2023 August blog by Chuck Peek
Epigrams:
There are stars whose radiance is visible on Earth though they have long been extinct. There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world though they are no longer among the living. These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark. They light the way for humankind. Hannah Senesh
We’ll have these moments to remember. The Four Lads
Hang on, Sloopy. Sloopy, hang on. The McCoys
We’ve survived longer, experienced more grief and change, lost faith in our country and perhaps regained it, worried deeply, been horrified by gun violence and baffled by liars in power, made new friends, possibly experienced illness ourselves, and had to remind ourselves of the preciousness of every day and individual memory more than once. Naomi Shihab Nye (from the preface to Copper Canyon Press, Expanded Anniversary Edition, Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, about what the past twenty years has brought us)
You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who have ever been alive. James Baldwin
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A Story
I’m running a quick errand to one of the grocery stores where we shop. It is not overcrowded this afternoon, but, as so often in grocery markets, people clot up near the more popular products—fresh produce, dairy and eggs, the meat sale. Crowded especially when those shelves or bins are being refilled, the stocker in the way of us shoppers in our queue, or possible us in their way I suppose. For once I’m not in a great hurry.
I came into the store just behind a Latina mother with her two daughters, mother short and stout, the younger daughter about 9 and still not so self-conscious that she can’t occasionally dance down an aisle on a whim, the idea of shopping not really of great interest. And her older sister, about 13 or 14 I’d guess, who has pretty clearly seen herself as less sister and more a second mother, sometimes checking on where her sister has danced off to, sometimes checking off the grocery list, as Mom pushes the cart, another basket hanging on her arm.
The older girl has slipped inside beside the produce stocker to check the radishes, a notepad and pencil in one hand and, with the other, lifting each bunch to examine it more closely, eventually lifting them all, turning them this way and that, before abandoning them all with a sort of sniff that says ‘none of that is at all suitable.’ She joins her mother and retrieves her basket. She notes that Mom has put some things in the cart and marks something off on her pad.
As two carts escape the area, we can move slowly forward until we are behind the stocker replenishing the plastic tubs of strawberries. This must be the stocking hour, I’m thinking, when I hear the older daughter saying to her mother, “Look, they are on sale two for $3.00. I wonder what’s wrong with them.” There is no critical faculty like that of a 13-year-old.
The stocker has heard her, too, and turns his head a bit to tell her over his shoulder, “Nothing is wrong with them…it’s just a good sale.” He was not unaware of her presence after all, it seems. Perhaps seeing her reflected in the glass of the doors keeping in the cooler air around the tubs of fruit already pared and sliced.
The younger daughter is now some ways down an aisle spinning in place near where the quartered melons gleam red under their shrink wrap. Her sister looks down where she’s spinning, longer hair flaring out as she goes round and round. Her sister, her hair in a no-nonsense trim, turns back to look again at the strawberries, and decides again to pass. The stocker, who can’t be over 15-16 himself, seems disappointed he hasn’t convinced her. He stops looking at his produce and turns the other way to look wistfully in her direction as she moves down to assess the avocados.
Mom, too, has watched it all. Before following her daughters, she reaches up, takes one of the larger tubs of strawberries, and places it in her cart. She looks back at me, smiles, and shrugs.
++
Another story
Buddy was just 17, soon to finish his senior year and go off to… Buddy didn’t know where. There was no one he didn’t like and nothing he was especially fond of, so he just had no idea about what might come next.
I didn’t know him too well, except we sat next to each other in homeroom. He’d always say “hello Julie” and I’d say something like “how’s it going, Buddy?”
He’d never joined much of anything at school and wasn’t really asked to by anyone. Except in band. There, he’d found Mr. Ward, the band director, who had taken an interest in Buddy. He was putting together a school first, a little band he sometimes called a dance band, sometimes a jazz band, sometimes what he called a “rhythm and blues” band—and he’d asked Buddy to consider joining. That’s the first time Buddy got an inkling of what he might like to do with this life.
“Mr. Ward,” he said, “I’d like that because, you know, I want to be a singer with a band.”
“I didn’t know that. What makes you want to be a singer with a band?”
“My dad, I guess. My folks and my grandma moved here when I was little, moved from where Dad grew up in Mississippi, and about the only music he knew was sung by some guys in the back of a barbershop there. Dad calls it the blues. He’d say, ‘lots of folks have some blues to sing…doesn’t matter who you are’.”
That was really when Mr. Ward began to get a clear picture of Buddy. What he had seen in Buddy was no secret, because he’d talked about it with other teachers and one of them was the mother of one of the girls in Buddy’s class, and she’d told her daughter what Mr. Ward was thinking of doing and who he’d asked. She said Mr. Ward picked him not just because he could play but because he wasn’t asked to join much at school, only just the band, and Mr. Ward knew why. He knew Buddy lived on the wrong side of the tracks.
Mr. Ward had told his wife Liza all about it. He told her how, in many places, students’ futures were limited by their pasts, but he didn’t feel that was “American.”
“Carl,” she replied, “you’re just like that song the McCoy’s used to sing on the radio when we were younger, you don’t think Buddy should be looked down on just because his folks don’t make very much.”
“What song? Mr. Ward asked.
“You know, the one you arranged for the pep bands to play when the team was behind, I think it was called Hang on Sloopy!”
Mr. Ward just grinned. “Yep,” he said, “Sloopy hang on is the name of the game all right.”
But then the first event that shook up the whole school happened. Ms. Nelson, the Assistant Principal, saw two girls cross the hall from their home room and go into the girl’s room and, when they didn’t come out very soon, she cracked the door to peek in and saw the two girls kissing.
At least that’s what people gathered, because she didn’t exactly say “kissing” and whatever she said, none of the adults were repeating to us kids. Some kids said their folks said “embracing,” but that didn’t sound much like a kid-word to us, so we were left to our imaginations…which to be truthful had never before imagined anything like this.
Anyway, by that night the two girls had been expelled. I doubt that the townsfolk, like the members of the school board, would have cared about it much, except that everyone wanted to know the real story. What do you suppose they were really doing? That, call it curiosity I guess, was what fanned the flames that meant they called a meeting of the school board to make sure the whole town was on the same page with this thing, and people could go and state their opinion.
And no one had expected it, but Buddy went. Buddy who’d never uttered an opinion in his life. His being there caught them off guard and he was at the mic before anyone thought to tell him he couldn’t use the mic because he was a student. He’d been about the only student to show up and no one, as usual, had noticed him until it was too late.
Buddy started off with his usual sort of conversation…stringing together some seemingly disconnected thoughts…but as he warmed to his subject, the audience grew quieter; their silence seemed to encourage him and by the close he was in a rhythmic flow.
We might not know much of what he said except as our parents might have remembered it and only that part they would talk about with us, but those public meetings were tape recorded, and I worked in the principal’s office as a student aid and, one day when everyone was busy, I found that tape recording, wound it up on the recorder, and listened to it.
Just about them, they came out with the first little portable recorder, a Sony as I recall, so I tested fate. I saved my allowance, bought one, found another moment to be alone in the office, wound up the recording once again and played it so I could tape it on my own recorder.
Here’s how I remember the last part of what I heard. His voice was soft and had a bit of what I suppose is a twang and he spoke almost like he was singing:
Those girls were our friends just days ago, and you’re telling us we can’t be friends anymore?
Those girls were our classmates just days ago, and now they won’t be classmates anymore?
Some folks are not bad, just not like you, and that’s no call to kick them out.
When he’d finished, he walked back to his chair and, as he passed me, he said, just like we were in home room, “Hi, Julie.”
In my home, at least, the matter ended with my mother saying we wouldn’t be talking about it anymore and my dad saying they should have never let Buddy get up and talk and my feeling that, maybe they shouldn’t have since what he said didn’t make any difference to the vote of confidence in the decision to expel the girls.
The senior class graduated without the two girls, and that would have been the end of the matter except that soon after, not long after graduation, came the second event that shook us up even
A freight car on a siding where the railroad cut through town blew up. Buddy was in the passenger seat of a car that was waiting at the crossing when the explosion blew the side of the train out and shards of the wood siding hurtled across the road. One of them flew through the open window, struck Buddy in the neck, and severed his carotid artery. He bled out before help could arrive. His grandmother was shaken to the core but not hurt.
At the funeral, a few kids came, most of us seated with our parents, except the two girls who had been expelled. I overheard my dad say to my mom, “Why is Julie carrying that huge shoulder bag?” and “Why have they let those two girls come to this?”
The two girls, however, were seated with Buddy’s parents. I guess they were kind of sitting in for the brothers and sisters Buddy had never had. His grandmother, I guess a kind of matriarch of the family, had sketched out something of a eulogy on a paper napkin, but she was crying too much to get most of it out. She’d almost pull herself together, but then she’d look out and see Buddy’s parents and the two girls, all crying, and then, standing there in front of everybody, she’d start crying again, too.
But his much she did manage to say; she said, “It is too bad Buddy never got to be a singer with a band, because, my-oh-my, could that boy sing the blues or what!”
I had no way of knowing she was going to give me the perfect opportunity to do what I’d determined to do. As everyone was crying and we were waiting for his grandmother to speak, I’d taken out the little portable player, and when she sat down, before the pastor could resume, I pushed the play button, and Buddy’s own words became his own memorial:
Those girls were our friends just days ago, and you’re telling us we can’t be friends anymore?
Those girls were our classmates just days ago, and now they won’t be classmates anymore?
Some folks are not bad, just not like you, and that’s no call to kick them out.
As my horrified parents took me in hand and led me out, my dad said, “That’s more than enough out of you, young lady.” Now Mother was crying, too, even as she was sobbing, “And that will be all of your recording adventures, as well.” The recorder and the cassette went in the trash that same day.
But, you know, some moments are recorded in your memories better than others.
++
With apologies to Sheldon Harnick who wrote the original lyrics in 1953, sung later by the Kingston Trio, and without much updating can sadly still be sung today but I updated the last two lines anyway:
They’re rioting in Africa, they’re starving in Spain.
There’s hurricanes in Florida, and Texas needs rain.
The whole world is festering with unhappy souls.
The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles.
Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch,
And I don’t like anybody very much!
But we can be tranquil, and thankful, and proud,
For man’s been endowed with a mushroom-shaped cloud.
And we know for certain that some lovely day
Someone will set the spark off, and we’ll all be blown away.
They’re rioting in Africa, there’s strife in Iran,
What nature hasn’t been reduced to doing to us
Is already being done quite nicely by our fellow man!
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This scene is taken from Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s Inherit the Wind, near the opening of Act Three, when Henry Drummond (the character in the play representing Clarence Darrow) responds to Bert Cates, the defendant in the “Monkey Trial” that had pitted Darrow against William Jennings Bryan over the matter of evolution. Gates has just referred to Darrow taking his case as a “long shot.”
Golden Dancer. . . That was the name of my first long shot. Golden Dancer. She was in the big side window of the general store in Wakeman, Ohio. I used to stand out in the street and say to myself, “If I had Golden Dancer I’d have everything in the world that I wanted.” (He cocks an eyebrow) I was seven years old, and a very fine judge of rocking horses. (He looks off again, into the distance) Golden Dancer had a bright red mane, blue eyes, and she was gold all over with purple spots. When the sun hit her stirrups, she was a dazzling sight to see. But she was a week’s wages for my father. So Golden Dancer and I always had a plate glass window between us. (Reaching back for the memory) But—let’s see, it wasn’t Christmas; must’ve been my birthday—I woke up in the morning and there was Golden Dancer at the foot of my bed! Ma had skimped on the groceries, and my father’d worked nights for a month. (Re-living the moment) I jumped in the saddle and started to rock— (Almost a whisper) And it broke! It split in two! The wood was rotten, the whole thing was put together with spit and sealing wax! All shine, and no substance! (Turning to Cates) Bert, whenever you see something bright, shining, perfect-seeming—all gold, with purple spots—look behind the paint! And if it’s a lie—show it up for what it really is.
As its authors note, the play “is not history.” In fact, like Man for All Seasons, it isn’t even very good history. Instead, such plays probe the whole matter of civic responsibility and public integrity, both so badly under siege today. Inherit the Wind was in its opening run at the National Theater in New York when I saw it as a boy, sometime around 1955-1956. The night we saw it, Paul Muni played Drumond / Darrow, Ed Begley played Brady / Bryan, and Tony Randall played Hornbeck / Mencken. I’ve been told that Begley and Muni often exchanged parts. On the same trip, we saw Damn Yankees and Major Barbara, but I suspect my whole love of theater began in the seed planted then by Inherit the Wind.
That whole evening came back to me when my good friend Stan Dart, playing Drummond / Darrow to my Brady / Bryan at Kearney Community Theater, brought the theater to a total silence when he rendered Drummond’s Golden Dancer lines. When we wanted to reprise the play years later, the company felt it was “too dark” for their season’s line-up. Or perhaps they just thought we were too old. At any rate, we reprised Neil Simon’s Sunshine Boys instead. Nothing dark in that story, unless you’ve actually read or seen it! That occasion for strutting across the stage—that came, too, in the last twenty years! As did the privilege of being in the casts of Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Of Mice and Men. Right—what did Steve Martin and John Steinbeck know of darkness?
Kearney, Nebraska
End of the summer blog—August 2023
Chuck Peek
Next blog—let’s see what rioting or strife September brings, but before that, about Labor Day will bring a quarterly In Memoriam.
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