jelly ~ a personal history

A Chilly Morning

2011-10-01T08:10:00.000-07:00

A chilly morning. My first taste of the day: warm Coke left on my desk last night. My little dog has trouble getting on and off the bed, so I lift her, and she kisses me. We limp together out into a new day. Sun's up, sky is blue. I see the family pictures we had taken last month when we were all together are up on the computer. I view them twice, they are good, I love seeing them! I love that these are my sons and their wives, my grandchildren, my sweet husband (who I argued with yesterday over trivial stuff, just stupid stuff). I love them all "to the end of every day's most quiet need," as Emily wrote. My whole body warms. ..."with the breath, smiles, tears of all my life...."

Post BC

2011-03-04T09:25:00.000-08:00

The Bishop's Company after I left, on their way to tour Alaska. Jeanne Needham on the far left, Hal Bokar on the far right. Standing beside Jeanne is David Beardsley (Phyllis's son), Merle Harbach, and Phyllis. Don't know the others.

Thanks to David for the photo!

2010-04-18T22:33:00.001-07:00

Gov. Benjamen Harrison

1. Hon. John Armistead m. Judith. AKA "The Councillor".
Children:
i Judith Armistead.

Some more information on this line on ROOTSWEB

Second Generation
2. Judith Armistead (1.Hon.1 ) b. of Hesse, Gloucester Co, VA, m. 1688, Robert "King" Carter, b. 1663, "Crottoman", (son of John Carter, Col and Sarah Ludlowe) d. 4 Aug 1732. Judith died 23 Feb 1699. Robert: King Carter, as he was called on account of his immense possessions, resided in his family seat "Crottoman", on the Rappahanock river in Lancaster county, VA. He was rector of William and Mary College and sustained that institution in its most trying times. He was speaker of the House of Burgesses and treasurer of the colony during reign of Prince William, Anne, George I, and George II.
Children:
i Elizabeth Carter b. 1680.
ii Judith Carter.
iii Anne Carter.
iv John Carter b. 1690.
v Lucy Carter m. Col. Henry Fitzhugh.
vi Mary Carter.

Third Generation
3. Elizabeth Carter (2.Judith2 , 1.Hon.1 ) b. 1680, m. (1) Nathaniel Burwell, (son of James Burwell and Anne Jones) d. 1721, m. (2) George Nicholas, MD.
Children by Nathaniel Burwell:
i Lewis Burwell.
ii Carter Burwell.
iii Robert Burwell.
iv Elizabeth Burwell.

Children by George Nicholas, MD:
v Robert Carter Nicholas.

4. Judith Carter (2.Judith2 , 1.Hon.1 ) m. Mann Page. Mann: Of Rosewell.
Children:
i John Page.
ii Mann Page m. Anne Corbin Tayloe, (daughter of John Tayloe and Elizabeth Gwynn (Lyde).
iii Robert Page.

5. Anne Carter (2.Judith2 , 1.Hon.1 ) m. Benjamen Harrison. Benjamen: Of Berkley
Children:
i Benjamen Harrison, Governor VA.
ii Anne Harrison m. William Randolph. William: Of Wilton
iii Elizabeth Harrison m. Peyton Randolph. Peyton: President of the First Continental Congress.
iv Carter Henry Harrison m. Susannah Randolph, (daughter of Isham Randolph and Jane Rogers).
v Brig.Gen Charles Harrison m. Mary Claiborne, (daughter of Augustine Clayborn).
vi Nathaniel Harrison m. (1) Mary Ruffin, (daughter of Edmund Ruffin) m. (2) Anne Gilliam, (daughter of William Gilliam). Speaker of the State Senate, Sheriff of Prince William County, 1779.
vii Robert Harrison d. 1771.
viii Daughter Harrison. Killed by lightening with her father and sister.
ix Female Harrison. Killed by lightening.

6. John Carter (2.Judith2 , 1.Hon.1 ) b. 1690, m. 1723, in VA, Elizabeth Hill, (daughter of Edward Hill IV) d. 1777, Corotoman. John died 31 Jul 1742, Corotoman, VA. Was a Barrister-at-Law (Middle Temple). AKA "Secretary" Elizabeth: Of "Shirley"
Children:
i Edward Carter.
ii Elizabeth Carter b. 1731.
iii Charles Carter b. 1736.

MEMORIES

2009-10-08T11:20:00.000-07:00

Midnight
Not a sound from the pavement
Has the moon lost her memory
She is smiling alone
In the lamplight
The withered leaves collect at my feet
And the wind begins to moan
Memory
All alone in the moonlight
I can dream of the old days
Life was beautiful then
I remember the time I knew what happiness was
Let the memory live again

Every street lamp seems to beat
A fatalistic warning
Someone mutters and the street lamp sputters
And soon it will be morning

Daylight
I must wait for the sunrise
I must think of a new life
And I mustn't give in
When the dawn comes
Tonight will be a memory too
And a new day will begin

Burnt out ends of smoky days
The stale cold smell of morning
A street lamp dies, another night is over
Another day is dawning

Touch me,
It's so easy to leave me
All alone with the memory
Of my days in the sun
If you touch me,
You'll understand what happiness is
Look, a new day has begun...

("CATS" --Andrew Lloyd Webber)

The Way We Were...

2009-10-08T10:49:00.000-07:00

...Scattered pictures
of the smiles we left behind,
smiles we gave to one another
for the way we were....

WARNING

2009-10-05T11:36:00.000-07:00

Warning
by Jenny Joseph

WHEN I AM AN OLD WOMAN I SHALL WEAR PURPLE
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other people's gardens
And learn to spit

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

Heading Toward the Music

2008-09-10T11:53:00.000-07:00

Monday, September 01, 2008

See the pyramids along the Nile
Watch the sun rise on a tropic isle
Just remember, darling, all the while
You belong to me.

See the marketplace in old Algiers
Send me photographs and souvenirs
But remember when a dream appears
You belong to me.

I'll be so alone without you
Maybe you'll be lonesome too---and blue

Fly the ocean in a silver plane
Watch the jungle when it's wet with rain
Just remember till you're home again
You belong to me

I am sad to see another of my childhood icons has died. Every Saturday night when I was seven or eight, my folks listened to a musical radio variety show, Your Hit Parade. Jo Stafford was one of the featured girl singers. They also featured a guitar player who could make his guitar cry and say "Maa-maa," which I loved. But I loved Jo Stafford best. If she was supposed to sing, and it was past my bedtime, I begged to stay up long enough to hear her. While it may have had as much to do with my staying up later, I really did want to hear her sing. Time magazine says she was one of the greatest ballad singers of all time. Her popular hit You Belong To Me sold two million copies. She was, says Time, up there in a group that included July Garland, Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee. During WWII, and even into the Korean War, she performed for servicemen overseas "who felt as if they were home" when she sang. "Although she was a major star, she was a modest person who would have seemed out of place in a limousine. She was like a girl on a bus, always heading toward the music," writes Jonathan Schwartz. Jo Stafford was 90 years old.

For the longest time now, I have gone to bed whenever I damn well please. Good Night, Jo. Sweet dreams.

Some Things I Thought You Should Know....

2008-07-07T19:22:00.001-07:00

Saturday, February 02, 2008
WI: Do Unto Others

They buried my prophet today. When he was asked "How are you?" he'd reply, "Better than ever! And the best is yet to come!" The leader of one small country once claimed that Gordon Bitner Hinckley could "charm a donkey or a king," and attributed this gift to his love of people, and his great humility. I will miss his gentle ways and his quick wit. It's reported that when he learned Mitt was considering a run for the White House, he said, "If you decide to run and you win, it will be a great experience. If you run and lose it will also be a great experience!"

I will miss the twinkle in his eyes. I will miss seeing him throw kisses toward the crowds in China, and Africa, and in the Philippines. I'll miss his waving hello's and goodbye's with the cane he was supposed to walk with.

Someone in the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas said they would all be out to picket at the funeral, calling President Hinckley a "fraudulent old fool." I don't know if they actually came or not. If they did, none of the news chanels reported it. WBC also says "God hates Hinckley ...and all Mormons without exception. All such go to Hell." I think these nuts are a very small fraction of evangelical Christian folks. I also would hope if they really came, that President Hinckley could've hit 'em over the head with his cane--but I'm positive he would have simply turned the other cheek.

But that's not saying I wouldn't have hit 'em over the head with MY cane (if I had one)! Here's the word from Bill Keller, host of a Florida TV program. It says: "this information has been given to you in love, and we can assure you that it is accurate and honest." Yeah, right.

And why in the world are they so obsessed with our "magical" underwear? Is anyone out there so obsessed with your underwear? I think not. My underwear is my business.

Well, then.--I'm off to spend eternity in Hell. But really, when the time comes, I'm taking my cane with me...and my magic underwear.

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Posted by Joyce Ellen Davis at 6:02 PM 17 comments
Friday, January 25, 2008
Brother

This is a picture of my big brother, Gaylen, and me. I called him "Brother," because for many years I thought that was his name. He hung out hundreds of my diapers on the clothesline for our mom, he carried me around on his back, he paid me pennies and nickles to smell his feet and scratch his back. I first time I ever heard Mairzy Doats and Dozey Doats was when he sang it, drying dishes after supper one evening. I thought it was the funniest song in the world. He built model airplanes and hung them from the ceilings all over the house. There was a perpetual smell of balsa wood and model glue. He flew them in circles over the desert with our cousin Billy. He learned to play the trumpet. He listened to Stan Kenton jazz records, and to Woody Herman, subscribed to Downbeat and Metronome magazines.

Walkin' with my baby, she got great big feet...
Caldonia! Caldonia! What makes your big head so hard? Hunh!

That was the second funniest song in the world.

He said he wanted to be an aeronautical engineer, and fly real airplanes. He bought his own plane with money he earned reading gas meters, and took flying lessons. But when he went away to college, he studied music, and became a performer and a composer, and a teacher. Igor Stravinsky liked Woody Herman's scat and screech Caldonia too, so much, in fact, that he wrote music for Herman's band. WHen my brother composed his own music, years later, much of it echoed the sound of Stravinsky. For his PHD at the University of Utah, my brother wrote music for a ballet gala, performed by the U of U Ballet (which became Ballet West), That piece, TOXCATL, based on Aztec history during the periodic "War of the Flowers," was no doubt inspired and influenced by Stravinsky. This is where he met my sister-in-law, Marianne, a ballerina with the company. They married and had four children, two boys and two girls. He played French Horn with the Utah Symphony under Maestro Maurice Abravanel for years.

He set a poem I wrote when I was seventeen to music for a 75 voice choir, performed and recorded with brass and timpani. He also used a text of mine called JAEL, for a short opera written a few years later. Most recently (April, 2000), I was pleased when he asked me to provide and edit the text for an ambitious piece called APOTHEOSIS, based on the writings of Neal A Maxwell and performed by the Ricks College Chamber Orchestra and Collegiate Singers. A CD was made for Tantara Records as part of their Heritage Series, called Three Sacred Works. An absolutely fantastic piece of music! The last thing he wrote was a piano piece called Fallen Angel, for a special project uniting LDS classical composers with LDS visual artists, performed by Grant Johannesen, called Mormoniana.

He accompanied the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on several tours around the world, he was invited by the Chinese Minister of Culture to spend time in China lecturing and performing at three of the conservatories there. He's performed with George Shearing (on bass), Mannheim Steamroller (on horn), and has accompanied Margaret Whiting, the Lennon Sisters, Liberace, Ray Charles, and many others. He played a jazz concert once with Paul Horn, Conte Condoli, and Milton Bernhart.

The last three years, my brother has suffered with multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, and diabetes (which took his sight a year ago). But it never, ever, took away his spirit, his sweet nature, or his sense of humor. Now he is dying. We all went over the night before last to say goodbye -- but I hate goodbyes. I said "Goodnight," and he said, "You've been a good sister." We said our "I love you's," and I asked him to please hug Mama and Daddy when he sees them, and to tell them I miss them. And to "leave a light on" for the rest of us. (You know, like that Motel 6 commercial).

Night before last he said to my sister-in-law, "Did you order this?" "Order what?" she asked. "This music," he said. They were playing Faure's REQUIEM for him. Whoever they were, bless them. And bless him.

(Please click on the link to hear a bit of Fallen Angel)

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Posted by Joyce Ellen Davis at 11:57 AM 15 comments
Friday, December 14, 2007
Last Words.

But, hey. This is my last word on the subject, I promise!

When Lawrence O'Donnell, in his little fit of anti-Mormon rhetoric said that the Mormon Church was "racist" and "ridiculous," he also said that it is "based on the work of a lying, fraudulent criminal named Joseph Smith" he was treading on ground that got Don Imus fired. Maybe O'Donnell should be fired for his lack of on-air civility. Had he lived in a less forgiving culture, say, Islamic, and said that about the Prophet Mohammed, they would undoubtedly put out a bounty on his head. Here in America, while we tend to take a dim view of name-calling and slander, such statements are usually overlooked. We don't behead folks for their views here in the land of free speech. But I saw the broadcast. You could almost see the spit flying from his enraged lips.

I was shocked. Sort of. We Mormons are, historically and intellectually, pretty resilient. So, just for the record, let me offer another view. Joseph Smith was a farm boy from upstate New York. Yale literary scholar Harold Bloom, who has written many, many books, has written one called The American Religion, in which he writes of Joseph Smith: "I can only attribute to his genius or daemons his uncanny recovery of elements in ancient Jewish theurgy that had ceased to be available either to Judaism or to Christianity, and that had survived only in esoteric traditions unlikely to have touched Smith directly." Joseph had a third-grade education. His mother described him as a "relatively quiet" boy. When he was 14, reading in the Epistle of James, first chapter and fifth verse, which says: If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him, he then went out into the woods behind his house, knelt in prayer, and said he had a vision, in which two "Personages" appeared before him; one pointing to the other said, This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him.

Ministers of the day told him his "vision" was of the devil, and that he was "deluded," but he knew what he had experienced. "I had actually seen a light," he wrote, "and in the midst of that light I saw two Personages, and they did in reality speak to me; and though I was hated and persecuted for saying that I had seen a vision, yet it was true; and while they were persecuting me, reviling me, and speaking all manner of evil against me falsely for so saying, I was led to say in my heart: Why persecute me for telling the truth? I have actually seen a vision, and who am I that I can withstand God, or why does the world think to make me deny what I have actually seen? For I had seen a vision; I knew it, and I knew that God knew it, and I could not deny it, neither dared I do it...."

And I, and thirteen-million-plus other people believe him. He assured us that God continues to speak to people, that he is alive and well, and that he had not said everything he had to say thousands of years ago and has nothing left to say: "For unto him that receiveth I will give more."

Joseph Smith taught that the glory of God is intelligence, and that Man is, that he might have Joy. He taught us that "Families are Forever." He taught that whatever principle of intelligence man attains in this life will rise with him in the resurrection. And that we are to seek wisdom and to "study and learn and become acquainted with all good books, and with languages, tongues and people." He taught us that we are not alone in the universe.
"And God said, Here is wisdom, and it remaineth in me...And worlds without number have I created...But only an account of this earth give I unto you, For behold, there are many worlds that have passed away by the word of my power. And there are many that now stand, and innumerable are they unto man; but all things are numbered unto me, for they are mine, and I know them." And, "Every spirit of man was innocent from the beginning." And animals have souls. Well, there's more. But you get the idea.

As for the the "racist" thing: we believe that God has not only spoken to the Jews who wrote his teachings in the Bible, and to the people who wrote them in the Book of Mormon, but "Know ye not that there are more nations than one?...and because that I have spoken one word ye need not suppose that I cannot speak another, for my work is not yet finished...for I command all men, both in the east and in the west, and in the north and in the south, and in the islands of the sea, that they shall write the words which I speak unto them." (And I say, yes! there is Truth and Beauty in the words of Black Elk, and the Buddha, and in the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad -Gita, and the Koran.)

A Book of Mormon prophet says, "Ye shall not esteem one flesh above another," and "one man shall not think himself above another." And because every single one of us is a literal child of God, we are all brothers and sisters, and are loved equally.

So, Brother O'Donnell, I forgive you for saying that we are ignorant and gullible, misguided and ridiculous racists.

God bless.

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Posted by Joyce Ellen Davis at 7:44 PM 5 comments
Thursday, December 13, 2007
We all know Mormons are evil...NOT!

So, Lawrence O'Donnell, a panelist on "The Mclaughlin Group" is lamenting on TV that Mitt Romney Did not "Take the opportunity to distance himself from the evils of his religion," calling us "racist" and "ridiculous." So O'Donnell is a nasty bigoted little man.

But I am disappointed in Mike Huckabee, who, after saying "I would never try, ever, to pick out some point of your faith and make an issue of it," did just that, and then blamed his statement on the New York Times reporter Zev Chafets. Apparently after describing himself as the "only Republican candidate with a degree in theology," Mike was asked by Zev if he considered Mormonism a cult or a religion, and his answer was, "I think it's a religion. I really don't know much about it," and then surprised Chafets with a question of his own. Chafets says Mike asked "in an innocent voice, 'Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?'"

Well, Mike, that was about as slick a maneuver as any other remark designed to inflame anti-Mormon prejudice against Mitt. I thought you were better than that, Mike. I even thought you were kinda cute. Now you're starting to scare me....

To quote from a letter to the editor in today's paper: "What does scare me is that the same folks who hold major sway in presidential nominations in Iowa are the same folks who believe [God] created the universe 7,000 years ago, 9,000 years after human beings domesticated dogs."

So, I am still in Obama's camp (even though he was raised Muslim, and simply declares himself to be a "Christian" of no particular brand). Another letter to the editor says: "As the American public stumbles over itself trying to figure out who the 'real' Christians are, who was 'raised' Muslim and who is more beholden to whose God, the presidential candidates likely feel a sense of relief. They don't have to worry about explaining their stances on real issues of real importance."

I say, "Amen" to that.

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Posted by Joyce Ellen Davis at 1:00 PM 6 comments
Friday, December 07, 2007
Mitt's Speech

Like Mitt Romney, I am a Mormon. I won't be voting for Mitt. Unlike most of the people in Utah, I am Democrat, and I'll probably vote for Obama. Nevertheless, it ticks me off that Mitt should need to defend his faith as a candidate for President of the United States of America, that he has to somehow prove to other Americans that he is a Christian. Or, that he is as Christian as other Christians. Like Mitt, "I believe in my Mormon faith and I endeavor to live by it." It defines who I am (a child of God), informs me where I came from and gives my life purpose.

In today's Deseret News, Lee Benson writes that "Weirdness, not religion, is the real issue." He says Romney's "problem is this: 160 years since they drove us out of Nauvoo, people still think Mormons aren't normal.

"They think we're weird.

"This is perplexing to us who are actual Mormons, and not just because it bugs us that our beliefs, rites and rituals attract a great deal of ridicule when other religions can have their chants, creeds and ceremonies and no one seems to look twice.

"Nope. We don't like it because we know we are every bit as normal as they are."

And as moral, and as intelligent. We are a lot like everyone else--we don't have horns, as people once believed, we are born, we marry, we love our children, we teach them to be honest, to tell the truth, to love each other, we try to be good role models, we laugh at jokes, we go to the movies, we eat at McDonald's, play with our dogs, pay our bills, dress up on Halloween, blow out birthday candles, grow old, and die. Like everyone else, some of us "get it right" and some us us "screw it up." We give, we take. We are a lot like you. Our similarities are much, much greater than our differences. In our hearts, we know this. And we hope you do, too.

One UK newspaper reporter wrote that Mormonism is a "pop-art cartoon" of mainstream Protestantism. I hope, when the first Jew, or the first Buddhist, or the first Muslim, or the first Atheist runs for President, that he/she will be chosen because they are good, and decent, and honest, and smart. I hope people will not think they are "too weird" because they are "less mainstream."

Orson Scott Card (also a Mormon) wrote in today's paper: "...when it comes to choosing a president, does a person's opinion about the nature of God make any difference at all? What makes a difference is the candidate's character. Does he actually live by the rules he professes to believe in? Does he keep his word? Character is the only issue that matters, in my opinion. A person who professes correct opinions but has no honor won't be much good as a president, while a person of honor can believe what he wants about God and still be a president we can trust."

So, did Mitt persuade the evangelicals? I doubt it. Lee Benson wrote, "He might have been better off just wearing a badge that said "Vote For Me. I'm Normal" and leaving it at that. Anyway, he gave it a shot.
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Posted by Joyce Ellen Davis at 1:43 PM 5 comments
Saturday, June 02, 2007
Labels People Have Given Me over the Years

I borrowed this idea from January, Choir-girl, Up and Comer, Democrat, Good-cooker, and Poet-Mom, and had fun doing it!

* * * *

Newborn*Girl*Baby*Daughter*Granddaughter*Sister*Niece*Cousin*
Mugwump*Blondie*Dice*Dicey*Joyce*
Joycie*Child*Skinny*Fat*Bashful*Shy*Quiet*Baby-Crazy*Student*Smart*
Latter-Day Saint*Mormon*Child of God*Desert Rat*Californian*Brownie* Girl Scout*Girlfriend*Loner*
*President of Art Club*Artist*Grand Prize Winner*Sweepstakes Winner*President of Drama Club*Graduate*Best Friend*Joycie-My-Joycie*Juice*Beatnik*Bohemian*Flower Child*Single*Passive*Agressive*Actress*New Girl*Not A Bulldog*Married*Newlywed*Mrs.*That Girl*That Lady*That Woman*Wife*Sister-in-Law*Daughter-in-Law*Joy*Poet*Author*Writer
*Cancer Victim*Patient*Survivor*Neighbor*Book Award Winner*American*Democrat*Protester*Activist*Pacifist*Telephone Operator
*Lens Polisher*Waitress*Usher*Telemarketer*Teacher*Poet of the Year*Renter*Homeowner*Pet Owner*Animal Lover*Credit Card Holder*Sis*Aunt Joyce *Editor*Moviegoer*Right-Brained*Reader*Utahn*Mother*Mama*Soccer Mom*Pedestrian*Pianist*Mother-in-Law*Grandmother*Gramma*Big Apple*Gram Cracker*Librarian*Retired*Vacationer*Senior Citizen*Spacey*
*Blogger*Contributer*Pepek the Assassin.

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Posted by Joyce Ellen Davis at 7:47 AM 9 comments
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
My First Meme...!

Wendy, who is quiet about a lot of things, answered 5 questions sent to her by her friend Karl. Now she has given me five questions (of her choosing) to answer. I'll do my best, okay? Then, if YOU want to play, let me know in the comments and I will personally craft five questions for YOU!

1. Compare and contrast women now and then.

Women then were tougher than they are now. They wore hats and bustles and corsets and shoes that required a crochet-hook to button. They didn't have zippers and snaps and velcro, or cute Nikes. They had to go out and gather their own nuts and berries and grind it into pemmican, whereas now we can put on our Nikes and run down to the Safeway, or better, the Olive Garden. They looked funny. Just look at a photograph of your great grandmother, for instance. We look good--we pluck our eyebrows and Botox our wrinkles and color our grey hair.

Women were tougher then than they are now. There is no way in hell I could ever walk a thousand miles through the snow (in my high-buttoned shoes). Or lose most of my children to flu or diptheria (as my great grandmother did), or watch them die of hunger, or cold, and bury them and leave them on the plains. I just couldn't. My children had all their vaccinations, and parkas, and braces on their teeth.

Women were tougher then than they are now. They had to read penny dreadfuls, or the Bible, or nothing at all. We have Blogs!

2. I'd like to know a bit about your faith...

I am LDS (Mormon). I believe that "the Glory of God is Intelligence," and that I am a child of God, that I have a Heavenly Mother as well as a Heavenly Father. I believe that life is eternal, that I existed before my birth on this earth, and will continue to exist. I believe that the universe is filled with light, and with life, and that those are probably the same thing. I believe that "Families are Forever," and that "Man is that he might have Joy." (Joy: being loved, learning to love others, having free agency to make bad choices, learning things -- languages and histories and cultures, planets, stars, galaxies....) I believe that God speaks to men, that there are many 'holy' books, that Mohammed and the Buddha, and Black Elk were inspired with truth. I believe the Old Testament, and the New Testament are testaments of Jesus Christ. I believe the Book of Mormon is ANOTHER testament of Christ. I believe that Christ's Atonement was universal and applies to everyone, to all people, to animals, to "every blade of grass." So, yes, I kiss my dogs. But not on the LIPS. (Does this answer your bonus question, somewhat? --but, I didn't even talk Baby Talk to my babies!) I believe that animals have souls--if any of our lives are eternal, they all are. I believe that I will have the opportunity to hold the baby I lost, and kiss his neck, and raise him to a perfect adulthood as a part of our family. There it is. In a Nutshell. And, though this is not part of the original question: what do I regret the most? I most regret that I did not adequately teach all my children that what is most important in their lives, at the end of the day, when all is said and done, is that they seek first the Kingdom of God. I regret, too, that I have not always done this.

3. You said you traveled a bit...(from Home) as a young woman...How did your parents and peers feel about that?

I joined a theater repertory company when I was young and had decided to become a great actress...it was a lot of fun and I loved the people I travelled with, the people I met, and I wouldn't trade those experiences for anything. I have a lot of good memories. But, my parents weren't as enthusiastic about my "bumming around the country" with a bunch of actors. But they got over it. As for my peers...I was kind of a loner (not the kind that suddenly buys a gun and 50 rounds of ammunition and shoots people!) but I kept pretty much to myself...so I don't know what they thought. My folks were supportive, in spite of their misgivings.

4. Did your sons marry women like you...or not like you?

Um, probably not like me. THEY (my sons) are a lot like me, but their wives--not so much. One of my daughters-in-law is Japanese, is a wonderful housekeeper (which I am not) and a fantastic cook (which I am definitely not). She is tiny and beautiful, a good mother to Bookworm and Starfish. Another daughter-in-law is Filipina, also tiny and beautiful (which I am not), teaches school, is a good mother to Chime and Cake, and loves to eat stuff I think is hideous--like pig's blood over rice, balut (half-grown duck embryos in a half-boiled egg *shudder*) and fish heads; another is tall and fair-haired and beautiful, and Lutheran, and Swedish, (all good things!). She has a Master's of Social Work degree, is a family counselor, and is the mother of my two fair-haired, blue-eyed and hazel-eyed grandsons. And the most recent is a Baptist/Episcopalian, dark-haired, attorney (much smarter than I!), who is a victim's advocate and looks like she should be on TV in Law and Order... and is the mom of my littlest, so handsome grandson. So, no, they're not like me...They are all four of them beautiful and smart and kind-hearted, and I love them all ENORMOUSLY! We have really interesting Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners!

5. What food soothes you?

What food? ALL food (but not blood, balut or fish heads). I am like a vacuum cleaner, soothed by old crackers, stale cake, cold spaghetti, ...anything. Unfortunately.

Bonus question: Do you kiss your dogs? How about Baby Talk?

I love my dogs. See question/answer #2.

Directions for the Interview Meme:

1. Leave me a comment saying "Interview Me."

2. I will respond by asking you 5 questions. I get to pick the questions.

3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.

4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.

5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them 5 questions.

** Photo of my great grandmother, Laura Ann. Thanks, Wendy. That was fun!

.
Posted by Joyce Ellen Davis at 10:07 AM 10 comments
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Metaphor: The Tree of Utah (Or, What I Did Last Summer)

Monday, May 15, 2006
The Wild God's Grace

A nice piece I found in some old papers today while looking for something else. This article appeared in SUNSTONE, August, 1990. It's written by an old acquaintence, Levi S. Peterson, and was presented at the 1990 Washington D.C. Symposium.

A MORMON EVOLUTIONIST AND THE WILD GOD'S GRACE

(excerpts)
...Prairie dogs are rodents which live in burrows. In prehistoric America their subterranean dwellings covered hundreds of miles of grassy plains. Viewing them, I thought of the birds to whom St. Francis of Assisi preached, for these prairie dogs seemed like a congregation of worshipers--curious, attentive, and devout. I join St. Francis in declaring the plants and animals of the earth to be my closest brothers and sisters. I rely on my mute intuitions to inform me that the impulse to to live I find everywhere on this fecund earth, in grasses and algae and pine trees as well as in prairie dogs and human beings is godly. This inorganic planet of magma, rock, water and air, is divine; but even more divine is the life that has occupied it and made it home. I love the wild world because it is so replete with an unapologetic impulse to live. The plants and animals claim their birthright. They do not agonize over duty; they listen to an inner commandment and strive to exist. And in their presence I worship, for God has spoken them, and they are his Word.

...I do not limit culpability among animals to the carnivores, for herbivores are guilty of maiming and killing plant life. For that matter, plants too participate in evil as they ingest, inhibit, and kill other plants or animals. It is the inborn curse of the mortal order whereby all living things are under the grim necessity of devouring other life. To achieve the goodness of developing my own life and the lives of other human beings and the lives of the plants and animals I choose to favor, I must sacrifice innumerable other plants and animals.

...I do not try to clear God of complicity in this tragic state of affairs. It was God who ordained that the original protoplasm from which life has evolved should be mortal. So on Judgement Day, if there is to be a Judgement Day, God will stand indicted under a law of his own devising. On that day I will be ready to forgive God, as I hope he will forgive me. I will forgive him because I do not believe he can intervene in the natural order he has established. My only certitude regarding God is this: he is the creative force of the cosmos which expresses itself in natural law. But of course, I am pleased to imagine, to hope, he is much more as well. I hope God is the guarantor of certain outrageous miracles, one of which is the immortality of individual human beings...I hope he is the supernatural destiny toward which consciousness and spirit in the natural world are tending.

...Each Sunday as I partake of the sacrament, I devote a portion of my meditation to a prayer for pardon. I do not ask Christ to forgive me, because I do not believe he has ever condemned me...I must forgive myself, over and over for failing to be a saint. I affirm that the best and purest expression of God in this wide universe is in the imperative of the human conscience toward self-sacrifice in behalf of others. "If any man will come after me," said Jesus, "let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me...." The cross of our new ecologically oriented age is vaster, weightier, more hopeless of being borne than the old cross of earlier ages. We are asked to be eco-saints. Though our duty to our own kind is in nothing diminished, we are now asked to love and cherish the wild world as well. We are asked to covenant ourselves to the cause of clean air, pure water, and natural soil. We are asked to engage ourselves in behalf of snails, meadowlarks, kelp, moths, and earthworms, too. The living world is our temple and we are asked to keep it holy."

(It's LONG but it's worth it.)
Posted by Joyce Ellen Davis at 4:10 PM 6 comments

Monday, August 01, 2005
MOVIE STARS
The day after the tsunami hit South Asia, taking nearly 30,000 lives and causing incalculable destruction, Elder Subandriyo called Bertha Suranto to take leave of her job and travel to the city of Medan in northern Sumatra. As a volunteer for her church, she began purchasing building materials, tents, food, clothing, cooking stoves, and materials for thousands of hygiene kits. As each truck was filled, Sister Sutanto phoned ahead to her husband who was helping out in Banda Aceh, and he helped distribute the items among those in need--99 % of whom were Muslim. Everywhere they went, townspeople ran out to greet and welcome them. "We felt as though we were movie stars," Sister Suranto said. One village chief said more than anything else, his village needed copies of the Koran, as theirs had been swept away in the tsunami. A few days later, the LDS Church presented the village with 700 copies.

I say, Good for them. My question: if the shoe was on the other foot, would the Muslims have done the same with copies of the Book of Mormon?

...And So,

2008-05-24T10:52:00.000-07:00

...and so, we made a life together. And became a FAMILY.

Our memories, too, make journeys. What is lost comes back to find us when we need to be found." --Nancy Willard

I'm a Mother!

2007-09-30T18:59:00.000-07:00

May 25, 1965

We rented out the little house in back-- they have no furniture, so we have to buy it all. We got a mattress set for $26 and a refrigerator for $45-- both in good condition. The renters gave us a $100 dollar bill!

...The baby kicks and punches a lot, and has for quite a while. I can even see it on the outside. Usually when I'm lying down and trying to rest is when it decides to exercise. It turns around and rolls from one side to the other a lot. I've been going into the backyard to suntan some afternoons. I'll feel funny now with renters in the back. I am getting so fat. Sometimes I get so depressed, about nothing. I feel like sitting in the corner and howling, and I can't think of any reason WHY. I get lonesome sometimes.

A man just left who wants to sell us a water softener. He doesn't know we don't have any money! My washer and dryer both work good, only the water has to run out into the backyard. But it dries up fast. We still have to get so many things-- a crib mattress and pads and baby clothes, etc. Week after next I start working my 10 split trick. Only two more months to go. (I worked for Ma Bell as a telephone operator, the same job my mother worked at for twenty-five years in Inyokern).

August 20, 1965

They are getting even with me for those nice four days off. I'm working ten days in a row. Five to go. But there is one piece of good news. We're going to get our insurance after all. Some nice lady from Juvenile Hall gave us a lot of baby clothes, an infantseat, and a car bed.

(As it turned out, I didn't have to work those ten days in a row after all. Of the five days left, I only worked four. And it was a good thing the insurance kicked in when it did. The baby was born on the last day, three weeks early. Surprise, surprise. A BOY-- six pounds two ounces, 18 inches long. Marvin said he looked like Woody Woodpecker. I thought he was just beautiful! What d'you think?)

*

Windmills of Your Mind

2007-09-30T17:55:00.000-07:00

Round, like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning
On an ever spinning reel
Like a snowball down a mountain
Like a carnival balloon
Like a carousal that's turning
Running rings around the moon

Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes on it's face
And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind

Like a tunnel that you follow
To a tunnel of it's own
Down a hollow to a cavern
Where the sun has never shone
Like a door that keeps revolving
In a half forgotten dream
Or the ripples from a pebble
Someone tosses in a stream

Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes on it's face
And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind

Keys that jingle in your pocket
Words that jangle in your head
Why did summer go so quickly
Was it something that I said
Lovers walk along the shore
Leave their footprints in the sand
Was the sound of distant drumming
Just the fingers of your hand

Pictures hanging in a hallway
And a fragment of a song
Half remembered names and faces
But to whom do they belong
WHen you knew that it was over
Were you suddenly aware
That the autumn leaves were turning
To the color of his hair

Like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning
On an ever spinning reel
As the images unwind
In the circles of your mind

(From the soundtrack to the movie The Thomas Crown Affair, words and music by Alan Bergman and Michel Legrand)

*

The Summer of Love

2007-05-24T19:58:00.000-07:00

So. Suddenly I found myself with a husband, and I became a wife. In a small apartment on Mallul, in Anaheim, a few blocks from Disneyland. From our bedroom window every night we could view fireworks over the Matterhorn and watch Tinkerbell fly from the top peak down through the exploding darkness toward the Sleeping Beauty's Castle. And a block away, out the same window, there was a big red T rising above the ThriftiMart. Life was beautiful. I listened to folk music and wrote poetry all day. I practiced playing Marv's guitar and sang along with Joan Baez and Judy Collins and wondered with Pete Seeger Where Have All the Flowers Gone?Joan said the answer was Blowin' In the Wind. If we waited long enough, the Lord would Kumbaya. The Beatles sang that Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been, lives in a dream....

It was the Summer of Love, Lyndon Johnson won the Presidency and 50,000 young soldiers would die in a far-off place called Viet Nam, which was of little concern at the time. Nobody had even heard of Viet Nam, really. We had no idea that once in, there would be no way out. Flowers were in Power.

We bought furniture--a blue couch, two end tables, a lamp, a brown plaster statue of Confucious, and somewhere along the line, another of comedian W.C. Fields. We bought dishes. Marv had one plate, one drinking glass, a knife, fork and spoon.... We bought pots and pans. Potholders (Marv's kids at Juvenile Hall made us an endless supply of yarn potholders). Bath towels.

We still went to Newport Beach often, got browner, ate bananas-on-a-stick, gathered collections of seashells. We went to old art films, Black Orpheus, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. We saw Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove: How to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,
and Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton in Becket,and Anthony Quinn in Zorba the Greek.

Rent was $40 a month, and we were happy with very little money. A lonely kid from the apartment below us came up every day to visit me. Colyer Dupont was a child actor, eleven or twelve years old, with long blond hair. My hair was long, and blond. He thought I was pretty, said I was like his sister. His mother was divorced, and carless, so when Colyer went to auditions at Disney Studios in Hollywood, I took them there in my little old DKW, which ran on a mixture of half-and half, half gas, half oil--(Janet had taught me how to drive that car in the Rose Bowl parking lot in Pasadena the year before). Colyer's mother and I waited, our fingers crossed for him. All of us were living on a shoestring, you know. It didn't matter.

Marvin worked as a counselor at Albert Sitton Hall (and Orange County Juvenile Hall), a place for delinquents and homeless children. I still saw myself as an aspiring actress, an eccentric bohemian, while I tried to learn to cook and clean and be a good wife. Marv and I were very much on the same wavelength--one or the other of us finishing each others sentences, or transferring identical thoughts. Often, even our dreams at night would slide from one head to the other, sharing words and images, a unique intimacy, a sort of "meeting of spirits," like Leonard Cohen wrote about in Suzanne. In the music we listened to the singers were like friends. It was a time of great happiness.

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by
You can spend the night beside her
And you know that she's half-crazy
But that's why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges
That come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her
That you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer
That you've always been her lover
And you want to travel with her
And you want to travel blind
And you know that she will trust you
For you've touched her perfect body with your mind

And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching
From his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain
Only drowning men could see him
He said "All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them"
But he himself was broken
Long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone
And you want to travel with him
And you want to travel blind
For he's touched your perfect body with his mind

Now Suzanne takes your hand
And she leads you to the river
She is wearing rags and feathers
From Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey
On our lady of the harbor
And she shows you where to look
Among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed
There are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love
And they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds the mirror
And you want to travel with her
And you want to travel blind
And you know that you can trust her
For she's touched your perfect body with her mind

.

I Do! I Do!

2007-03-27T09:48:00.001-07:00

WEDDING DAY--June 19th, 1964

2007-03-27T09:14:00.000-07:00

They played Bach's Brandenburg Concertos when Marv and I were married. My brother played a French horn solo called Romance, and a friend sang Tonight, Tonight and There's A Place For Us from WEST SIDE STORY. (This friend, who was an actor, was killed a few years later during a performance of Oliver, the villan Fagan, shot by a badly packed blank bullet. )

When Marv proposed marriage, back on Valentine's Day, 1964, he gave me a heart-shaped box of candy. Inside, in the center, one of the candies was missing, and in its paper wrapper was a diamond ring. On the previous Sunday night, February 8th, the Beatles had appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. Marianne thought they "looked like apes." Gaylen was impressed with their "backbeat." They sang I Wanna Hold Your Hand, and She Loves You, and Please Please Me to an audience of screaming teenagers. And I said, "Yes." Absolutely. Yes.

This was my third visit to the L.A. Temple. The first time was when I attended its dedication, as a teenager; the second was on September 10th, 1957, when Gaylen and I were sealed to Mama and Daddy after their marriage for Time and Eternity. Marv's best friend (and Best Man) Richard Barbieri and his wife Eileen were there for us, and Gaylen and Marianne. Janet was mad that she wasn't allowed inside the Temple for the ceremony, but she and beautiful Cindy Moller (who took time off from her job as a topless dancer at the Dunes in Las Vegas) made up for it by providing a huge bottle of champagne (which we kept in the closet, unopened, for years and years....), painting "Just Married" signs in lipstick, and tying tin cans to the back bumper of the car.

Janet was my Matron of Honor, my sister-in-law, Marianne, andMarv's little sister Jean were my Bridesmaids. I wore Janet's wedding dress, that filled both the "something old" and "something borrowed" requirements. The "something new" was my veil, with a sparkly little decoration in the front. Two of my old boyfriends were there. (There. I have survived. Do you see? I am happier than I ever was! Do you see?)

"Hey," one of them said. "You look great!"

I smiled, knowing I looked terrific. Marv and I had been to the beach often. We were both thin and sun-tanned and golden. My hair was blonde and he had hair! I'd say now, looking back from a distance of forty-plus years, that we were perfectly perfect people. Almost.

Some wedding pictures: Marv cutting our cake with a pancake turner. Why didn't we have a knife? I have forgotten. Janet and me, smiling. "You be good to her now," she warned him. No one ever said to me, "You be good to him." At least, I don't remember it if they did. Claude Gillham, a friend whose lap I used to sit on as a five-year-old while I rubbed his bald head, gave me a hug. Mama used to tell me not to rub his wonderfully smooth head, because it would hurt his feelings. FOr the life of me I could not imagine why it would ever hurt his feelings. But this night, I did not rub his head. I held two of my cousins little girls for photographs. And I may have been thin, but my corset was so tight I could not breathe, and I thought the night would never end.

Tonight, tonight. won't be just any night.
Tonight there will be no morning star.
Tonight, tonight, I'll see my love tonight,
And for us, stars will stop where they are....

But it did. And we drove from the desert back to the city, where Marv's room-mate, a cop we called Sweet William was sleeping in the bedroom. So, at three in the morning, we threw a mattress on the front room floor, and we slept.

We honeymooned in Ensenada, Mexico. We stayed at a little motel just out of town, on the beach, called Cabanas Monte Carlo, run by some people from Lebanon, who gave us a calendar with Hernan Cortez carrying off some voluptuous black-haired, half-dressed woman. We ate tacos at places who made their tortillas by hand and cooked them over big metal drums, places run by Chinese, called Fat Choi's Mexican Food. We ate Chinese at places called Pedro's, or Juan's. We ran out of money and lived for three days on corn tortillas, goat's butter, and 7-Up. At night piteros players on the street made lovely ancient music with magic flutes and drums. We took walks on the rocky beaches and watched the sun set. I wore my hair long and loose, and Marv smiled a lot. We loved each other. I'd never had so much fun in my whole life. We were poor but happy. The village idiots.

There's a place for us,
Some day a time for us.
Time together with time to spare,
Time to learn, time to care.
Someday.

There's a place for us,
A time and place for us.
Hold my hand and we're halfway there.
Hold my hand and I'll take you there
Somehow,
Someday,
Somewhere.

.

Marvin Maurice Emerson Davis, Jr

2007-03-26T19:27:00.001-07:00

vvv

Marv and I had only known one another for about eight years, so it was sort of a whirlwind romance, you might say. *Smile* This is a good time to let you know you something more about Marvin Maurice Emerson Davis, Jr (besides his impetuous nature). He was born in St. John's Township, Harrison County, Iowa, in his Grandmother Stoddar's house, the first of six children. For a while they lived in Sioux City, in a quiet neighborhood called Morningside, where he fell in love with a little girl with a red sweater and had his first banana split, and crossed the Missouri River over the singing bridge, and carried a real pocket-knife in a pouch at the top of his lumberjack boots. His father worked in the slaughterhouses down by the river's edge. His mother was from a well-to-do Chicago family. She had taken dancing lessons, and wore ribbons in her hair. When she moved to California with her family she had a real future in Hollywood. Everybody thought so. And the California air would be healthful, a cure for her mother's consumption. The Stoddar's (Marv's mother's people) were from old seafarer's, ship's captains, Master Mariners, and such. His father's ancestors can be traced back to a Black Irish lad named Roe and an Indian medicine woman named Dancing Sun, and to a President of the United States and a Signer of the Declaration of Independence.) When he was still a little boy, the family moved to Alhambra,California. On the way, at Grand Canyon, he had a nosebleed. Once there, Marv fell in love with a little girl in a yellow dress, tried a couple of times to burn down his house, blew up seagulls with carbide-laced bread, and endeared himself to his sisters by hanging their paper dolls by the neck until they were dead or chopping them into pieces with his scissors. He wasn't always that violent. He camped overnight at Tin Can beach with his friends, and stargazed. He peddled newspapers, and --out of embarrassment, or fear-- those he didn't sell he bought with his own money and threw away down the rain gutter, rather than return the unsold papers to the manager. In school, he was required to memorize "Invictus," by William Ernest Henley:

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of Chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade.
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

"Invictus" was the motto of the United States Naval Academy, class of 2001, (the year the Trade Towers in NYC went down), hurling defiance into the teeth of the storm.

He joined the Navy when he was just seventeen, and spent most of the next four years as a radioman on Guam, an island paradise he would dream about for the rest of his life. The Navy taught him to drink and smoke cigars, and saved his life. Once, he almost drowned himself swimming alone in off-limit waters, out past the coral reefs. When he found himself exhausted, he decided to give it up, and just let himself go under. When he ran out of air, he changed his mind and resurfaced. He gave up, went under, and came up again for air several times before they hauled him in, his legs raw and bleeding from the knife-edged coral. I guess I owe the Navy for that.

When he wasn't on the island, he was on the USS Chandler, where he sat alone on the deck at night and wrote poetry, sang songs to himself, and smoked cigars-- a vice he overcame, thanks to his conversion to the LDS Church. I guess I owe the Church for that.

It was while he was in the Navy that he became converted to the Church. I met him in 1957 while I was a student at the Pasadena Playhouse. He was working as a counselor at Hathaway House, a home for abandoned and emotionally disturbed and abused children. He had a great love and sensitivity for those children. Later he worked at Albert Sitton Hall in Orange County. We had a lot of fun together. When he held my hand it just seemed to fit. We spent lots of time at the beach, or at Pershing Square in LA (which used to be a fantastic place populated by schizophrenics, street preachers, drunks, dope fiends, and Salvation Army revivals). We went people-watching at Boorman's, a market in Pasadena which specialized in packaged pig-snouts and pig-tails and pig-feet, and it was purely awful, --but fun. We had unusual dates, and he fell in love with me.

We went our separate ways for a while, while I went out on the road with the theater company, and he almost married somebody else, a girl named Jane, heiress to the riches of the Tappen Stovetop Ranges fortune. He might have had millions and lived comfortably ever after, but, as it happened... it seemed like every time I went to visit my friend Janet, for some reason Marv would always show up with his skis, or on his motorcycle. Fate seemed to be throwing us together. Anyway, I finally proposed, and he accepted, and we were married, and I'm glad, because I do love him. Penniless though I was, he thought I was "a fairy princess," and loved me back.

He had a terrible temper. He had the soul of a poet. He loved opera, Lily Pons and Enrico Caruso, and folk music-- Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, he loved Johann Sebastian Bach, and took me to the LA County Library where, listening with one shared headphone, each of us with one speaker, he introduced me to the Brandenburg Concertos. I owe him for that.

He's been a good father to our five sons. He's a good grandfather. He loves John Wayne westerns and old war movies (if they have no blood, and star John Wayne). He likes his poetry to rhyme. His favorite movies are The Wizard of Oz and Brigadoon. He loves to watch football on television, and his favorite color is yellow. He's an insomniac. He still loves opera. And he still holds my hand.

What else?

Saul Bellow (who won a Nobel Prize for literature) said: "I blame myself for not often enough seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. Somewhere in his journals, Dostoyevski remarks that a writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace things,
scratch around in it long enough, and lo! soon he will hit upon the marvelous. I tend to believe that, at least most of the time." And H.G. Wells said that "Man must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind him to the fact that each moment of his life is a miracle and a mystery." Each moment of my life has been a miracle and a mystery. The love I have for Marvin, the birth of each one of our children, our grandchildren, have surely been miracles and mysteries. Johnny Carson asked singer Helen Reddy once what she'd do if her success would all end tomorrow. And she said, "If it should all end tomorrow-- well, I've had one heck of a ride, and enjoyed every minute of it!"

Me, too. It's all marvelous! I've had one heck of a ride, and I guess I owe my Father in Heaven big time for that.

.

The University of Utah

2007-03-26T18:50:00.000-07:00

The U of U was on the hillside across from my brother Gaylen's house on Sunnyside Avenue. The Zoo was only a little farther up the hill. I walked to the University and back home every afternoon, and the fields behind the National Guard Armory were empty except for meadow larks and sparrows. I lived in the basement of Gaylen and Marianne's little house until their new house on Orchard Drive in Bountiful was built. Mom and Daddy were building a new house on the lot just to the west, and were getting ready to move from California. Every morning after the move to Bountiful, Gaylen and I would climb into his Volkswagen and chug off to school together. He had his new PhD in Music, and was teaching several classes in music theory and composition, and French Horn. I took Music 101 from him, and felt obligated to get an "A" because I really didn't want him to think I was stupid. I loved the class, and he was an awesome teacher. I spent much of my free time between classes in the listening library of the music building listening to Palestrina Masses. My friend Janet wrote, warning me that this was a terrible place to meet men, and she worried that I would become an old maid.

I loved my Physics and Astronomy classes. I barely made it through a year of French. Paris est dans le Sud de la France. Le Seine traverse Paris. The new Pioneer Memorial Theater had just been completed, and most of my classes were there, or in Kingsbury Hall, next to the music building. I loved to sit under the trees between the two buildings, listening to the hodgepodge of sounds coming from the windows of the various practice rooms: piano scales, violins, horns, voices.... When Kingsbury became the home of the Ballet and Dance Department, I began to live my life, from dawn until dark, in the basement of the Theater building.

My theater classes were fine. The University accepted most of my Playhouse credits, so I had all upper level classes. I wrote home:

May 25, 1961

Dear Folks, Thanks for the dress and sweater. They're very nice, and fit fine. Gaylen's house is really going up fast. The basement and floor are in. Marianne is so excited-- she's been planning paint colors and decorating and such. The kitchen is all built in. Gaylen has been trimming all the trees on their lot and yours.

Do you know who the happiest motorcyclist is? The guy with the bugs all over his teeth! And have you seen the new Helen Keller doll? Wind it up, and it walks into the wall! (Not very funny?)

I have a rehearsal at 2 this afternoon. We open on Wednesday. I got my name in the paper this morning-- spelled wrong. We have been having late run thru's lasting until after one a.m. I play Dunyasha Thursday night. One performance out of four. Amy E. plays opening night and the week-end. So Byron took me aside after rehearsal & told me why I was playing just one night. He said he was sorry I wasn't playing more, but that there were "a lot of things involved," such as the fact that Amy has been here three years, and this is the first good part she's had. Mrs. McGrath (Byron's wife, Grace) was there when he was talking to me. She said she liked my Dunyasha, and that when she looks at me she thinks of 25 plays I could do! That was nice.

I met John Jory last night (Victor Jory's son). We talked for a long time. He came again tonight, and asked where in California I lived, & how come I was here, & how I liked the Playhouse, etc. He's done a lot of shows there, since he was a little boy.

Maybe I'll just enroll in the Writer's Conference this summer, and save my money for the Fall quarter. There aren't a lot of classes offered in summer. I'll just concentrate on the Conference, and maybe some of the summer shows. I'll have to get a manuscript together-- don't know what....

Wednesday

Opening night's over. The show ran 20 minutes late. Amy felt very bad about it, she was in tears. It will be me in tears tomorrow. John Jory told me he's coming tomorrow night. And Gaylen and Marianne will both be there. So there will be at lest three people in the audience. There was a full house tonight. More later.

Thursday

We had another full house-- even had to turn people away. MY night is over. Byron patted my cheek, called me "Angel," and said it was "Swell." Who knows? Since I have just one night, there's not much use for criticism. Marianne and her mother came. Gaylen has been writing a philosophy paper all day and all night. Her mother is mad at me, I think. See, we had this weird-looking bug on the wall, it could run like hell, boy. Gaylen was after him with a piece of paper and a Kleenex. Marianne was shrieking and her mother was on his tail with her shoe, stomping and shouting, "WELL MY GODFREY, GAYLEN, KILL IT!" (That's the nearest to swearing I've ever heard from her).

"My sister'll be mad at me if I do," he said. Up to now I was just an innocent bystander. "He won't kill it," said Marianne.

"WELL I'LL KILL IT!" And Mrs. J. runs at it with her shoe again. So I took Gaylen's Kleenex & picked up the bug & put him outside. My cat was running wild by this time, rolling up all the rugs, with her eyes big and her ears back flat-- Hot damn! Quite a fun little episode, huh? The cat's all lovey now tonight. Goodnight.

Saturday

Tonight is the last night of "Cherry Orchard." Grace McGrath told me I was "just wonderful." I heard a lot of good things from a lot of people. She said I was the best Dunyasha she'd ever seen. I wish I could do it again tonight, even if Byron does feel obligated to Amy because she's been around for so long....

After last night's show my ride decided to go with the rest to a little bar called the Blue Angel. I felt awkward and out of place because everyone was getting drunk but me. Joyce the Stick. Gaylen and Marianne will begin to wonder-- I'm always bringing half-crocked people in to use the bathroom at one or two a.m.... Byron and Grace are having a cast party after the show tonight. Full house again, with people standing, crammed in every aisle. I wish you could see it.

Gaylen's going to plant a couple of little apple trees on your lot. I told him I thought Mrs. J. was mad at me. He said, "Well, she makes ME mad, quoting the Bible about the Lord sending things to torment man! The world is full of bugs-- every drop of water is full of little bugs, and most of them are harmless, if she only knew it!"
He's a good brother. XOXO

So that's how things went, generally. I went to the Writer's Conference that summer. Robie McCauley talked with me about my manuscript of stories (for 20 minutes and 6 dollars). He said my stories were too short and unfinished, and too grotesque.

Well. I got to do "Look Homeward, Angel" on the mainstage. Actually, I went to read for the understudy for Mercedes McCambridge, the actress coming from Hollywood to play Mrs. Gant. I only went along because my friend was trying out for one of the roles, and I read just because I was there, not because I expected to get the role. I was already involved in another show. Allen Somebody was doing "The Rainmaker," and I was doing Lizzy. We had several performances in Salt Lake and were taking the show to Moab in a few weeks. I could have had the understudy role. The director, Robert Hyde Wilson (we called him "Rawhide") said I read it perfectly, and he seemed disappointed and angry when I apologized and told him I couldn't do it....but he gave me a smaller part. In theater lingo, "Break A Leg" is a good-luck wish. As it happened, Ms. McCambridge actually broke her leg and was unable to come, so they hired an actress from New York, Leora Dana. She inspired me. She was a wonderful actress, absolutely awesome. Every night. I wrote home: I would love to keep trying for professional theater. If I am too old (by the time I finally get out of school) to play charming young things, then I'll play character and mother roles. After seeing Miss Dana in "Look Homeward Angel." She has played mother roles her whole career. I'm not a very charming young thing anyway!

Well. We took "Rainmaker" to Moab. And it was fun! I was Lizzie! Gene Pack, who hosted a classical music show on KUER for many years after, played my brother Noah. Steve Somebody-- I've forgotten his last name-- (he was a dead ringer for James Dean) played Starbuck. We took publicity photos in an old barn. Steve What's-his-name, standing up in the hayloft emptied the flashbulbs out of his camera down onto the bald head of Gene Pack, standing unaware below him. The flashbulbs bounced off like ping pong balls. I laughed and rolled around in the hay until I thought I would die of laughter. No one else seemed to think it was THAT funny.... Steve and I had a love scene in the "tack room." I discovered that I really liked kissing! I mean, it was 1963, I was almost 24 years old. I had certainly kissed, and been kissed before. But here, in the middle of "Rainmaker," I discovered that I really really liked kissing! And I can't even remember his last name!

Kim Hunter, who I had admired greatly since I was a teen-ager for her role as Stella in "Streetcar Named Desire," (she won an Academy Award for that), came to the U. to do G.B. Shaw's "Major Barbara." I wrote home: "I saw "Major Barbara" between rehearsals Saturday. It's a great show. I am very impressed with Kim Hunter. I sneaked into a symposium here this afternoon sort of by accident. The Theater Guild was listening to a discussion of Shaw, and "Major Barbara," and Kim Hunter was on the panel. I sat in the back with the newspapermen. (This was an accident, too, as I just walked in and sat down, uninvited. I didn't know then what, or who, was happening). Anyway, it was the most interesting hour of the day.

Anyway. I took a directing class from "Rawhide." I decided to do Christopher Fry's "A Sleep of Prisoners," which we had done when I was on the road. I cast a very good friend, Victor Gordon, a fine actor who was also Black, as God. In the 60's, people were marching for equality, and bombing churches, and killing civil right's workers and burying their young bodies in landfills. Our performance would be in a church in Bountiful, in my Ward on Orchard Drive. There were a few raised eyebrows at our rehearsals, but the show went very well. Rawhide gave me an "A". Years later, Time Magazine wrote a piece on the status of Blacks in Utah, and they interviewed Victor Gordon, who apparently felt like a 2nd class citizen among Mormons. I've always regretted that I never wrote a letter to the editor of Time, wondering if Victor remembered the time when he played God in a Mormon church?

Graduation was a blur. Forty-plus years later, I discover that the Baccalaureate Address was given by Neal A. Maxwell, "...but speaking the truth in love..." He said: "It is they to whom we look for concern with justice, whether this concern is held in spite of the fact that we live on a planet that someday will blink, quiver, and die or whether the concern is held because life on this planet is part of a continuum in which we strive for proximate justice; it is they to whom we look for some shared realism about the nature of man and for assurance and reassurance that man is sufficiently rational and good that, therefore, we need not despair. It is they to whom we look for shared concern about freedom....It is they to whom we look to place a premium upon knowledge as essential to survival in a changing world.... If all of us cannot link arms for the task of dealing with conflict by communicating the truth...we shall be a crippled culture-- a pathetic huddle of the timid, the apathetic, and the fearful-- a society likely to end as Eliot said, 'not with a bang, but a whimper.'"

*

ACT THREE: On the Road

2007-01-05T19:35:00.000-08:00

I went "on the road" with the Bishop's Company, American Repertory Players, in the summer of 1960. A fellow I knew from the Playhouse, Mark Rawson, was one of their 22 actors. I was number 23. Mark was from Glen Falls, NY, and had done three seasons of summer stock there before coming to Pasadena. He was a member of the Oregon Shakespearian Festival. He Left the Company almost as soon as I arrived, to do summer theater in Cripple Creek, Colorado. My first show was in Denver. I'd had two days to prepare. The pay was ten dollars a week, and the Company provided our meals and a roof over our head.

My mother thought it was a big mistake. She thought it was a bad idea for me to go "bumming around the country" with a bunch of actors, and tried to talk me out of it. As it turned out, she was wrong.

I was excited. The Bishop's Company was a group of professional actors dedicated to performing plays they thought were socially significant, in churches, at universities, sometimes in prisons. It began as the dream of a young and ambitious woman named Phyllis Benbow Beardsley, who I never met, but her young son wrote a poem about her I've never forgotten: There is no other mother, either far or near, who needs so much her girdle, and uses so much her brassiere. She was a tall red-head who "took courage in both hands and made the dream a reality." I believe Christopher Fry's The Boy with a Cart was their first play, a gentle, lyric poem of a shepherd boy who packs his old, nagging mother into a cart he has made, making himself a harness of willow shoots to pull it. They set out across the hills of SOuthern England. The boy believes that when the shoots break it will be the place where he will realize God's purpose. They performed this around Los Angeles, along with another called Thor, with Angels, and Herman Melville's Billy Budd for a while before their cross-country tours began. Variety wrote: "The theatre has gone back to the church after a lapse of about 400 years. And it has gone back with all the embellishments that modern theatrical techniques and modern ways of playwriting can muster." And again, "The prodigal son has returned to the bosom of the family and may well turn out to be one of the fair-haired boys. In other words, the theatre, after wandering into some devious pathways during the past 400 years [has] returned. The return of the 'bad boy' of the arts to its cradle is not only a healthy sign, but an indication that the deliquent has grown up...." All that was said way back in 1947. In July of 1954, the Los Angeles TImes ran an article that said: "Bishop's Company Booked at Churches Coast to Coast.
Los Angeles' own drama-in-the-church troupe of professional actors, The Bishop's Company, has shoved off on its first nationwide tour...." Anyway, by the time I joined them, they had four units, two that remained in the Los Angeles area and two that criss-crossed the United States and Canada. THey had BIG plans. We will have a ship! The ports of the world will be its harbor! I don't know if they ever reached that goal, but after I left, they toured Hawaii.

Alan Paton gave his permission for the Company to adapt his novel Cry, the Beloved Country as a play. Also in the repertoire were C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce, Rumer Godden's An Episode of Sparrows, Steven Vincent Benet's The Devil and Daniel Webster, and another of Christopher Fry's poetic plays, Sleep of Prisoners. And after all those years, we still did Boy With A Cart. The 'home' units did A.A Milne's Winnie-The-Pooh, as well as The Diary of Anne Frank.

I loved travelling. I loved the other actors. At first, as new people came into the group they were simply called "Newgirl," or Newboy." Whenever someone left, or went to join another unit, and new people came, we were given our name, and the newcomers became "Newgirl" or "Newboy."

I genuinely loved theater, and was grateful to be given this opportunity to work at something I had been preparing myself to do. While I was on the road, my best friend Janet was knocking on doors in Hollywood. I knew even then that my chances of working in Hollywood, or on Broadway in New York were remote at best--something akin to being abducted by space aliens. And with the Company, I did make it to New York, and I was a working actor!

In fact, one chilly Thanksgiving in New York City, when I was buying chestnuts from a street vendor (the wonderful perfume of roasting chestnuts is the BEST!), he went for coffee, asking me to "take over the cart," for a few minutes-- so, I also sold chestnuts on the sidewalk in New York City for a few minutes....

I wrote disgustingly long letters home, describing every cornfield and bird and Burma Shave sign we passed. Some others slept, some read, some studied lines. I remember Jim and Judy laughing hysterically over a book of Fractured Fairy Tales: Guilty Looks Enter Tree Beers, and Ladle Rat Rotten Hut, and Center Alley Enter Ladle Gloss Slobbers.

I wrote: "Hello from one of the Dirty Dozen in their Travelling Tenement! We're going to write Sleaze, Inc. on the side of the trailer. Our trash bags are overflowing with old show programs, candy wrappers, banana skins, etc. More mosquitos. It's raining again. We're thinking of calling ourselves The Jolly Consumptives. Cough, cough...."

"...We drove to Bowman, North Dakota last night. Up at seven and drive all day and most of the night. Then we'll be in Winnipeg tomorrow. Are you following me on the map? I love this!"

"...Spent last night in a hotel in Muskegon. The water wouldn't run out of the sink, and the plug in the bathtub didn't fit. I had to plug up the drain with my heel to keep the water in. Somebody's baby cried all night and a drunk talked to himself for hours outside our door. This place smells like Muskegon sounds. Yucch."

"Did you know I'm insured by Lloyds of London?"

"CHICAGO!--we have a necklace of dandelions hanging from the rear-view mirror. Yesterday I met a little girl who was overcome by standing next to a real actress! She said, "Gee, can I touch you?" SHe said she thought I was "the prettiest one" in the show! I could really get to like this. Lots of kids and old ladies ask us for autographs."

"...I feel--something I can't find words for. Like time is so short and things go by so quickly, and that frightens me...."

"Tonight we play a huge old barn of a building. I can hardly see the back wall from the stage. They've got eight baskets of flowers up there. If they don't move them, we'll all be hidden in the foliage! We went through Minneapolis and St. Paul early this morning. Can't remember much, but neither can I remember sleeping--just being tired and uncomfortable, and having my leg or my hand or arm go numb at close intervals...."

"THere was so much I wanted to tell you, but I'm too tired. About New York City, and the fly in my jello. About midnight rehearsals in hotel rooms. About all the company jokes (mostly dirty). About being so tired you think you're going to be verrry sick. And about all the beautiful people I've met."

I did, actually, meet and shake hands with Edward Teller, the Father of the Hydrogen Bomb. I didn't really know how famous (and infamous) he was, at the time. I only knew the people who introduced us told me, "Harry Truman called him before dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and said, Ed? What d'ya think?" Ed suffered a heart attack in 1979, which he blamed on Jane Fonda, for promoting her latest movie, The China Syndrome. Everybody said he was the "real" Dr. Strangelove. He seemed like an old man when I met him, but he lived until 2003!

I loved the people in my unit. Jeanne Needham was pretty, and funny when she didn't mean to be funny. Don Crail was a preacher who ran away with the circus. Dan Barrows had been in radio and TV in Cincinatti before joining the company. Chris Elm was easy to talk to, and Jim and Judy were good buddies. Jim's mother owned Brigham Young's "wine snifter," and Judy was a great horse-woman from Kentucky. She and I once rowed a little boat out on a big lake in a storm, with thunder and lightning crashing all around us. Gasping and sweating, we took turns rowing back to the dock, and when we finally got back, she said, "Thank you very much for the ride, Miss Earheart!" Frank Herold was Judy's "significant other." I once rolled Frank a cigarette made of weeds, when he ran out of his own brand. He said it was "very mild." Everybody sort of paired off--Frank and Judy, Jeanne and Clyde Phillips, and Jim and Marilyn. Freddy Goff and I were "an item" but he always smelled and tasted like cigarettes. He was good to me, wanted me to come to his home in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and promised to take me to New Orleans, to the Mardi Gras.
Ummm. Never happened. WHen I left the road to go back to school at the University of Utah, he married Carol Sunde, a sweet Lutheran girl from St. Olaf College in Minnesota. Maybe they are still married, if she hasn't passed on from breathing too much secondhand cigarette smoke. They were all truly like family.Jim Wheaton, one of the original eight, writes in his book Masks Before the Altar, "For me, each person was still an island that needed to be free...There are means of escape." For all our closeness, emotional, physically packed into the car like sardines in a can, as a "unit," each time we stopped, in every city, we were islands entire unto ourselves. Always.

I wrote: "One of the guys gave me a bouquet of scaggy wildflowers and a real hawk feather to brighten up our otherwise drab hotel room. He found somebody's falsie as we were about to leave Chicago, and he was embarrassed to ask who it belonged to. "Nobody would admit it if it was theirs anyway," he said. It didn't belong to me!"

CHEW MAIL POUCH TOBACCO, TREAT YOURSELF TO THE BEST. If Daisies Are...Your Favorite Flower...Keep Pushing Up...Those Miles Per Hour...Burma Shave. Kokomo. 14 miles. Eat. Budweiser, King of Beers. 4:24 P.M.

I wrote to Marvin: "Hope I don't have to be nice to anybody tonight. Hope they just leave me alone. I get so tired of being nice to people, saying the same things over and over. I'll be glad to get home. We'll have taquitos on Olvera Street."

Marv replied: "Looking forward to having 'Taquitos for Two,'(a new song I just wrote). Sorry this is such a short letter, but you must remember I am a short man. Although I am an intellectual giant."

I sent him one last letter from the road: "I miss you so much I could go out and eat worms. But you know how I hate to eat alone."

I had one standing ovation for a performance as Olivia in An Episode of Sparrows. And that one will have to last the rest of my life. I needed to stop. I was tired of waking up every morning wondering Where am I?, like an amnesiac from some old 1940's film. I needed a place to put things. I needed to go home. But sometimes at night I still have dreams about finding the company again, and I take off with them again, on another tour. Again. And it's almost like I've never left.

.

Yes, M'am.

2006-12-20T20:05:00.000-08:00

That would pretty much be it!

ACT TWO: No Business Like Show Business!

2006-12-16T18:46:00.000-08:00

I. Loved. Theater. I REALLY LOVED THEATER! I loved the idea of theater~from the masks and robes of the ancient Greeks to the early Medieval and Renaissance Mystery and Morality plays and pageants, I loved Commedia Dell'Arte and Shakespeare. I loved Antigone andMother Courage. I loved Sarah Bernhardt and Maude Adams, Helen Hayes and Ellen Terry. I loved theater for eternally examining the questions of human existense, for letting us see ourselves as we were, and are.

There were plays other than these, whose titles I've forgotten, and no pictures were taken to remember them by.

Teahouse of the August Moon featured Clark Howat as the young soldier, Lisa Liu as his Japanese sweetheart, and Jerry Oddo as Sakini, the narrator. I played one of the Japanese children. I wore latex eyelids, and dyed my hair black and went barefoot. The play ran for eight or nine weeks, and when it was over, the black hair-dye wouldn't wash out, and turned my blonde hair green.

Aria Da Capo, by Edna St. Vincent Millay: A lovely play with an anti-war sentiment. One of the lines I remember: "Columbine, your mind is like an escallop of oysters--first a layer of oysters, then a layer of crumbs...." I was Columbine. Still am.

I played the Prioress in Gregorio and Maria Martinez Sierra's The Cradle Song, a "perfect gem of a play," a "wonderfully touching piece of theater" in which an unwanted infant girl is left on the doorstep of a convent and is raised by Dominican nuns. We actually went to a convent, where the sisters taught us how to move, what to do with our hands, the melodies of their chants, the beads of the Rosary...they let us wear their clothes. This is a beautifully-written, delicate play I did twice, playing different roles: at the University of Utah a few years later I played Joanna of the Cross.

Easter Song was the West Coast Premiere. I was Sarah Brute, a sort of Medieval witch who believed that sacrificing little girls would insure good crops. My roomate Janet was in this one with me, playing Kie, the wife of Soren. (She later named her first little girl, Kie--pronounded key-a). Johnny Mercer's daughter Mandy played one of the children. Her big line was, "I hate oak bark soup!" And her famous dad came all the way from Hollywood to hear her say it! During one performance, the back set wall began to fall down, and I was so "into it" I never noticed. Janet thought it was a lot funnier than it did. I hope that was not the night Johnny Mercer was in the audience.

Idiot's Delight was set in a lavish hotel in Switzerland just before the onset of WWII. Harry Van, a two-bit American entertainer is stranded there with his travelling all-girl troup, Les Blondes. I chewed a huge wad of gum and carried a stuffed dog. One performance, one of Les Blondes zipper snapped while we were dancing our stuff, and she did all the bumps and grinds with one hand behind her back, holding her costume together. But she was a real dancer, and knew what she was doing.... The play was filmed in 1939, with Clark Gable doing Harry and Norma Shearer doing Irene (E-rain-a). It ended with the bombing of the hotel, and my friend Edmund Guerrero played Wagner's Flight of the Valkuries on the piano while the bombs exploded all around us. Off the set, he taught me how to play it, but it never sounded as good. My favorite line, said by Irene: "O-ma-ha? Vere dat? Persia?"

Oedipus Rex: I am lamenting, "Where did you get the courage to put out your eyes?" Backstage, we ripped off our chitons and changed costumes without dressing rooms. Nobody seemed to notice that we were all half-naked back there.... I changed with Paul Price, who later earned some fame as one of The Village People, and on Sesame Street.

Summer and Smoke was written by Tennessee Williams. I played Nellie. In Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker, I played Dolly Levi. The Purification was a dark play written in poetry by John Steinbeck. Three Men on a Horse was a comedy, in which I was Mable, a sort of Gun-Moll, here with Gary Necessary (who I had a crush on). I used to see Gary's name on television credits once in a while. He worked on one of the Olympics. Paul Price is shown here with Edith somebody, who lived next door in the dorm. One night I accidently locked myself in the bathroom. I could hear her singing away next door, our windows were practically on top of each other. I yelled for help for the better part of an hour--she never heard me--so I wrote poetry on the toilet paper until midnight, when Janet finally came home. She saved the toilet paper, saying, "Someday you'll be famous, and I'll have an original!" Poor Edith. She once had to cry on stage and carried an onion wrapped in a handkerchief to help her out. Everyone kept saying, "What's that smell?"

Roses for Johnny Johnson was an allegorical anti-war play. Johnny was Everyman.

And, there's Janet, doing Italian Straw Hat. I can hear her yet, wailing "But Papa, I don't want to get married!" And beautiful Myrna Fahey, who I dressed, in Holiday for Lovers. Myrna was a graduate of the Playhouse, and was in several movies and television shows. SHe did The Fall of the House of Usher with Vincent Price, the TV series Father of the Bride and in TV's Batman, she was False-Face's assistent, Blaze, among many other roles. SHe died of cancer, at 40.

There are other plays, for which I have no pictures: Ionesco's The Bald Soprano, The Sandbox, The Cherry Orchard, Bus Stop, Of Mice and Men, Glass Menagerie, Look Homeward Angel.

I loved the amber magic of the lights, the make-up, the costumes...and the applause. And if I live to be a hundred I will never fill that void.

.

ACT ONE: Ordinary People

2006-11-26T20:50:00.000-08:00

"There was, too, a wonderful simplicity of desire. It was the last time that people would be thrilled to own a toaster or waffle iron."

-- Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

Bill Bryson writes: In 1951, when the averge American ate 50% more than the average European, Americans owned 80% of the world's electrical goods, produced more than 40% of its electricity, 60% of its oil, and 66% of its steel. America's 5% of the world's population had more wealth than the other 95%. In fact, 99.93% of new cars sold in 1954 were U.S. brands. By the end of the 50's, GM was a bigger entity than Belgium, and Los Angeles had more cars than did Asia -- cars for a gadget-smitten people, cars with Strato-Streak engines, Strato-Flight Hydra-Matic transmissions and Torsion-Aire suspensions. The 1958 Lincoln Continental was 19 feet long. And before television arrived (in 1950, 40% of Americans had never seen a television program; by May 1953 Boston had more televisions than bathtubs).

Consider what was new or not invented then: ballpoint pens, contact lenses, credit cards, power steering, dish-washers, garbage-disposals. In 1951, a Tennessee youth was arrested on suspicion of narcotics possession. The brown powder was a new product--instant coffee.

Unlike today, when everything edible, from milk to bad spinach and mad cows, has its moment as a menace to health, in the 50's everything was good for you. Cigarettes? Healthful. Advertisments, often featuring doctors, said smoking soothed jangled nerves and sharpened minds. (What WERE we THINKING?) X-rays were so benign that shoe stores installed them to measure foot sizes. In Las Vegas, downwind from atomic weapons tests, government technicians used Geiger counters to measure fallout. People lined up to see how radioactive they were. It was all part of the fun! What a joy it was to be indestructible.

And indestructible we were then. "People knew, without a warning lable," Bryson notes dryly, "that bleach was not a refreshing drink."

White House security precautions were so lax that on April 3, 1956, a disoriented woman from Michigan detached herself from a tour group and wandered around the White House setting little fires. When found, she was taken to the kitchen and given a cup of tea. No charges were filed. The 50's did have worries. You could get 14 years in an Indiana prison for instigating anyone under age 21 to "commit masturbation." And to get a New York fishing license, you had to swear a loyalty oath.

But yes, we were still indestructible.

In September of 1957 I met my very best friend (who remains to this day my very best friend) Janet Lane. We loved each other enourmously from the start. We shared a small upstairs room at the Playhouse Women's Dorm, with ugly orange furniture and a view of the Playhouse, three blocks away. She was 19, a year older than I was. Her hair was red, her eyes dark brown, and her cheeks had dimples. I thought she was very beautiful and very sophisticated. She thought her nose was too large. "It's
my father's nose," she used to wail. SHe smoked. Sometimes we talked all night long, whispered to each other things we had never told anyone else. She swore, and taught me to swear. (I don't swear anymore--much--but I still know how). She informed me which of our fellow students were "gay," and what being "gay" was. (I was dumbfounded and amazed. What an incredible and inconceivable revelation this was!) She gave me sisterly advice: "For Heaven's sake, fix yourself up a little bit, use some more make-up. Eye shadow. And don't wear pink! You look like Alice in Wonderland in pink."

"You glow on stage," she told me later.

The dorm, actually Hale Residence Hall, had rules. All meals must be eaten in the dining room, not in the kitchen, and on trays provided you. (Well, I always ate in my room, vegetable soup, cold spaghetti, directly from the can). The piano must be used ONLY from 7:00-8:00 p.m., the television must be turned off at 10:00 p.m., and of course, may not be played at the same time. Callers must always be out of the dorm by 10:00 p.m. (There was a ladder the girls used to climb out the windows, or to allow callers to climb in.) On SATURDAY and SUNDAY mornings, no caller is permitted in the dorm before noon...etc etc etc.

We worked hard, preparing to be famous. We rehearsed often until near midnight, and then went to "Tops" to eat French fries before going home to bed. We exchanged photo stills from whatever show were were doing. I worked with wonderful, witty, talented people: Myrna Fahey was beautiful, had done several movies, and was sweet to me. Gita Maynard thought I was lovely, and Barbara Drew signed her photo, "Joyce, you've been a darling...." Holly Harris was spectacular, Jerry Oddo, playing Sakini in Teahouse of the August Moon scrawled his autograph on a program cover, and wrote: "To my personal Alice in Wonderland. My love and kisses for being so wonderful to work with. You will find your 'cricket'." Lisa Liu was was charming and graceful as the Japanese sweetheart. From another old program cover: Holiday for Lovers. "All the best, from here on to the top!" I actually shook hands with Burt Lancaster, and Bette Davis, and Piper Laurie! Burt smiled broadly and looked right past me, Bette wore a turban, and Piper was--well, really, really beautiful. Well. We were nothing if not optimistic. Alice in Wonderland. It was an image that seemed to follow me around, and when I actually had the opportunity to be Alice at the newly-opened Disneyland, I turned it down because I was homesick, and wanted to spend the summer at home. Charlotte Stewart, who lived in the room next door grabbed it, and went from there to a regular role as the schoolteacher on the Little House on the Prarie TV series. My friend Makoto Iwamatsu, "Mako," did the best "Puck" I have ever seen in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, and went on to be nominated for an Academy AWard "Oscar" for his performance with Steve McQueen in The Sand Pebbles. Margaret O'Brien and John Drew Barrymore did Romeo and Juliet on the Mainstage. Most of us you have never heard of.

I wanted to write. I bought a bicycle for five dollars and pedaled it down the hill to Pasadena City College, where I took writing classes from my first real "mentor," Helen Hinckley Jones, a marvelous teacher and friend, who had written histories of Israel and Iran, of Utah and the railroad, and another book about Iran, A Wall and Three Willows. She liked what I wrote, and took a special interest in me. She loved me, and I loved her. Years later, when I began to publish articles and poetry, and wrote Chrysalis, she wrote me letters of congratulations and encouragement. But that's a story for another day.

My roommie Jan was going with (and later married) David Isenhart, a young artist from San Francisco, who had studied painting with Richard Diebenkorn. His paintings were large and abstract, with thick swatches of color. He made pottery, fashioned himself a necktie out of brown yarn, cat hair, and popsicle sticks. He dripped colored wax candles over the tops of wine bottles. He read books by Lawrence Ferlinghetti,Kenneth Patchen, Jack Kerouac, and Alan Ginzberg. I read them, too. We were birds of a feather. Janet said we were the "only true beatniks" she knew. I kind of wafted from the end of the "beat" generation into the "Flower Children," and ended up becoming a "hippie" of sorts, and stayed that way. But that's another story for another day.

I ran around with sweet Bobby Giles, who was inescapably "gay," who wanted to be a writer as well as an actor, and who, bolt out of the blue, decided he was in love with me and wanted to get married. Kissing Bobby was like kissing a plastic doll. This was an unforseen event that surprise me, but we remained good friends until his death, writing letters, sending pictures and Christmas cards and such, even had a few visits in between his visits from the Philippines and Japan. The last time I saw him we lived in Provo, Utah. I was married and had three little boys, and was about eleven months pregnant with the fourth, another boy. Another story.

I went out (for a while) with some cowboy dude whose name I can't remember, who thought he was John Wayne, and who, on a hike in the mountains, left me stranded on a huge rock because he had no idea how I should get down. I figured it out. I went out (for a while) with a fellow from Cal Tech, a true egghead rocket scientist, whose apartment walls were papered with pictures of near-naked girls torn out of Playboy Magazines. I carried on a long-distance romance with a cute sailor named Chuck, who after we broke up sent me a long letter signed with a skull and crossbones. I went with an actor, a champion fencer, who drove an Aston Martin, whose mother was an opera singer and father was a biologist who researched regeneration of tissues by cutting earthworms into pieces (another story, probably best left untold). And another with a boy named Jerry Meyers, who kept an aviary of birds in his yard, who called me "Juice," made fishing lures with peacock feathers he kept in big bright green and purple bouquets. Jerry loved photography, loved martial arts, and had a black belt in Karate. He could break bricks with his fingertips. It was while I was with Jerry that I met the love of my life, the real deal.

Marv was an idealist, a dreamer with the soul of a poet. We ate Mexican at Ernie Jr.s, we had taquitos on Olvera Street, and shared one headphone at the city library, listening to Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. I think of our time together as bonfires at the beach, waterfront carnival lights reflected in the water, seen from the top basket of the ferris wheel. He was folk songs on his guitar, and collections of sea-shells. He was long walks out to the end of the pier where little boys and old men threw fishing lines out into the waves, and he was the shrill cries of seagulls. I knew what his favorite color was, and he thought I was a "fairy princess." We sat in our shallow sandstone cave and looked out at the ocean. We ate tuna fish sandwiches, and he wrote I LOVE YOU on the brown lunch bag and hid it in a hole in the rocks. Sometime, we said, we'll come back, in fifty years or so, a little wrinkled white haired lady and gentleman, holding hands, to see if it is still there. Our bodies were covered with sand and salt. We laughed and were happy and alone in
the world. I never said "I love you" to anyone else.

.

Brother

2006-11-20T19:15:00.000-08:00

Gaylen "A" Hatton (Excerpts from A Brief Overview of My Life)

"I was born in Osdick, California, on the 4th day of October, 1928. Osdick was named after Pete Osdick, who lived until the 1940's. Pete was an old miner who always wore a sprig of greasewood in his lapel to show that he was proud of the desert. For some reason the name of the town changed to Red Mountain, because of the big red mountain to the east. Main Street in Red Mountain was about a mile long, surrounded by mines, shacks, homes, and saloons (each with a red light)...the Shamrock, the Palace, the Owl, and Roxie's, which was across the tracks by the house where the old witch lived, and there was a dump at each end of town which I frequented, looking for treasures. Mattress Jack lived lived on Main Street in the remains of an old panel truck. He came up the street one day, and my friend Dale Edwards grabbed his hat off his head and ran with it. Mattress Jack tried, but couldn't catch him.

I thought curly hair was 'tough' & had my mother curl my hair with a curling iron, and dressed in a makeshift 'Masked Marvel' costume. I could lick anybody. Aunt Josie ran the Post Office. I sneaked in one day with my new cap gun, hid below the service window and rang the bell. When Aunt Josie came, I put my hand up over the edge and pulled the trigger. She almost died from being shot with a cap gun. I thought it was a pretty good joke. I can still remember hearing real gunshots at night while in bed, and I always worried about my grandfather, who was the Constable. He was supposed to have been in a running gun battle with someone, but I was never told the details. The only time I ever saw him shoot was when he shot a dying, rabid dog I found on my way to the dump.

I used to sell papers, magazines, etc. for spending money. I would hit every saloon on the street, and the miners and the 'girls' were always generous in helping me out. I was a pyromaniac. I set my dad's shed on fire. I set a fire in the back of our garage, which was put out just in time to avoid exploding some barrels of gasoline and heating oil. I set the whole desert on fire by throwing a match into a dry sage brush. Half the town had to help us put it out. I found an old automobile headlamp that used as oil wick. I put gasoline in it and burned off my eyelashes when it exploded. I whittled off the heads of matches to make small explosives. By putting them in a piece of pipe sealed at one end I could shoot out a wad of tinfoil that would penetrate an orange. I'd put match heads in 30-30 shell casings and hit them with a hammer to make them explode...Without TV or video games we had to be creative.

I found an old beach umbrella, took it apart, tied ropes to the canvas part to make a parachute, tied it to my waist, and jumped off the highest part of our garage. After hitting the ground hard enough to break my legs, the parachute unfolded in front of me. I decided I would have to jump from a greater height, and considered jumping from the headframe of the Santa Fe mine, which was about 75 feet tall, but I could never get up the courage.

My dad was a hard rock miner, and a great baseball pitcher. My mother was an artist. I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. She would sing as she worked at home, and I thought her voice was beautiful. I thought she should be a movie star, since she surpassed all of them in every way. I remember the Christmas when I received a pair of leather chaps. I was about four years old. I didn't know they were to be worn over one's pants, so I tried them on without any pants, rejoining all of the family with my butt showing through the back of the chaps.

We raised chickens and I sold eggs to the neighbors. We had a mean milk cow for a while, who kicked everybody who tried to milk her. She would get out of her fence and everybody in town would have to chase her. There was never anybody who had more love and sympathy for animals than my mother. She has influenced me greatly in this respect, and to this day I find it difficult to kill anything, and rarely do I eat meat.

Dad and I worked a tungsten mine about thirty miles North of Red Mountain, on the edge of China Lake. We worked that mine, just the two of us. I loved working with my dad. It was hard work, but I was in the best shape of my life. I could carry a bucket of tungsten high-grade ore in each hand down a mountain slope for some distance, and dump the ore in a special place. Each bucket would weigh as much as 150 pounds. I wanted to study aeronautical engineering, and planned to attend Cal-Poly at San Dimas. For some reason, I changed at the last minute and decided to be a music major at Brigham Young University. I have never been sorry. I got my B.A. Degree at BYU in STring Bass Performance. Then, my M.A. Degree at BYU in Composition. Finally, my Ph.D. Degree at the University of Utah in Composition with a minor in Philosophy.

My parents bought me a drum set when I was about four years old. I used to watch Mr. Moore chew on his cigar while he played the drums for my Dad's dance band, and I wanted to be a drummer like him. My parents played lots of 'feed the kitty' dances. I could accompany fox trots and waltzes quite well at the age of four. When I was ten, my parents bought me a trumpet. I loved it.

After graduating with my B.A. Degree, I was drafted into the army, and I found myself being shipped out to Germany. I was first stationed at Dachau, where the famous Jewish concentration camp had been located. The place had a terrible odor. I saw the ovens where the bodies had been burned, and the big tree that had died after the ashes of 25,000 Jews had been buried next to it. The European Band School was at Dachau. I had a choice of joining the 7th Army Symphony or going to a band unit in Frankfort, and I chose to go to Frankfort, where I studied Horn with Joseph Stegner, and string bass with Wilhelm Kramer...excellent musicians. I was transferred to a band in Verdun. I played parades and concerts, and played bass six nights a week in a local club. The Jazz combo consisted of four of us, piano, trumpet, bass, and drums. What an excellent group it was, playing mostly Be Bop. At first I got blisters on my fingers, then blood-blisters underneath, and finally callouses.

I came back to BYU from the army--I was considering going to France to complete my studies at the Paris Conservatory, but Dr. Leon Dallin urged me to study with Leroy Robertson at the U of U, where I could play in the Utah Symphony at the same time. Robertson was a great and inspiring teacher. My thesis work for my Ph.D. was a composition for ballet called Toxcatl, based on Aztec history, during the periodic 'War of the Flowers' between the little Republic of Tlaxcala and the mighty empire of the Aztecs. It was performed by the Utah Ballet, predecessor of Ballet West in May, 1963. I was invited to audition for third horn, and was hired by the Utah Symphony. Maurice Abravanel, the conductor, became a good friend, and was responsible for commissioning some of my orchestra music, and engaging me to do many special arrangements when needed. One of these, El Noche de
Los Tropicos, I put together from stuff found in the New York City Library...music originally composed by Louis Gottschalk. The piece was recorded by the Utah Symphony for Vangard Recording Company.

While performing in the pit for a ballet performance, one young ballerina, Marianne Johnson, caught my eye. Sunday she attended a study group with me. Monday we were engaged to be married. We were married in the Salt Lake Temple on August 6th, 1958. We have four good children, Nannette, Keven, Heidi, and David, and several grandchildren.

We moved to Sacramento where I taught at Sacramento State University and played principal horn in the Sacramento Symphony. Marianne danced important roles with the Sacramento Civic Ballet. We were there for sixteen years, and continued to go to Sun Valley every summer, and then to festivals in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. In 1979 we returned to BYU, where I played in two faculty groups, Brassworks and Orpheus Winds. Brassworks, on several occasions accompanied the Tabernacle Choir on tours around the world, and Orpheus Winds was invited by the Chinese Minister of Culture to spend some time in China, lecturing and performing at three of the conservatories there. What a great experience for all of us, making new friends, seeing the Great Wall, and the clay figures at Xian. I have been fortunate to be able to play music in seventeen foreign countries, and around the United States, and Marianne has shared many of these experiences with me. I have performed with such great groups as George SHearing (on bass), Mannheim Steamroller (on horn), and have accompanied Margaret Whiting, the Lenon Sisters, Liberace, Ray Charles, and many others. I played a jazz concert once with Paul Horn, Conte Condoli, and Milton Bernhart...I could talk almost forever about my music associations and experiences. There are other things in life that are more important, but music has surely been a wonderful thing to me.

My Dad's family all came to Red Mountain from Utah to work in the mines, aunts, uncles, cousins, and even some friends. Some had been baptised into the LDS Church, some not. In any case, there was no LDS Church in Red Mountain. Occasionally, some Mormon missionaries would come through for a few days. WHen I was fourteen, President Bunker of the California Mission came to Dad's mine one day. He called my Dad aside, reached into Dad's shirt pocket, took out his pipe, and threw it off into the sage brush. Then he called my Dad to be the Branch President of the new Red Mountain Branch. We held our meetings at our house. About a dozen people would attend the meetings. At fourteen, I was baptised. Dad ultimately became the Branch President of the church in Ridgecrest, and then the Bishop. I returned to Inyokern when discharged from the army, and before returning to BYU to get my M.A. Degree, my Mother and father went with me and my sister, Joyce, to the Los Angeles Temple, where our family sealings took place.

I have had occasion to teach various Sunday School classes, youth classes, Priesthood classes, etc. I have led choirs, been a Bishop twice, and Branch President of the Fruitland Branch--before being made Branch President I was the finance clerk, priesthood leader, organist, Primany accompanist, and choir accompanist. I know the Gospel is true...that God lives...that Jesus is the Christ...that Joseph Smith was, and is, a Prophet of God...and that we are guided by a prophet today...and that it will continue to be so. That is my testimony to all that will hear it!

Oh, Cruel Thorns

Oh, cruel thorns, were thou upon my brow,
whose awful twinings on my Lord pressed down;
Might I not wish thee gone, nor hope to know
A sweeter death beneath thy crown.

Thou pierced hands, and body wounded sore;
The heart's blood spilling down as somber rain,
My heart and hands do reassure those scarlet welling drops
Fall not in vain.

O precious signs, so pure and undefiled,
Of holy flesh and blood in sacrifice;
May I become in faith a little child,
Partaking guiltlessly before His eyes.

And weary feet, who paid thy fearful toll
Upon the stony way to Calvary;
Set now thy prints upon my soul,
And I will walk in joy, to follow Thee!

--Onita Davis
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A Letter from my Brother

2006-11-09T13:25:00.000-08:00

October 13, 1957

Dear Joyce,

Thanks for the letter--I enjoyed hearing from you, and hope you are able to write often. I am happy that you like it there--it will be a wonderful experience for you, and you should get a great deal out of it. You mention that you suddenly find yourself among a lot of people more talented than yourself; this will alway be the case, so don't let it discourage you. Just as we are often most critical of those faults in others which we do not possess ourselves, it usually happens that we are likewise made very conscious of their virtues which we seem to lack. I have very good pitch discrimination; yet I have been discouraged by others who are gifted with absolute pitch. Many others memorize better than I, and while beginning to labor with languages I was very discouraged to make the acquaintance of a young man who had a fluent command of at least seven languages. I cannot memorize scriptures, and other people know the Bible backward and forward. I cannot play horn as well as many others, and I feel inadequate playing jazz on the bass. My ability to compose and arrange seems weak in comparison with others.

However, I have recently acquired a changed attitude concerning these things which used to worry me so much. I find that I usually play better in tune than one person who has absolute pitch. It is difficult for me to memorize languages and scripture--but I was engaged by the symphony on the strength of an audition during which I played all their requested horn passages from memory. I have been complemented on being the best third horn played the symphony has had. And, I am getting compositions performed and commissioned even more than my teachers, who are recognized composers. And the best bass player in town, whom I have eulogized on occasion, has told several people that he wishes he played as well as I. So, you see, I have decided that while we all envy the talents of others, they envy ours in return--we are generally more talented than we think. It is healthy for a perfectionist attitude to spur us on--when we believe that everything we do is not quite good enough, and we try constantly to do better. It is not healthy when we degrade ourselves and become discouraged and quit. Many talented people have given up their work simply because they have felt they could never equal the work of other talented people. Not all writers can win the Pulitzer Prize--but most can be happy successful writers. Not all composers can win the Guggenheim Award, but they can still create and know the joy of hearing their work. Every pianist will not be a Rubenstein, nor can every violinist be a Heifitz. Most conductors will never wqual Toscanini, and every artist cannot be a Van Gogh or a Picasso. I could go on indefinitely--but what I am trying to say is simply that there is a lot of room in the world for talent of every kind, and everyone can be a success without necessarily being the greatest in his respective field. Anyway, who is to judge?

Well, enough of my sermon! All is well here. I am not in school this quarter, but I am concentrating on German privately instead. I would like to pass the exam in January.

I had seventy-five copies of the choral composition made up, and it should be sung definitely in January. I am enclosing one of the choral parts which lacks all the brass and timpani accompaniment. It will be recorded, and I'll send you a copy.

Abravanel just called and said I have definitely been awarded the Rosenblatt Award this year. It is a $250.00 award for the commissioning of a new work to be played by the symphony. I am in good company, since those receiving the award before have included Crawford Gates and Leroy Robertson.

Well, Joyce, I hope you continue to enjoy your work there. And please continue to write whenever you are able. I'll try to answer everything I receive. --Be good!

Love, Gaylen

(I think this was good advice, and pass it along.... The choral composition he mentioned was a poem of mine which he set to music, Somewhere Lies a Line. He also used a text of mine called Jael, for a short opera he composed. And most recently (April, 2000), I was pleased when he asked me to provide and edit the text for a piece called Apotheosis, based on the writings of Neal A. Maxwell, and performed by the Ricks College Chamber Orchestra and Collegiate Singers. A CD was made for Tantara Records, as part of the Heritage Series, called Three Sacred Works.)
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The Playhouse

2006-11-09T13:23:00.000-08:00

SCENE: The Pasadena Playhouse College of Theater Arts.
TIME: The Present.
CAST: About 270 future Sarah Bernhardts and Laurence Oliviers and (implied in the wings) a list of distinguished graduates whose names you have seen in neon.

As the curtain rises there is a brief flashback to 1916. In a funny little theater called the Savoy, there is a small troupe of professional actors led by Gilmor Brown. They are presenting a different play every week. Then, there is a rapid series of scenes. These show Brown trying to maintain at his own expense a producing group composed of a small nucleus of professionals assisted by a larger group of amateurs, the Pasadena Community Playhouse. As these scenes fade out like calendar pages being flipped up through the years, the action returns to the present. Brown, now an alert 83, sits in his memoir-lined office at the Playhouse.

Activity in the classrooms, rehearsal rooms, the small student theaters, and the main stage down below attest to the success that he has brought to his beloved theatrical institution. In addition to its fully accredited College of Theater Arts, which was established in 1925, the Playhouse has gained a notable niche in the theatrical world with its Main Stage productions. There have been more than 2600 of them produced there, 125 of which were world premiers. And many of the best actors and actresses have trod its boards either as students who carried spears and went on to fame, or as recognized professionals who have starred at the Playhouse out of respect for its reputation, or to take advantage of it as a recognized showcase for their talents with the orchestra seats teeming with movie talent scouts.

As a school, the college offers a two-year course in three phases of theatrical arts--acting, technical and television. There is also a three-year course that leads to a master's degree. It includes what must be the most fascinating "final exam,"--choosing and editing a script, producing and directing a play.

The first-year course is the same for all students. It consists of the basic techniques of acting, speech, history of the theater, stage movement, fencing, and dancing and make-up. In the second year, students select their major, receiving intensive and specialized training in the category of their choice--stage, movies, or television, or any of the technical aspects of any of them. The third year, of course, is devoted to continued development of the student's specialty.

Within the Playhouse are three tiny, but well-equipped theaters. They frequently serve as classrooms during the day, are opened to the public at night for student productions. And, of course, there is the Main Stage, where advanced students can compete with professionals in readings for coveted parts.

Students fence on the roof garden, bound and bend in the dance halls, listen to serious lectures in classrooms, go through wierd vocal exercizes to improve their diction, pour over the thousand of tombs on the theater that line the school's extensive library shelves, and, like students everywhere, chatter in the corridors between classes and gab in the snack bar.

That the Playhouse does a competent job of training is glaringly apparent from its list of illustrious graduates. It's impossible to name them all, but here are a few names you might recognize: Dana Andrews, John Carradine, John Conti, Victor Jory, Wayne Morris, Preston Foster, Robert Young, Lee J Cobb, Lloyd Noal, Onslow Stevens, and many others." To which I might add the names of Makoto Iwamatsu (Mako), who was once nominated for an Oscar for his role in "The Sand Pebbles," with Steve McQueen, and Dustin Hoffman, and Charlotte Stewart, who played the schoolteacher on the "Little House on the Prarie" TV series, who took on the role at the newly-opened Disneyland of "Alice in Wonderland" which I might have had but for homesickness.

(This article was written years and years ago for the Los Angeles Times newspaper, by Art Ryon. We went back to Pasadena and visited the Playhouse in 2000, the turn of the century, and found that nothing lasts forever. The theater is still going strong, but there is no longer a school. The student theaters are storage areas, the Playbox, downstairs, is a coffeeshop. But the great curtain with a picture of a ship, on Mainstage, remains.)

China Lake

2006-11-08T09:51:00.000-08:00

"The base at China Lake lies 150 miles northeast of Los Angeles, just off U.S. 395. Founded in 1943, it was originally known as the Naval Ordnance Test Station, or NOTS; in 1967 this was changed to Naval Weapons Center (NWC). It's different from every other base the United States Navy runs. It operates under Navy command, but its history connects it to outside, civilian institutions, especially the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena. Most of the population is civilian. Moreover, these people are all scientists, engineers, and technicians, "damned professors," as they were called in the beginning. But their achievements are undeniable, for China Lake has produced some of the most effective military ordnance in the world, from the
barrage rockets used in the 1943 invasion of North Africa to the explosive lens charges in the first atomic bombs and a vast array of guided missiles and bombs, Zuni, ASROC, Shrike; above all, Sidewinder (AIM-9, as it's known officially).

Most of these weapons are launched from aircraft, and this has dictated a good deal about the base, especially its remoteness and its size. China Lake is huge--more than a million acres, 1,800 square miles. This immense territory is divided into two great tracts, separated by a narrow civilian corridor running up the Panamint Valley through the town of Trona. THe range south of this line has been used to develop "stealth" technology and electronic warfare countermeasures, but its the northwest section that's the more important, for the airfield, the laboratories, and the community itself are all located here. THe upper northern half is tableland, rugged hills, and valleys where wild horses and burros still roam, and high up on the faces of the cliffs, which have names like Renegade Canyon and Cactus Peak, one can still see the strange etched drawings, called petroglyphs, made by a long-vanished race of Indians. To the south the hills give way; the land becomes flatter, merging with the desert; and finally, in an abrupt slope, it runs down to the depression that is China Lake itself. Of course, there has been no lake here for ten thousand years, although once this part of the Mojave was covered by a chain them. Now only the dried-up beds of these lakes remain, hard and hot, and gleaming white with deposits of borax, calcium, and silica. China Lake is perfect for the base's test ranges."*

* "CHINA LAKE," by Anthony Hyde

The petroglyphs are protected by the Navy. The coyotes weren't. We used to hear them howling at night, but now they're gone. My Uncle Frank and Aunt Lauree, and my cousins Burt, Jimmy, Frankie, Gary, and Delsa lived on the base. When I was little, and we used to visit them often, there was a big billboard just outside "the gate" that warned: Loose Lips Sink Ships. Uncle Frank was an engineer. Whenever any member of their family had an upset stomach resulting in quick trips to the bathroom, they always said they had "NOTS Trots." I thought that was funny!

Between the time I graduated from the Pasadena Playhouse College of Theater Arts, the the time I went on the road with a repertory theater company called The Bishop's Company, I worked for the Navy tracking missiles on film (I once tracked a speck of dust on the film, mistaking it for the missile, for a whole day), putting pilot's statistics into a computer, and inputting scientific articles about the "effects of radiation on living tissue." I sort of liked watching the Sidewinder speeding along on its desert sled, but the burnt "living tissue" falling off its bones stuff I just couldn't take, and I quit. Sometime after this, the High School was moved from the base to the town of Ridgecrest. A good move, if you ask me.
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The Twelfth of Never

2006-11-08T07:28:00.000-08:00

Get Your Own! | View Slideshow

Strange Desires

2006-11-07T15:10:00.001-08:00

Sherman E. Burroughs is the name of my High school. The school was on the Navy Base itself, you had to check in at "the Gate" before you could enter, and you had to have "a Pass." There were two distinct classes of kids--the Navy brats, and the rest of us, the outsiders. The Navy brats could buy stuff cheap at "the Commissary," which we were never allowed to go into. Girls who went out with sailors were considered "fast,"--the "bad" girls. The boys in school, with their packages of cigarettes rolled up in their T-shirtsleeves and their hair combed in DA's (Duck Ass's) were no competetion for the sailors, who were always after the older girls. I didn't fit in with any of them, insiders or outsiders. My High School major was Art. I was president of both the Art and Drama clubs, and we never had one meeting. I won several art competitions, lots of ribbons--even had a couple of paintings on display in Los Angeles and in the County Museum. This one was a winner, called "Marbles." In the Drama class, I was so shy and unfriendly I don't know how I ever won the lead in our big play, written by Mary Lee, our teacher--probably because I was a natural at playing a shy, disturbed girl who had a fear of guns and was very anti-social. I liked art, and drama. I liked English, and writing. I spent 90% of my time in Algebra writing poems. My teacher, Mr. Richardson, would walk by, look at what I was doing, smile, and walk on by (knowing I'd never be a mathematician.). He was right. Miss Lee wrote in my annual: "Joyce, a fine dramatist, a thrill to have you in the lead of our play." Mr. Richardson Wrote: "To a fine girl student." My P.E. teacher, Mrs. Haig, wrote: "The most spirit with the least noise--you're a pleasure in class." I was never on a "team," never in Pep Club, never a cheer leader. In my Junior year, my art teacher, Adeline Williams (who I adored) wrote: "You have the artistic feeling that is rare. Your art development has been everything I'd hoped for.Please keep on painting this summer. We have a big year ahead of us." And after our Senior year, she wrote: "Best Wishes for a very successful future! In whichever art fields you decide to spend most of your time, Good luck!" (From an article that appeared in the paper: "Mrs. Adeline Williams, arts and crafts teacher at Burroughs High School, was the Grand Sweepstakes Winner in the Kern County Art Show Festival, which was held in Bakersfield this month. Winning the Award for her oil painting, 'Fabulous City," the art teacher painted an abstraction of Las Vegas. Mrs. Williams, who has her masters in education from Loyola University in Chicago, received her art training at the Art Institute of Chicago and then studied privately with the famed California artist Millard Sheets. Mrs. WIlliams painting, along with Joyce Hatton's whose work won the Sweepstakes prize at China Lake, is included in the traveling art show which will be seen throughout Kern County.") Our ALMA MATER:

Beneath the High Sierra's
Our Alma Mater stands,
Encircled by the mountains,
Swept by desert sands.

Our colors show the green and white,
Our spirit stands for Truth and Right.
To Burroughs High, we lift our cheer,
Hail, Alma Mater, dear!

The first great love of my life was a sailor. A green-eyed, blond sailor, who smelled wonderful, who talked with me on the telephone for hours, taught me to drive, told me he loved me, kissed my head when I had the chicken pox and my hair was tangled and full of calamine lotion, wanted to marry me, and when I decided to spend my time in the theater, and went off to school at the Pasadena Playhouse, he married someone else.

My love came up from Barnegat,
The sea was in his eyes;
Treading as soft as a tiger cat
And told me terrible lies.

His hair was yellow as new-cut pine
In shavings curled and feathered;
I thought how silver it would shine
By cruel winters weathered.

But he was in his twentieth year,
This time I'm speaking of;
And we were head over heels in love with fear,
And half a-feared of love.

My hair was piled in a copper crown--
A devilish living thing--
And the tortoise-shell pins fell down, fell down,
When that snake uncoiled to spring.

His feet were used to treading a gale,
And balancing thereon;
His face was brown as a foreign sail,
Threadbare against the sun.

His arms were thick as hickory logs
Whittled to little wrists;
Strong as the teeth of a terrier dog
Were the fingers of his fists.

Within his arms I feared to sink,
Where lions shook their manes,
And dragons drawn in azure ink
Lept quickened by his veins.

Dreadful his strength and length of limb,
As the sea to a foundering ship'
I dipped my hands in love for him
No deeper than their tips.

But our palms were welded by a flame
The moment we came to part,
And on his knuckles I read my name,
Enscribed within a heart.

And something made our wills to bend
As wild as trees blown over;
We were no longer friend and friend,
But only lover and lover.

"In seven weeks or seventy years--
God grant it may be sooner--
I'll make a handkerchief for you
From the sails of my captain's schooner.

We'll wear our love like wedding rings
Long polished to the touch;
We shall be busy with other things,
And they cannot bother us much.

When you are skimming the wrinkled cream,
And your ring clinks on the pan,
You'll say to yourself in a pensive dream,
'How wonderful a man!'

When I am slitting a fish's head,
And my ring clanks on the knife,
I'll say with thanks as a prayer is said,
'How beautiful a wife!'

And I shall fold my decorous paws
In velvet smooth and deep,
Like a kitten that covers up its paws,
To sleep and sleep and sleep.

Like a little blue pigeon you shall bow
Your bright alarming crest;
In the crook of my arm you'll lay your brow,
To rest and rest and rest."

Will he never come back from Barnegat,
With thunder in his eyes,
Treading as soft as a tiger cat
To tell me terrible lies?

--"The Puritan's Ballad," Elinor Wylie

Well, I learned you can't have your cake and eat it, too! I was physically sick about that for, oh, a month or two! All my great loves have been sailors! And he did come back, in 1984, with his wife, when I was named Utah Poet Laureatte, and "In Willy's House" had its concert reading at the University of Utah. He was a grandfather, and I had a husband and five young sons. What else can I say? That I still remember how he smelled?

LITANY FOR A SNOWMAN

"I have a problem. Everybody I ever loved
I still love." --Alice Morrey Bailey

What I wanted most was
First, a sort of lusty voyeurism,
To stare boldly
For a long time,
Neither of us speaking.
Then, for an icebreaker
I would have touched his hair
Where pale blond had silvered,
Would have taken his eyeglasses in hand
To better gaze on passions
We would not name. Without a word
I'd have taken his coat,
Have taken his hands in mine,
Turned them, looked a long time
At the palms, the nails, the backs,
Would have touched the hairs
Growing there, and touched
His arms. At last
I would bury my face
Against his chest and breathe of him
Until the inside of my head,
My lungs, my cells, were filled
With the scent of soap, after-shave,
Sun--whatever it is--
That makes me want to cry.

The last two years of High School I was the art editor of our yearbook, the El Burro. Time flies. This year (2006) is the 49th class reunion. I think, most of them never knew me THEN, why would they know me NOW? Those who did know me then were surprised when I (who had hardly spoken two words to anybody) went off to become a great actress! :)

"Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?" --William Shakespeare
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Glen "A" Hatton (February 3, 1907 ~ September 15, 1982)

2006-11-05T14:51:00.000-08:00

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A COMMUNION OF STARS (for my father)

2006-11-05T13:46:00.000-08:00

1. UNEXPECTED GUEST

There were nights on the Mojave
so bright we could watch the evolution of stars
above Five Fingers rising from the desert floor:
Bootes, Cassiopiae, Orion's Belt
with such an outpouring of energy and magnitude
that they will consume themselves
in only twenty million years
measured not by photocell upon a telescope
but by the naked eye

We used to sit and watch the sky
for signs and wonders
and now we know these happen
with predictable regularity
high above chaparrel and sage
watched by hawk and packrat

Papa burned brush in the woodstove
and the fire shot showers of sparks
like stars
Papa fixed his eyes on Polaris
poked the spitting fire and believed
in miracles

Before the moon
before the stars
before the earth even
was Papa with a pocket full of sweets
nothing's sweeter than an outcropping
of good silver-sulfide ore
the music of the gloryhole
harp enough for him
a pennysworth of carbide
lit in a tin hat like a star

I am an unexpected guest
at this festival of lights
a stranger out of time
grown large unwieldy unrecognized

Once as a child I tried to fly
upward from the valley floor
arms outstretched
a thousand tiny filiments of wings
flew about my sun-haloed hair

I didn't know then
words
would be my wings

2. COMMUNION

Not that it has a meaning
outside of this odd smile I find
a certain peace of mind

a rat came every day to eat from Papa's hand
lunch shared from a tin pail
a ham sandwich apples chocolate a thermos jug of milk
the dry rock they sat on hot
where the sun beat

under the earth is the sound of water running
see there where the wall is wet
water rises to meet cracks in the rocks
it does not freeze in winter
nor evaporate in summer but remains
sweet and cool without disguise

Face to face with the rat
eyes blinking from a mask of fine white dust
this gentle man and the rat
without greed without avarice
found this rare circle of breath
wide enough and room enough for two

In the purity of noon
nothing was wasted
ants found the chocolate crumbs

3. MEXICALI ROSE

Papa played the saxophone. Of all
his music he played Mexicali Rose best.
I'll come back to you
some sunny day....

The desert wind blows from the west
In the wind I sometimes hear a slurred voice:
Stop crying....
I think of all I did not do
and did not wish to do
and wish to do now

The last notes are departed
the reed split the keys stuck
the saxophone lies on a shelf in the dark
of the closet behind a box
of almost forgotten dolls
Some night
splitting the universe in two
in a cave of stars
the flooding Pleiades all white about his knees
his pockets filled with little bits of sweetning silver
he'll take it up again
and every earthly thing will change
their dreams aroused to his slow music
a long lost voice

Mexicali Rose stop crying
I'll come back to you
some sunny day....

EVA PEARL WOLFE ~ 15 October, 1909 - 12 March, 1992

2006-10-27T17:11:00.000-07:00

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Personal Record of Eva Pearl (Wolfe) Hatton

I was born at home in Leonard, Colorado, October 15, 1909. My nine-year-old sister Josie, and my eight-year-old brother Ray, had been sent away from the house, and my sister said they were sitting outside betting on whether I would be a girl or a boy.

I was very spoiled. My mother had to work outside most of the time, and my sister had to take care of me. I remember once when she wanted to give me a bath in the tubs that we used then, and I wouldn't sit down, and I tore her dress badly, fighting with her to keep from sitting down.

The only bad disease I had that I can remember was scarlet fever. My mother and I were quarantined in a different house from the rest of the family for quite a long time. I think this disease caused me to lose my sense of smell and taste. I can only taste sweet, sour, salty, and bitter things...not flavorings like garlic or vanilla. I can only smell things like eucalyptus oil, mentholatum, etc....not roses, honeysuckle, or skunks. My father was William Ray Wolfe, born in Nebraska someplace. His father was Silas Wolfe. His mother was Matie Elta Eldredge (or Phillips). My mother was Grace Ellen Mow. They were both good looking. My mother had red hair...also my sister and I.

We lived in sawmill camps a lot. My father had to keep track of long lines of figures, and he could add these figures up in his head almost as fast as we can use an adding machine now.

They used to have dances, and we would dress up in homemade costumes, and try to fool everyone about who they were. Once my mother and a friend dressed alike and danced once with their husbands, and then went and changed dressed and fooled everyone.

My brother worked from when he was twelve or thirteen. In the winters we moved to town. Colona was one where I went to school. I had a friend who had a teeter-totter, and we would put our legs in our sweater sleeves, and pull it on to look like pants, and really ride the teeter-totter fast and high.

I was never self-conscious until one time my brother told me I was red-headed, freckle-faced, pug-nosed, knock-kneed, and bow-legged, and I cried and cried, and from then on I was always bashful and self-conscious.

We moved to California (Randsburg) and we lived about two miles out of town in a tunnel for quite a while. I had to walk to elementary school, and I was always afraid I would meet a donkey (some were in those hills), but I never did. I graduated from eighth grade in Randsburg, California, and started to high school in Lancaster, California. I lived in a girls dormatory, and I was the youngest one there. There was one boy who liked me, and he was one who had a car, and he would come up the street, and we always knew he was coming, his car roared so. He used to come at night. Also some other boys did, and the girls would slip out to meet them. I think the others necked a little, but I wouldn't even let him hold hands. If I saw him coming down the hall at school I would turn off so I would miss him. I liked him, but I was too bashful in those days. After a while he got disgusted and got another girl...and I don't blame him (looking back). About my last two years in high school I had a great big football player for a boyfriend, and he never had a decent car.

After I graduated Glen and I were married. Lauree(his sister) and my mother went with us to Los Angeles, and we found a minister who came to our hotel and married us.
(Note* That minister turned out to be Reverend Lloyd C. Douglas, who later became famous for his many novels, some of which were made into movies, ie: The Robe, Magnificent Obsession, The Big Fisherman and many others.) We went to a show that night named "How to Hold Your Husband." At first we rented a nice house. Later we bought a little two-room house, and moved another room on it for a bedroom. Gaylen was born while we lived in this house. We didn't have washers then, and I had to washlothes on the washboard in the kitchen sink. which was made of cement. Glen worked in the mines then, and we didn't have very much money. We played for dances. We didn't have a radio, but my sister did, and we bought a speaker and hooked it up so whenever they had music we did.

After a while, they took the train out of that district, and Glen got railroad ties and built us a really nice place. His uncle helped him. It had walls as thick as the ties, and was stuccoed outside, and was cool in the summer and warm in the winter. It had two bedrooms, a front room, kitchen, shower...and a big screen porch in front. We had no inside toilet in those days. It was a little outhouse in the back, and we had a long clothesline from the house out to it. Joyce came along when Gaylen was about eleven, and he used to hang a string of diapers from the house to the toilet for me every day. This was on the desert, and our water cost us one cent a gallon.

Gaylen went all of his first eight years to school in Red Mountain, California, to the same good teacher and friend. Then je went to high school in Barstow by bus, sixty miles each way, a day. The last two years he boarded down at Barstow with some people, and after he graduated he went to college at BYU in Provo, Utah, and later to the U of U in Salt Lake.

We moved to Inyokern, California in 1944, and had a service station and general store with my brother-in-law. The general store turned out to be with Glen's father and Glen. It was wartime, and the government brought in lots of Indians, and on paydays we would cash their checks for them. There would be a long line of them. Lots of them had long hair in braids and couldn't write or speak English.

I joined the Church on November 1, 1953. I was baptised in the gym on the Naval Base at China Lake, California. I played for the Singing Mothers, and Glen's sister Lauree was chorister for years. WE had, at one time, about 26 in the group. Once we put on an entertainment for the community, and it was a big success. Almost as soon as I joined the Church they made me organist, and I was supposed to play for Stake Conference in Barstow. I had never played the organ so I had to play the piano, and I was so frightened I couldn't keep my legs from jumping and my fingers from trembling.

I worked as a telephone operator for ten years (to date), and still working at it, April 22, 1961.

*More notes: In the picture where Mama stands on the front porch of the house in Colorado, about age 9, those in the photo are her sister Josie, her dad, his half-sister Eva and her husband Louis Courier, and their little boy. Aunt Eva used to save the catalogues for Mama to cut paperdolls out of.

The Girls in the picture are, L to R, Aunt Josie, Bacopickle, Aunt Louise (Ray's wife), her mother, Aunt Eva, and Mama.

Mama's best friend Irma, died in childbirth not long after this photo was taken.

Mama worked for Joe Apple in his store for a long time. WHen Eskimo Pie ice cream bars first came out, he kept Mama in good supply. She loved Eskimo Pies! When Mr. Apple invented his E Z Tire Changer (so easy a woman could do it!) Mama was his model in the booklet-brochere that advertised it.

In the photo of mama hanging clothes in the Cool Hat, the hat I remember best was a big Mexican Sombrero, pink and yellow, with little colored balls hanging from the brim. She always wore this when she'd hang out clothes, "to keep from getting freckles" in the sun.
.

MAMA

2006-10-27T14:03:00.000-07:00

even though i didn't write this poem, it conveys what i feel in my heart:

there are times in life when one does the right thing
the thing one will not regret,
when the child wakes crying "mama," late
as you are about to close your book and sleep
and she will not be comforted back to her crib,
she points you out of her room, into yours,
you tell her, "I was just reading here in bed,"
she says, "read a book," you explain it's not a children's book
but you sit with her anyway, she lays her head on your breast,
one-handed, you hold your small book, silently read,
resting it on the bed to turn pages
and she, thumb in mouth, closes her eyes, drifts,
not asleep -- when you look down at her, her lids open,
and once you try to carry her back
but she cries, so you return to your bed again and book,
and the way a warmer air will replace a cooler with a slight
shift of wind, or swimming, entering a mild current, you
enter this pleasure, the quiet book, your daughter in your lap,
an articulate person now, able to converse, yet still
her cry is for you, her comfort in you,
it is your breast she lays her head upon,
you are lovers, asking nothing but this bodily presence.
She hovers between sleep, you read your book,
you give yourself this hour, sweet and quiet beyond flowers
beyond lilies of the valley and lilacs even, the smell of her breath,
the warm damp between her head and your breast. Past midnight
she blinks her eyes, wiggles toward a familiar position,
utters one word, "sleeping." You carry her swiftly into her crib,
cover her, close the door halfway, and it is this sense of rightness,
that something has been healed, something
you will never know, will never have to know.

-- by Ellen Bass, 1985 from Our Stunning Harvest

It was here, at about age seven, after crawling into bed beside Mama, which I did often, that I would lie with her feeling very safe and loved, and the two of us memorized Saadi (out of an old Relief Society manual): If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft, and of thy slender store, two loaves alone to thee are left--sell one, and with the dole buy hyacinths to feed thy soul.

It was here in the bed that the three of us, Mama, Daddy, and I, would kick back and read the Sunday Funnies together. It was here, while Mama was reading Forever Amber, or Knock on Any Door,or another of her favorite books, that I stuck my finger into the empty bed light socket and almost blew my finger off!

.

Connect The Dots: I AM FROM

2006-10-27T07:30:00.000-07:00

I am from light, yes, a spark from the great Intelligent Light that set the universe afire, from Love, both spirit and matter, yes, and from the green living body of the earth, ocean and saltgrass, rain and roots. I am from amoeba, invertebrate to vertebrate, from Lucy. I am from Ephriam, from ancient Celts breathing in haze rising from peat bogs. I am from tassled cornfields in Cornwall, from the fires and peppered spices of Spain, from El Cid. I am of salt miners and salt barges of Cheshire, I am from their empty bellies and of the potatoes and buttermilk that filled them. I am from sailing ships, and steamboats. I am from children walking behind handcarts crossing the vast American prarie, I am from their frozen feet, wrapped in gunnysacks or dancing polkas or Fylde waltzes or Virginia reels. I am from fiddles and string bands and French horns. I am from sego lilies and lumpy dick and bread n'with it, from white salamanders and the three Nephites and funeral potatoes. I am from gold miners and lumberjacks, and red-haired women. I am from pony tails. I am from books. I am Plantagenet, and DeBohun. I am Shearer and Barkdull and Wolfe. I am Hatton, and Mau, the English, the German, the Scot. I am from Eva Pearl and Glen "A", the second of two, the female model. I am white beans and banana peppers, pot roast, macaroni and tomatoes. I am from both pain and pleasure. I do not ask perfection. I only ask for NOW. I am from poetry and a perfect brightness of hope. I am from wings.

(Inspired from January, at Poet Mom's list. Thanks!)

Small Things

2006-10-22T10:50:00.000-07:00

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Monday and Me.

Native American Prayer

Dear Father hear and bless
Thy beasts and singing birds
And guard with tenderness
Small things that have no words.

.

Minor Problems

2006-10-19T21:22:00.000-07:00

I have been close to my mother, but we never talked much about things intimate or personal. I carry her inborn reserve. The minor problems of adolescence, boys, pimples, the first menstruation, the first brassiere -- all great embarrassments to me -- were taken care of quickly and with a minimum of fuss, and I kept my feelings to myself. She was always there if I needed her. She never understood my revulsion at the dresses and pretty clothes she wanted me to wear when I wore faded blue jeans and too-large T-shirts, or why I let my hair go long and wild and stayed by myself, obstinate and sullen and full of unshared fantasies. I never meant to be rude or rebellious, but I was. I never felt unloved.

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one of Them....

2006-10-19T13:04:00.000-07:00

When my mother was young, when they moved from Colorado to California, and picked cotton along the way, she saved enough money to buy a piano. Not a Grand piano, not a Steinway, but a player piano, with wide, flat pedals you pumped like you were riding a bicycle uphill. There was a window in the front, with sliding doors, that opened onto a roller, where you could load punched paper rolls that would play songs of your choice. You pumped the pedals like a hiker climbing Everest, and piano music poured out without your having to touch a finger to the keys. The keys jumped all by themselves, as if played by a ghost. Oh! You Beautiful Doll, Alexander's Ragtime Band, Put Your Arms Around Me, Honey Hold Me Tight and my favorite, that went: Where do you work, a-John? I push, I push I push! Where do you push, a-John? On the Delaware-Lackawan-awan-awan-awan, the Delaware-Lackawan.

By the time I was big enough to pump, one of the pedals had broken, and you had to tie your foot to it with a piece of rope, and pull your right foot up before pushing it down again. It was good exercize. I loved the music. Mama gave me piano lessons from age five or six until I was eleven, and got an attitude and refused to practice any more. That was a big mistake.

My attitude had a lot to do with my braces, my bad self-image. I felt fat and ugly. Sometimes I hated myself, my hair, my nose, and made ugly faces in the mirror and threw things. I escaped into books. I rocketed away to far planets. I went to the movies, where it was always cool and dark, and I could fade out of my mediocre existence and be any of those film characters I chose to be. And I was beautiful and funny and smart and rich....

At the movies you could see a double feature, a newsreel, a cartoon(usually Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, or Daffy Duck, or Porky Pig), and previews
of coming attractions, all for a dime. Sometimes, during the intermission, they would give away prizes. On Saturdays, there were serials, to-be-continued cliff-hangers that carried over to the next Saturday. Our heros were Gene Autrey, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. I changed my name to "Cheyenne," and sang I Come from Montana, I wear a bandana, my spurs are silver, my pony is gray... and I Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle, as I go ridin' merrily along....I sang, Give me land, lots of land, under starry skies above, Don't Fence Me In! We were surrounded by real Indians, hired to help build the railroad that came through town, also the new Naval Ordinance Test Station at China Lake, a Navy Base just east of town, where they made and tested real rockets.

I discovered comic books, and Science Fiction. I devoured Weird Science Fantasy, and Superman,and Wonder Woman. I loved Tales from the Crypt. Science Fiction became my life, and this was while such greats as Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov were writing for the comic books. I idolized Ray Bradbury. I went from reading The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew and Mr. Popper's Penguins to The Martian Chronicles and I, Robot overnight.

Ray Bradbury wrote of himself: "I was one of Them: the Strange Ones. The Funny People. The Ones who waited through long days and nights, who used other peoples dreams for their lives."

I was one of Them, too. The Strange Ones.

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Grace Ellen Mow

2006-10-09T20:30:00.000-07:00

10 September, 1882 -- 4 July, 1970

Grace, my grandma, age sixteen. She wrote "We were married...in the section house ay Colona. A preacher came in on the train from Ouray to marry us. I had just turned seventeen years old. There was a big dance that night. We danced all night, until morning."

.

William Ray Wolfe

2006-10-09T17:00:00.000-07:00

December 16, 1899
Wedding picture: William Ray Wolfe and Grace Ellen Mow. She was seventeen, he was twenty-four. It was his birthday.

My Grandpa Who

2006-10-06T11:30:00.001-07:00

My Grandpa who (I never saw)

My grandpa who (I never saw)
shot mice behind the bedroom door
or under the pianoforte
blowing hell-holes in the floor
(O.F. Winchester's .44)
the bullets ricocheting
wall to wall. He swore
"Devil take!" and S.O.B!" and
"Plagues upon you!" (he
no catechist, he
no votary of Epicurius),

who, with his
stubborn Scottish jaw
and ranting woodman's fists
cut railroad ties
for Denver and the Rio Grande,
and caused my grandma
grief enough
to shoot herself (left breast,
she missed her heart
by barely half an inch).

And yet,
for all his fierceness
loved my mother
tenderly,
(a tiny red-haired dolly
he dandled on his knee).
I never saw my grandpa
but grandpa gave to me
enough insanity
to keep my devils free.

Everybody has a story. What was her story? What was his? I have no way of knowing, really, why she did this. My mother told me what but not why. Maybe she never knew, herself. Whatever it was that made my grandma, Grace Ellen, my Bocapickle, to want to die, I am sure it changed and shaped the rest of her life. Really, all their lives. Mama said her father was a very possessive and jealous man, given to irrational rages and fits of anger. Grandma wrote that he had "a very bad temper." He did shoot at mice inside the house. One of the ricocheting bullets landed between the pillows on the bed where the babies were sleeping. I wonder, did they cry? Were they too afraid to cry?

A blogger friend of mine, liz, writes, "We have all been on a journey that brings us to this place. Right now. We should be gentle with our own feelings and careful to think about why we are moved to judge another."

.

Kern River

2006-10-05T17:03:00.000-07:00

John and Bacopickle. Daddy and Mama.

A picnic. Years ago. My grandmother, Bacopickle, is still alive. She is here with her long used-to-be red hair wrapped around her head in circles of braids. John has a bottle of Four Roses whisky to keep him company. He celebrates every holiday with a bottle of Four Roses. He sits apart from the rest of us and hums comfortably to himself. In ten years they will both be gone. But today it is all right, today is fine! Tomorrow we will go our separate ways, but today we are all together again. Daddy cooks hamburgers over an open fire. Blue smoke rises high into the air. Mama helps Bacopickle with the lemonade and potato salad. My big brother climbs out of the river, says he won't go back in, the water's too cold. He lies on a wide, warm rock to dry out, like a lizard in the sun.

Wild blackberries grow all along the river's edge. The water sparkles. I throw little rocks into the water and the circles of ripples widen and run together. I step off the bank and wade out until the cold water is up to my knees. Little silver shivers dance like ripples up my backbone. Mother calls me to come back. I turn toward the shore and step off into a deep hole. The cold water closes over my head. Water is in my eyes, in my nose, in my mouth and ears. The waterweeds cover me, tangling my legs, pulling me down. I can't see or breathe or think. I can't call out. I can only sputter and cough and flail my arms helplessly.

My big brother comes in after me. I gasp and cling to his neck. When we are safely back on shore, he says, "If you'd been in the air instead of in the water, you'd a been flying!"

.

By Gis and By Saint Charity

2006-10-03T19:59:00.000-07:00

In this book
there was a picture
of fair mad Ophelia,
floating face up, trailing daisies:
on another page
The Rape of Lucretia,
startled hand to throat,
round breasts fallen over her bodice
like white May pears.
Somewhere, dark Othello
and that poor Jew Shylock
protested in blacker pentametered despair.

The pictures drew me.
The words were only partly
understood, underscored by my
splayed young fingers across the page.

Now I trail ink-stained daisies
of my own, sing mad songs,
demand my pound of flesh,
stare blindly across the spaces
between years, and wait
for whirling obsidian waters
to have me,
to carry this ash-black body
coughing blood
and cut it into stars.

Painting: Echo of Ophelia by Im Elbenwald

BEWARE THE BODY

2006-10-03T19:57:00.000-07:00

re
It never rains in sunny California
and it never rained where I come from
winter and summer it was the same,
our flat forced grass was coaxed
out of the sand with promises of sun
sun and more sun.
Reality was chapped knees, chapped lips,
too-small oxfords with the toes scuffed out,
Roy Rogers and The Sons of the Pioneers
singing "Happy Trails...."

After the war they shot cats
that ran wild and thrashed in the bamboo stand.
There were sunny California Januaries when wind
rattled layers of loose wallpaper
on bedroom walls, and worn checkered oilcloth
covered the kitched table.

Night was an alien thing.
Snakes climbed dark folds in my windowcurtains
while voices murmured from lit rooms
on the other side of the door: Deuces wild,
they said. Here's another chip
to sweeten the pot.

Grandma Josie, dead from diabetes
at thirty-four stood quietly in the dark
on my side of the door, whispering
with urgent intent.
I could hear the voice but not the words.

Now, no dreaming here
I hear the words unravelling clear
and unmistakable:

Beware the body that betrays.
Beware the body...
Beware....

Poor Donald Duck

2006-10-03T18:24:00.000-07:00

At ten. Embarrassed by my crooked teeth, afraid to smile. But not yet old enough for this to be a great hinderance to my self-image. I still like to play with dolls, and paper dolls, and read books, although my best girlfriends are beginning to like boys. My animals have become my best friends, my dogs and cats and birds. I am traumatized when some adult decides to shoot and kill all the cats and kittens that live in the bamboo field. My friend Carlita's dad decides to murder her pet duck, Donald, right before our eyes, the bastard. And I have to get braces on my teeth (which I will wear for the next three years). My big brother is away at college most of the time, and I spend a lot of time alone, drawing, trying to read Shakespeare--some sonnets, The Rape of Lucrecia, Hamlet. I have to look up the word rape in the dictionary, and I am intrigued by the concept. The picture of fair, mad Ophelia floating down the river, trailing daisies and singing mad songs stays with me yet. And my own grandmother, my dad's mother, whose name was Josie, and whose photograph at the age of twelve--about my age--was hung on a bedroom wall and used to whisper sibilant riddles to me, her paper lips moving mysteriously, scaring me. My best friend, my dog Lucky, was run over by a car while I was at school, and my dad buried him somewhere out on the desert. I searched tirelessly for his grave (as I had for my brother's dog, Sparky).

The family was still all together. Bacopickle and John lived next door. Uncle Ray and Aunt Louise, my mother's brother and his wife, and their three children lived close by. My cousin Wanda, who we called 'Ginger,' made me costumes out of old bedsheets and curtains. We practiced backbends and frontovers and cartwheels every evening in the front yard. We played hide n' seek until it was too dark to see. We ran until we were salty with sweat. My brother Gaylen, the year before he went away to school at BYU, and our cousin Billy, made gasoline engine model airplanes and flew them in circles out on the desert. My brother had an absolute passion for airplanes, and flying. He wanted to be an aeronautical engineer. Model airplanes were suspended on wires and strings from ceilings all over our house. Billy's nose always told him when Mama or Bacopickle were baking bread, and he was always the first one in line for the first hot-out-of-the-oven slice with butter. (Billy survived Korea, and was killed in a car wreck outside Las Vegas a few months after his discharge. Gaylen went on to the university and majored in music, becoming a composer and a professional musician--but he still loved flying.) Dad's sister Lauree and her family lived nearby and we ate Sunday dinners together after church, either at their house or at ours. Mama's sister (also Josie) and her two beautiful daughters, Donna, and Deana Rae, were just a house away. I loved them all immensely. Still do. The Family.

I still danced with Miss Dee. I had my first role in a Christmas play at school, as the 'Christmas Fairy,' with tinsel sparkling on my fairy wings and costume (made from an old silk petticoat of my mother's -- another great embarrasment to me. I cried, and complained, and carried on over that one for days!) and a sparkling magic wand. I don't remember much about the play, but my role was to help Santa by bringing in animals. My lines were: "Come birds, come! I need you!" and "Come bees, come! I need you!" Well, it wasn't Shakespeare. But, who knew? And actually, it wasn't really the first. The Christmas before, I had a line as one of the Crachit children when we did Dickens A Christmas Carol. "I hear the pudding singing in the basin!" That was it. Our onstage Christmas feast was Spam, hidden behind a paper mache turkey, and red Jell-o.

.

The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of

2006-10-03T16:35:00.000-07:00

There is a curve in the road from Randsburg going into Red Mountain, where a drunken and bloody wild woman with frenzied hair once ran down the hill to the road and flagged down our car. Without invitation, she wrenched open the back door and climbed into the back seat beside me, smelling of whisky, blood dripping from her elbows, and screaming crazily, "He's going to kill me! He's going to kill me!" Alarmed, I almost climbed out the other side. Daddy drove her down to the saloon, where she wanted to get out. --

But that's not my story. My story is the dream I still have repeatedly of going back to Red Mountain, around the curve in the road, trying to find my Nanny's house, my Aunt Mame's house, Bacopickle and John's house, and our house, just below the two rusty water tanks on the hill. It seems I know just where they should be. But they are not there. And Mr. Apple's store, where Vivian Rollins and I used to go for Eskimo Pies and Delaware Punch. She'd say, "Charge it," and they were magically ours, without our having to pay any money. Apple's store is still there, empty but for an old piano, rusty bedsprings, some old Coca Cola posters, and lots of dust. But the rest is all the stuff of dreams.

THE NIGHT THE ARCADE BURNED

2006-10-02T20:26:00.000-07:00

The night the Arcade burned the air turned red
as blood, a midnight mummy-shroud of smoke
wound up the sky, an ash and cherry cloak
that so lit up the glass, the house, the shed
containing all the Gypsy's magic strings
that moved her wooden hands, her ruby rings.
Oh, fire! Fire! forever in my head!
She should have known, that lady in the box,
and played a lucky card to break the locks.
She should have felt the lick of doom, have known
the itch of ghostly flame that was her own
undoing. I watched for a penny card,
some remnant of the cindered holocaust
that showed the Gypsy's fingerprint, unmarred
and pointing where the Exit sign was lost.

One night, after dinner was over and the dishes had been washed and dried, while the grown-ups were in the kitchen playing Poker at the table, I went to the front room and entertained myself with the piano bench. I turned it over and climbed into the little box the upside down seat made. I had a tea-strainer and a few red, white, and blue poker chips they gave me to play with. When I shook the round white chips in the tea-strainer they made a sound like eggs boiling in a pan. So, the piano bench turned upside down became my "boat" and I began "cooking eggs" for my picnic. I had hardly begun when I happened to glance up at the window in the front door. It was RED. I climbed out of my boat and went to look out the door. To my horror, the PENNY ARCADE across the street, where my friend Nancy and I often spent our afternoons buying trading cards with pictures of bubble dancers and movie stars, where we sometimes had our fortunes told by the gypsy lady in a glass box, where my brother once won a metal army tank by guiding a mechanical claw toward his prize, was ON FIRE! I ran to tell the adults, "It's burning! The Arcade is burning!" And nobody listened. No one paid attention to my excited rantings. So the Arcade went up in flames, and in the process, sent sparks over to the house next door to it, which was Nancy's house, and burned it up as well. For days afterward, she and I sifted through the charred remains looking for her dolls, Donnie and Tony.
Sadly, we never found them. (Years later, she would name her first son Tony). Nancy and her father and mother would live with us at our house until they moved away to Blue Diamond, Nevada, where her dad had a job in another mine. We were seven.

My dad was a volunteer Fireman after that. When the fire siren would go off in the middle of the night, he'd leap into his pants and shoes, and we'd chase the fire engine. I remember one night mother had forgotten to fill up the gas tank and we ran out of gas, and the fire engine sped off, leaving us behind in a cloud of dust. Daddy almost never swore. This was the first time I heard him swear.
.

The Pentecostals, 1948

2006-10-02T20:23:00.000-07:00

Week after week
they climbed their six splintered
pentecostal stairs to dance
like wonderful trained
bears, climbing, falling,
singing, their hands that ordinarily
held books or washed babies
or sometimes counted out money
to pay the milkman,
clapping,

clapping joy
as if they held tambourines,
laughing, their eyes lit
with some inner glory like a fire:

Oh holy, holy, they sang
and tossed their heads to a strong
upbeat rhythm. Oh brother, oh sister,
Oh holy, their housekeys jangling
in their pockets, their coins jingling
as the plate was passed.

What would I have dropped
that summer night--absolved--into their plate
as they danced, howling their songs
holy, and more holy, like a circus troupe,
but my ignorance, an offering of
my two dazed eyes,
my pious, stunned tongue,
my baseball,
my cap pistol and a red roll of caps,
a white Life Saver, and
four glass black marbles still warm
from my hand?

Outside
under the glass-black sky and looking in
at their window, it was awesome,
and I wished I knew the words.

Daddy loved boxing, and baseball. I remember listening with him to the radio broadcast of the fight for the Heavyweight Championship when Rocky Marciano beat the World's champion Jersey Joe Wolcott. We listened to a lot of boxing matches and a lot of baseball games on the radio. In the summers, both my dad and my brother played baseball with our local team. Both of them pitched. And sometimes my dad was umpire. The whole town turned out for the games, except on the nights when the Pentecostal's held their church meetings. Then, a few friends and I would sneak away from the game and look in the windows at the people inside singing and praying and sometimes speaking in tongues.

FRIENDLY VILLAGE

2006-10-02T19:55:00.000-07:00

Even now it seems as if I remember the words that begin this book: I know a village where you would like to live. I would like to live there, too. The streets run up hill and down hill...and there are flowers in every garden." That may not be exactly right, but it's very close. The book recounted the adventures of Alice and Jerry. I think there was an old man named Ned. One chapter toward the end of the book told of blueberries growing by the sea. The boy actually gathered blueberries. I dreamed of blueberries, I longed forblueberries, I lusted afterblueberries. Many many years later, when I finally did taste a blueberry, it was a big disappointment. There is a lesson to be learned here. If you find it, you win -- a box of -- you guessed it -- blueberries!

FIRST READER

2006-10-02T19:37:00.000-07:00

I can see them standing politely on the wide pages
that I was still learning to turn,
Jane in a blue jumper, Dick with his crayon-brown hair,
playing with a ball or exploring the cosmos
of the backyard, unaware they are the first characters,
the boy and girl who begin fiction.

Beyond the simple illustration of their neighborhood
the other protagonists were waiting in a huddle:
frightening Heathcliff, frightened Pip, Nick Adams
carrying a fishing rod. Emma Bovary riding into Rouen.

But I would read about the perfect boy amd his sister
even before I would read about Adam and Eve, garden and gate,
and before I heard the name Gutenberg, the type
of their simple talk was moving into my focusing eyes.

It was always Saturday and he and she
were always pointing at something and shouting, "Look!"
pointing at the dog, the bicycle, or at their father
as he pushed a hand mower over the lawn,
waving at aproned mother framed in the kitchen doorway,
pointing toward the sky, pointing at each other.

They wanted us to look but we had looked already
and seen the shaded lawn, the wagon, the postman.
We had seen the dog, walked, watered and fed the animal,
and now it was time to discover the infinite, clicking
permutations of the alphabet's small and capital letters.
Alphabetical ourselves in the rows of classroom desks,
we were forgetting how to look, learning how to read.

--Billy Collins, "Questions About Angels"

.

June Allyson & Me

2006-10-02T19:31:00.000-07:00

America's Sweetheart, June Allyson, has died at 88. I feel I must say something about her death, since I fell deeply and irrevocably and eternally (as much as a person can, at the age of seven) in love with her. I had just seen Little Women, in which she played the role of Jo. I was totally charmed. In all, she made 25 movies for MGM. Her "perky wholesomeness," her husky voice, her cheerful smile, her eyes, made her famous. Those eyes. How they glistened when she wept. How they sparkled and crinkled when she laughed! I wrote her a letter, detailing my love for her, and she sent me an autographed photo of herself. (One of thousands, I'm sure, but I didn't know that then.) I returned the favor by sending her a picture of me, this one. I found out that her birthday was on October 7th, and I sent her a necklace paid for from my own stash of money. (This gift went unacknowledged, but my love never waivered.) I haven't seen or heard of her in ages, I had almost forgotten her. Now she has died. RIP, June. You were one-of-a-kind!

Miss Dee

2006-08-30T19:03:00.000-07:00

This, then, is a tribute to you, Miss Dee, wherever you are now. Miss Dee was a Jew, some people around town called her a Kike. Whatever, she was dark haired and beautiful and graceful, and every little girl in her dance classes loved her immensely. We all wanted to be just like her. Wherever she came from, suddenly she was here, in the middle of the Mojave Desert, to teach us how to be beautiful and graceful. We were like a flock of little brown birds in the presence of a Phoenix. Her real name was Mrs. Kahn. What was the "D" for? Delilah? Daphane? Diana? Deborah? I can't remember, but it must have stood for something more radiant and grand than our names: Norma, and Jackie, Virginia and Leonie, and Joyce.

There, in her little studio with its music, and barre, and mirrors, in the middle of all that dry sagebrush and sand, she taught us Acrobatics, Ballet, and Tap dancing. In our spare time after school we all practiced doing splits, and backbends and frontovers and cartwheels. We practiced tapdancing in our bare feet, in the sand. (Here I must tell you that my friend Leonie Kinikin also had a pair of ice skates, and we also used to ice skate in the sand! -- Our regular skating, with the skates clamped onto our shoes and fastened with a skate key was done on a big cement slab by Flossie's Variety Store).

Once or twice a year Miss Dee gave a recital, and our parents were invited to watch us perform. In Wisteria we were supposed to be a kind of lovely lavender flowers I had never seen. We were White Clouds drifting in a blue sky, we tapped out patriotic rhythms in sparkling Red, White, and Blue. Leonie and Norma danced Sunset and Night, where Leonie's beautiful many-colored costume was at the end, covered in Norma's black cloak. Oh, I can't begin to tell you how I envied Leonie's beautiful, filmy, pink and gold and scarlet colored dress, as Joseph's brothers must have envied and coveted his coat of many colors! I would have thrown her into a pit for that dress. I would have sold her into Egypt.

You see, Miss Dee, I remember this, even now! And though I know you will never see this, I want to tell you, Thank you, thank you, thank you, for sharing your grace and your talents with some little girls a long time ago in the middle of a great desert. You were an oasis in a wilderness.

Watch Me Grow

2006-08-30T18:44:00.000-07:00

Me, Myself, and I

2006-08-01T16:58:00.000-07:00

"The morning breeze has secrets to tell you.
Do not go back to sleep."

--Rumi

What secrets did the morning breeze of my early childhood tell me? That childhood is bliss. That the universe is a friendly place, full of love and kindness. That, as the poet Rumi wrote, we have been in heaven, we have been friends of the angels. And now we are here to discover our selves. Our consciousness expands in every direction, and what we intend to create, and what we desire, is on its way.* The Talmud says: Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers, Grow, grow. So does an angel bend over me. And you.

*Dr Wayne Dyer

The morning breeze has secrets to tell you
Do not go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.
Do not go back to sleep.

People go back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.
Do not go back to sleep.

Little Boy Blue

2006-07-11T21:05:00.000-07:00

The little toy dog is covered with dust,
But sturdy and staunch he stands;
And the little toy soldier is red with rust,
and his musket moulds in his hands.
Time was when the little toy dog was new,
And the soldier was passing fair;
And that was the time when our Little Boy Blue
Kissed them and put them there.

"Now don't you go till I come," he said,
"And don't you make any noise!"
So, toddling off to his trundle-bed,
He dreamt of his pretty toys;
And while he was dreaming, an angel song
Awakened our Little Boy Blue--
Oh! the years are many, the years are long,
But the little toy friends are true!

Ay, faithful to Little Boy Blue they stand,
Each in the same old place--
Awaiting the touch of a little hand,
The smile of a little face;
And they wonder, as waiting the long years through
In the dust of that little chair,
What has become of our Little Boy Blue,
Since he kissed them and put them there.

--Eugene Fields

I had memorized this poem from one of my books by the age of five. I loved it, I loved the picture that illustrated it. A book I have now lists it among other inferior poems because it is sentimental. "It oversimplifies," says the book. "It is unfaithful to the full complexity of human experience. It aims primarily at stimulating the emotions directly rather than at communicating experience truly and freshly; it depends on trite and well-tried formulas for exciting emotion; it revels in old oaken buckets, rocking chairs, mother love, and the pitter-patter of little feet."

Well, okay. It may not be listed among the very greatest of poems, but it was just right for a five-year-old who was still very into rocking chairs and mother love.

Tumbleweeds

2006-06-22T12:34:00.000-07:00

When I was a child, I would curl up in bed under three blankets, covering my ears against the wind howling outside. We could tell, by wind-clouds piling up along the tops of the Sierra-Nevadas, when there would be a big blow. The wind always came from the west, blowing sand into waves of dunes in the front yard, settling a fine, thick silt on the window sills and in the corners. It made spooky howling noises in the stovepipe and the clanging of the chains on my swingset against the bars kept me awake all night. As I looked out my bedroom window, the red light from the Penny Arcade sign across the street bloodied every grain of sand, turning the whole window red. Sand blasted the paint off cars and pitted windshields, and blotted out the sun. It stung our eyes and textured our dinner and turned tumbleweeds into flying missiles.

Once, the circus came to town in the middle of a terrific windstorm. Their Big Top swayed and groaned, the ropes and posts and canvases snapped like ships in the blowing sand. The daring young men on the flying trapeze may have been daring, but they were not fools, so they stayed safely on the ground while their swings billowed and lifted without them. Still, we saw monkeys (One, wearing a little red coat with gold buttons, bit my finger, outstretched in friendship. I never tried that again!) and elephants, lion-tamers and clowns. We saw Bambi-the-Snake-Woman, and Bobo-the-Dog-Faced-Boy. The Man-Turned-to-Stone invited our hands to feel the vibrations on his leg while he spoke. A nine-foot giant mummy, leathery and brown, reclined in a wood-and-glass case. Beside him in a smaller case there was another mummy of an ancient infant that looked like a little shriveled, brown monkey. We ate pink spun-sugar cotton candy, and shiney, red candy apples-on-a-stick.

And I remember once, Gypsies camped their tents and wagons at the far end of our lot. Someone said Gypsies stole children, dyed their skins brown with the juice of berries and walnuts, and they had to be Gysies for the rest of their lives. I lived in
horror they might kidnap me, yet I secretly hoped they would, so that I could live a life traveling in tents, wearing gold earring and bracelets up to my elbows, and dancing to the music of tambourines. However, I took the long, round-about way to school for as long as they camped there. I never heard one tambourine. The closest I ever came to living like a Gypsy was years later when I travelled around the country with a theater reperatory troupe--in a tan station wagon overflowing with old show programs, candy wrappers, banana skins, etc., and we made our own peculiar music (of a sort). In school every morning, the teacher gave us mimeographed pictures to color of Farmer Brown, Farmer Brown's Wife, and Farmer Brown's Boy Bill. (Never once Gypsies!)

I remember the hills and gullies full of sage and creosote and cactus, coyotes and rattlesnakes and lizards. When more and more people began to move in, they all vanished. The shrill night howling of coyotes used to send shivers of fear up and down my back. Now most of the remaining coyotes are pacing up and down in zoos, although the sheepmen say some still attack and kill their sheep. I suffer with the sheep, but my heart is with the coyotes. I think the whole history of creation is in those sheep and the coyotes.

Grandpa in Flowers

2006-06-20T14:58:00.000-07:00

For tho' from out our bourne of time and place
the flood may bear me far,
I hope to meet my pilot face to face
when I have crossed the bar.

--Tennyson

James William Hatton
12/14/1878 - 12/13/1944

SO IT GOES!

2006-06-20T09:07:00.000-07:00

I like to think of people as Kurt Vonnegut's Tralfamadorians saw them in Slaughterhouse Five,--as continuous beings not unlike long caterpillars, with fat baby's legs at one end, and long, ancient legs at the other--beings forever all-one-piece, integrated and entire. Vonnegut's Tralfamadorians, seeing into the fourth dimension, perceive the universe in a radically different way:

"All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

"When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition at that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'So it goes!'"

So it goes. I am five-years-old, and they have taken me to say "goodbye" to my grandpa, who is sleeping in flowers, but he doesn't wake no matter what is said to him.

Then I am six-years-old, having another encounter with Vulture Death. I hold a brown leather dog collar. Topper was a good dog, now he is dead, run over by a truck. The truck meant no harm. The driver was sorry, and he said so. I think of all the uncounted dogs and cats and birds that died somewhere back in my childhood: Sparky and Cue-Ball, Topper, Lucky, Penny and Bobby, blue and green parakeets, Monday the sparrow, Perry the chipmunk....a boxfull of naked pink baby mice someone found in an old trunk and brought to me. Another sparrow we named Frosty. Toots, and Queenie, the last dogs of my childhood. When Topper died, for weeks afterward the very air smelled of him. He was nowhere and everywhere. And every loss brought floods of tears. When Lucky died I wrote my first poem:

There is no more puppy
to laugh with, or play.
There is no more puppy
to care for each day.

There is no more puppy
to come when I call,
there is no more puppy,
no puppy at all.

Well, it's not Shakespeare, but what d'you expect? I was eight.

Back to Vonnegut's caterpillar. I am six again, watching snakes climb up the gray folds in the window-curtains, hearing the old photographs on the walls whisper to one another of times past in quiet, paper voices. My heart thumps monstrously loud.

Whatever happened to Baby Dumpling, and the rocking chair, and all those pop bottles full of sand? Nicodemus had no shoes, so who was it stepped in all the pies? Jesus loves me, this I know. I'll be a sunbeam for him. I love Jesus. I love cats. Cue-Ball is my cat. He rides in the little buggy and sings. A sunbeam, a sunbeam, Jesus wants me for a sunbeam. Loves. By pinching is how people who love each other very much get babies.

I was stunned when mother told me how people do get babies. "Do you remember that word I told you not to say?" Mother must have been acutely embarrassed. "That's what people do." She never said the word, but that was my sex education. I knew those bizarre activities occurred, whatever they were called. But I could not imagine why anyone would want to do such things, and certainly, if they did, it didn't concern me. We never talked about "it" again.

So it goes!

THOSE TIMES

2006-06-14T16:52:00.000-07:00

Diane and me, in wildflowers. Riding in a baby carriage, being angry, bawling that my friend Diane (being littler) was sitting comfortably in the shade of the hood while I was at the end, in the sun. The carriage was being pushed by someone named Virginia.

Riding on my dad's shoulders down the hill in the dark to get ice-cream, and returning home to find Santa Claus had come. He left a set of little blue plastic dishes, and my beautiful Baby Sunshine baby doll. She was also called, sometimes, Baby Dumpling--(after the real baby of a friend of my mama's--actually, Blondie and Dagwood's first baby Alexander was called 'Baby Dumpling,' so that's where it all started, in the funny papers!)

Playing with my mother's old dolls, a blue celluloid baby (which I left outside to be ruined--(all her arms and legs fell off), and another of her dolls which I loved, with a china head, real hair, and a smile with real teeth--(which I also left outside for the dog to ruin). She was my mother's, when she was a little girl. The doll's name was 'Norma,' and she still resides (her china head glued back together) in a box in my attic.

I remember playing in Bacopickle's garden, the fence, the hollyhocks. I always carried a big smooth oval rock around, pretending it was my 'baby.' John, Bacopickle's husband (but never my 'grandpa') once sent me a letter (an exciting thing!) telling me to 'be a good girl,' and to 'go sit on a tack,' or maybe it was 'don't sit on a tack.' Whichever, I was pleased and thought it was funny. John always called me "Blondie."

A watermelon 'bust' at Dry Lake. My cousin Jerry and I kick sand on the campfire to put it out. The big people heap praises upon us. We kick more sand on the fire. I am going to marry Jerry. Jerry kicks a big desert turtle on the top of its shell with the heel of his boot. How mean! I am not going to marry Jerry after all.

My brother's black dog, Sparky. My brother jumping over a fence, followed by Sparky. I remember looking for Sparky after he was poisoned, suspecting that he was buried under a red hill of dirt in the yard, digging to find him.

My old black-and-white tomcat, Cue-Ball. I dress him up in doll clothes and haul him around in my wicker doll-buggy. He is docile and loving and content. He lays on his back and purrs, wrapped in a little blanket. Sometime later, I am sitting on my Grandma Bacopickle's lap in the big rocker. Cue-Ball is on my lap, purring, his claws pushing in and out like cat's do when they're happy. One of his claws catches a big scab already on my knee and pulls it off. The knee becomes infected, and we go to see Dr. Drummond (the doctor who delivered me), where his pretty nurse, Cherry, fixes me up with a new bandage. I remember my crib, metal with white, peeling paint. Every time I walked by it I knocked the scab off my knee! I slept in the crib until I was four or five.

I remember going on vacation, a picnic of sorts. I need to go potty and I'm taken out to a private wooded place. Later on, I discover my privacy was invaded--someone took my picture! I feel betrayed and humiliated. I am enraged and embarassed seeing these two photographs, "hoarding my small dignity," as Anne Sexon wrote in a poem called THOSE TIMES.

We are in Whitney, Nevada, where my dad is thinking of buying a store with my Uncle Leffel. I find a nest of kittens, one dangling by its neck between two shelves under a counter. In Whitney, I make a 'cradle' of my hands to rock a tiny baby turtle, (a fingerplay mama taught me): Here are mother's knives and forks, here is mother's table. Here is sister's looking-glass, and here's the baby's cradle. We leave Whitney after a short time and come back to California. (My brother, who was 14 at the time, informs me that there was a big magnesium mine that opened up, and since it was wartime, there was a great demand for magnesiuim. Dad and two of our uncles, Leffel and Ray, thought a store would be a good idea. We stayed there for only six months, so it probably wasn't.)

Someone holds me up to peer over a high fence where a little girl who has no arms plays. They tell me how she can feed and dress herself, and write, anyway, with her toes. I am impressed. Someone holds me up to a window, where a sick girl named Yvonne is darkly quarentined behind a screen. Say "Hello," I am told. "Hello," I say, but I feel something dark inside my chest that I can only equate now to Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year.

The sound tin cans made when they were scraped in the sand. Filling up empty bottles with the sand, patting it down flat when they were full. The taste of sand, the wonderful smell of it. Pouring it out, and scooping it up again.

Making 'pets' out of the little white balls of fuzz that grew on the creosote bush beside the house. In the summer, they turned, like dandelions, into tiny yellow flowers. The smell of wildflowers in the spring. The hillsides were covered with wildflowers.

The tobacco-smell of my grandpa. The powder-smell of Nanny.

Outhouses. Grandpa and Nanny had a seat with a lid on theirs. Ours was just a hole in a board. My little potty chair inside, by the ice-box. My little rocking chair.

My butcher-boy outfit with flowers embroidered across the front. My coat with little buttons shaped like deer.

The 'bean' tree in our yard, a locust tree, I think. I gathered the long, thin green pods and 'cooked' them.

I remember seeing a movie cartoon where Mickey Mouse cut a loaf of bread into slices so thin they were transparent. You could see the knife passing through.

Biting the skin on my mother's elbow because it felt so good to my teeth. --Never hard enough to hurt, but it must've been really annoying to her....

Misunderstood! I am standing in the front seat of the car, between Mama (who is driving) and Mrs. Lambly, (who is all dressed up) and who has white hair and shiney dangling earrings. I admire her earrings, am about to touch them, when mama scolds me, tells me to "stop it." I realize that she thinks I will pull them through the piercings in the lady's ears. My feelings are hurt that she thinks I'd do something so stupid. I just thought they were pretty things, and I was going to tell her so.

The rusty water towers on the hill above our house. The silver milk cans in the barn. The way the cream wrinkls on top of the milk.

Rinaldi's Meat Market; It smells of the thick sawdust covering the floor, ankle-deep, and of salt. I like to come here with my mother. The earthy smells of the mine shafts daddy works in, of the burning carbide in the miners' lamps, of cool wet rocks.

All of these before I was five, before we moved away from Red Mountain.

THE BOMB

2006-06-04T11:33:00.000-07:00

Praise The Lord

2006-06-04T11:17:00.000-07:00

And Pass the Ammunition

Down went the gunner; a bullet was his fate,
Down went the gunner, and then the gunner's mate.
Up jumped the sky pilot, gave the boys a look
And manned the gun himself as he laid aside the Book,
Shouting: Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition!
Praise the Lord, and Pass the Ammunition!
Praise the Lord, and Pass the Ammunition,
And we'll all stay free!

Praise the Lord, and swing into position,
Can't afford to sit around a'wishin'.
Praise the Lord, we're all between perdition
And the deep blue sea!

Yes, the sky pilot said it. You've got to give him credit,
For a son-of-a-gun of a gunner was he, shouting:
Praise the Lord; we're on a mighty mission,
All aboard! We're not a'goin' fishin'.
Praise the Lord, and Pass the Ammunition,
And we'll all stay free!

Words and Music by FRANK LOESSER

WW2, Three Musketeers

2006-06-04T10:05:00.000-07:00

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor Naval Base in Hawaii in a surprise attack, killing some 3,000 Americans. I actually remember people weeping, whispering those words, "Pearl Harbor!" Within days, young Americans flocked to enlist in the service, among them my dad's curley-headed brother, my Uncle Rulon. He spent most of the war years in (of all places), Iran. Daddy joined the Coast Guard. Tommy Dorsey recorded "Kiss the Boys Goodbye." The Andrew Sisters sang about the "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy." In the years that followed, clocks were turned ahead one hour as "war time," now called Daylight Savings Time, went into effect. Gasoline, sugar, and butter were rationed. People carried little packets filled with "tokens," little round brown things that could be spent as money. Mama filled plastic trays with a white margerine and poured in little packages of yellow dye to make it look like real butter. Even the movie stars went to war. Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Gene Autry, Spencer Tracy, and Douglas Fairbanks joined up, while glamorous women stars asked us to buy war bonds. "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition" was number 1 on the Hit Parade. I stood on some piano bench, somewhere, and sang it to much applause. (The end of my singing in public, I might add!) Mama sang in the kitchen, while fixing dinner and doing dishes, she sang as she made the beds, and swept the floors. Ac-cent-tchu-ate The Positive, E-lim-i-nate the negative. Don't Get Around Much Anymore. I'll Never Smile Again. I'll Be Seeing You in All the Old Familiar Places. The Last Time I Saw Paris. She sang Sentimental Journey, and You'll Never Know Just How Much I Love You, You'll Never Know Just How Much I Care.... These songs became part of me, and I knew all the words. Oh How I Hate To Get Up In The Morning. I dropped little rocks on ants, playing "Bombs Over Tokyo," and I knew how to draw a swastika with my finger in the dirt. Hitler's face, and Tokyo Joe's were everywhere. They're Either Too Young or Too Old, They're Either Too Gray or Too Grassy Green! The Pickin's is Poor, and The Crop Is Lean....

Then President Roosevelt, who so often spoke to us over the radio, died. Mama cried, and stopped singing. We dropped an Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and another on Nagasaki. We stormed the beaches at Normandy. The war was over.

They continued to perfect the Bomb. Even after we moved from the yellow house Daddy built in Red Mountain to the house with a bird's nest in the chandellier in Inyokern, they continued to test the Bomb in Nevada. We got out of our beds early in the morning on the day of the test, stood in our front yard, and watched as the red cloud rose over the east mountains. We could see it all the way in California. And we could hear, and feel, the rumble of the shock wave several moments after.

People began to worry about the "T-Zone" in their cigarettes, Taste and Throat, and they would "Walk a Mile for a Camel." There was "Never a Rough Puff in a Lucky," and the old 'ice-box' became a thing of the past when we bought a new refrigerator. Campbell's Soup was "Mmmm-Mmmm Good!"

There were "real" faces and "friendly" faces. "Real" faces belonged to Harry Truman, and Estes Kefauver, and Clement Attlee, to Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, to Dorothy Lamour and Betty Hutton. Although some of these faces were also "friendly," I paid more attention to other faces I loved: Sniffles and Mary Jane, Marmaduke Mouse, Little Henry, the Little King, and Little Lulu, with her black ringlets, her cheery smile, her red dress, and her olive-black eyes.

Now cigarettes are politically incorrect, they'll give you cancer and bad breath, and their secondhand smoke will kill you. And Sniffles and Mary Jane, along with all those other "friendly" faces have gone the way of the dinosaur and the dodo bird.

A Lamb's Tail

2006-05-21T22:11:00.000-07:00

When Daddy left for work every day, he'd give Mama a peck on the lips and she'd always say, "Be careful, and don't work too hard!"

And he'd say, "I'll be back in two shakes of a lamb's tail!"

I guessed that meant quickly, as, in a flash. Hmmm.

This one is short, so you can read it quickly, in two shakes of a lamb's tail, and go on about your business.

Don't You Forget it!

2006-05-21T11:22:00.000-07:00

"Epamanondas, you don't have the sense you were born with. But I love you just the same, and don't you forget it."

And he never did.

EPAMANONDAS, ET AL

2006-05-21T09:53:00.000-07:00

I learned, from the age of two or three, to love books. Epamanondas was the first. Epamanondas, who carried the butter home as he had carried the cake, "wrapped up in leaves and put in his hat as he came along...." And, of course, the butter melted and ran everyplace.... Later, his Auntie told him, "I've got six pies cooling on the doorstep--you be careful how you step on those pies!" The pies sat cooling in a row on the doorstep. As soon as his Auntie left, Epamanondas went out, and he was good and careful. He stepped right--in--the--middle--of--each one! When his Auntie came back, she said "Epamanondas, you don't have the sense you were born with. But I love you just the same, and don't you forget it!" And he never did.

I can't remember a time when I was not in love with books. At Christmas, Santa Claus would often bring me a book. There was The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes, a real women's lib story first published in 1939, about a lady bunny who attains the exalted position of Easter Bunny in spite of her responsibilities as the mother of 21 children. In the end, this "brave, kind, and swift" bunny must fly to a snowy mountaintop to delived a beautiful egg to a sleeping boy before she can return home to hide eggs for all 21 of her own children. The sight of the sleeping boy with that beautiful, fragile egg in the palm of his hand sent waves of dread through me. I knew the boy would wake up with no idea of the egg in his hand--and it would fall--and that would be the end of that!

I loved the Snipp, Snapp, and Snurr books. by Maj Lindman. Babar the Elephant was another favorite. My Nanny gave me A. A. Milne'sNow We Are Six on my sixth birthday, and inscribed it: To a Nice Little Girl. I memorized it.

Then there was the comics page in the newspaper: The Teenie Weenies were tiny people who lived among the birds, chipmunks, mice, squirrels and rabbits in Teeny Weenie Town. and the Katzenjammer Kids, Invisible Scarlet O'Neil, Dick Tracy,Red Ryder and Little Beaver. The list could go on and on.

Once we got a set of encyclopedias, filled with volumes of information and pictures--a mother testing a baby's bathwater with her elbow, a story of gypies who
dyed a stolen child's skin brown with walnut juice. The set was red, with gold-leaf that said: COMPTON'S PICTURED ENCYCLOPEDIA on the front of each book. We also had a set of medical encyclopedias I loved to look at, in which various people suffered with unspeakably horrid illnesses which cracked their lips and spotted their skins. There were other pictures in which broken arms were expertly set in slings elaborately folded and tied.

In school we read of Dick and Jane, Spot, Puff, and Baby Sally. I loved the weight, and feel, and the smell of books! So, I became a bookworm. I don't remember ever learning to read. It seemed as if I always knew how, and I could never understand people who didn't love to read.

Songs My Mother Taught Me

2006-05-21T09:27:00.000-07:00

BARNACLE BILL THE SAILOR

Who's that knocking at my door?
Who's that knocking at my door?
Who's that knocking at my door?
Cried the fair young maiden.

It's only me, Im home from the sea,
said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.
I'm all lit up like a Christmas tree,
said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.

Are you young and handsome, sir?
Are you young and handsome, sir?
Are you young and handsome, sir?
cried the fair young maiden.

I'm old and rough and dirty and tough,
said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.
I drink my gin and I dip my snuff,
said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.

I'll come down and let you in,
I'll come down and let you in,
I'll come down and let you in,
cried the fair young maiden.

Well, hurry before I bust down the door!
said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.
I'll rare and tare, and rant and roar!
said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.

I'll spin you yarns and tell you lies,
I'll drink your wine and eat your pies,
I'll kiss your cheeks and black your eyes,
said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.

If you love me, say it's I,
If you love me, say it's I,
If you love me, say it;s I,
cried the fair young maiden.

Aye, aye! said he, It's certainly me!
said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.
Aye, aye! said he, And now we agree!
said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.

Tell me that we soon shall wed,
Tell me that we soon shall wed,
Tell me that we soon shall wed,
cried the fair young maiden.

Never again, I'll come no more!
said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.
And if you wait for me to come
You'll sit and wait and suck your thumb,
said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.

(These were lyrics from an old 1930 Betty Boop movie, but there are other, raunchy lyrics. She only sang me the clean version, although I do remember a line that went: To hell with the dance, and down with your pants, said Barnacle Bill the Sailor!)

Self Portrait...

2006-05-20T18:31:00.000-07:00

Who said you can't go home again! Here am I rocking on the front porch of Thomas Wolfe's home in Asheville, NC. I went back once to look for my old home in the California Mojave desert one summer, with my mother. We laughed all the way to the airport, ate peanuts and drank Cokes on the jet. The day we drove out there the desert was hot. Most of the wildflowers were gone. The town is still there, but our house was gone. Vanished. Where it should have been was a small square foundation, a lizard, a few weeds. Vanished. Like Grandpa and Nannie, and Nannie's yellow cat called "Pinky." Like my brother's black dog Sparky. Like Daddy. And Mama. Daddy was a miner. Mama said my father was always one shovelful away from the glory hole that would've made us rich.

OK. So, maybe you can't go home again. But words are magic! In 1939, Mother's Day came on a Sunday, May 14th. I was born the day after. They said Daddy leaped the fence like an Olympic hurdler to tell my Nannie and Grandpa, "It's a girl!" The newspaper headlines that day announced that Premier Mussolini gave his views on the question of war in Europe: "There are not enough problems big enough...to justify a war," he said. So, he was wrong. That day Bob Feller, pitching for the Cleveland Indians, saw his mother in the stands hit by a stray ball. Sophie Tucker, Katherine Cornell, Tallulah Bankhead, and Katherine Hepburn played on Broadway the night I was born. I was a shy kid. I told my husband I spent my childhood reading Plato and Aristotle. I lied. I wasted a lot of time under the fig tree in our back yard floating ants on boats made of leaves. I practiced flying off the swings, sure that if I wished hard enough and kept practicing, one day I would take off like a bird, and never come back.

I decided I'd be an artist. I majored in art all thru High School. Then I decided I'd be a great actress (like Katherine Hepburn), and went to the Pasadena Playhouse. I spent about a year travelling with a road repertory company, and we played seven different shows across the U.S. and Canada. I did mostly little girls and old ladies. I got tired of living in hotels and suitcases, so I left the road and enrolled at the University of Utah. My dearest friend Janet decided I was going to wind up an old maid because I hardly ever went out. I spent much of my time in the music library listening to Palestrina Masses. At any rate, I graduated in '64 with BFA in Theatre Arts and got married a couple of weeks later. And had five sons. And no money. I survived that. I survived melanoma, and wrote a book about it, called CHRYSALIS (out-of-print now, but several copies are still floating around on Amazon.com). I taught writing for several years, had a poetry textbook and a book of poetry published, IN WILLY'S HOUSE. I love to write, but have kind of gotten out of the habit. Maybe this will inspire me again.

Now that I am--almost--sixty-seven, and closing in on an ending that may be a beginning, or a continuation, I know that it's all about change. Susan Griffin, in "A Chorus of Stones," says: The body remembers who we are supposed to be. And in this there is grief.

I think sometimes I am supposed to be about four, read to, sung to, rocked to sleep in the wicker rocker on our vanished front porch, wearing my small thin body, without this unfamiliar heaviness, these strange wrinkles, this loose flesh. Last night I dreamed I was in my Grandmother's house. My mother was there. I was ecstatic. My father came past the window and looked in, and then came into the room where we were all gathered. I threw my arms around him and gave him a kiss. Then the dog woke me up wanting to go outside.

H.G. Wells said that "Man must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind him to the fact that each moment of his life is a miracle and a mystery." My life so far has been a miracle and a mystery. As all of our lives are. Isn't it grand! Almost like going home.

Gloryhole

2006-05-18T10:49:00.000-07:00

Daddy in the mine, "a penny's-worth of carbide" lit in his headlight "like a star."

Rough and Ready

2006-05-18T08:17:00.000-07:00

"In 1918," writes Jack McGinnis in his little book called RANDSBURG-Southern California's Greatest Gold Camp, "a big silver strike was discovered." And the Kelly mine, where Daddy worked, "was on its way to fame. It was almost unbelievable how rich it was." Other silver mines, the Silver King, Big Four, Silver Glance, Red Warrior, and the Yellow Aster were also booming. A post office was established in 1922. "The miners were calling the town Gin City, and Sin City, and the postal department soon got tired of the confusion, so they settled the name by calling the town 'Red Mountain.'

"Red Mountain was a rough and ready town. Saloons were everywhere and this was during prohibition, too. Authorities didn't seem to care and looked the other way. If a raid was planned on Red Mountain, somebody was always tipped off. Girls and liquor were plenty everywhere you went, up and down the main street. Gambling was everywhere. This was really a last frontier town in the west. There were places named the Northern, the Silver Dollar, the Owl, the Shamrock, the Palace, the Stag, and many more. The girls were all young and beautiful. Everybody had fun," he writes. My brother says, "Red Mountain was an interesting place in which to grow up. I lived there the first fifteen years of my life, and still retain many fond memories of it." He delivered newspapers to the "girls," the prostitutes down on the main street. "They were always nice to me," he remembers. He says, "My dad was the foreman at the Santa Fe mine. He had studied mining engineering through a correspondence course, and I believe he knew more than most engineers. We used to sneak to the edge of the Santa Fe and spit down it until a piece of spit hit one of the miners after gaining several hundred feet of momentum. We got chewed out plenty."

All the mines, Daddy said, were full of Tommyknockers, gremlins who caused cave-ins, who loved to trap miners, and I thought, would surely eat a child whole if one wandered too close to one of the mine shafts. I was interested in Tommyknockers, apparently more than my big brother was! On occasion I did take Daddy's lunch to him, and was lowered down the shaft in a bucket, carrying the food in my lap. The Kelly had a 1400 foot vertical shaft, a head-frame with a large wheel pulley at the top and a hoist house below where a long cable with the bucket extended down into the shaft. I never saw a Tommyknocker, but I loved going down into the mines where it was cool and damp, and smelled of rocks and carbide and old timbers that shored up the tunnel walls and ceilings. Daddy would spit in the lamp on the front of his hard hat and the carbide gave off a gas he lit with a match. The little fire barely lit the rocks walls and the tunnels were shadowey. The fires in the miners headlamps were like little stars.

Daddy came to California from Utah as a young man barely eighteen years old. His father came, too, bringing his fiddle (which, years later and restored, my oldest son would learn to play). Grandpa could make slip-bark whistles, and tie a button over a string so that, wound up, it would hum as the string was pulled tight, then loosened, and pulled tight again, an endless delight to me.

Mama taught me to play "cat's cradle" with a piece of string pulled in patterns from one set of fingers to another. Back and forth. Mama came from Colorado when she was thirteen, a green-eyed little girl with a head full of wild red hair and freckles (which she hated). She had picked cotton all the way across central California, had lived in a cave with her father, her red-haired mother, a red-haired sister named Josie, and a brother named Ray, and she had walked to school in Red Mountain along the very rim of the hill in back of our house, afraid of the wild donkeys that roamed and brayed there, leftovers from the old miner's camps before Red Mountain, Jo'burg, and Randsburg were boom towns. In time, Mama and Daddy met and married, and Mama didn't learn until they'd been married for 50 years that my father had given up what was a promising career as a professional baseball player for love. He LOVED baseball! He once pitched a no-hitter against the famous Satchel Paige, and might've pitched for the Los Angeles Angels, but for love of Mama, and mining. They didn't have much, but they had that. He built the house for her out of railroad ties. They loved each other, and they made beautiful music together, playing for dances at the White House in Randsburg, Daddy on the saxophone, slurring out sweet songs--Mexicali Rose was his favorite--while Mama played the piano. And after my brother was born he went along with them. When he got big enough, 2-years-old or so, he sat up on stage with the band on an upturned Folger's Coffee can, chewed on a make-believe cigar, and drummed alongside the cigar-smoking drummer. (Years later my second son would learn to play his grandfather's sax, and sometimes used it in his own band.)

My brother was an imaginative little boy who liked to dress up as a cowboy, making corrals with sticks and catching horned toads to use as his "horses," or as the "Masked Marvel." He was almost eleven when I was born, and was often recruited to hang out long lines of diapers when Mama needed help. He was a good boy, and a good brother. He went away to High School in Barstow when I was only three or four, and so I only saw him on week-ends and summers. He learned to play the trumpet and took piano lessons and loved model airplanes. He glued together balsa-wood frames, covered them with silk and hung them in the kitchen, and flew them across the desert, airplanes with one set of wings, or with two sets, and propellers, airplanes that smelled of balsa and model glue. And those with real gasoline engines were like birds, alive in his hands.

Memories with Pictures

2006-05-16T16:15:00.000-07:00

Rewind!

2006-05-15T08:21:00.000-07:00

Today is my sixty-seventh birthday! Go backward sixty-three years to the day of my 4th birthday party. Find my cousin Jerry to my right, and my friends Vivian and Billy to my left. My friend Diane cried, and so is not in the picture. I was very concerned. (Inside, I am still four-years-old. Still concerned. Where are you now, Diane?)

Now I know that it's ALL about change. Susan Griffin, in A Chorus of Stones said "The body remembers who we are supposed to be. And in this there is grief." I think sometimes I am supposed to be about four, read to, sung to, rocked to sleep in the wicker rocker on the front porch to the crossing of searchlights, wearing my small, thin body, without this unfamiliar heaviness, these strange wrinkles, this loose flesh.
.

There Was A Little Girl...

2006-05-15T08:15:00.000-07:00

There was a little girl
Who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead
And when she was good
She was very very good
And when she was bad she was...horrid!

(About three years old. I remember I loved that little ring.)

Pictures 1

2006-05-14T19:25:00.000-07:00

Me, my first photo. Mama and me. Grandpa and me. I really loved him. I loved to sit on his lap and watch him roll his own cigarettes, from tobacco in a little white bag with a golden drawstring. He was Sheriff, and he was also a miner. He finally died of black-lung and is buried in San Bernardino, CA.

Red Mountain

2006-05-14T17:51:00.000-07:00

In May of 1939, a man could buy a Plymouth Roadking for $645, or a tin of Bond Street Tobacco for 15c. The World's Fair was in full swing in New York City. Mrs. Roosevelt had greeted more than 20,000 Brooklyn women the morning I was born. The New York Times reported that two pickpockets and an umbrella mender "in possession of a screwdriver, pliers, and a flashlight" had been arrested the night before and were repenting in jail. James Joyce's first new work in 17 years, Finnegan's Wake was heralded in the Wall Street Journal as "The most unusual literary event of our time."

So it was. On the night of my birth, the sun, on the other side of the world, was in Taurus. The moon, on my side, was in Aries. Our house was on the side of the hill. In spring, the hillside was covered with flowering creosote, yellow asters, and pink-eyes, which, it seems to me, was another name for Indian Paintbrushes. Clumps of pink and white wild primroses bloomed everywhere (the pollen was thick and golden, and brushed under your chin would tell whether or not you liked butter, or boys, I can't remember which). Thick, waxy desert lilies decorated the roadsides. The smell of spring on the desert was incredible. By mid-May, most of the flowers had been ravaged by the herds of sheep that came through like locusts and ate everything green right down to the dirt.

Our house was yellow. Daddy built it himself from railroad ties, and a locust tree grew in the side yard. There was a screened front porch that let the cool evening breezes blow through, and an outhouse, which I rarely used, being lucky enough to have my own potty-chair beside the ice-box in the kitchen. The wars flourished in Europe, but our front porch was a safe place to be. By 1943, the Wehrmacht was in retreat, Lucky Strike Green had gone to war, and people were singing "Praise the Lord, and Pass the Ammunition." Rocking on our front porch in the evening then, Mama sang to me. She sang, Pony Boy, Pony Boy, won't you be my Pony Boy? Don't say no, here we go, off across the plains. Marry me, carry me right away with you.... There were occasional blackouts; more often searchlights criss-crossed in the dark while she sang of the Fox in the Log: Naaa, naaa, naaa said the little fox, naaa, naaa, you can't catch me!... Or Brahm's Lullaby.
Often she sang about the Poor Babes in the Woods, two children who went for a walk one day, got lost, died, and the robins so red brought strawberry leaves and over them spread.... It was the saddest thing in the world, and I cried and cried for those lost children.

A corral to the north of the house was home for old April, the brown Jersey cow who once kicked Grandpa in the head. Mama always said April was stubborn and mean and stingy, but I liked sitting on her back, my skinny legs splayed straight out, while Daddy milked her. Later, Mama heated the milk in a great silver pan to bring the cream to the top, a thin, wrinkled, pale layer she skimmed off the top with a spoon, while she complained that the cow owned by my Uncle Frank and Aunt Lauree gave milk with yellow cream that rolled off the top like a thick jellyroll.

Old April was uncooperative in more ways that this. When my twelve-year old brother helped Daddy bring her into the corral on the evening she first became a member of the family, she bolted as if she were being led to slaughter, and took off up the hillside, scattering primroses and pollen to the wind, with Brother and Daddy close behind her. They hollared and waved their arms and tried to head her off, each trying to outguess the direction she'd take next. For a cow, she'd have made a good race horse, galloping first to the north, then up the west hill, skirting bushes and galloping across gullies before heading toward town. Dad hollared for Mama to get the car, and as the sun dropped behind the hill, and it was beginning to get dark, to keep the cow in the headlights. Mama grabbed me up, and she cranked up the old green Model A, and off we went, without a word, without a road, up and down the mountain, through ditches, the Model A's headlights shooting out two thin beams of light to illuminate the first truly exciting adventure of my life!

By A Departing Light

2006-05-13T10:07:00.000-07:00

My Uncle Ray named the bar the Hut. Inside the Hut it was always cool and dim and beery. Usually country music was playing. Cowboy tunes. Lost love.
Your cheating heart will make you weep, you'll cry and cry, and try to sleep... The bar was next door to the post office where my mother's sister, Aunt Josie, worked. Our mailbox was number 297. Why do I remember such an inconsequential fact when most days now I can't even remember what I had for breakfast? If I remembered to eat breakfast. I also remember our telephone number was 741, which as Inyokern grew, became 7741, and then 72741. Mama was a telephone operator. The telephone office was next door to the bar on the other side of the street, right across from the Hut. There was a Shell gas station with a big yellow seashell in front on the south side of the street, and a Mobile station with a red flying horse on the other side. There was a market where a nice lady named Cooksie rang up groceries, a barbershop run by Jack the Barber, and a store, which my daddy owned. He bought the store from Mr. Clarence Ives back when the town was only a store and a gas station, called Bentham's Corner. Now the sign in front of the store said: HATTON & HATTON Dry Goods and General Merchandise.

When I was about eight, and baptised, and accountable for all my own sins, I began to wonder how it all started, everything, the world, and time, and stars, and people. EVERYTHING, eternally rushing outrageously in both directions, backward as well as forward. Well, they said, God. Then who made God? I said. What was before the beginning?

Tomorrow is Mother's Day. Today I sat with a lump in my throat, listening to Fresh Aire Interludes, the same music my mother loved, the same music I played over and over for her the night before the morning she died. The last music she heard, songs called Velvet, Amber, and Mist, played on a tape recorder until she fell asleep. She timed her breathing to it. Now, hearing it again, I relive that terrible night, and other, sweeter nights when I stayed over and slept with her in bed.

By a departing light
we see acuter, quite,
than by a wick that stays.
There's something is the flight
that clarifies the sight
and decks the rays.

--Emily Dickinson

Before the Beginning

2006-05-11T10:40:00.000-07:00

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

--Leonard Cohen

A requiem is a mass sung for the dead, usually in Latin. Requiem aeternam dona eis, et lux perpetua luceat eis, which means "Rest eternal grant them, O Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon them." I have loved primarily four requiem masses that make my heart beat faster and my hair stand on end. First, of course, is Mozart's Requiem Mass in D-Minor; then Faure's, and Andrew Lloyd Webber's, which they did on Fifth Avenue in New York City, and Benjamin Britten's War Requiem. Requiem aeternam dona eis, they all say.

I was five when my paternal grandpa died. His funeral was held in a picturesque little chapel in Randsburg, now a historical site. It was the best place they could find for a lot of people to attend. Grandpa had been the Sheriff, and wore a silver star over his heart. He rolled his own cigarettes and kept a little bag of tobacco tied with a gold string in his pocket under the star. When they held me up to look in the coffin and say goodbye, I thought he was sleeping in a bank of flowers. Since then, so many have gone: all the grandfathers and grandmothers, all the aunts and uncles, some of the cousins... Daddy and Mama--all of them without the fanfare of a requiem mass. I loved them all, still do. Requiem aeternam dona eis.

I remember they hung a black wreath with black flowers and ribbons on the front door of the bar on the south side of the main street that ran through Inyokern. It was 1945, a year after Grandpa died. Gold letters across the front of the ribbon said OUR CHARLENE. Charlene was the two-year-old daughter of the bar's owner and his wife. Until that day I didn't know that children could die. Until that day childhood was a safe place to be. Even so, I knew that there remained three things I knew for sure. I was loved. I was still safe. And I would forever be "little" while the rest of the world would forever be "big." Time was nonexistent. The world was unchanging. I used to take Charlene for rides on the back of my tricycle. She died of some undisclosed illness I would never learn the particulars of. Her parent's sold the bar to my mother's brother, Uncle Ray, and they moved away. I made myself sick trying to cry from a sadness I could not feel. "Stop that," my mother said at my noisy attempts at grief. I stopped, after awhile, and put Charlene to rest somewhere in the back of my mind. Every now and again she stirs, and I remember a black wreath on a door. But for the remainder of my childhood those three things held fast: I was loved. I was safe. And the world was basically unchangable. Blessed be childhood.

In My Life

2006-05-06T20:27:00.000-07:00

There are places I'll remember
All my life though some have changed
Some forever not for better
Some have gone and some remain
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life I've loved them all

But of all these friends and lovers
There is no one compares with you
And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new
Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I'll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more

Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I'll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more
In my life I love you more

--JOHN LENNON lyrics - "In My Life"
(Lennon/McCartney)