visitors all in a line. Somehow he managed to get David at the front. Then he opened the little door with the card pasted on it and led David by the lapel of his jacket (for which David was beginning to feel self-conscious next to the man’s neat suit and the Canadian woman’s simple tourist dress) down a narrow, unlighted staircase made of rotting stones, telling all of them to watch their steps, to be careful, and not to let their candles blow out. He repeated each of his sentences first in French to David, then in English to the Canadian woman, and finally in Italian to the handsome woman and her two children.
At the bottom of the stairs, they found themselves in the catacombs, and the guide began to describe the people who had built them, who had worshipped there, and who were buried there now, his voice echoing softly into the damp clay-stone walls and the shadows waving on them as the candle flames fluttered in the humidity. The air was very cool.
The man led them along, pointing out how tiny the tomb-niches were because people were smaller in those days (especially ones who lived underground, David thought), always repeating each one of his sentences in all three languages and always keeping his hand on David’s lapel because, as he said to David, he knew the way well and was afraid someone might get lost if he were not there to guide them.
Often they would just stroll along gazing down the tall, narrow corridors of crumbling clay, the man telling David how well he spoke French, what a fine-looking young man he was, and asking if he didn’t think the women in Paris were beautiful. Sometimes, the passageway was so narrow that they had to turn sideways and squeeze between the shadowed walls. The guide would then somehow twinkle through quickly, wait patiently for the others, and then take up David’s lapel again, because as he would say again, he knew the route so well.
Once the guide stopped them, had everyone pass his candle forward to him and then had everyone sit down on the cool ground. When he took the candles away from them down the corridor, the walls grew even taller and darker above them. The guide set the candles all around a little chapel far at the end of the narrow passageway, and asked David and the others to try to imagine the early Christians sitting or kneeling there, in single file since it was so narrow, watching a little priest moving about in the tiny chapel down the way. They all watched as the guide moved around putting the candles in the wall holders. A tiny golden cross shimmered in the soft flame-light next to his shadow.
“Monsieur,” the guide had come back and was speaking into David’s ear, “I am here every evening after five, you know. And I like young students like yourself, who are more interested than these tourists.” He put his hand on David’s shoulder, “Come back some afternoon next week (I am here every afternoon after five) and I will give you a personal tour of the family tombs."
3
The morning air was fresh, the sunlight clear and comfortable. David was walking among the pensione and small, below-street cafes along Via Palestro. Rome early on Easter morning was very quiet.
He had returned to his bed early the evening before, just as the city was beginning to glow and smile, gyrating in welcome to the holy day ahead. The French boy and the two law students from Sicily, with whom he was sharing a room, had not returned until two hours before David got up in the morning and began his easy stroll across the city.
He wandered among small, rising streets north of Via 20 Settembre. The streets had been washed, and the morning smelled like mowed grass after a rain. He hadn’t yet seen even one car.
At Via di Tritone, he watched the fountain running over the strong man’s muscular thighs. The water was clear and blue-green at the same time, chirping like mountain streams over cool stones. Beyond, there were several policemen standing guard at the corners and entrances of a large stone mansion. They straightened and clicked their heels as David passed. He smiled slightly and acknowledged the salutation with a courtly nod. He didn’t feel as reckless as he had the afternoon before, not quite as “pleasantly silly” as he would have said. But he still felt free somehow and confident in a way.
He turned north again among steep streets and some steps with iron railings, hearing occasionally the passing of a car on one of the broad avenues nearby. The sun seemed to scrub the little stone buildings leaving them rosy and clean.
Soon he was listening to his heels strike the cobblestones of the alley with the Etruscan restaurant where he might as well have lunch after the service. It didn’t matter. As he crossed the wide Via del Corso he remembered that he had planned to call Alison sometime to say “Happy Easter,” and watched a single little Fiat amble by. The woman inside smiled at him.
He rested a moment at the Mausoleum of Augustus, then crossed the Tiber, and wandered beyond the green park at Piazza Cavour, where people were beginning to move about, and walked on toward the Vatican. He passed a little bakery and stopped in to buy another small package of crackers. He slipped them into his jacket pocket, tearing away the wrapping at the top as he again walked toward the main piazza. The crackers were old and limp, but he was hungry and liked them anyway.
In a small piazza north of St. Peter’s, little groups were gaily strolling and chatting, policemen were directing traffic, and all the tables of the sidewalk cafes were filled with bright people, most of them European.
David stopped in at one of them to call the convent where Alison was staying with other members of the Paris students’ pilgrimage. She was not there, another student had explained. She had left earlier with her boyfriend, who was studying in London that year. David hadn’t known they were planning to be together. She had talked about going to the Forum to read lines from Julius Caesar with friends from the pilgrimage group.
He was on about his third cracker when he wandered between the columns and into Piazza San Pietro itself. Already hundreds of people were there, swinging their legs over the sides of the waterless fountains or sitting around the center obelisk, strolling about in the sunlight, or chewing gum. But the vast circular opening looked almost empty.
At the main entrance at David’s left, vendors had already begun selling their Pope pennants and pictures, their gelati, and their orange, red, and white balloons. Most of them had signs in four or five languages and shouted at everyone in Italian, pointing at the signs and at what they had to sell.
David stepped from under the columns to the gray paving stones. Already, the huge empty-seeming piazza was beginning to jump and move. David started out across the open space, his legs feeling loose and his knees agile under him. It was his “crowd feeling.” He felt them watching him enviously, in his picturesque old jacket and easy stroll, and felt sorry he had shaved off his beard as Alison had wanted him to. He would never have worn it home anyway.
All the people in the piazza seemed to be dressed in red or white cottons, sports-shirts and tourist dresses, with new Kodak cameras hung from their necks and “Festival” written in their eyes. David surveyed them as he strolled by the first fountain; they were quieter than he would have supposed, some of them with their eyes closed and faces turned up, baking in the sun like peasant breads on hot stones. His own camera was old and worn, and folded up small enough to slip into his sports jacket pocket.
He imagined meeting some friend from the Paris school, as he expected he might, and slipped another cracker between his lips. “My breakfast,” he would say to them, and they would admire him and laugh that he could do such unusual things now. Many of the people had bought ice cream from the gelati man since it was so warm.
On the other side of the piazza, David noticed that the people were very crowded, some in a line coming toward him and others in a stream moving the other way. He wandered over and followed the stream moving toward the basilica, trying to behave as if he knew where they were headed.
A row of wooden barriers stretched all the way across the front part of the piazza, still several hundred feet from the basilica. The people moving David along were just able to squeeze around the end of the barriers. Ten yards beyond was a second row of barriers, and twenty yards beyond it a third. David moved with the others up behind this foremost row of barriers, which was only about fifty feet from the basilica. There were hundreds of cameramen with long lenses and television and film cameras, and reporters with recording machines, all hurrying back and forth beyond the barrier testing various angles on the main balcony in the center of the cathedral facade, where a large white cloth had been draped. David found a place just in front of the balcony, where only one row of spectators separated him from the barrier.
He began to stand there quietly, occasionally eating another old cracker. The sun was very warm on the back and top of his head, and especially on his neck, and soon he felt content to stand there watching the reporters and photographers testing various angles, even though he was no longer moving his feet at all and had been walking for quite a long time. After a while he was warm enough to take off his heavy old jacket, revealing to the crowd his comfortable corduroy sports coat with wrinkles in the sleeves and the tear in the cuff he had received from a barbed wire fence he had climbed near Vicenza so that he could hitch-hike on the parkway (which was illegal!). Surely someone should notice that, he thought. He always felt very public these last days, especially in a crowd.
Presently, he began to take note of the people standing nearby. To his right was a bald German man in a gray suit talking to a dark, athletic Italian. They were speaking in English, the stout German quite volubly; and the Italian was laughing and making brief, pleasant replies. The German had his wife there who was short and stout, as he was, and as neatly dressed; she had a small camera dangling from her neck. The Italian man was there with a small son, about five years old, who was always clinging, about his father’s knees.
Directly in front of David were two unmistakable American girls, clean, beauty-treated, sweet smelling and fluffy-haired; and next to them was a tall, thin and fair lady with white hair, who seemed to be quite by herself and who looked about by turning her head in little jerks this way and that. Her eyes had something lively or wild about them, but her features were as precise and delicate as Alison’s.
From under the columns where David had entered the piazza, four or five military bands now marched, each accompanied by forty or fifty soldiers dressed in the same uniform as the band they marched with. All of them marched between the two wooden barriers, behind David and the others with him, separating them from the vast other section of the crowd, which now numbered in thousands, moving and waving in the sunlight like a multicolored wheat crop far, far beyond the last part of the broad entrance avenue. Each band played a brief tune, and then all stood at ease.
The German and the Italian were getting on so well by this time that all around were quite actively, though tacitly, enjoying the conversation. --Yes, it was a grand day, they said. --Yes, the boy was the Italian’s son and they came out to hear the Pope every Easter. --The Germans were here on a pilgrimage with a good many others who had all chartered a bus.
Soon the German man spread his enthusiastic good will to all those standing nearby, by offering to everyone (though not to David who was still some way behind him) a bit of an enormous chocolate bar. That brought the white-haired lady, who turned out to be English, and the two American girls, who turned out to be southern, into the conversation. Later the girls and the English woman moved a little away from the German couple, and the Italian man and his boy and began to talk among themselves.
David tried to think of a nonchalant way to include himself into their cheerful conversation. He briefly considered offering everyone a cracker, but there were only a few left by then.
At that moment, someone made a short announcement over the loudspeaker at the front to the basilica. The English lady wondered what the man had said since she herself did not understand Italian. The Italian man and the German were joking and talking about something else.
David, on the other hand, felt that he had understood. “I believe,” he addressed the English lady, whose eyes fired at him in return, “that the announcement said that the mass will begin at 11:15. I don’t really understand Italian, but I think I understood the words for ‘mass’ and ‘11:15.’” He had learned words like that from reading train schedules and signs on churches and museums.
It was enough to make the others take note of him. The English lady thought he spoke much more like an Englishman than an American, but the American girls seemed rather uninterested. He noticed that one of them had a box camera in her hand with her purse.
The announcement was repeated, and the Italian man confirmed that the mass was to begin at 11:15. David informed them that that was only five minutes away. In a moment, a stream of young man and boys in ankle-length black robes with delicate white lace vestments on top of them appeared from the center door of the basilica (seminary students, the Italian explained). Then a cardinal, similarly dressed except with a little more white lace, came out and began to celebrate the mass at the small altar which had been set up just under the balcony; the seminary students were standing on both sides of the altar and by turns answered the cardinal in Latin and gazed, thunderstruck, at the huge crowd now assembled before them.
Now and again as the cameramen tested various angles on the crowd (a reporter was squatting just to one side of the center aisle between the big-eyed seminary students, setting up a portable tape recorder), members of the crowd would kneel down. The white-haired English lady was at the front and felt conspicuous since she couldn’t see anybody else to know whether or not to kneel down too; she would start to kneel down and then hesitate. David put his heavy jacket on the ground for the German woman to kneel on. When the mass was over and the seminary boys were milling around and looking at the crowd, she gave David back his jacket and thanked him for it. Her husband was wiping his forehead and bald scalp with his handkerchief; he thanked David too.
Even the American girls seemed friendlier after the mass. They were from Alabama. The bands played a little more.
Just then the entire crowd burst into frenzied shouts and applause. A fierce joy, warm as the sun, sprang into sound, as the reporters began running back and forth in front of the seminary students who were beginning to stretch and twist their necks to see the balcony above them.
The heavy maroon curtains there had been pulled open from inside. A minute later, the Pope stepped out in his white robe and his conical, bold-spangled hat. Wild jubilation rang from the crowd. David clapped his hands too. Everybody was shouting and applauding madly. The white-haired lady was jerking her head this way and that. The faces of the American girls were red, and they were bouncing up and down on the balls of their feet. Everybody was smiling and laughing and talking to himself. The women looked like they wanted to hug each other, and David too.
The Pope was waving to everybody with the back of his hands. David felt a drop at the side of his cheek and didn’t know whether it was perspiration or a tear. It was so warm, it could have been either. David could see the Pope’s old smile, and remembered how tired the calm old man seemed in all his pictures.
After a few minutes, everyone got very quiet. The Pope spoke briefly, and no one moved. David didn’t feel like moving. He thought of how strange it all was, how feudal, and how old. In a minute the Pope started saying “Happy Easter” in every language he could think of. Each time he would say it, a different little group would cheer and wave from somewhere, and everyone would applaud. When he said it in English, David, the American girls, and the English lady cheered, and the Germans smiled at them. Then he said it in German and the man his wife cheered, so the others smiled at them. When he said it in Italian, everyone cheered, and the German man thumped the Italian on the back. It was like a football game or a political convention, David thought, where there was a lot of cheering and everybody had a good time.
Suddenly, the Pope said something else, and from under the eaves at the right of the Vatican colonnade, hundreds of white doves flew out above the crowd and into the sky. Then as the Pope spoke again and some people knelt down, the birds flew around and around overhead getting smaller and smaller in the deepening blue, swirling down and around and away...
It was over then, and the Pope went back between the red curtains.
Before David knew it, the bands and the soldiers with them had marched away under the columns again and the crowd was scattering about. The Italian man and his son were gone, and the German and his wife were hurrying away after the bands. The white-haired English lady was walking off to the left, looking this way and that. The American girls had disappeared.
The reporters were all running away, and a few cameramen still tried various angles on the crowd. The seminary students had gone back into the basilica.
Some men came hurrying out and moved some of the saw-horses around. There was a loud squawk as someone let a corner drag on the paving stones. A few people wandered through the hole in the barrier, but most of them went over to the right, where a long line had formed moving into the side door of the cathedral next to the colonnade. It was rather quiet for such a large crowd.
David felt his “crowd feeling” again. He reached under the folds of his jacket which he held draped over his arm, but there were no crackers left. He moved over to one side, his knees feeling weak from walking and then standing for so long. He leaned against the part of the barrier that had been pulled away to one side, facing the obelisk and the dry fountains, the wide piazza and the broad approach avenue, and, far away in the crowd and the sunlight, the bridge.
It was very warm, and David stood there leaning with one foot up behind him on the wooden barrier. He was relaxed and placid, watching the many colors of the people scurrying around. Once he closed his eyes and turned his face up to the sunlight and felt like a fat peach lying forgotten in the light on a bed of damp leaves. When he opened his eyes again some of the color had gone and the people shimmied for a moment.
Pretty soon, he saw Alison walking toward him down the center of the piazza, with a young man talking to her. She was wearing a red dress that David had not seen before. He watched her coming, but she pretended not to see him until they were close enough to speak to him. David enjoyed watching her coming. “Hi, David,” she called.
“Hello there,” David took his foot down but still had his elbow on the barrier’s top bar. He thought his eyes must be glowing.
“Isn’t Rome wonderful!” she was very enthusiastic.
“Rome is wonderful,” David nodded sagely, and made the wrinkles laugh about his eyes.
“David Grosmann, this is Tom McKay.”
They shook hands. David was surprised that Tom, the Great Tom whom Alison had told him about in Paris and on their trip to Spain, was so regular. He was just a nice, clean-cut American boy with blond hair, cut very short. He had a light, tan, triangular face with rugged cheekbones, and seemed very “West Coast.” A nice-looking young man, David thought, with a firm handshake.
They chatted there a moment saying how much they’d heard about each other, and how nice the weather was.
All the time, David was looking at Alison. She had been with Tom now for several weeks, he supposed, and David had already forgotten her gay vitality. She was small and slender with delicate hands and features, dark hair and eyes with long lashes. Her skin was fair, and her mouth thin but tender and sweet...
“We’re going to the forum this afternoon,” she said.
"Yes,” David smiled. “You’re going to read Shakespeare.”
Tom laughed. “You knew about that? She gave it to me this morning.”
She had tiny thin fingers, and her hands were always cool. David remembered that he had given her a birthday gift when they’d had tea together in Florence, a reproduction mounted on wood of her favorite Lippi madonna with her favorite St. Francis quotation on the other side. But she didn’t mention it. She was wearing the black lace mantilla they had bought in Madrid.
“Are there many with you this afternoon?” David asked.
“Some kids from the Vienna school,” Tom said.
Alison’s dress had a small cord which ran around her hips two inches below her waist. The skirt didn’t begin to fill out until just above her thighs. Her little body softly rounded out the abdomen of the dress.
“I’ll be going back to Paris tonight,” David said. “I don’t know exactly what I will be doing this afternoon, wandering around in the sun somewhere, I suppose.” He imagined their asking him to come along with them to the Forum. But they didn’t, and soon they were playfully punching each other at how long the line was for Communion, and telling David goodbye…Tom shaking hands and Alison smiling oddly when David said he’d call her next week in Paris. Then they were walking off, laughing and joking.
The warmth was moving around inside him like smoky winds over an autumn fire. His eyes were full and glowing, but rather tired.
He replaced his foot on the bottom rail of the wooden barrier behind him, taking up again his nonchalant pose with his elbow on the top bar. How cool he must look, he found himself thinking, in his comfortable corduroy coat and his neat black slacks, in his nonchalant attitude in the sunlight watching the crowd in front of him. He was thinking that Tom and Alison would be talking about him now and looking back at him, seeing him from behind leaning that way on the barrier.
He happened to glance around. Their backs were to him, already far away, and Alison’s red dress was mixing quickly into the Joseph-coated crowd.
He watched after them a moment with the sun warming his shoulders and his forehead feeling a little heavy.
“People look much better in the sunlight,” he said.
***
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
American Politics and Supreme Court Appointments
***
1
I was confused by the Senate discussions of the most recent nominees to the Supreme Court (Sonya Sotomayor and Elena Kagan).
All the Senate speakers claimed that what matters in the Senate debates is the nominees’ legal aptitude and experience, as well as their clear understanding that a Justice’s personal and political opinions will not affect their reasoning and decision-making in any of the cases considered by the Court. Now, it may well be difficult for a Senator to be completely sure that a nominee’s profession of reverence for the law and legal precedent was sincere, but the fact remains that it seems universally agreed that one’s personal and political views are flat-out irrelevant to the Senate’s role in this appointment process.
AND YET, some of the very same Senators making this claim were also saying that these particular nominees’ personal convictions – such as Kagan’s views on gun control and military recruiting - are too liberal. How does this make sense?
Either such opinions matter or they don’t, right?
2
The Constitution itself does not provide any guidance either for the President in selecting his nominees or for the Senate in giving the President its advice and, more significantly (I suppose), its consent in the appointment of Supreme Court Justices.
From Article I:
[The President] shall have the Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.
(Note: the only illumination this section provides on the issue of Senatorial debate on Supreme Court nominees is that – apparently – it is not Constitutionally sanctioned for a two-thirds majority of the Senators present when the voting takes place to be required to indicate Senatorial consent on a particular Supreme Court appointment. Although there is no absolute prohibition of requiring a 60% majority of the whole Senate membership, not of just those present, that practice is not necessarily contrary to general sense of this Article either. This stricture was probably added to the confirmation process by some “activists” of the past.)
3
Taking political considerations into account in determining Supreme Court appointees is therefore in fact permitted by the Constitution, both for the President and for the Senate.
But wait: everyone in the Senate seems to agree that an individual’s personal and political convictions should not matter in the selection of new Justices. Today, this seems to extend also to the President, as evidenced in the outrage some Republican Senators expressed at President Obama’s recent statement that he was looking for nominees who could empathize with those affected by their decisions. In their own deliberations – in both the case of Sotomayor and Kagan - such Senators hammered away at the candidate to be sure that their personal past experience would not be allowed to influence their legal judgment on the Court. Democratic Senators, incidentally, had also grilled President Bush’s nominees on their clear understanding that their personal views , in this case conservative views, would not cloud their legal judgment.
It may not be a Constitutional matter, then, but everyone professes to believe that only legal aptitude and experience matter in the selection of a Supreme Court Justice.
But the fact is that many Senators – and especially today, most Republican Senators - clearly don’t really believe this. Why lie about it?
Could it be that Senators recognize that a great majority of the electorate believes that neither the nomination nor the confirmation of a Supreme Court Justice should be based primarily on partisan politics?
***
1
I was confused by the Senate discussions of the most recent nominees to the Supreme Court (Sonya Sotomayor and Elena Kagan).
All the Senate speakers claimed that what matters in the Senate debates is the nominees’ legal aptitude and experience, as well as their clear understanding that a Justice’s personal and political opinions will not affect their reasoning and decision-making in any of the cases considered by the Court. Now, it may well be difficult for a Senator to be completely sure that a nominee’s profession of reverence for the law and legal precedent was sincere, but the fact remains that it seems universally agreed that one’s personal and political views are flat-out irrelevant to the Senate’s role in this appointment process.
AND YET, some of the very same Senators making this claim were also saying that these particular nominees’ personal convictions – such as Kagan’s views on gun control and military recruiting - are too liberal. How does this make sense?
Either such opinions matter or they don’t, right?
2
The Constitution itself does not provide any guidance either for the President in selecting his nominees or for the Senate in giving the President its advice and, more significantly (I suppose), its consent in the appointment of Supreme Court Justices.
From Article I:
[The President] shall have the Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.
(Note: the only illumination this section provides on the issue of Senatorial debate on Supreme Court nominees is that – apparently – it is not Constitutionally sanctioned for a two-thirds majority of the Senators present when the voting takes place to be required to indicate Senatorial consent on a particular Supreme Court appointment. Although there is no absolute prohibition of requiring a 60% majority of the whole Senate membership, not of just those present, that practice is not necessarily contrary to general sense of this Article either. This stricture was probably added to the confirmation process by some “activists” of the past.)
3
Taking political considerations into account in determining Supreme Court appointees is therefore in fact permitted by the Constitution, both for the President and for the Senate.
But wait: everyone in the Senate seems to agree that an individual’s personal and political convictions should not matter in the selection of new Justices. Today, this seems to extend also to the President, as evidenced in the outrage some Republican Senators expressed at President Obama’s recent statement that he was looking for nominees who could empathize with those affected by their decisions. In their own deliberations – in both the case of Sotomayor and Kagan - such Senators hammered away at the candidate to be sure that their personal past experience would not be allowed to influence their legal judgment on the Court. Democratic Senators, incidentally, had also grilled President Bush’s nominees on their clear understanding that their personal views , in this case conservative views, would not cloud their legal judgment.
It may not be a Constitutional matter, then, but everyone professes to believe that only legal aptitude and experience matter in the selection of a Supreme Court Justice.
But the fact is that many Senators – and especially today, most Republican Senators - clearly don’t really believe this. Why lie about it?
Could it be that Senators recognize that a great majority of the electorate believes that neither the nomination nor the confirmation of a Supreme Court Justice should be based primarily on partisan politics?
***
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Story: Replacing John
***
1
“Hi, Red,” John’s pleasant voice said on the telephone. “I was wondering if I could come right over.”
That’s odd, Red thought but he simply replied. “Sure, John. Come ahead.”
John Kinolden was one of Red’s best supervisors. He had almost twenty years experience, ten of which he had collected working for Red. He was knowledgeable in his field and good at his work. He was loyal to the organization, demanding both of his staff and himself, and well-liked and -respected by just about everyone. He also worked well with Red and his vice-presidents, accepting direction amiably, yet not hesitating to express and explain any concerns he might have. His suggestions, moreover, were always reasonable and practical; Red took most of them.
So, it was with mixed feelings that, later that day, Red accepted John’s resignation, with an unheard-of six months notice, so that he could move up with a larger firm in a city about three hundred miles away. Replacing him seemed impossible; appointing a suitable successor would be difficult enough, especially in the small town where Red had his little business.
“John, you know we have come to depend on you and I’ll be sorry to lose you,” Red said, trying to focus on saying just the right things for his long-time colleague’s benefit rather than expressing the wave of disappointment (and panic) that swept through him at first. “But it sounds like a great opportunity for you and your family.”
“I sure think so, Red,” came the reply. “You’ve been just about the best boss I ever had, and I wouldn’t take just any old thing that came along.”
Red acknowledged the comment, and started a brief discussion on how to break the news to John’s staff and then other colleagues. John wanted to meet separately with each of the four professionals who worked with him and then meet with the six hourly staff as a group. Red could inform the others however he thought best after that had been taken care of.
“I could be there, you know John, to show my support or address any fears…”
But John wanted to handle it himself. Fine.
No one else in the department, Red thought, was in a good position to be promoted to the supervisor position, even Vera Marjotes, his long-time second-in-command, and John said – as Red was later able to confirm – that none of them would want the extra responsibility, despite the raise that would come with it.
So the search began right away, with detailed ads placed in the appropriate regional papers and trade journals. (This was in the 1980s, before the Internet was a primary resource when recruiting.) John helped write and place the ads. Red knew he could be counted on also to provide detailed information about the position to prospective successors as the search went on.
“I only hope,” he said to his wife, “that we’ll be able to have someone on the job before too long after John leaves.”
“Would you have to step in yourself, Red,” she said, “if the search goes on too long?”
“You know it, kiddo!”
2
Slowly, it seemed, applications began to come along. Most were from people just out of Business School and who lived far away, or from close-by but without the required credentials. That was the result Red had expected, but he didn’t feel good just because he had been right about that.
Then there was one, two, and finally three applications that looked pretty good. All were folks younger than John but who had enough of the right sort of experience to be considered seriously. Things might be turning around, Red thought cautiously.
Hiring the right person for a middle- or high management position, Red felt, was just about the most important work he did. He had telephone conversations with each of the three promising candidates. Two seemed a good long-term match for the community; the third less so, but she said all the right things about wanting to move and so on.
But the fact was, Red had to acknowledge, that one of the top three stood head and shoulders above any of the others, both on paper and over the phone. Red called this young man’s references first, then references of the other two. All recommendations were fine; none were blow-aways. So, Red selected the two he liked best to invite for interviews.
The front-runner was a young man with about 10 years experience in the field. Philip Temple was working just up the road in the only nearby city; his wife had decided to stay at home with their two young children, at least until they were both in school. When that happened Philip said she would be happy to commute up to the nearby city, since they both agreed that a small country town was the best place to raise their family. He was currently manager of only a unit within the comparable department, but his staff was the same size – perhaps one larger – than John supervised in Red’s business. The salary Red had in mind would be a modest increase for him, so Red’s hopes were high – despite his usual caution –going into the interviews.
The second-ranking candidate seemed okay and had grown up in a small town. He and his wife were childless but were said to be looking for a country home where they could garden and maybe even have a horse. But neither Red nor the staff were really excited about the prospect of his taking over. One of the professionals thought he didn’t seem as committed to the team approach to “supervising” as John had been; John himself articulated Red’s own feeling, saying it was good to have identified a real possibility, but looking ahead to Red’s front-runner. Red had not identified him as such, except in his own mind; he hadn’t even told his wife.
So the young fellow came down for a full morning the following week. John had still about a month left before moving on.
3
“I think we’ve found our man,” Red sang out to his wife when he came in for lunch early that afternoon.
“He worked out?” she said.
Red briefly reviewed the interview, and went over it in his mind again in more detail back in the office. John was expected to come in for a wrap-up late in the afternoon.
“I’m Philip Temple,” the young candidate had said cheerfully, sticking out his hand as the secretary ushered him in. He was good-looking, fit and energetic. He and Red exchanged preliminaries before reviewing the essentials of the proposed position. John was brought in after a few minutes, and introductions made; then, the two of them went off to the plant to look things over and to meet the others in the department. Red would join Philip in John’s office in a couple of hours.
That private exit interview had also gone well, Philip asking good, relevant questions as Red gave him the opportunity. He did verify that his wife and family would be covered by the company health insurance plan, but other than that, all his interest seemed focused on the work to be done. On his side, Red asked him – casually – if he’d ever had a “boss from hell.” He had found over the years that was a good way to see whether or not the applicant had any major authority “problems.”
“No,” Philip replied, laughing, and then added, “I guess some would say I’ve been lucky that way. I’ve always thought I was there to help the ‘boss’ rather than the reverse. So no, no ‘bosses from hell.’”
After 35 minutes of spirited conversation, Red told Philip he would telephone him in two or three days to see if anything had come up and sent him on his way.
That afternoon, John said Philip seemed like a very good candidate and mentioned that his staff thought so too.
4
And indeed, everything went well at first, better than Red had thought possible in the first weeks of John’s replacement’s tenure. Red’s wife invited Philip and his family over for a picnic supper in the second week, and all the adults took on the project of finding the newcomers a suitable home there in town. The kids were well-behaved too, and seemed to have a reasonably good time.
Red and Philip established a regular routine of weekly meetings, as Philip settled in. After an uneventful first two weeks, Red suggested the meetings take place in Philip’s office at the plant, thinking it would give him a regular reason for personally looking things over in that area. He’d gotten a little out of the habit…
“Hey, Red,” Philip said when he stuck his head in. “Could I ask you to walk around and say Hi to the staff before you go?”
“Great idea!” said Red, his usual reply to any suggestion he had already decided on.
First, though, they sat down around Philip’s old steel desk. Red noted that everything looked exactly the same as in John’s day. Tidy, neat. Even a couple of small framed family photos occupied the same spots on the desk. As usual, Philip mentioned a couple of upcoming activities, saying – when Red didn’t immediately offer his advice – what he was thinking of doing. Red was supportive, even when he made different suggestions. Philip was catching on quickly, he thought. One thing he brought up was a visit they were expecting from a new prospective client the next week, going over what he wanted Philip to do.
Afterwards, Philip walked around with Red but he hung back and let everyone have the opportunity to chat with the boss. That went well, too.
5
“Yeah, you’re right,” Vera, Philip’s second in command, told Red later that week. He had taken the initiative of seeking her out to check to see if Philip was doing as well as he seemed to be. ‘It’s still early on,” she said, “only about a month… But he’s a real nice person.” Red thought she was hanging back a little, so he made a mental note to continue to seek Vera out now and then to ask her how she thought things were going.
He didn’t have to seek her out two weeks later. Red had sent Philip to a one-day management seminar in the near-by city where he used to live. Vera appeared at his office door. “Got a minute?” she asked.
Red waved her in and finished a note to himself. “And how is Vera this morning?” he asked.
“Well, I’m fine, I guess,” she said looking intently at Red’s eyes. “I’m okay, but it’s really bad, Red. I thought I should tell you.”
“Vera, I’m glad you came by,” Red closed the office door. “You know, every time I’ve seen you around I’ve asked you how it was going – I asked a couple of others over in your operation too – and you all said Fine. …So is it Philip, or something else?”
“Did you hear what happened when those visitors were here last week?”
Red was again surprised. “Well, everything seemed to go well. We’re expecting a sweet contract in a couple of days…”
“No,” Vera said. “I mean with Philip.”
“He said the tour had gone well. The visitors seemed well-disposed.”
“You didn’t know he had fallen down, right there in front of them?” It was evidently Vera’s turn to be surprised.
“He didn’t mention it,” Red said.
“Well, everyone knows it,” she replied bluntly.
What she was referring to, it turned out, had happened as Philip escorted the three visitors from the opening little welcome in Red’s building to Philip’s plant across the campus. Apparently on the uneven ground in the little park there, Philip had gone right down. He popped up immediately and laughed it off.
“So, did he hurt himself, Vera? Made a bad impression, or something like that?”
“No, no. We don’t know anything about that. It’s a bad sign, you know. He just fell over.”
6
“So, how was the seminar, Philip?” Red poked his head into Philip’s office the next morning. He hadn’t gotten much from Vera, but thought he should check it out anyway. No one else from the firm was with them when the fall had taken place, so there was only one he could ask.
After a few brief sentences exchanged about the seminar, Red added: “Oh, you know, don’t you, it seems to be going well with our visiting dignitaries from ten days ago? You told me that was your impression. Marianne says they were very complimentary and appear ready to sign up with us.”
“I did know that, Red. Good news.”
“I heard you took a tumble,” he asked, smiling.
Philip seemed a little surprised, perhaps a bit embarrassed. “You knew about that, did you? Ha! well it wasn’t my finest moment,” he laughed. “I tripped over something, I guess, but… no harm done.”
“I just wanted to check if you were okay… ‘Are okay,’ I should say.”
Philip said he was fine. His tennis game was no worse, he said.
Why, Red wondered, had Vera thought Red should know about the incident? For himself, he had no lingering questions.
Then, a month or so later, Vera called to ask Red to come over when he got a chance. Philip was again away on a company errand, Red went over to Vera’s work area a couple of hours later, wondering if the young new supervisor had stepped on a few veterans’ toes. He was grateful to have Vera keeping him informed.
7
“This is serious, Vera, and I will take appropriate action,” Red was saying as his conversation with Vera was coming to a conclusion.
Vera had looked grim when he had come over to her area. There was enough surrounding noise that they felt comfortable being frank with one another without having complete privacy.
“It’s as bad as I said,” Vera started out.
Red didn’t think she had told him it was particularly bad, but he just waited for her to continue.
“We just can’t go on like this,” she said.
“The staff is having trouble getting along with him?”
“Oh no, no. He’s so nice. He’s kind and sweet. We all love him. But…”
When Red asked Vera to give him some examples of what Philip was doing wrong, she replied: “Well, he just shuts himself up in that office. For hours at a time.”
“Is this a problem because you don’t have access, he ignores you, doesn’t provide the leadership we need? That kind of thing? I’m just trying to understand, you know, Vera.”
“Well no, not exactly…”
“Doesn’t he do any work? Has he dumped his work on you or on everybody, something like that?”
“Umm, no. He gets the work done, I guess. He’s got the team operating efficiently. He knows what’s going on, and he tells us what he wants…” and she paused again. “It’s just… What does he do in there? He locks the door, you know. Why is that? We’re all worried about him, Red. He has a great wife and two young kids…”
“Vera, what are you afraid he might be doing? Is he alone in the office.”
“Well, drinking, Red! That must be what it is. Remember his falling down?”
“Does he ever smell of alcohol?” She shook her head. “Slur his speech? Or seem ‘out of it’?” She was still shaking her head, looking sad and frustrated.
Philip’s secretive behavior did seem odd; so Red said as he stood up to leave: “This is serious, Vera, and I will take appropriate action. But, you know, I won’t be able to tell you exactly what I am doing. That will have to be just between the two of us. But you can be sure I will not be doing nothing. Okay?”
He must have said that a dozen times over the years, whenever there had been a personnel complaint.
“In the meantime,” he added. “Do let me know if he gets any worse or anything like that. Can I count on you for that, Vera?”
8
Fortunately, the next weekend was one when the whole operation at Red’s firm shut down all the way through Monday. Philip had checked in with Red when he got back from his errand, saying everything was on track. On Friday, too, the new contract had been finalized. The future looked pretty good.
After thinking it over, though, and without mentioning the concerns about Philip to his wife, Red told her Sunday evening he had to go over to the office for an hour or so. He had decided he’d better check out Philip’s office for himself, just to see what there was to see… if anything.
Everything was as quiet as Red had expected. It was dark enough at twilight for any offices occupied to be easily visible. If he ran across the watchman, it wouldn’t be the first time he had been in for a private look-see.
Everything was on the master-key plan. The watchman crew and Red had the only Grand Master keys, so Red was outside Philip’s office upstairs in no time. He waited at the door and listened carefully. Nothing. How long had Philip been on the job, he asked himself, a little over a month now?
“Hey, Philip,” he called out as he softly rapped on the door. “Philip, are you there?” Again, nothing.
So he turned the key and flicked on the flashlight he had brought from the glove compartment. He closed the blinds over the one window behind the desk, and then turned on the desk lamp. Everything looked just as it always did when he came over for his weekly confabs with his new supervisor.
The desk was clean. No papers or files left out (as Red always did himself!). So he glanced around at the one metal bookcase across the room. It too looked just the same as usual; Red had checked it out before, noting a couple of popular management books and a few small stacks of trade journals. The family photos were only those two on the desk. The framed print on the one wall was the one John had left, but was hung in a different position and not so high.
Trying not to make even a slight noise, Red hesitantly pulled back the lap drawer. That’s where the photos were, rather a lot of them. But they weren’t of family. They were of sexy naked women, cut from men’s magazines. That was a surprise. Were there other secrets to be found in the other drawers?
He first opened the bottom drawer, which was about twice as deep as the other two.
It was filled to the brim with empty whiskey bottles. Sh-t, Red sighed. He closed up, turned out the light, opened the blinds, and got out of there.
9
“I’ll call them right now,” Red said into his office telephone. “And thanks, Duncan!”
First thing after the long weekend, Red had called an old school friend, a clinical psychologist. “I’m not asking you to do anything, but I do need some advice. Okay? I’ve got a real good supervisor who’s got a serious drinking problem. I absolutely know it, even though he’s very good at covering it up.
“I know this is a disability and I can’t discipline him just for being an alcoholic, but I can direct him to get help, right?” After that was confirmed, Red asked Duncan if he could recommend someone for Philip to be required to see. He was surprised to learn that the county health service got Duncan’s highest recommendation, and he also gave Red the name and number of another not-for-profit agency downtown that was highly thought of too… in case it didn’t work out with the health service. He told Red how to handle it with the county.
So, without even putting the phone back in its cradle, Red dialed the county service’s number and was put right through to a counselor, a certain Dr. MacDonald. They worked out a plan.
“You know, sir, you’re in a specially good position to help this young man,” Dr. MacDonald concluded. “It seems like a funny thing, but most people with alcohol dependency are willing to give up friends and connections in the community; they’ll even give up their wife and family before trying to kick the habit. It’s too important in their lives.
“But the very last thing they would hang onto… is their job. For some reason. Which puts you, the employer, in the position of having the most leverage that anyone has. So, you’re doing important work here.”
10
“Hey, Philip,” Red said an hour later. “Thanks for coming over. Have a good weekend?”
“Just great,” the younger man replied. “We took the kids up to Teri’s parents’. Everybody had a great time.”
“Sit down, Philip. I have something very important to discuss with you. This is hard stuff now, do you understand? And absolutely private. Just between the two of us, okay?”
Philip seemed on his guard now and had a puzzled look on his face. Red went on: “Philip, you have a great background for your position and you’ve gotten off to a very fine start. You know?”
The younger man nodded slightly, warily.
“Philip,” and Red leaned forward: “I know you have a problem with alcohol. It doesn’t matter how I know. I know it for sure, do you understand? You don’t need to respond. Hear me out.
“We all like you and all of us want you to succeed. I most of all want you to succeed here, but you won’t if you don’t get professional help. I mean it: professional help. And I hereby direct you, as a requirement of your continuing here at this firm, to engage a counselor now, today, and follow all of his or her directions. Do you understand?
Philip was completely quiet, but with a slight nod, he indicated he did understand.
“Now, here’s what we’re going to do, Philip. I am right now going to pick up that telephone on my desk and I’m going to call the county health service. It’s just out of town on the way up to the city. They’re expecting my call. And I’m going to hand the phone over to you and you’re going to make an appointment. See? An appointment for today. You will sign a waiver form there, giving me the right to know if you’re keeping your appointments and following your counselor’s advice.”
He reached for the telephone. “And Philip, you have to keep this appointment, or you will be fired. I really, really don’t want to lose you, Philip. You’ve got all we need… if you can just get this thing under control.”
“If they …,” Philip had to clear his throat. “If they tell you I don’t have a problem…?”
“I’ll take their word for it. But they’re not going to say that, Philip.”
Red placed the call, and Philip very professionally made the appointment with Dr. MacDonald.
“I’m going at two this afternoon,” he told Red handing back the phone.
“That’s a good start, Philip. I’m going to stick with you all the way on this.” And Red and Philip shook hands,
11
Philip and Red touched base every morning. In a conversation in his office Red made it clear he didn’t need to know any details. Just if Philip was okay and was keeping his appointments and doing what his counselor said. Red had talked with Dr. MacDonald himself after that first appointment. He and Philip had made a weekly appointment.
Red asked if it would be contrary to Philip’s waiver for the counselor to tell him if Philip really did have an alcohol dependency.
“I can tell you,” he replied patiently, “that we have made a weekly appointment. …And I can tell you that I think it is likely I will also recommend a weekly support group.”
Red absorbed that. “You mean like AA?”
“Like that, yes.”
“So how are things going today?” Red asked.
“Oh, every day is pretty much alike,” Philip said. “It’s going okay, in other words.”
“Anything unusual going on with the staff?”
“No, we’re fine. The family’s fine too…”
“Good. Well, I’ll be over to your place tomorrow, for our regular business meeting.”
12
And everything did seem to be going well. Vera seemed somewhat relieved, when he purposely crossed paths with her and asked, “Anything going on, Vera? Anything good?”
“Oh, it’s good,” she would say… and then she would mention something specific they were doing over in Philip’s area.
“Well, we’ll keep on truckin’, okay?” Red would say, or something similar.
In one of his reports, Dr. MacDonald mentioned that Philip seemed to think he owed Red a lot. That too seemed positive, didn’t it?
And then, early one afternoon, Philip called: “Say, Red. I was wondering if I could come over for a minute.” Red didn’t know what to expect, but Philip’s tone sounded normal, smooth.
Philip handed him his letter of resignation, telling Red that he was moving on, taking a position as a department head, as he had been before, in a large city in a different state.
“What a waste,” his wife said at supper that evening. “You did what you could, Red.”
“Yeah,” he said. “So much for leverage.”
***
1
“Hi, Red,” John’s pleasant voice said on the telephone. “I was wondering if I could come right over.”
That’s odd, Red thought but he simply replied. “Sure, John. Come ahead.”
John Kinolden was one of Red’s best supervisors. He had almost twenty years experience, ten of which he had collected working for Red. He was knowledgeable in his field and good at his work. He was loyal to the organization, demanding both of his staff and himself, and well-liked and -respected by just about everyone. He also worked well with Red and his vice-presidents, accepting direction amiably, yet not hesitating to express and explain any concerns he might have. His suggestions, moreover, were always reasonable and practical; Red took most of them.
So, it was with mixed feelings that, later that day, Red accepted John’s resignation, with an unheard-of six months notice, so that he could move up with a larger firm in a city about three hundred miles away. Replacing him seemed impossible; appointing a suitable successor would be difficult enough, especially in the small town where Red had his little business.
“John, you know we have come to depend on you and I’ll be sorry to lose you,” Red said, trying to focus on saying just the right things for his long-time colleague’s benefit rather than expressing the wave of disappointment (and panic) that swept through him at first. “But it sounds like a great opportunity for you and your family.”
“I sure think so, Red,” came the reply. “You’ve been just about the best boss I ever had, and I wouldn’t take just any old thing that came along.”
Red acknowledged the comment, and started a brief discussion on how to break the news to John’s staff and then other colleagues. John wanted to meet separately with each of the four professionals who worked with him and then meet with the six hourly staff as a group. Red could inform the others however he thought best after that had been taken care of.
“I could be there, you know John, to show my support or address any fears…”
But John wanted to handle it himself. Fine.
No one else in the department, Red thought, was in a good position to be promoted to the supervisor position, even Vera Marjotes, his long-time second-in-command, and John said – as Red was later able to confirm – that none of them would want the extra responsibility, despite the raise that would come with it.
So the search began right away, with detailed ads placed in the appropriate regional papers and trade journals. (This was in the 1980s, before the Internet was a primary resource when recruiting.) John helped write and place the ads. Red knew he could be counted on also to provide detailed information about the position to prospective successors as the search went on.
“I only hope,” he said to his wife, “that we’ll be able to have someone on the job before too long after John leaves.”
“Would you have to step in yourself, Red,” she said, “if the search goes on too long?”
“You know it, kiddo!”
2
Slowly, it seemed, applications began to come along. Most were from people just out of Business School and who lived far away, or from close-by but without the required credentials. That was the result Red had expected, but he didn’t feel good just because he had been right about that.
Then there was one, two, and finally three applications that looked pretty good. All were folks younger than John but who had enough of the right sort of experience to be considered seriously. Things might be turning around, Red thought cautiously.
Hiring the right person for a middle- or high management position, Red felt, was just about the most important work he did. He had telephone conversations with each of the three promising candidates. Two seemed a good long-term match for the community; the third less so, but she said all the right things about wanting to move and so on.
But the fact was, Red had to acknowledge, that one of the top three stood head and shoulders above any of the others, both on paper and over the phone. Red called this young man’s references first, then references of the other two. All recommendations were fine; none were blow-aways. So, Red selected the two he liked best to invite for interviews.
The front-runner was a young man with about 10 years experience in the field. Philip Temple was working just up the road in the only nearby city; his wife had decided to stay at home with their two young children, at least until they were both in school. When that happened Philip said she would be happy to commute up to the nearby city, since they both agreed that a small country town was the best place to raise their family. He was currently manager of only a unit within the comparable department, but his staff was the same size – perhaps one larger – than John supervised in Red’s business. The salary Red had in mind would be a modest increase for him, so Red’s hopes were high – despite his usual caution –going into the interviews.
The second-ranking candidate seemed okay and had grown up in a small town. He and his wife were childless but were said to be looking for a country home where they could garden and maybe even have a horse. But neither Red nor the staff were really excited about the prospect of his taking over. One of the professionals thought he didn’t seem as committed to the team approach to “supervising” as John had been; John himself articulated Red’s own feeling, saying it was good to have identified a real possibility, but looking ahead to Red’s front-runner. Red had not identified him as such, except in his own mind; he hadn’t even told his wife.
So the young fellow came down for a full morning the following week. John had still about a month left before moving on.
3
“I think we’ve found our man,” Red sang out to his wife when he came in for lunch early that afternoon.
“He worked out?” she said.
Red briefly reviewed the interview, and went over it in his mind again in more detail back in the office. John was expected to come in for a wrap-up late in the afternoon.
“I’m Philip Temple,” the young candidate had said cheerfully, sticking out his hand as the secretary ushered him in. He was good-looking, fit and energetic. He and Red exchanged preliminaries before reviewing the essentials of the proposed position. John was brought in after a few minutes, and introductions made; then, the two of them went off to the plant to look things over and to meet the others in the department. Red would join Philip in John’s office in a couple of hours.
That private exit interview had also gone well, Philip asking good, relevant questions as Red gave him the opportunity. He did verify that his wife and family would be covered by the company health insurance plan, but other than that, all his interest seemed focused on the work to be done. On his side, Red asked him – casually – if he’d ever had a “boss from hell.” He had found over the years that was a good way to see whether or not the applicant had any major authority “problems.”
“No,” Philip replied, laughing, and then added, “I guess some would say I’ve been lucky that way. I’ve always thought I was there to help the ‘boss’ rather than the reverse. So no, no ‘bosses from hell.’”
After 35 minutes of spirited conversation, Red told Philip he would telephone him in two or three days to see if anything had come up and sent him on his way.
That afternoon, John said Philip seemed like a very good candidate and mentioned that his staff thought so too.
4
And indeed, everything went well at first, better than Red had thought possible in the first weeks of John’s replacement’s tenure. Red’s wife invited Philip and his family over for a picnic supper in the second week, and all the adults took on the project of finding the newcomers a suitable home there in town. The kids were well-behaved too, and seemed to have a reasonably good time.
Red and Philip established a regular routine of weekly meetings, as Philip settled in. After an uneventful first two weeks, Red suggested the meetings take place in Philip’s office at the plant, thinking it would give him a regular reason for personally looking things over in that area. He’d gotten a little out of the habit…
“Hey, Red,” Philip said when he stuck his head in. “Could I ask you to walk around and say Hi to the staff before you go?”
“Great idea!” said Red, his usual reply to any suggestion he had already decided on.
First, though, they sat down around Philip’s old steel desk. Red noted that everything looked exactly the same as in John’s day. Tidy, neat. Even a couple of small framed family photos occupied the same spots on the desk. As usual, Philip mentioned a couple of upcoming activities, saying – when Red didn’t immediately offer his advice – what he was thinking of doing. Red was supportive, even when he made different suggestions. Philip was catching on quickly, he thought. One thing he brought up was a visit they were expecting from a new prospective client the next week, going over what he wanted Philip to do.
Afterwards, Philip walked around with Red but he hung back and let everyone have the opportunity to chat with the boss. That went well, too.
5
“Yeah, you’re right,” Vera, Philip’s second in command, told Red later that week. He had taken the initiative of seeking her out to check to see if Philip was doing as well as he seemed to be. ‘It’s still early on,” she said, “only about a month… But he’s a real nice person.” Red thought she was hanging back a little, so he made a mental note to continue to seek Vera out now and then to ask her how she thought things were going.
He didn’t have to seek her out two weeks later. Red had sent Philip to a one-day management seminar in the near-by city where he used to live. Vera appeared at his office door. “Got a minute?” she asked.
Red waved her in and finished a note to himself. “And how is Vera this morning?” he asked.
“Well, I’m fine, I guess,” she said looking intently at Red’s eyes. “I’m okay, but it’s really bad, Red. I thought I should tell you.”
“Vera, I’m glad you came by,” Red closed the office door. “You know, every time I’ve seen you around I’ve asked you how it was going – I asked a couple of others over in your operation too – and you all said Fine. …So is it Philip, or something else?”
“Did you hear what happened when those visitors were here last week?”
Red was again surprised. “Well, everything seemed to go well. We’re expecting a sweet contract in a couple of days…”
“No,” Vera said. “I mean with Philip.”
“He said the tour had gone well. The visitors seemed well-disposed.”
“You didn’t know he had fallen down, right there in front of them?” It was evidently Vera’s turn to be surprised.
“He didn’t mention it,” Red said.
“Well, everyone knows it,” she replied bluntly.
What she was referring to, it turned out, had happened as Philip escorted the three visitors from the opening little welcome in Red’s building to Philip’s plant across the campus. Apparently on the uneven ground in the little park there, Philip had gone right down. He popped up immediately and laughed it off.
“So, did he hurt himself, Vera? Made a bad impression, or something like that?”
“No, no. We don’t know anything about that. It’s a bad sign, you know. He just fell over.”
6
“So, how was the seminar, Philip?” Red poked his head into Philip’s office the next morning. He hadn’t gotten much from Vera, but thought he should check it out anyway. No one else from the firm was with them when the fall had taken place, so there was only one he could ask.
After a few brief sentences exchanged about the seminar, Red added: “Oh, you know, don’t you, it seems to be going well with our visiting dignitaries from ten days ago? You told me that was your impression. Marianne says they were very complimentary and appear ready to sign up with us.”
“I did know that, Red. Good news.”
“I heard you took a tumble,” he asked, smiling.
Philip seemed a little surprised, perhaps a bit embarrassed. “You knew about that, did you? Ha! well it wasn’t my finest moment,” he laughed. “I tripped over something, I guess, but… no harm done.”
“I just wanted to check if you were okay… ‘Are okay,’ I should say.”
Philip said he was fine. His tennis game was no worse, he said.
Why, Red wondered, had Vera thought Red should know about the incident? For himself, he had no lingering questions.
Then, a month or so later, Vera called to ask Red to come over when he got a chance. Philip was again away on a company errand, Red went over to Vera’s work area a couple of hours later, wondering if the young new supervisor had stepped on a few veterans’ toes. He was grateful to have Vera keeping him informed.
7
“This is serious, Vera, and I will take appropriate action,” Red was saying as his conversation with Vera was coming to a conclusion.
Vera had looked grim when he had come over to her area. There was enough surrounding noise that they felt comfortable being frank with one another without having complete privacy.
“It’s as bad as I said,” Vera started out.
Red didn’t think she had told him it was particularly bad, but he just waited for her to continue.
“We just can’t go on like this,” she said.
“The staff is having trouble getting along with him?”
“Oh no, no. He’s so nice. He’s kind and sweet. We all love him. But…”
When Red asked Vera to give him some examples of what Philip was doing wrong, she replied: “Well, he just shuts himself up in that office. For hours at a time.”
“Is this a problem because you don’t have access, he ignores you, doesn’t provide the leadership we need? That kind of thing? I’m just trying to understand, you know, Vera.”
“Well no, not exactly…”
“Doesn’t he do any work? Has he dumped his work on you or on everybody, something like that?”
“Umm, no. He gets the work done, I guess. He’s got the team operating efficiently. He knows what’s going on, and he tells us what he wants…” and she paused again. “It’s just… What does he do in there? He locks the door, you know. Why is that? We’re all worried about him, Red. He has a great wife and two young kids…”
“Vera, what are you afraid he might be doing? Is he alone in the office.”
“Well, drinking, Red! That must be what it is. Remember his falling down?”
“Does he ever smell of alcohol?” She shook her head. “Slur his speech? Or seem ‘out of it’?” She was still shaking her head, looking sad and frustrated.
Philip’s secretive behavior did seem odd; so Red said as he stood up to leave: “This is serious, Vera, and I will take appropriate action. But, you know, I won’t be able to tell you exactly what I am doing. That will have to be just between the two of us. But you can be sure I will not be doing nothing. Okay?”
He must have said that a dozen times over the years, whenever there had been a personnel complaint.
“In the meantime,” he added. “Do let me know if he gets any worse or anything like that. Can I count on you for that, Vera?”
8
Fortunately, the next weekend was one when the whole operation at Red’s firm shut down all the way through Monday. Philip had checked in with Red when he got back from his errand, saying everything was on track. On Friday, too, the new contract had been finalized. The future looked pretty good.
After thinking it over, though, and without mentioning the concerns about Philip to his wife, Red told her Sunday evening he had to go over to the office for an hour or so. He had decided he’d better check out Philip’s office for himself, just to see what there was to see… if anything.
Everything was as quiet as Red had expected. It was dark enough at twilight for any offices occupied to be easily visible. If he ran across the watchman, it wouldn’t be the first time he had been in for a private look-see.
Everything was on the master-key plan. The watchman crew and Red had the only Grand Master keys, so Red was outside Philip’s office upstairs in no time. He waited at the door and listened carefully. Nothing. How long had Philip been on the job, he asked himself, a little over a month now?
“Hey, Philip,” he called out as he softly rapped on the door. “Philip, are you there?” Again, nothing.
So he turned the key and flicked on the flashlight he had brought from the glove compartment. He closed the blinds over the one window behind the desk, and then turned on the desk lamp. Everything looked just as it always did when he came over for his weekly confabs with his new supervisor.
The desk was clean. No papers or files left out (as Red always did himself!). So he glanced around at the one metal bookcase across the room. It too looked just the same as usual; Red had checked it out before, noting a couple of popular management books and a few small stacks of trade journals. The family photos were only those two on the desk. The framed print on the one wall was the one John had left, but was hung in a different position and not so high.
Trying not to make even a slight noise, Red hesitantly pulled back the lap drawer. That’s where the photos were, rather a lot of them. But they weren’t of family. They were of sexy naked women, cut from men’s magazines. That was a surprise. Were there other secrets to be found in the other drawers?
He first opened the bottom drawer, which was about twice as deep as the other two.
It was filled to the brim with empty whiskey bottles. Sh-t, Red sighed. He closed up, turned out the light, opened the blinds, and got out of there.
9
“I’ll call them right now,” Red said into his office telephone. “And thanks, Duncan!”
First thing after the long weekend, Red had called an old school friend, a clinical psychologist. “I’m not asking you to do anything, but I do need some advice. Okay? I’ve got a real good supervisor who’s got a serious drinking problem. I absolutely know it, even though he’s very good at covering it up.
“I know this is a disability and I can’t discipline him just for being an alcoholic, but I can direct him to get help, right?” After that was confirmed, Red asked Duncan if he could recommend someone for Philip to be required to see. He was surprised to learn that the county health service got Duncan’s highest recommendation, and he also gave Red the name and number of another not-for-profit agency downtown that was highly thought of too… in case it didn’t work out with the health service. He told Red how to handle it with the county.
So, without even putting the phone back in its cradle, Red dialed the county service’s number and was put right through to a counselor, a certain Dr. MacDonald. They worked out a plan.
“You know, sir, you’re in a specially good position to help this young man,” Dr. MacDonald concluded. “It seems like a funny thing, but most people with alcohol dependency are willing to give up friends and connections in the community; they’ll even give up their wife and family before trying to kick the habit. It’s too important in their lives.
“But the very last thing they would hang onto… is their job. For some reason. Which puts you, the employer, in the position of having the most leverage that anyone has. So, you’re doing important work here.”
10
“Hey, Philip,” Red said an hour later. “Thanks for coming over. Have a good weekend?”
“Just great,” the younger man replied. “We took the kids up to Teri’s parents’. Everybody had a great time.”
“Sit down, Philip. I have something very important to discuss with you. This is hard stuff now, do you understand? And absolutely private. Just between the two of us, okay?”
Philip seemed on his guard now and had a puzzled look on his face. Red went on: “Philip, you have a great background for your position and you’ve gotten off to a very fine start. You know?”
The younger man nodded slightly, warily.
“Philip,” and Red leaned forward: “I know you have a problem with alcohol. It doesn’t matter how I know. I know it for sure, do you understand? You don’t need to respond. Hear me out.
“We all like you and all of us want you to succeed. I most of all want you to succeed here, but you won’t if you don’t get professional help. I mean it: professional help. And I hereby direct you, as a requirement of your continuing here at this firm, to engage a counselor now, today, and follow all of his or her directions. Do you understand?
Philip was completely quiet, but with a slight nod, he indicated he did understand.
“Now, here’s what we’re going to do, Philip. I am right now going to pick up that telephone on my desk and I’m going to call the county health service. It’s just out of town on the way up to the city. They’re expecting my call. And I’m going to hand the phone over to you and you’re going to make an appointment. See? An appointment for today. You will sign a waiver form there, giving me the right to know if you’re keeping your appointments and following your counselor’s advice.”
He reached for the telephone. “And Philip, you have to keep this appointment, or you will be fired. I really, really don’t want to lose you, Philip. You’ve got all we need… if you can just get this thing under control.”
“If they …,” Philip had to clear his throat. “If they tell you I don’t have a problem…?”
“I’ll take their word for it. But they’re not going to say that, Philip.”
Red placed the call, and Philip very professionally made the appointment with Dr. MacDonald.
“I’m going at two this afternoon,” he told Red handing back the phone.
“That’s a good start, Philip. I’m going to stick with you all the way on this.” And Red and Philip shook hands,
11
Philip and Red touched base every morning. In a conversation in his office Red made it clear he didn’t need to know any details. Just if Philip was okay and was keeping his appointments and doing what his counselor said. Red had talked with Dr. MacDonald himself after that first appointment. He and Philip had made a weekly appointment.
Red asked if it would be contrary to Philip’s waiver for the counselor to tell him if Philip really did have an alcohol dependency.
“I can tell you,” he replied patiently, “that we have made a weekly appointment. …And I can tell you that I think it is likely I will also recommend a weekly support group.”
Red absorbed that. “You mean like AA?”
“Like that, yes.”
“So how are things going today?” Red asked.
“Oh, every day is pretty much alike,” Philip said. “It’s going okay, in other words.”
“Anything unusual going on with the staff?”
“No, we’re fine. The family’s fine too…”
“Good. Well, I’ll be over to your place tomorrow, for our regular business meeting.”
12
And everything did seem to be going well. Vera seemed somewhat relieved, when he purposely crossed paths with her and asked, “Anything going on, Vera? Anything good?”
“Oh, it’s good,” she would say… and then she would mention something specific they were doing over in Philip’s area.
“Well, we’ll keep on truckin’, okay?” Red would say, or something similar.
In one of his reports, Dr. MacDonald mentioned that Philip seemed to think he owed Red a lot. That too seemed positive, didn’t it?
And then, early one afternoon, Philip called: “Say, Red. I was wondering if I could come over for a minute.” Red didn’t know what to expect, but Philip’s tone sounded normal, smooth.
Philip handed him his letter of resignation, telling Red that he was moving on, taking a position as a department head, as he had been before, in a large city in a different state.
“What a waste,” his wife said at supper that evening. “You did what you could, Red.”
“Yeah,” he said. “So much for leverage.”
***
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Humor
***
1
I heard a corporate President tell this as a true story:
The corporation became concerned at some point that the hourly workers were too uncouth or poorly mannered and started a low-key campaign to introduce some civilized expectations into the workplace. Signs were posted in all the restrooms: "All employees will wash their hands before returning to work."
Soon afterwards, a supervisor was using a restroom just off the floor with the assembly line, when a worker came in, used the facilities, and walked over to the door.
"Hey!" the supervisor gestured to the sign. "Can't you read?"
The worker turned and said, a bit defiantly: "Yes, I can read. But I'm not going back to work... I'm going to lunch!"
2
Have you ever known someone who seems to know personally everyone else, and who in one way or another keeps reminding you of that fact?
Well, I live in a small city, and even I know such an individual: his name is Neil Deane. One time, for instance, a famous U. S. Senator was going to speak in the town just up the road and my friend couldn't make it, but he told me to say Hello from him to the Senator!
I wasn't going to do that, of course, but when I did have the opportunity to shake this man's hand, he asked me where I was from. When I told him, he said, "Well, you probably know my friend, Neil Deane."
That was sufficiently annoying. Then, on another occasion, for a national charity drive a retired athletic star came through our own town, and Neil and I both had the chance to tell him Hello. Only when he got to Neil, he said: "Hey, how's it going? How's your wife... Sam, is it?"
So when the two of us won a raffle to go to Rome at Easter, we went several hours early to St. Peter's square so that we could get a good look at the Pope. There were a lot of people already there, but we got a great place to stand, with a good view of that little balcony up high in the wall of the basilica.
After we had stood there a little while, chatting a bit with the others who came in around us, Neil said: "I'll be back in a little while" and disappeared into the crowd. I was thinking he should have taken care of that before we left the hotel.
Well, time went on, and Neil didn't come back. The crowd was becoming more and more packed in. I figured if we did get separated, we could each find our way back to the hotel, and was enjoying my conversation with a man from Africa who had recently arrived. He was very dark and tall and skinny, and he was wearing a very brightly decorated cloth covering his whole body. He spoke English very well, and had a British accent.
There had been no sign of Neil, when the heavy red curtains were pulled back and the Pope stepped out (to a huge ovation, of course) but among the several people standing with him... was my friend Neil!
The African gentleman leaned down to ask in my ear: "Can you tell me who that lad is in the white dress with the conical hat...
...standing next to Neil Deane?
3
A girl was being examined by her doctor. Her blouse was unbuttoned as he listened to her heart and her lungs with his stethoscope.
After a minute, he said: "Big breaths, Louise."
And she said: "Yeth, and I'm only thixthteen!"
4
Just about everyone - I suppose - has heard that, as we get older, our most prominant features simply become still more pronounced. Those who are a little stubborn, as they age, tend to become more stubborn. Those who can be irritable become more irritable.
In general, that is, those qualities that tend to characterize us the most earlier in life, tend to become more and more prominant as we grow older.
So, personally...
...I'm looking forward to becoming handsomer and smarter!
***
1
I heard a corporate President tell this as a true story:
The corporation became concerned at some point that the hourly workers were too uncouth or poorly mannered and started a low-key campaign to introduce some civilized expectations into the workplace. Signs were posted in all the restrooms: "All employees will wash their hands before returning to work."
Soon afterwards, a supervisor was using a restroom just off the floor with the assembly line, when a worker came in, used the facilities, and walked over to the door.
"Hey!" the supervisor gestured to the sign. "Can't you read?"
The worker turned and said, a bit defiantly: "Yes, I can read. But I'm not going back to work... I'm going to lunch!"
2
Have you ever known someone who seems to know personally everyone else, and who in one way or another keeps reminding you of that fact?
Well, I live in a small city, and even I know such an individual: his name is Neil Deane. One time, for instance, a famous U. S. Senator was going to speak in the town just up the road and my friend couldn't make it, but he told me to say Hello from him to the Senator!
I wasn't going to do that, of course, but when I did have the opportunity to shake this man's hand, he asked me where I was from. When I told him, he said, "Well, you probably know my friend, Neil Deane."
That was sufficiently annoying. Then, on another occasion, for a national charity drive a retired athletic star came through our own town, and Neil and I both had the chance to tell him Hello. Only when he got to Neil, he said: "Hey, how's it going? How's your wife... Sam, is it?"
So when the two of us won a raffle to go to Rome at Easter, we went several hours early to St. Peter's square so that we could get a good look at the Pope. There were a lot of people already there, but we got a great place to stand, with a good view of that little balcony up high in the wall of the basilica.
After we had stood there a little while, chatting a bit with the others who came in around us, Neil said: "I'll be back in a little while" and disappeared into the crowd. I was thinking he should have taken care of that before we left the hotel.
Well, time went on, and Neil didn't come back. The crowd was becoming more and more packed in. I figured if we did get separated, we could each find our way back to the hotel, and was enjoying my conversation with a man from Africa who had recently arrived. He was very dark and tall and skinny, and he was wearing a very brightly decorated cloth covering his whole body. He spoke English very well, and had a British accent.
There had been no sign of Neil, when the heavy red curtains were pulled back and the Pope stepped out (to a huge ovation, of course) but among the several people standing with him... was my friend Neil!
The African gentleman leaned down to ask in my ear: "Can you tell me who that lad is in the white dress with the conical hat...
...standing next to Neil Deane?
3
A girl was being examined by her doctor. Her blouse was unbuttoned as he listened to her heart and her lungs with his stethoscope.
After a minute, he said: "Big breaths, Louise."
And she said: "Yeth, and I'm only thixthteen!"
4
Just about everyone - I suppose - has heard that, as we get older, our most prominant features simply become still more pronounced. Those who are a little stubborn, as they age, tend to become more stubborn. Those who can be irritable become more irritable.
In general, that is, those qualities that tend to characterize us the most earlier in life, tend to become more and more prominant as we grow older.
So, personally...
...I'm looking forward to becoming handsomer and smarter!
***
Saturday, August 7, 2010
In Times of War, Times of Recession (essay)
***
1
First, we need to review some simple, basic concepts.
In a healthy, stable economy the consumers’ demand for the goods and services produced is more or less satisfied by the supply available. Prices stay more or less the same, because neither the supply nor the demand is too big or too small. When it happens that people want more goods and services than the economy is producing at that time, prices go up. The relative scarcity of goods and services makes them more valuable and makes the people willing to pay more for what they want and need. The rise in prices is called, of course, inflation.
When it happens that the economy can produce more than the people want or can afford, the goods and services become less valuable. People have less money – or are unwilling to spend enough of their money – to keep the economy going at its current level. There is more being produced than can be purchased, so those firms producing the goods and services compete more among themselves for customers; the surest way for them to compete effectively, attracting more customers than their competitors, is to lower prices. This opposite state of affairs from inflation is called recession, as prices “recede” from their former levels.
Often, either kind of these imbalances between demand and supply corrects itself in a little while: when prices go down, people become able, or willing, to buy more. At the same time, as all prices go down, producers are able to spend less on the goods and labor needed to make their products. Producers provide fewer goods and services and people buy more, until a relative balance between the supply produced and the people’s demand is again achieved.
When prices go up, people become willing or able to buy fewer goods and services than they had been, reducing demand. At the same time, the prices the producers themselves have to pay for the materials and the labor required to produce their goods and services also go up, so they cut back on the supply they are providing. These two processes continue at the same time until again a relative balance is achieved between the demand and the supply available.
However, this self-correction rather often seems not to work, at least not right away, and serious problems arise.
If people continue to have or gain more money than what producers can provide to meet rising demand, prices will continue to rise. Still more goods and services will be produced; more materials will be bought and more workers will be engaged, providing people with still more money and driving prices up still further. In this situation, it often happens that some individuals prosper less than others; sometimes many are able to afford less and less because the prices they are seeing grow higher and higher, while a few can afford to buy more and more, continuing to drive some prices - such as real estate prices - further and further upward. This is sometimes called an inflationary spiral.
On the other hand, if prices go down so steadily that small adjustments in the supply of goods and services are not enough to restore stability, producers will have to take extreme measures. Some firms will be strong enough to keep up with the falling demand by laying off more and more of their labor force and by making continuing reductions in the materials needed to provide the goods and services. They may have to stop providing some things altogether. And other, weaker firms may have to go out of business completely.
As the purchase of materials and the payrolls of workers shrink further, the suppliers and the workers have still less to spend on what they want and need. That drives prices still farther down, producing more cutbacks and more layoffs, reducing the value of people’s savings and their homes and other assets, which in turn cause still further reductions in the money available to buy, and so on. A downward spiral of this type is called a depression, which is an extreme case of recession.
In 2008, all the economies of the world – including the United States’ economy – experienced a sudden, significant recession, the effects of which promise to stay with us for a long time: high unemployment and prices not high enough to stimulate resumption of production.
2
At least since the worldwide, Great Depression of the 1930s, it has been well known that national governments can intervene in the operations of the economy with beneficial results for all, in ways that are temporary and reversible. As a result of such adjustments of national governments’ fiscal policies, the economies of the world have been relatively stable and self-correcting since World War II.
The basic principles are easy to understand:
In times of inflation, relatively too much money is available in the economy for a healthy relative stability; so what is needed is a group of measures reducing the amount of money available. The actual amount of money, dollars and cents, produced by the national government can be reduced and higher interest rates can be paid for national bonds; private banks too can raise their interest rates so that people will be inclined to save more, also reducing the availability of money to drive prices up and up.
There are always schools and roads to be built, bridges to be maintained, national debts to be repaid, libraries and museums to be expanded, and in general, infrastructure to be upgraded; so another tried and true method of controlling inflation is to raise taxes, thus directly and surely reducing private demand. Finally, the need for controlling so-called “runaway” inflation creates a clear opportunity for paying down the level of national debt.
In times – like ours – times of recession, national governments can increase the supply of money entered into circulation, up to a point. They can also reduce interest rates up to a point so that more businesses can borrow what they need to keep going, thus continuing to buy materials and pay workers.
And a time of recession, or depression, is a perfect opportunity for a national government to add to its debt, borrowing new moneys so that our government can itself provide additional goods and services – like upgrading public infrastructure and the like – in order to give producers business and to pay workers wages which together cause more money to enter the marketplace and to raise demand for goods and services.
Such stimulation of the economy by government spending, stabilizing prices and putting workers back on the job, will remain temporary, in effect only to the level needed and for the time required to restore a relative balance between the supply and the demand that can be sustained within the private economy.
3
In a time of war – like our own time – it is obviously necessary for a national government to spend more than in times of peace with a relatively stable economy.
To be able to do so, a national government usually increases its debt, perhaps selling war bonds to the general public as well as borrowing on the international money market. It often seems to happen that the extra money spent on the war effort does not stay within the nation’s own borders and the extra military money also tends to go to large corporations, their executives and stock-holders, rather than to the wider public who are somewhat more likely to spend it. In cases like this, the extra spending does not produce the rise in prices, the inflation, that war spending sometimes produces.
We are now at war, and at the same time we are trying to recover from the most widespread and profound recession since the 1930s. To pay for the wars (Iraq and Afghanistan), for years we have been running up our national debt. To attempt to promote a rise in the value of our labor, our goods and services, our savings and other assets, we have also increased the money supply (as much as we prudently could) and lowered interest rates just about as far as they will go; and we have done a little – not much – so-called stimulus spending in hopes of injecting temporary government money directly into the economy.
The end of the war effort is not really in sight; we will have extraordinary military expenses for at least a decade. The economy is no longer descending toward depression, but is not making much progress either.
It seems obvious that this is a time when we need to increase the national debt substantially further. The U. S. government still seems to be to the safest public investment available in the world, so we do not now seem close to an excessive debt. Another bad side effect of high national debt is sometimes inflation, but we are so far from seeing prices rise significantly that to be concerned about inflation now seems laughable.
In short, everything indicates that now is a time to look to our government to engage in a truly extraordinary level of spending, as much of it as possible right here at home. Basically, there are only two ways for governments to raise the level of money available for such spending: increasing the national debt and raising taxes.
If we are reluctant to raise the taxes paid by those relatively few individuals and corporations with extraordinary levels of revenue and accrued assets, then we must increase debt.
On the other hand, if we are reluctant to further increase the national debt, then we must raise taxes, perhaps beginning with the wealthiest individuals and corporations who can afford it most easily and whose day-to-day spending will decline less than the immediate spending of those less financially comfortable.
Facing the indefinite continuation of both our time of war and our time of recession, our government – if it is responsible – will inevitably raise its expenditures beyond current levels; this is the greater good in our time. To finance this additional spending, we should consider a modest raise in the national debt and a modest increase in the taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations.
***
1
First, we need to review some simple, basic concepts.
In a healthy, stable economy the consumers’ demand for the goods and services produced is more or less satisfied by the supply available. Prices stay more or less the same, because neither the supply nor the demand is too big or too small. When it happens that people want more goods and services than the economy is producing at that time, prices go up. The relative scarcity of goods and services makes them more valuable and makes the people willing to pay more for what they want and need. The rise in prices is called, of course, inflation.
When it happens that the economy can produce more than the people want or can afford, the goods and services become less valuable. People have less money – or are unwilling to spend enough of their money – to keep the economy going at its current level. There is more being produced than can be purchased, so those firms producing the goods and services compete more among themselves for customers; the surest way for them to compete effectively, attracting more customers than their competitors, is to lower prices. This opposite state of affairs from inflation is called recession, as prices “recede” from their former levels.
Often, either kind of these imbalances between demand and supply corrects itself in a little while: when prices go down, people become able, or willing, to buy more. At the same time, as all prices go down, producers are able to spend less on the goods and labor needed to make their products. Producers provide fewer goods and services and people buy more, until a relative balance between the supply produced and the people’s demand is again achieved.
When prices go up, people become willing or able to buy fewer goods and services than they had been, reducing demand. At the same time, the prices the producers themselves have to pay for the materials and the labor required to produce their goods and services also go up, so they cut back on the supply they are providing. These two processes continue at the same time until again a relative balance is achieved between the demand and the supply available.
However, this self-correction rather often seems not to work, at least not right away, and serious problems arise.
If people continue to have or gain more money than what producers can provide to meet rising demand, prices will continue to rise. Still more goods and services will be produced; more materials will be bought and more workers will be engaged, providing people with still more money and driving prices up still further. In this situation, it often happens that some individuals prosper less than others; sometimes many are able to afford less and less because the prices they are seeing grow higher and higher, while a few can afford to buy more and more, continuing to drive some prices - such as real estate prices - further and further upward. This is sometimes called an inflationary spiral.
On the other hand, if prices go down so steadily that small adjustments in the supply of goods and services are not enough to restore stability, producers will have to take extreme measures. Some firms will be strong enough to keep up with the falling demand by laying off more and more of their labor force and by making continuing reductions in the materials needed to provide the goods and services. They may have to stop providing some things altogether. And other, weaker firms may have to go out of business completely.
As the purchase of materials and the payrolls of workers shrink further, the suppliers and the workers have still less to spend on what they want and need. That drives prices still farther down, producing more cutbacks and more layoffs, reducing the value of people’s savings and their homes and other assets, which in turn cause still further reductions in the money available to buy, and so on. A downward spiral of this type is called a depression, which is an extreme case of recession.
In 2008, all the economies of the world – including the United States’ economy – experienced a sudden, significant recession, the effects of which promise to stay with us for a long time: high unemployment and prices not high enough to stimulate resumption of production.
2
At least since the worldwide, Great Depression of the 1930s, it has been well known that national governments can intervene in the operations of the economy with beneficial results for all, in ways that are temporary and reversible. As a result of such adjustments of national governments’ fiscal policies, the economies of the world have been relatively stable and self-correcting since World War II.
The basic principles are easy to understand:
In times of inflation, relatively too much money is available in the economy for a healthy relative stability; so what is needed is a group of measures reducing the amount of money available. The actual amount of money, dollars and cents, produced by the national government can be reduced and higher interest rates can be paid for national bonds; private banks too can raise their interest rates so that people will be inclined to save more, also reducing the availability of money to drive prices up and up.
There are always schools and roads to be built, bridges to be maintained, national debts to be repaid, libraries and museums to be expanded, and in general, infrastructure to be upgraded; so another tried and true method of controlling inflation is to raise taxes, thus directly and surely reducing private demand. Finally, the need for controlling so-called “runaway” inflation creates a clear opportunity for paying down the level of national debt.
In times – like ours – times of recession, national governments can increase the supply of money entered into circulation, up to a point. They can also reduce interest rates up to a point so that more businesses can borrow what they need to keep going, thus continuing to buy materials and pay workers.
And a time of recession, or depression, is a perfect opportunity for a national government to add to its debt, borrowing new moneys so that our government can itself provide additional goods and services – like upgrading public infrastructure and the like – in order to give producers business and to pay workers wages which together cause more money to enter the marketplace and to raise demand for goods and services.
Such stimulation of the economy by government spending, stabilizing prices and putting workers back on the job, will remain temporary, in effect only to the level needed and for the time required to restore a relative balance between the supply and the demand that can be sustained within the private economy.
3
In a time of war – like our own time – it is obviously necessary for a national government to spend more than in times of peace with a relatively stable economy.
To be able to do so, a national government usually increases its debt, perhaps selling war bonds to the general public as well as borrowing on the international money market. It often seems to happen that the extra money spent on the war effort does not stay within the nation’s own borders and the extra military money also tends to go to large corporations, their executives and stock-holders, rather than to the wider public who are somewhat more likely to spend it. In cases like this, the extra spending does not produce the rise in prices, the inflation, that war spending sometimes produces.
We are now at war, and at the same time we are trying to recover from the most widespread and profound recession since the 1930s. To pay for the wars (Iraq and Afghanistan), for years we have been running up our national debt. To attempt to promote a rise in the value of our labor, our goods and services, our savings and other assets, we have also increased the money supply (as much as we prudently could) and lowered interest rates just about as far as they will go; and we have done a little – not much – so-called stimulus spending in hopes of injecting temporary government money directly into the economy.
The end of the war effort is not really in sight; we will have extraordinary military expenses for at least a decade. The economy is no longer descending toward depression, but is not making much progress either.
It seems obvious that this is a time when we need to increase the national debt substantially further. The U. S. government still seems to be to the safest public investment available in the world, so we do not now seem close to an excessive debt. Another bad side effect of high national debt is sometimes inflation, but we are so far from seeing prices rise significantly that to be concerned about inflation now seems laughable.
In short, everything indicates that now is a time to look to our government to engage in a truly extraordinary level of spending, as much of it as possible right here at home. Basically, there are only two ways for governments to raise the level of money available for such spending: increasing the national debt and raising taxes.
If we are reluctant to raise the taxes paid by those relatively few individuals and corporations with extraordinary levels of revenue and accrued assets, then we must increase debt.
On the other hand, if we are reluctant to further increase the national debt, then we must raise taxes, perhaps beginning with the wealthiest individuals and corporations who can afford it most easily and whose day-to-day spending will decline less than the immediate spending of those less financially comfortable.
Facing the indefinite continuation of both our time of war and our time of recession, our government – if it is responsible – will inevitably raise its expenditures beyond current levels; this is the greater good in our time. To finance this additional spending, we should consider a modest raise in the national debt and a modest increase in the taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations.
***
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Reminiscence: Listening to Radio as a Child
***
Although my radio listening today is limited to classical music, NPR, baseball games, and an occasional old radio show online or on MP3 CD, it is still probably true to say I have listened to radio just about my whole life, now almost 70 years long.
1
From the time I was a toddler in central Texas and during summers even after I had started school, I spent mornings with my mother and our maid Clorey as they did the routine housework. The radio seemed to be always on, starting with Arthur Godfrey Time every morning (often after Don McNeil and The Breakfast Club). I also remember Mother working around the house while listening to favorite soap operas, many of which ran for 15 minutes daily, such as Our Gal Sunday, Just Plain Bill, Ma Perkins, and in the afternoon, Young Widder Brown and Pepper Young’s Family. As Mother got supper ready each evening, in my memory One Man’s Family was always playing on the ivory-colored, bakelite Philco radio on the kitchen shelf.
Our family sometimes listened to early evening shows like Truth or Consequences, Life with Luigi, Twenty Questions, or Lum and Abner (I could never figure out why that was Mother’s favorite). I remember sitting at my grandparents’ house about 200 miles north of our home beneath a tall old radio console with a small lighted-up orange dial, listening to Pappy Lee O’Daniel: “Pass the Biscuits, Pappy! [” This must have been after 1948, when he finished his term in the U S Senate.]
2
At some time during grammar-school, I got my own radio. The first was perhaps a crystal receiver which did not require electricity; I remember fooling around with the ear phone and this small green plastic torpedo-shaped toy that was tuned by pulling out or pushing in a little copper-colored shaft which when fully extended was about four inches long. I listened to snippets of whatever I could tune in, I suppose.
Soon I had my own, real radio in my bedroom. On many a long summer afternoon, I could be found there working a jigsaw puzzle, or drawing and coloring a picture, while listening to The Game of the Day, with play-by-play announcers like Buddy Blatner, Lindsay Nelson, Al Helfer, the old Scotsman Gordon McLendon, and Dizzy Dean – each on a different day, of course. The Yankees were the dominant team in baseball, and they seemed to be on more often than anyone else with Rizzuto, Jerry Coleman, Berra, Gil McDougal, Mantle, Gene Woodling, Bauer, Ford, Lopat, Alllie Reynolds (“The Chief”), and all the others.
But National League games were carried too, so I could hear about Musial, Banks, Kiner, the great Dodgers, and all the rest. I don’t know why, but Eddie Stanky was one of my favorites back then. (Later, I switched to Rizzuto because his name was on my glove… It was black!) And what about Feller, and Rosen, and Nellie Fox?
A distant but powerful big-city station would sometimes come in pretty well, for some reason carrying every Chicago White Sox game; maybe their local minor league team was in the Sox’s farm system. The nearest minor league team, the Pioneers, was not affiliated with any major league club, but they played teams in the Big State League who were. Their games were on almost every night, and there was a year or two when I listened often, noticing how the crowd background noise always seemed the same and how the announcer would sometimes fall silent. There was sometimes a clicking noise in the background. (Much later I learned that the announcers did not travel with the team and gave the play-by-play from a teletype machine, while speaking over recorded ballpark sounds.)
3
By the time I was in high school, my radio listening habits had changed. On weekends I eagerly plugged into western dramas and cops-and-robbers shows, often on a little portable I took with me as I did my required yardwork. Favorites included Have Gun/Will Travel with John Dehner and Gunsmoke with William Conrad and Harley Bair, The Green Hornet, Mike Hammer, Suspense and Inner Sanctum… And of course there were the comedy shows: Amos and Andy, The Jack Benny Program, Ozzie and Harriet, Phil Harris, Martin and Lewis…
I was no longer waiting all week for Saturday morning to get underway with Sparky’s high-pitched voice calling out, “No school today!” or for Let’s Pretend (but I probably would sneak in a listen now and then.)
The little tabletop radio belonging to someone else in the family somehow had its case broken, and I adopted it. I set it up on the bedside table right next to my pillow. Eventually it had no case at all, so at night when the lights were off I could see the warm glow of the vacuum tubes in the dark.
By this time, I had discovered that radio musical accompaniment helped me to focus on “boring” homework assignments. Now that I come to think of it, I wonder if back then in the late 1950s evening network programming wasn’t becoming limited to Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights – and in about 1955, when I was about 12 or 13, the Pioneers ceased to exist! – so that on the radio, music was about my only alternative.
Although my tastes at this time were not absolutely catholic, they were at least “episcopalian,” as I enjoyed listening to pop, country and western, and – it seemed unusual in my crowd – rhythm and blues. Where I lived in Texas, the strongest stations were the Austin ones: KTBC, KVET, and KNOW … plus one other that I will describe in a minute.
4
I can’t remember what I tuned in shortly after supper (surely, gasp, I didn’t endure just… silence!), but I believe it was eight o’clock on week nights when a program of country and western music came on called “Western Cavalcade.” They advertised a popular night spot just north of Austin called the Dessau Dance Hall where in fact many of the stars of the day performed, whose latest hits were played each evening on the air, people like Ernest Tubb, Webb Pierce, Ferlin Husky, Rex Allen, Slim Whitman, Lefty Frizzell, Hank Snow, and others of course.
Women’s names don’t flood back in my memory, but there must have been songs by women on “Western Calvacade,” at least Patsy Cline. Jim Reeves and George Hamilton IV were favorites, I seem to recall, as well as a new recording of “The Streets of Laredo” whose young artist – with a big, deep voice (no, not Marty Robbins) – I can no longer remember.
And I have been saving the best till last.
Every week night, at nine which was my usual bedtime, I could hear from Austin a local D J who called himself “Dr. Hepcat.” As I lay there with the case-less radio murmuring next to my ear, this older African-American gentleman would say, with “Sweet Georgia Brown” playing behind him: “Hello, chappy. Hello, chick. This is your old friend Dr. Hepcat…” (I eventually came to discover that the good doctor’s real name was Lavada Durst.)
So almost every night - as I remember it - I would drift slowly off to sleep listening to Dr. Hepcat’s current favorite singles by the likes of Al Hibbler, Fats Domino, Ben E King, the newcomer Sam Cooke, Jackie Butler (“The Ice Man”), The Clovers, Etta James, Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, maybe eventually The Platters, and Chuck Berry. As I remember it, Dr. Hepcat played the better known, more mainstream R and B performers…
But that was not so much true of the D J who, on Austin’s KTXN on Saturday mornings, played Little Willie John, Big Joe Turner (“Boss Man of the Blues”), The Robins, The Charms, Ruth Brown, Big Mama Thornton (“Hound Dog” makes a lot more sense coming from a woman), The Midnighters and The Cadillacs, Little Walter, Bull Moose Jackson, Lavern Baker, Ella Mae Morse, the young Ray Charles, Little Richard, The Gladiolas, Roy Hamilton, Ivory Joe Hunter, and so many others.
KTXN was a little, mostly Spanish-language station that was on the air only during the daylight hours. I understood it was located on Austin’s east side (where Mexican- and African-Americans lived). Jockey Jones’s show was - I believe - the only KTXN program that was not in Spanish, and even some of Jockey Jones' commercials were en espagnol. His principal sponsor was a market called Guajardo’s, whose special seemed always to be H and H Coffee.
How I wish I could tune in again this morning to Jockey Jones and to the Mutual Game of the Day this afternoon, with Dr. Hepcat to look forward to tonight. What a treat that would be!
***
Although my radio listening today is limited to classical music, NPR, baseball games, and an occasional old radio show online or on MP3 CD, it is still probably true to say I have listened to radio just about my whole life, now almost 70 years long.
1
From the time I was a toddler in central Texas and during summers even after I had started school, I spent mornings with my mother and our maid Clorey as they did the routine housework. The radio seemed to be always on, starting with Arthur Godfrey Time every morning (often after Don McNeil and The Breakfast Club). I also remember Mother working around the house while listening to favorite soap operas, many of which ran for 15 minutes daily, such as Our Gal Sunday, Just Plain Bill, Ma Perkins, and in the afternoon, Young Widder Brown and Pepper Young’s Family. As Mother got supper ready each evening, in my memory One Man’s Family was always playing on the ivory-colored, bakelite Philco radio on the kitchen shelf.
Our family sometimes listened to early evening shows like Truth or Consequences, Life with Luigi, Twenty Questions, or Lum and Abner (I could never figure out why that was Mother’s favorite). I remember sitting at my grandparents’ house about 200 miles north of our home beneath a tall old radio console with a small lighted-up orange dial, listening to Pappy Lee O’Daniel: “Pass the Biscuits, Pappy! [” This must have been after 1948, when he finished his term in the U S Senate.]
2
At some time during grammar-school, I got my own radio. The first was perhaps a crystal receiver which did not require electricity; I remember fooling around with the ear phone and this small green plastic torpedo-shaped toy that was tuned by pulling out or pushing in a little copper-colored shaft which when fully extended was about four inches long. I listened to snippets of whatever I could tune in, I suppose.
Soon I had my own, real radio in my bedroom. On many a long summer afternoon, I could be found there working a jigsaw puzzle, or drawing and coloring a picture, while listening to The Game of the Day, with play-by-play announcers like Buddy Blatner, Lindsay Nelson, Al Helfer, the old Scotsman Gordon McLendon, and Dizzy Dean – each on a different day, of course. The Yankees were the dominant team in baseball, and they seemed to be on more often than anyone else with Rizzuto, Jerry Coleman, Berra, Gil McDougal, Mantle, Gene Woodling, Bauer, Ford, Lopat, Alllie Reynolds (“The Chief”), and all the others.
But National League games were carried too, so I could hear about Musial, Banks, Kiner, the great Dodgers, and all the rest. I don’t know why, but Eddie Stanky was one of my favorites back then. (Later, I switched to Rizzuto because his name was on my glove… It was black!) And what about Feller, and Rosen, and Nellie Fox?
A distant but powerful big-city station would sometimes come in pretty well, for some reason carrying every Chicago White Sox game; maybe their local minor league team was in the Sox’s farm system. The nearest minor league team, the Pioneers, was not affiliated with any major league club, but they played teams in the Big State League who were. Their games were on almost every night, and there was a year or two when I listened often, noticing how the crowd background noise always seemed the same and how the announcer would sometimes fall silent. There was sometimes a clicking noise in the background. (Much later I learned that the announcers did not travel with the team and gave the play-by-play from a teletype machine, while speaking over recorded ballpark sounds.)
3
By the time I was in high school, my radio listening habits had changed. On weekends I eagerly plugged into western dramas and cops-and-robbers shows, often on a little portable I took with me as I did my required yardwork. Favorites included Have Gun/Will Travel with John Dehner and Gunsmoke with William Conrad and Harley Bair, The Green Hornet, Mike Hammer, Suspense and Inner Sanctum… And of course there were the comedy shows: Amos and Andy, The Jack Benny Program, Ozzie and Harriet, Phil Harris, Martin and Lewis…
I was no longer waiting all week for Saturday morning to get underway with Sparky’s high-pitched voice calling out, “No school today!” or for Let’s Pretend (but I probably would sneak in a listen now and then.)
The little tabletop radio belonging to someone else in the family somehow had its case broken, and I adopted it. I set it up on the bedside table right next to my pillow. Eventually it had no case at all, so at night when the lights were off I could see the warm glow of the vacuum tubes in the dark.
By this time, I had discovered that radio musical accompaniment helped me to focus on “boring” homework assignments. Now that I come to think of it, I wonder if back then in the late 1950s evening network programming wasn’t becoming limited to Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights – and in about 1955, when I was about 12 or 13, the Pioneers ceased to exist! – so that on the radio, music was about my only alternative.
Although my tastes at this time were not absolutely catholic, they were at least “episcopalian,” as I enjoyed listening to pop, country and western, and – it seemed unusual in my crowd – rhythm and blues. Where I lived in Texas, the strongest stations were the Austin ones: KTBC, KVET, and KNOW … plus one other that I will describe in a minute.
4
I can’t remember what I tuned in shortly after supper (surely, gasp, I didn’t endure just… silence!), but I believe it was eight o’clock on week nights when a program of country and western music came on called “Western Cavalcade.” They advertised a popular night spot just north of Austin called the Dessau Dance Hall where in fact many of the stars of the day performed, whose latest hits were played each evening on the air, people like Ernest Tubb, Webb Pierce, Ferlin Husky, Rex Allen, Slim Whitman, Lefty Frizzell, Hank Snow, and others of course.
Women’s names don’t flood back in my memory, but there must have been songs by women on “Western Calvacade,” at least Patsy Cline. Jim Reeves and George Hamilton IV were favorites, I seem to recall, as well as a new recording of “The Streets of Laredo” whose young artist – with a big, deep voice (no, not Marty Robbins) – I can no longer remember.
And I have been saving the best till last.
Every week night, at nine which was my usual bedtime, I could hear from Austin a local D J who called himself “Dr. Hepcat.” As I lay there with the case-less radio murmuring next to my ear, this older African-American gentleman would say, with “Sweet Georgia Brown” playing behind him: “Hello, chappy. Hello, chick. This is your old friend Dr. Hepcat…” (I eventually came to discover that the good doctor’s real name was Lavada Durst.)
So almost every night - as I remember it - I would drift slowly off to sleep listening to Dr. Hepcat’s current favorite singles by the likes of Al Hibbler, Fats Domino, Ben E King, the newcomer Sam Cooke, Jackie Butler (“The Ice Man”), The Clovers, Etta James, Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, maybe eventually The Platters, and Chuck Berry. As I remember it, Dr. Hepcat played the better known, more mainstream R and B performers…
But that was not so much true of the D J who, on Austin’s KTXN on Saturday mornings, played Little Willie John, Big Joe Turner (“Boss Man of the Blues”), The Robins, The Charms, Ruth Brown, Big Mama Thornton (“Hound Dog” makes a lot more sense coming from a woman), The Midnighters and The Cadillacs, Little Walter, Bull Moose Jackson, Lavern Baker, Ella Mae Morse, the young Ray Charles, Little Richard, The Gladiolas, Roy Hamilton, Ivory Joe Hunter, and so many others.
KTXN was a little, mostly Spanish-language station that was on the air only during the daylight hours. I understood it was located on Austin’s east side (where Mexican- and African-Americans lived). Jockey Jones’s show was - I believe - the only KTXN program that was not in Spanish, and even some of Jockey Jones' commercials were en espagnol. His principal sponsor was a market called Guajardo’s, whose special seemed always to be H and H Coffee.
How I wish I could tune in again this morning to Jockey Jones and to the Mutual Game of the Day this afternoon, with Dr. Hepcat to look forward to tonight. What a treat that would be!
***
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