Well, it's really only a painting of a Baltimore Oriole, all orange and black against a blank plaster wall under the basement stairway. My dad built me this tiny cramped retreat for my collection of images of birds. It was my brother Chick (who taught architecture and interior design until his recent retirement) who inscribed the golden ornithological logo. A few weeks ago he stopped by to show off his picture to a friend. Chick treats our house, which was our childhood home, as though it were his personal museum. He made a beeline down below and opened the door of the dusky cave to tell his tale. Into the shaft of light burst the brilliant plumage.
"We made a book about the evolution of our feathered friends from lizards and reptiles. Mike wrote the words and I did the illustrations." That's the way he presented it.
"It was forbidden to speak about evolution in the public schools. It seemed somehow sacrilegious to point out that creatures derive from other forms: they didn't just emerge from the hand of God." I made this little speech, which I hoped would enhance the mystery of the tiny childish chamber. My brother would have none of it. He just about said, "Pshaw." I added another comment. "My education evolved out of the Rochambeau Branch Library. They actually lit the fires on the hearth during winter holidays. During the summer I took twenty volumes from that wise owl's lair to our vacation retreat to fill in the gaps in the public school curriculum"
That basement closet at my home has become just and only that. We keep leftover clothes that will go away to a bin, or costumes that may serve on Hallowe'en, or just tokens of past fashions in this space. It took a visit from my brother to bring back its peculiar past.
When we were children, we made clubhouses out of any little nook or cranny in a house not Victorian and generous in alcoves and hideaways, just awkward corners and eaves. There we would hide our hobbies, pretty simple ones -- collections of comic books and boxes of cards. Not your sports cards, but wartime airplane spotting cards, and movie star cards, and, for us, Audubon Society decks of birdwatcher cards.
That rather grand version of the oriole commanded my respect and set the stage for our careers at R.I.S.D.
Maybe that's why I see R.I.S.D. as sort of secret closet club. Once our school puts up its grand new campus, and leaves behind its exquisite 1940's library across from the Athenaeum for grander quarters downtown over the river, maybe it will lose that intimate quality and become something high and mighty. In the meantime, our brief little rendezvous in the id of our homestead, the nest of an oriole, sings a little song.
After our sherry by the fire, we went downtown to dinner at The Old Canteen. Its walls were decorated fifty years ago with images of Venice, done by our uncle Herb Fink, upon his return from his Prix de Rome. The landscape with figures was deeply familiar to us. Herb too had pursued his interests in art and in geography and history at the corner public library, the Rochambeau Branch. My brother and I feel that Providence belongs to us, perhaps especially the quarter surrounding Rochambeau, and that we belong to R.I.S.D., a toy world. Not long ago, at R.I.S.D. I heard a strange conversation among faculty. They claimed that public libraries, like museums, had been created and maintained to support the power of the elite and to diminish the authority of the working classes. In the case of our family, quite the reverse was true. Rochambeau, like the R.I.S.D. museum, empowered us and liberated us, living up to the logo "Enlightenment." My oriole in the cellar struck me as a personification of all that.
It was the last summer before the opening up of the "fabulous" fifties and the closing down of the postwar forties. We didn't yet think of the East Bay as a suburban world. It was for us East Side cityslickers a series of summer communities-Hampden Meadows, Barrington, Warren, Bristol. We spent the days biking on our clunky American models around the curving roads and trails among the small orchards and farmlands, admiring the variety of homes from grand manors to very simple bungalows and proud of knowing our routes while our parents were away at work. We might even hike at night for a moody movie.
In those days you didn't have a phone at your summer place. It was before the age of television. All we had were our books or comics, our cribbage boards, maybe a hammock or glider in the yard to swing on and while away an hour, and the cove for an afternoon swim-especially if the tide was high.
We-or at least I-got those books from the Rochambeau Branch: a full load of 20 were allotted and allowed. They traveled with me the same route eastward and kept me close company morning noon and night, like pets.
I like to stop by and stare at our house on the cove. It bears a plaque now dated 1927. We got it in 1943 and stayed for seven summer seasons. I've used up whatever nostalgia I kept of those days. What with sunburns, poison ivy, and early teen blues, I don't look back through rose colored glasses-and not in anger either. But I nevertheless think of that summer of '49 as a wonderful spell all the same.
The girls on their screened in front porches in Barrington were so lovely. It was a treat to cover the space of County Road and spend some time visiting them and their houses-just a little fancier than ours. The way their city homes across the dividing line the length of Rochambeau Avenue at Hope Street in Providence, were a little grander than ours. They were like little princesses ruling over their realms and planning their future empires in the fabulous fifties. But mostly during that spell of seven summers I was a reader, expecting the world to conform to the plots of the novels I read, which were just a bit over my head. I come across these novels, or films made from them, and they seem so exotic by today's realistic or at least crude standards.
The things you can find nowadays in the antique shops of Warren are precisely the same items that came with our place in Hampden Meadows, and none of it cost anything at all in that era when everybody wanted the latest new stuff. Who could have dreamed how precious they would become in half a century? I can remember the fate of every single chair, chest, tool, cloth, or pot from our closets, and I find their twins as I drive the roads I used to cycle, stopping among the elegant antique shops.
The town of Bristol has become a special treat with its tea rooms and little bookstores. Its wee downtown where every street has a view of the water reflecting the sky, an unchanged horizon of history both collective and personal. I make my pilgrimage to East Bay, starting with the customary curve to my family's place. These short sojourns in Hampden Meadows, Barrington, Warren, and Bristol give me pleasure and nourishment. The odysseys down Rochambeau across the Boulevard, over the bridges to the trail and around the crisscrossing bikepaths are almost like patriotic prayers, like the words to the ballad of 1949: "Gonna Take a Sentimental Journey." The windshields of my little Suzuki X90 coupe become an open book as I read in memory the texts of the stories and the anecdotes of 1949.
While spring comes nearer, I dream of some peaceful time in South County, especially in this era when you can get any volume from any branch without carrying a ton in your luggage.
A couple of decades ago I established a screened gazebo in Narragansett as a shaded retreat for my summer reading and as an office for my typewriter. I wrote columns for summer newspapers and translated a French guide text for Foster Family Plan. In time the space got converted into a dovecote. I raised peach ringnecked pigeons until my birds relocated to a neighbor's barn, cheerfully or mournfully depending on your ear for birdcalls.
Then my gazebo summerhouse readingroom stood and waited as my daughters penned their stuffed animals and left the playhouse behind: we acquired a pet Italian greyhound who hunted and tossed those toy fantasy beasts about while teething and training.
The garden gazebo has held bikes, kept deckchairs safe from winter's damage, and put in time discreetly as a listening post when guests stop by with secret stories not to be overheard indoors in our tight cabin.
This past August I found decay in the foundation timbers. The shed has seen better days. My family has a rat tradition of sticking loyally to things, witnesses to personal history. My gazebo reference and study carel echoes with the plaints of pigeons, the complaints and giggles of girls, the tapping of a manual typewriter and the sound of words learned in Paris, as well as stanzas from old poems and phrases from Victorian novels.
Hollyhocks, roses, vincas, and a wild mulberry bearing a hummingbird nest surround my gazebo, which has taken its realm as focal point of my yard. A rusty red wagon holds the models for South Park characters. A birdfeeder dangles from a steel pole. Books and poems give you delusions of grandeur as you make a bench a throne.
I was born on the border of Roger Williams Park. My first imprinted pictures of the world from within a wicker stroller were the gardens. When we moved to the East Sick I found on my bike in Swan Point the same idealized versions of nature, a humanized wilderness. My companion was often my late grammar school classmate, whose father was then the principal horticulturist. At the original consecration of the cemetery at Swan Point, the words were declared, "A charm there is to soothe grief, in autumn's pale and fallen leaf." I sought grandeur and transcendance in the wall of great boulders and in the marble angels. Today the current horticulturist strolls the grounds and fills me in on its life beyond the sculptures of dead children, the cannonballs from the Civil War, the slate pages of the past, the miniature pyramids and Italian villas. "This giant sassafras is usually a southern tree, but grows happily here." He knows the hawks that prey on squirrels and he reads the language of bark and leaf. We come upon an apple-shaped green fruit. "If you open it you will fmd a walnut." At the resting place of H.P.Lovecraft I find handwritten passages from the poet's pen, collar bills, shells and stones, gifts to the soul of the chronicler of Providence. "I am Providence," he had declared, and I steal the line, a graverobber.
I had been trying for many semesters to find the virtually vanished "Story of G.I. Joe," from among my various distributors of bygone movies. The title finally showed up in a catalogue and I jumped at the chance to view it as an adult.
The film bio of Ernie Pyle had been made just before the end of World War II. Burgess Meredith portrays the renowned and beloved war journalist and Robert Mitchum begins his career as a tragic hero. This serious and responsible depiction of the plight of the ordinary soldier in the invasion and liberation of Italy won critical as well as audience acclaim, but perhaps because of its extraordinary honesty lost out in mass popularity to more sensational treatments. I found it to be an influential precurser to the neo-realist Italian productions of Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio da Sica. It merits a review and recall.
Ernie Pyle carried his handy typewriter into the front lines, the classic little guy, no longer young, who reports the straightforward word of how the doughboy acts, feels, and talks, each infantryman with his own point of view. Pyle sends his letter home in his column for his folks, his girl, his neighbors.
One married enlisted man gets a recording of his baby son's voice and tries to play it on a Victrola. He freaks out to battle fatigue. Another, an American Italian, falls for a local Sicilian girl and gets into big trouble. A third manages to carry a pet puppy into the big fight. When the boy is killed, the dog's wailing lets us know. None of these portrayals, many of which "star" actual men in uniform, comes across either as artifically sentimental or as falsely grandiose, but only human. The cinematography is poetic and powerful, poignant and yet intimately subtle and always dignified.
In fact, "The Story of G.I.Joe" transcends itself and turns into epic tragedy rather than either melodrama or documentary. The movie hit the box office before Pyle had died in Japan. It's not really about him but rather by him. It quotes his words but features the American troops he befriended and loved.
Directed by William Wellman (a World War I vet) and produced with pride by Lester Cowan, this tribute to a generation, a prelude to "The Best Years of Our Lives" offers far more than mere antiquarian or nostalgic appeal. It is both a plea for peace and a recognition of the magnitude of military sacrifice and service. Rather than show off the horrors of war in a literal-minded bloodbath, it implies suffering by suggesting the impact of weapons and stress upon living people. Never glamorizing the authority of generals, it prefers to praise the common man. There is even a wedding scene complete with a "honeymoon" in a covered jeep. One can be realistic and hardboiled, frank and direct, even witty, without the vulgarity and obviousness that dominate the screen as we currently know it.
If you ever get a chance to grab hold of "G.I. Joe," take it from me, it will challenge your admiration for pretty much any other "war movie" you may have seen. It is of course done in black and white, but the tones are more elegant, eloquent, and expressive than anything gory and overproduced you may have watched.
As former president of the Friends of Rochambeau and also an advisor on video collections at the Barrington Library, I have encouraged the collection not of popular but of rare and splendid cinematic works of art--as part of our social conscience and esthetic judgment. And then, I have and keep a special place in my innermost heart for the culture of World War II.
"The Messiah wore a G.I. uniform," wrote a French Jewish Holocaust survivor artist. Even on a surface level, the music, the movies, the journalistic correspondence, and the ecology of the era that brought us from the depression through "the duration" to the brink of the existential postwar period carry me back not only to childhood but to the idealism and clarity of another America. I read the columns of Ernie Pyle among my summertime perusals of little branch libraries in R.I. wherever I vacation. Getting to hear his lines read aloud by a fine performer like Burgess Meredith made my recent afternoon with a video and a VCR a worthwhile pastime I felt like sharing with us exiled Rochambeau branchers.
My most recent such voyage brought me across from Chelo's to a small street called "Foch Avenue." I have lived in Paris and shopped and sipped and supped on the Avenue Foch . I didn't realize that Marshal Foch, general of the allied forces before the Armistice, had stopped by our town in the World War I era. Until I phoned the library and found a transcript of a radio show created by the late Florence Simister, called "Streets of the City." She had described the origin of this tiny lane of simple frame houses at Smithfield Avenue.
I remember Florence quite well. She was my kindergarten teacher, as Miss Parker. I loved her, a delicate young lady who haunted the Rochambeau Branch and had a fairy like quality that endeared her to me.
I find everything five minutes away from my house at the crossroads of the world.
These days there are those who boycott the French for their lack of support for our American plight and fight. In the days when our streets were being named, they came to our rescue, just as we came to theirs in the World Wars. My own way was once called "D'Estaing Road" but got changed to Creston Way.
Wish me a bon voyage around the corner as I grope my own way until Rochambeau re-opens.
I was something of a bookworm. My father appears to have switched from
studying the English and Spanish languages to delving into the secrets of
business, leaving literature to me.
On the day I graduated as an English major from Yale, we fell into a long silence. He never quite approved of my friends, guests, or theories of poetry. We only really made up through shared grief and shared joy. But we fused our stories after his passing. I took a few things among his possessions, a couple of brushes, a navy wool robe, a practical aluminum skiff, an old dictionary and thesaurus. More importantly, my dad comes back as an elfin presence and absence, a magical figure from a classic Hollywood ghost story. He keeps me secret company as I play father to my own three children at Father's Day.
When I was a boy, my father tried to do right by his three boys. He bought us three pairs of boxing gloves to learn self-defense. He gave us pens and watches as we entered our high school years. We took piano lessons for a touch of refinement to show off to girls, I guess.
The boxing gloves ended up in the attic. The upright pianos went down to the basement. Pens and watches were swapped, stolen, lost, only their ghosts going on as metaphors. I probably treat my son's friends as my dad dealt with mine. They don't seem to mind and come back for more. One among them cell-phoned from his school and asked to write my biography. He earned an A at Classical.
I bring back my father in thought quite often, with a smile at the souvenir. He never dined out, but sent me wine on my birthdays. He paid my tuition but did not read my texts. He showed up at any lecture or talk I gave as a teacher, laughed at my jokes and frowned solemnly at my points to ponder. As a depression baby I must have been a burden. A near-sighted sparrow perching on the branches of the Rochambeau library, I need kindly treatment. Like a small dog I barked to fight for my rights and against my slights, even when there weren't any.
On these holidays of honor, we exalt yesterday and put the past high on a pedestal. I don't do that. But my father and I get along in spirit down the lane of life. The big machines and high walls around our library can't pen in the phantoms.
I have always wanted to have snowdrops among the patches of snow in late
winter. It's probably the word itself that called to me, like the name "Snow
White" from my first tale and movie. The yard that wraps round my house,
which bears a plaque declaring it had been my parents', holds mostly ivy,
rocks and later the crabgrasses of August. Snowdrops promise delicately like
their whitewashed cousins the shy albino Indian pipes and crocus.
Back to my snowdrop. I put in a group of their bulbs in late fall. You read differing accounts of how to establish a bed. Transplant them in bloom? Some say yes, others nix. Bury the bulbs before frost? That's what I did and looked forward all winter through. I heard reports of early snowdrops right through shifting drifts at Valentime, as I call that week. An anonymous giver sent me a pussywillow plant on that occasion. Rochambeau ranchers like the idea of a plain grey or anemic flower. A snowdrop, too, is modest and humble.
Over and again I circled my property squinting for a sign of something poking up. Nothing.
I had hidden one final little brown ball under a stone. There! Turning up and out, a tentative stem had risen and bent. Dangling from its crown hung a single pearl earring. Too tiny for my camera to capture. I took out pencil and pad to sketch a quick image of stone, stalk and tear of ivory. Maybe I can give it an Asian esthetic of super simplicity and symbolism. The singleton had rather a puny look. It was a runt. Will it go down to come back next year bigger and bolder?
A proper gardener would not bother with these words. But I am not a gardener, only a lowly poet. My wisteria produced one bunch of royal blossoms some seasons ago, then gave up and gave out. No matter what I did. My iris starts out with strong leaves but has abandoned its flowers. It's the shade and roots of Rochambeau maples.
I don't demand gorgeous displays of color or elegant majestic designs. A lover of libraries and linguistics, I am satisfied with metaphors.
I do hope my snowdrop will stay.
They count your nieces and nephews in your obit, and nowadays they make mention of your best “companion.” They may add a former spouse to the list of your legacies. But how about the people you sip coffee with, whose names you may not even know? Caffeine cousins may talk and listen more closely than blood relatives. The ties may be thicker.
There are a couple of table sharers from my favorite haunts that I wanted to study with a camera. I offer these quick snaps of Becca and Mark.
Becca hangs out at Javaspeed, the new spot on North Main that sells scooters and shows off a poster of Audrey Hepburn steering Gregory Peck through the alleys of Rome. “We have our own Audrey,” bragged Chris, one of the owners as well as a mechanic, and he introduced me to our local star, Becca. She bought a little white two-wheeler, brings it in for repairs or just instruction, and stays to have a cuppa with me at the windowseat. The view outdoors is forever marvelous. Oasis, a gathering place for the challenged, sits next door: there’s always a poetic and interesting silhouette passing by the front pane.
Becca smokes, wears a lip ring, and sports a few tattoos, but she has class all the same. Her profile is pure and noble, and her smile is fetching. You can get philosophy from the chit-chat at Javaspeed, or pick up ideas on what’s hot and what’s not in terms of studs and pins, naughty words to print on your helmet, new points of view about what a street is when you move along on a single, slim pair of tires. I got a big kick out of taking a roll of film featuring Becca and bike.
Higher up the hills of town, there’s that collaborative café called “729” where an art gallery sells images of Paris, rather than Rome, and more formal folk sit with word processors among the coffee things.
My best friend here is a fellow named Mark. I’ve known him for years. He reads gruesome comics and Gothic fantasy. Usually quite alone, he greets me sociably and tells me what’s happening in the world of “music” and the realms of Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Mummy in their current incarnations among the young at heart. Always garbed in black and bent over his devices and gadgets for this other dimension in which he dwells, he lifts up his countenance to say a chipper hello. At long last, I spotted him at the outdoor frontage of 729 and clicked my shutter. I was pleased with the image. It brought out the dignity, poignancy, and solitary spirit of a fellow traveler among the Providence corner places where the search for a saucer, a spoon, a ceramic mug, and a kindly word can be fulfilled like a grail-without recourse to airports, jetplanes, and the busy boulevards of old Europe.
"Don't get around much anymore." Doesn't that say it all about the war? How about "In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree?" Don't we all have an apple tree in our past with all that goes along with it? Duke Ellington did some of those ballads. Judy Garland offers in spinning phantom form "This Heart of Mine" and asks "How About You?" Imagine taking your heart so seriously, and hoping to share more than a bed! Glenn Miller recommended "Speak Low." I know he got the idea from Kurt Weill and Ogden Nash, but he set their thoughts to the breath of players. Don't shout your affection, but whisper it. Rosie Clooney challenges, "You'll never know." Those of us in the know recollect the rest of the words, and recite them in mumbles and murmurs, but the very phrase by itself implies the sequence of love's logic. Our Andrews Sisters were very much of their time, and of my boyhood, chanting about "Rum and Coca Cola," warning, "Don't Fence Me In," and worrying, or bragging, that "Rumors Are Flying." Just ponder for a moment the changes in our culture since those charming commentaries. Moving right along through one of my many stapled order catalogues. Dick Haymes croons, "Moonlight Becomes You." Doesn't it become every one of us? And he seems to have found a "Mam'selle."
We close down our sympathies in music at certain portals and doorways. It is only the sounds of the '20's, '30's, 40's, and a mere one or two beyond the '50's or '60's that speak to my soul. Most of them seem overblown, crass and coarse. "(Although, perhaps strangely, I like the foul-mouthed outrages of rap: maybe because my youngest likes them, or maybe because they fulfill the jokes of my youth.) It's the loud, blasted sentimentality of my early adult years that turns me off. Mostly, they tell the story of my life, I guess, as they do for so many among us.
Vaughn Monroe, who played at Wrentham's King Philip's Lounge in my Hope High days, threatened, "Someday, you'll want me to want you!" Tommy Dorsey told her, "I'll Never Smile Again." Harry James demanded "All or Nothing at All."Frank Sinatra, master of the quiet poem, before the smug victories of his later rat pack days, said quite simply, "There Are Such Things." He worried about "The Ghost of a Chance." Romance used to be a tentative, fragile yearning, not a brag, a boast, a cry of triumph. I have to leave out so many wondrous American song names, where from the first three syllables you were on your way to a wonderland of innocence and sophistication. On purpose I omit the biggest hits. What do you think of the shy modesty of Louis Armstrong asking his sweetie to "Dream a Little Dream of Me"?
I admit that the majority of my old favorites go back and date to the duration of World War II, but a number of others bring me to my earliest influence of the depression, when Judy Garland claimed that "The Best Things of Life are Free," but "You can't Have Everything!" Leftover from the roaring '20's were witty slang recipes or reminiscences for romance like "My Old Flame," "Me and My Shadow" "Deed I Do" and "I've Got a Feeling' I'm Fallin'". In the '30's Kenny Baker listed "All the Things You Are" and Kate Smith put herself down with "I Don't Know Why." I like the anxiety and defeatism of American melodies of mellower times. In my own college days, the mid-'50's, Johnnie Ray eccentrically kept that mood indigo, with songs like "The Little White Cloud that Cried" and "Just Walkin' in the Rain."
That's enough for now. A few seasons ago I did a little show at a nearby cafe, reading before the mike the insults and abuses in rap, reveling in their nastiness, but then contrasting them with the full, flowery renditions of "Stella by Starlight" or "In a Quaint Caravan," a la Ink Spots. Not to prove a single thing, just for fun. That's why I'm writing this, just because my patriotism is all wrapped around the notes and the metaphors of the silly symphonies I danced to, dreamed to, wept to, and saluted in my innermost secret self and spirit.
A recent speaker at an annual meeting of the Friends, Florence Markoff, put together a dramatic reading of "Address Unknown," a series of letters between a Jewish and a German art dealer in the late '30's. Florence did not know that there had been a film treatment by William Cameron Menzies of this tragically ironic correspondance. But I had screened this Paul Lukas noir cinematic contribution to film lore for my R.I.S.D. class and for a summer showing in our auditorium. Beautifully, darkly lit, it took its place among the movies that taught American audiences something of what was happening beneath the documentary glimpses for Pathe News. It does not exist on video, and is impossible to order from any distribution company at present. Does anybody happen to have some sort of copy?
You may have heard "Warsaw Concerto" on your classical music channel while driving stuck in traffic on North Main Street or on Hope at the corner of Rochambeau or in front of our branch library. It was composed specifically for a flick from the duration (World War II and its prelude) to illustrate musically the tale of a Polish pianist and the partisan anti-Nazi choices of artists. The movie, titled variously either Suicide Squadron or Dangerous Moonlight, was directed by Anton Walbrook in Britain and brought to the U.S.A. as wartime propaganda, and introduces Michael Rennie.
These low-budget and rather brief efforts to tell tragic tales visually and poetically mean a great deal to me. They inscribed and imprinted themselves upon my boyhood right here in the Rochambeau neighborhood. When I see them again as an adult, not only do I relive the past, but I rediscover American values when left and right and conservative and liberal held quite different tones than they do in our time. I find depth and beauty where more conventional critic of today see only flat or trite formula. The reason they vanished and evaporated was the cold war, the HUAC era, and the sea of front lawns that isolated us from our collective past. The movies were suppressed, neglected, abandoned. Some have come back to us, especially the most popular and renowned, such as, of course, "Casablanca." But these lesser known and odder reels depend upon libraries and collectors for their survival as art objects, souvenirs, and documents.
If anybody who happens upon these words caught in your summer spider "web" comes upon these or other such fare, please rsvp or send the info along to your nearest and dearest library. I'll be waiting, I'll be seeing you, in all the old familiar places and faces and traces of yesterday's magic on the silver screen.
"You pay no attention to what's on your plate!" my wife declares right in front of the chef, our hostess and friend who has welcomed us as travelers and guests at her Taos restaurant called The Trading Post. In fact, I do write free-lance pieces about cafes and pubs here and there, but I concentrate more on side dishes than on main courses. In Taos it is margaritas and salads I care about. Kim our keeper here puts Grand Marnier in her concoction and pours them for us and herself on the rocks, not frozen. Her salads are marvels of fresh lettuces of every variety. It is good to be a snob about such small luxuries as the perfect tomato or the most correct baguette to go with the cheese board.
Kim's hostess at her trading post, a restored spot also serving as art gallery, is Judy, a tiny, lively Hawaiian person with round spectacles, a slightly silvery ponytail, lots of quirky opinions--and, of course, a pickup truck. I compare her to a hot red chile pepper. We sit together after hours watching cook and servers finishing up, as I taste a spoonful of restorative gaspacho.
I came here from the tiniest of states, poor li'l rhody, where our spaces are
tight and our sky portioned off like the picayune houselots, especially here
round Rochambeau. In Taos you study the horizon with its flashes of lightning,
its grand rainbows, its mountain majesty, its sagebrush terrain, the freedom
and regality of everchanging cloud and sunbeam, and, at night, its
diamond-studded star display.The territory claims its own diarists like D.H.
Lawrence--not to mention its movies like "Leave Her to Heaven."
Kim prepares picnics and takes us to all the proper places to test margaritas and Mexican specialities that cannot be aped away from this haunted landscape--which draws artists, poets, and seekers of spirit to the sites of the tragedies of our past era. Painters leave their mark as much as the gardeners and litterers, native and tourist.
I gather pinion knots of swirling root forms from the banks of rivers or woodland pathways--to add to my local ocean driftwood. Different hummingbirds come to Kim's beebalm, Anna's instead of my Rubythroats, and the beebalm has a different name and hue. She takes us to all the proud gardens and knows each wildflower or tame bloom by title and repute.
Under moonlight we hear the howls of coyote, wolf and dog blending. By dawn we find the carcass of a calf in the backyard. As we make our way by jeep or pick-up we beep the horn to spare the lives of jackrabbits. Kim's neighbor also collects those pinion roots, but he adds little eyes to stare out, fashioning native creatures of fantasy for the welcome patio, a dada artist bringing human meaning to found objects. When Kim's dog, terrified of a bolt of lightning, leaps indoors through a screened window, it is this neighbors who fixes the damage, except to the nose of the poor domestic beast.
Kim, charged with energy, accompanies us over the hilltops to Los Alamos, the Shangri-la of World War II. Robert Oppenheimer had been a bright but fragile New York lad sent to Los Alamos to cure the colds and strengthen the bones of a city-bred boy among the healing air, water, and soil of New Mexico, steeped in native lore. As head of the secret group of experimental nuclear scientists from round the free and enslaved world to create a Bomb to end the disease of tyranny. Oppenheimer's European relatives had suffered and died under the nazi boot, and chose this magic place for his wizardry. A nearby museum tells the tale with all its dark dilemmas and ambiguities, a huge open book for all to study.
Imagine too. Millicent Rogers, retired high fashion model thin from girlhood rheumatic fever, brought out the beauty of the very stones and ores of the region she adopted. Her home, shaped like a pueblo, is a monument to her esthetic vocation. We visited a native church on Indian ground. Mary figures powerfully and colorfully, but not so much as a virgin mother, but more as the personification of even more ancient faiths. In the tiny graveyard next door, each marker tells its own ironic testimony to oppression, betrayal, and renewal. Everything goes back into the soil and nourishes depth of feeling, even the shared and deep tastes of the foods.
When I have a few moments to myself, I dig out one of the library loans, magic carpets. As I write these words, they carry me back to Taos. Kim cooks for the White House staff, for movie stars. She cares for us pilgrims from Providence. Taos has its own personal goddess for me, bearing glasses, fruits and vegetables, wines and sauces, wearing a western outfit of jeans, silver belt-buckle, and a New Mexico smile.
In the first year of World War II a fancy series of small books celebrated
the variety of local libraries, perhaps as places where those on the home front
could escape from the stresses of the duration. The sixth and final slim
volume, written by Evelyn Chase, which I came upon in a Wayland Square antique
shop, describes the R.I.S.D. library thus:"To reach it, you enter the Benefit Street lobby and take the fine marble staircase. The majesty of the reading room brings forth enthusiastic comment from all who see it. A feeling of eighteenth century elegance and serenity has been recreated. The golden brown of the carved teakwood panelling glows in the sunlight that streams in the high windows and lends a mellow charm to the alcoves and mezzanine with a friendly, inviting touch.
"No less attractive are the appointments and furnishings. American walnut,
slightly darker than the teak, has been used for the desk, tables and chairs.
Still darker tan is the floor covering of wide cork tiles set in a herringbone
pattern. Warmth of coloring is added by the books and the deep acquamarine
leather of the upholstery. From the south windows there is a lovely vista down
Benefit Street, past the ivy covered walls of the Athenaeum and the gay red
brick row of dwellings beside it. These views of old Providence increase the
attractiveness of the very beautiful Library of the School of Design.
" Perhaps you may feel some desire to visit in reality. We would be very happy to have you do so."
It is common knowledge that R.I.S.D. plans to move its collections over the bridges and river into the glittering and gorgeous bank palaces of downtown. However, this curmudgeon faculty member regrets the prospective loss of our secluded but delightful and desirable, and gracious, environment that has served students of art and design as well as tourists, natives, and guests. Each of our local libraries has a character and mission, and memory, of its own.
In midsummer I hunt for the right book to mark the season. It comes to me by magic. A couple at a birdwatcher store recommended texts by a gardener named Sara Stein, under witty titles like "My Weeds," and "Noah's Ark."
Local libraries here in South County used to keep wondrous regional books at the shore shelves, but of course nowadays they get great stuff from round the ocean state, like pebbles and shells. Stein's Ark was easy to locate, but her Weeds is out of print, and I had to wait a bit to get my hands and eyes on this delightful buried treasure. She illustrated Ark by herself, but borrowed a RISD student, one Ippi Patterson, to portray those stubborn plants with their incredible stories.
Sara Stein does quite considerable research on the history of those naughty herbs, as the French call them, using scholarly methods and letterwriting attacks on government agencies for pamphlets. But, mostly, she hacks away at the jungle of rough, tough intruders in the dust she tries to tame in Pound Ridge, New York, and Rockland, Maine. Most gardeners include memoirs and prayers among their journal entries, and Sara is no exception. So, "My Weeds" is a lot of reading, ploughing through information about the evolution of flowering grasses and what human intervention has done to the planet. We have weakened the power of the vegetable realm in order to make roots, fruits, and leaves more palatable, but also more defenseless, more dependent upon our control and organization.
In the end, however, wilderness will reclaim the spaces we "develop" or devastate. Witty, insightful, and knowledgable to beat the band, she gets to you, and you really need to have a companion to read passages aloud to, or you will taste her phrases like hors d'oeuvres, just in small amounts. The drawings do help, as they make you concentrate on one stubborn pest at a time. There is a Zen to mid-summer. Sara makes weeding a myopic feminine obsession with an intrinsic human purpose in a world without an aim.
"And then again there is this it is in the struggle to make a garden grow that intimacy with plants is gained. If I had never tracked the quackgrass roots, never known the stink of wild garlic, never tangled with the catbrier, the echoed cussing of my father's introduction to weeds would not have made of bindweed the beloved enemy it has become. No wonder my ears were deaf to the pleas of houseplants. They had remarkably little to say...My experience has been like discovering kin with whom, both historically and biologically, one has unsuspected ties."
Pretty fancy words, huh? On the commercial stacks of bookstores, the gardening how-to volumes never soar to such philosophical heights. That's where libraries come into the picture. They can get it for you.
In my front yard a mullein came to spend the summer. I took snapshots of it. In our world it usually visits highways, asphalt parking lots, dead ends. I have just one Queen Anne's lace beside the cobbles where I park my car. I welcome her like an honored guest. That's near our Rochambeau. Here for August in Middlebridge at Narragansett, hummingbirds haunt the beebalm, which is half weed/half proper property held in by a stone wall. All sorts of insect pests vie with the hummers, but, as Sara Stein points out, they hold each other in checks and balances as time goes by. It's still the same old story, a fight for love and glory.
Brendan Gallogly lives on Summit Avenue, right round the corner from our Rochambeau library. You might have watched him skateboarding throughout his boyhood. He's a sophomore at B.U. at present, a classmate and room-mate of my son Reuben. Gallogly's claim to fame with me is that he sketches the stories of his life and times on scraps of paper with whatever pencil is at hand. I like that about him.
It is early August as I send along a napkin illustrating a tale I told him at my table here in Narragansett. He and Reuben had been paddling a new red kayak along Narrow River and stayed for supper. I was going on about Rhode Island summers and the tiny houses of my childhood and youth.
"At Oakland Beach we had a place with a kerosene stove, an ice box, an apple tree in the back yard, with a swing, a front porch with a rain barrel, an oil-cloth table with a Victrola on it you had to wind up, an outdoor shower, and not much else. A horse would come by with a driver who would carry a huge block of ice with tongs and put in on top of the ice box. The ice cream man also came by with a horse."
Brendan was especially interested in the tree and the horse. Then I went on about other simple shacks by the shore. "In Hampden Meadows near Barrington at Hundred Acre Cove we had a pump in the sink and a steep hill going down to the mucky eelgrass beach. My dad dug out the cesspool and had to bring the refrigerator down from the city. It was the Duration, and nothing new was being manufactured, only war goods. We never did have a phone or a mailbox. We played cribbage."
I added in the discomforts and idleness of July and August. The broken glass after the '38 hurricane at the brown beaches of Oakland Beach, and the poison ivy and pre-sunscreen burns of Barrington. But wait--there is another place here in South County just round the corner from this porch!
"Yes, Brendan, the Finks had a lonely glass shelter on the river, with blueberry patches in the lots surrounding our retreat. Guests would pick them and my mother would bake them into pies, just as she had done with the apples in Oakland Beach. I lived on my bike and would pick the corn next door in Hampden Meadows. My life wasn't as joyous as my brother's. He had a sailboat of his own. He was a couple of Augusts older and had a coupe with a rumbleseat. I was the runt of the Fink litter and looked and felt like it. Are you the runt of the Gallogly litter?"
I have to tease Brendan. My Reuben likes me to taunt him. He claims Brendan goes over these conversations with a fine tooth comb.
I really believe he has a future as an illustrator. He pays close attention to visual detail and mixes up a story until it comes out his way. So this soft sketch on a paper towel--or did it serve as a napkin? hard to tell--is as much about Gallogly as it is about Fink. Brendan spent his own boyhood summmers here in Bonnet Shores with his seven brothers and sisters. In a far more consumerist culture than the one I grew up in, with its ice cubes carried pony express and its backyard source of food and its lonely miseries among the indelible nostalgic pleasures.
I like to share a table with people who draw. They give my past a future. By the way, it was Brendan Gallogly's idea for me to send this on to you. August is a month for looking backward to the thousand Julys and forward to the ripening apples and corn and new friendships (hopefully) under the next full moon.
Yours...
Last Updated: August 31, 2004