Spare the Thoughts & Prayers

When my book about busking, Pay the Piper! appeared in print, I gave a reading at Jabberwocky Bookshop here in Newburyport and introduced myself thus:

Hello! My name is Barbara Ehrenreich, and I’m here to talk about my new book, Nickel and Dimed.

Most in attendance knew me as a busker, or street-performer, and so they got the joke’s stereotype of playing for little more than spare change. For all I know, they may have inferred an unstated reference to the book’s subtitle: On (Not) Getting by in America.

But I went on to tell them that Piper had more in common with another Ehrenreich book, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, that appeared six years after her 2001 classic.

At that time I was just beginning to assemble various essays I had penned about busking, and so any title with the word “Streets” was bound to command my attention. Dancing did not disappoint. as I was able to reinforce my own book with references to its final scene, where Ehrenreich and a friend ascend from a New York subway, into music on the sidewalk.

As I wrote in a chapter titled “A Call to Un-Mall,” Dancing is a call for a “vibrant public life… a must-read for any busker or renfaire performer, practicing or would-be, who may ever doubt their own sense of purpose.”

I also sent her an email to tell her that Crackerjack is a brand name with an upper-case C and no s at the end, a common mistake that could have caused her a problem if not corrected by the second edition. Of course, I used that as a way to mention my own project with scenes that illustrated the point and purpose of Dancing.

Next day, she sent thanks for the correction, offered names of a couple book agents, and wished me well.

According to The Guardian, her son accompanied the announcement “with a comment redolent of his mother’s spirit”:

She was never much for thoughts and prayers, but you can honor her memory by loving one another, and by fighting like hell.

For an idea of how completely that single line captures a woman who always went against the grain of conventional wisdom and the grind of safe conformity, here’s a sampling of what she wrote:

No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.

Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women’s liberation… none was more alarming, from a feminist point of view, than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.

We love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist.

In fact, there is clear evidence of black intellectual superiority: in 1984, 92 percent of blacks voted to retire Ronald Reagan, compared to only 36 percent of whites.

Employers have gone away from the idea that an employee is a long-term asset to the company, someone to be nurtured and developed, to a new notion that they are disposable.

Marriage is socialism among two people.

Take motherhood: nobody ever thought of putting it on a moral pedestal until some brash feminists pointed out, about a century ago, that the pay is lousy and the career ladder nonexistent.

America is addicted to wars of distraction.

The titles of her more than 20 books–ranging from women’s rights to workers’ rights to the inequities of the American healthcare system–reveal a commitment to social justice as deep and as long as that of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Lewis:

Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation
Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America
Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy
For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women
Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer

Other titles are just as enticing, but as I start to recall that email she sent me, and what I believe she was telling all of her readers, I better get back to adding titles of my own.

Barbara Alexander Ehrenreich died on September 1. She was 81.

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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/sep/02/barbara-ehrenreich-author-dies-nickel-and-dimed

2C2E

In 1989, the year that Salman Rushdie went into hiding, and in the years immediately before and following, I frequently wrote columns about cross-country travels with my daughter that proved quite popular with readers of the local paper.

She was just 11 that year, four years older than Rushdie’s son, Zafar, who was suddenly and necessarily estranged from his father. To maintain some connection, the author of probing novels with deep historical, religious, and philosophical content, wrote a children’s story and engaged his son as his first-read editor.

After hearing the first draft, Zafar told his dad that it was a good story, but it needed “some jump.” Rushdie took that to mean “quicken the pace” and told Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that Zafar liked the “jump” of the second version.

In September, 1990, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the adventures of an irrepressibly happy young boy who finds himself living in a city so sad that it has forgotten its name, appeared in bookstores and libraries all over the world where speech is–or at least was–still free.

These were years when I spent more time downtown playing music than anywhere writing anything, and in the holiday season I would bundle up with fingerless gloves that allowed me to pipe Christmas carols along with my standard jigs and reels, bourees and minuets.

On the very day before Rushdie’s interview aired, a woman approached after I finished a song and handed me a $20 bill rather than putting it the basket. She insisted on a condition: That I would turn it into “a present for Rachel.”

‘Twas a few nights before Christmas that I had her open it. I figured it would take five or six nights of bedtime installments, but Haroun has more jump than Zafar may have bargained for. Several times I had to stop my voice from racing. Rachel loved it, only conceding to sleep when we were halfway through.

I took it to bed and read to the end before turning out the light.

When we woke up to pouring rain, we finished breakfast and rejoined Haroun and his story-telling father through pages of magical realism that she found exciting page by page–and that I found as thoughtful and satisfying as the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Robertson Davies.

One recurring item in the dialogue we adopted into our own father-daughter vocabulary: The label that Haroun used whenever he could not answer the boy’s questions, 2C2E for “too complicated to explain” Sure sounded better than “I don’t know” and “Because.”

In the age before internet shorthand and texting abbreviations, both the sight and sound of it struck us as hilarious, and yet it had a weird echo of Hamlet’s 2B or not 2B that kept us guessing about subjects rather than shrugging them off.

Perhaps that’s my response this weekend to the news that Salman Rushdie is on a ventilator, likely to lose an eye if not his life: 2C2E. No matter what we might guess or learn about why it happened, we cannot shrug it off.

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https://literatureessaysamples.com/haroun-and-the-sea-of-stories-salman-rushdies-use-of-allegory/

To Do What Must Be Done

Sisu is what they call it in Finland.

While it has always reminded me of the Jewish word, mensch, “a person of integrity and honor,” I now learn that Finns consider it not a noun but a verb denoting:

… the immense power of life within you and nations that won’t let life perish, the fire in the belly that transmutes fear into faith in the face of adversity, and… the courage to take action against impossible odds.*

As you can imagine, the word sisu has been echoing throughout Finland since the start of the invasion. In a country that also shares a border with Russia–and has already been threatened by Putin–they can easily relate. Whether the rest of the world knows the Finnish word or not, most all of us agree–with awe and admiration–that the Ukrainian people are sisu.

And that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a mensch who personifies sisu.

Praised heaped on Ukraine’s president–from the entire world with the exceptions of Russian oligarchs, Belarus officials, America’s Republican Party, and Fox Noise–is well-deserved. In fact, it is understated by those who have forgotten what he did less than three years ago.

While there’s no comparison between a phone call and a military invasion, keep in mind that the implication–or the veiled threat–of the phone call was to leave a nation vulnerable to military invasion from a hostile neighbor already armed at its border.

Keep in mind, too, that the phone call came from the then-president of the United States who repeatedly allied himself with the Russian dictator.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has now stood up to both of the world’s foremost proponents of fascism.

He’s more than a noun. He’s a verb. Sisu!

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https://ghanafiles.com/ukraines-president-volodymyr-zelenskyy-biography-real-age-facts-wife-children-houses-cars-net-worth/

The quote is from a Finnish page on social media which comes to me second-hand. The emphasis on four words is in the quote.

Angel of the Boardwalk

Nine years ago, I wrote a column for the Daily News teasingly headlined: “You may be downsized, but I’m dinosaured.”

Fittingly, I wrote it on the concession counter of the Screening Room while a film entertained a full house. No need for me to be in the booth waiting for cues to change reels with the newly installed hi-tech equipment.

That was the point: I had gone from projectionist to button-pusher.

Soon after it appeared in print, I received this:

Dear Jack: I knew one day I would read your article about the loss of film projectionists. I have a real darkroom in my house that I have not used for several years, and I do miss it. I always felt as if I was creating art when I worked there.
Now just a button and a few clicks and an image is created.
I share your loss, but what will you do now? Are you the button pusher still? Annie and I still go to the Screening Room but we always liked having a different film each week. I hope to still find you in the booth and behind the counter. I look forward to those few exchanges we have.
Let me know what’s going on.
All the best, Pat
And P.S. I did so enjoy those lollipops. 🙂

Lollipops aside, Pat Bashford and Ann Kemp saw every film we played–showing up in Ann’s 1959 Morris Minor convertible, top down weather permitting–until Ann passed away at 77 in 2014. Both were active in an assortment of community groups ranging from books to horticulture, from the Firehouse to the Unitarian Church.

Ann was always friendly but a bit reserved as befits a native Brit, while Pat was prone to jokes and ever-ready banter. A native Ohioan, she was known for the ever-present twinkle in her eye.

In retrospect, Ann may have seemed reserved only in comparison to Pat. Who wouldn’t?

Pat usually greeted me with a wise-crack about my last newspaper column. When I was critical of the mayor, she offered herself as a reference for a job in City Hall. When I attacked the Newburyport Board of Health, she was less optimistic: “Well, there goes your plan to open a restaurant!”

A faithful reader, she was always encouraging: “I read all the columns almost immediately… You should, you know, gather these bright sparkles and put them in a book.” On occasion, she called me “a bullshitter,” a term of endearment among people of Irish descent.

Her obituary appeared in Newburyport just this weekend following her passing at the home of her son in Western Massachusetts two weeks ago, and it illustrates how and how often she offered such support:

Throughout her life, Pat closely befriended many women, who found in her a steadfast source of strength and joie de vivre, and an exemplar of wisdom, fair-mindedness, and independence. She forged these friendships wherever she lived, and more than a few were with former students. Most of her friendships lasted until the end of her life, stretching back fifty, sixty, and even seventy years in some cases. Her unforced enthusiasm for others was remarkable. So many of Pat’s friends will miss her nearly as much as her sons will. Even those who met or knew Pat only briefly were touched by her kindness, perception, and sparkle.

Pat’s lifelong passions were the visual arts, which, as we sometimes forget, includes theater. When she lived in Reading for some 25 years, she performed, directed, and designed sets for area theater groups. Her performance in Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth won the 1987 New England Theater Conference Best Actress award.

The obituary is full of surprises if only because Newburyport knew her for just the last two decades of a nine-decade life. By that time, photography was foremost in her efforts and attention as she offered exhibits and mini-books with titles such as Courting Nature’s Bliss and The Life of Water.

Indeed, it was the water surrounding Plum Island that drew Pat and her camera to move here. In her own words: “Water sustains us, surrounds us, soothes us, feeds us and works small miracles with our emotions — calming us, thrilling us, frightening us.”

For all that, the photo of hers that has most intrigued me–and was coincidentally chosen to accompany the obituary (link below)–is of a Plum Island dune between the waters of the ocean and the estuary. Many times have I started and stopped along that walk at Parking Lot Three to find the exact spot and recreate for my own eyes Pat’s “Boardwalk Angel.”

When I told her, she was amused: “That would make it ‘Boardwalk Devil’.”

Her last years in Newburyport were not easy. Numerous friends–some half her age, if that–would take her places, but she missed the close companionship of Ann. And along with octogenarian and nonagenarian aches and pains, she took an occasional fall:

Dear Jack, what a delight to see you today and am so sorry I couldn’t stay to visit.
Congratulations on becoming a grandpa. I hope your visit will be just what you desire.
I loved reading your columns. I didn’t get the [newspaper] all of the fall for I was in a rehab center for 7 weeks (!) and then had home PT and OT and a nurse for another 6 weeks. The fall disappeared; I missed half a year all because I don’t know my left foot from my right. But I start out patient therapy next week and hope soon to put the walker in mothballs and me on the road again…
Come by again when you get back and let’s have a chat. I miss talking with you..

As you can tell, I had dropped in unannounced, a whirlwind of last minute visits before getting on a plane to meet my new grandson in Los Angeles. But Pat welcomed that. And she also warned off a visit when it might be a problem for you:

Dear Jack, If you feel like coming out in this icky weather, I am home this afternoon. I’ll even make you a cup o’ tea!
If you don’t wish to slog out, I’ll be here another day. Haven’t given up the ghost yet.😊
Love, Pat
P.S. The door is open, just walk in and up the stairs.

As I recall, that was the visit for which I brought her a collection of eight or nine Tootsie Pops–a dozen would not tolerate the elastic band I used to make it appear as a bouquet–which she so enjoyed at the Screening Room, two per film.

“Love Pat.” Who couldn’t?

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Lot 3 Boardwalk Angel: https://sites.google.com/site/travelswithpat/

“Pat acquired her first camera as a teenager soon after World War II, a gift from her father that she owned all her life.” From: https://www.hampshirecremation.com/post/patricia-ann-bashford-1929-2021?
And from a friend in Seattle who knows far more about photography than I: “I don’t know a lot about Rolleiflex cameras like the one shown in Pat’s hand, but they were highly prized. Several of Imogen Cunningham’s and Vivian Maier’s self-portraits show similar twin-reflex Rolleis (often backwards since shot in a mirror).”

Ann Kemp: https://obituaries.newburyportnews.com/obituary/ann-kemp-772762221

Portrait by Marilu Norden, most of whose work is of the American Southwest (which may explain the earrings): https://marilunorden.com/paintings/

Under Wraps

When I finally went to a dermatologist at the insistence of friends, he took one look at the dark spot atop my abdomen from across the room and told me to return at 5:30 that winter evening.

Coming from a man a few years older than I and a few inches taller in a flowing white coat, the steely look and unhesitating command preempted any objection I might have made regarding plans for supper or night-time entertainment.

“Ah, yes. I’ll, I’ll be here.”

My alarm went unremarked, as he entered a notation on a clipboard while I buttoned up. Nor did he say anything, not even goodbye, as I walked out the door behind him.

A few hours later, he barely said hello as I walked toward the receptionist’s desk. She wasn’t there, nor was any nurse or any other patient. The doctor opened the door to the back rooms and motioned me into one of them. He did tell me to get up on the table and remove my shirt, although I was already doing both.

During the procedure, I don’t recall any words from him other than “This will sting a bit” and “Lean back.” As he applied the bandage, he said that he was sending the tissue to a lab in Cambridge, and that I’d hear from him in about five days.

“Should I do anything in the meantime.”

“Nothing you can do.”

Again, he said nothing more as I put the shirt back on and left. Trying to lighten my own mood, I chirped, “Well, talk to you soon,” as if we were drinking buddies with plans to watch football the coming weekend.

He voiced a flat “Good bye” as I left, his eyes fixed on his clipboard.

Medical verdicts are usually definite, pronounced in a single word. It is one of the great ironies of medicine, of language, of modern life such as it is, that we crave Negative and dread Positive.

As an English teacher who got mileage out of that grim joke 25 years ago, I did not laugh when the receptionist said “positive” over the phone. Good thing I didn’t faint and instead kept listening, as she quickly added, “but they think Dr. Swanson got it all. He wants you to come in soon for a second sample.”

“As soon as he wants.”

A few days later, taking the appointment of another patient’s cancellation, I was under his knife again. I joked about living on borrowed time and hoping that I was as “negative” as my employers thought. When he looked puzzled, I explained that I was on the faculty of a local college and had started asking aloud in department meetings whether we were supposed to be college teachers or nursing home attendants. He seemed to grimace.

“They call themselves ‘deans,’ but they’re really accountants,” I concluded, and I think I detected more of a grin. But there’s a chance I may have just imagined it in my giddiness. With the same no-nonsense focus and precision, he soon carved his sample, put it in a jar, and applied a bandage.

As I buttoned, I told him that if he was willing, I’d return each week for a cut, and we could call it a weight loss program. Unsmiling, he said merely, “No thanks.”

“But many thanks to you, Dr. Swanson!” The words were effortlessly sincere as I went out the door.

This time he said, “Good luck,” but with no emotion or smile, as he once again stared at his clipboard.

After the second verdict proved negative, I set up bi-annual checkups that soon became annual. None of them were eventful, just a few small cuts that did not require a Cambridge lab exam.

In January 2007, I quit smoking, and by April I had gained 35 pounds. When I saw Dr. Swanson in June, I told him he should increase his fee since there was so much more of me for him to look at.

Might as well have told him that I prefer boxers to briefs. “Doesn’t matter,” he said as if saying “ho hum,” and he continued to squint through his eyeglass within an inch of my neck.

And so it went. I figured that he was like a possessed musician or high-strung athlete, so focused on the task at hand that nothing else registers, and so I thought nothing of it. Until the morning that a small item in that day’s Boston Globe caught my eye, a notice of magazine article by a dermatologist claiming that Franklin Delano Roosevelt died of melanoma. Since FDR had many ailments, mostly associated with childhood polio, this was kept secret, even after his death. Hard to think of this now, but cancer, right into the 1960s, was considered shameful, somehow indicative of bad character.

Though the stigma is long gone, this revelation of FDR’s melanoma came as a surprise. I happened to be driving past Anna Jacques Hospital later that day, and brought the paper to Dr. Swanson’s office, figuring that I’d leave it with the receptionist. Behind her and past a nurse perusing a screen at another desk, the doctor was standing perfectly still, his hands up in front of him, holding nothing, as he appeared to be examining a plant hanging from the back wall.

Ah, the plants! All over and around that room and its three desks, they had to be, or so I thought, an attempt by the receptionist or a nurse to cheer the cheerless doctor up.

“Hello, Dr. Swanson!” I called out, but he did not move.

“Can I help you?” the receptionist called up, clearly intending to intercept whatever I had to say. I handed her the paper, pointed to the two paragraphs, and told her I thought the doctor would want to see it.

Not sure exactly why, but I think the words “written by a dermatologist” caught him. Whatever the case, he broke from his trance, walked over, snatched the Globe right out of the receptionist’s hand, and stared at it. And stared at it. Since it was so short, I awaited a “Wow!” or a “Thanks!” maybe an “I already know this” or an “I don’t believe it.” But no such declaration was forthcoming, as he continued to stare at the text.

I glanced down at the receptionist who motioned with her eyes for me to leave.

“Well, I gotta go. You can keep that!”

She nodded her head with a slight smile. He continued to stare at the paper.

Only once did I see him outside of his office. Wish I could recall the name of the film, but he arrived at the Screening Room one night when I was selling tickets before climbing into the projectionist’s booth to run the show. With him was a woman I presumed to be his wife who handed me a $20 bill before I handed her the change–yes, it was that long ago–and looked up at them for the first time.

Immediately struck me that his hair appeared brushed more evenly to the side rather than just matted back over his balding spot as I always saw it. He looked five or ten years younger, which I attributed to her.

“Well! Hello, Dr. Swanson!”

“Oh! Hello.”

So he did recognize me, but you’d have never known it from the lack of expression on his face or the flatness of “hello” after the initial surprise. His companion gave me a wide smile and a cheery “Thank You!” as they turned and went into the theater. Both smile and cheer seemed incongruous at the time. In retrospect, they seem knowing.

Four years ago, Dr. Charles Swanson succumbed to a three-year battle with cancer, during which he continued treating patients, including me just four months before he passed. His obituary dispelled my assumptions. No marriage or children were mentioned, but he had a lifelong passion for botany and gardening. So those plants were his! As is the custom of obituaries, the one in the local paper did not mention the cause of death, nor did it mention any medical condition, recent or lifelong.

Conversations, however, among his many patients, seemingly the entire population of Newburyport, all included the word “quirky,” and some included a word that would never have occurred to me. Eventually, due to his regional reputation as a diagnostician, the Boston Globe ran a more comprehensive obit confirming that diagnosis of him.

The man who saved my life was autistic.

Maybe I didn’t just imagine those few smiles.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/bostonglobe/name/charles-swanson-obituary?pid=187051161

All of this comes back to me after reading NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, a controversial best-seller in 2015 that serves not just as a history of autism, but as yet another history of the intersections of politics and science around the world.

If you never heard of the eugenics movement in the USA a century ago, with no less an advocate than Pres. Woodrow Wilson, the opening chapters are a concise history of it. And if you think you already know enough about the subject of racial history kept out of our schools, you need to know that eugenics became an American export that propelled the Nazis–and that it lingers with today’s neo-Nazis now in the base of authoritarian movements on both continents.

But that was not the controversy in 2015. It was–and still is–over author Steve Silberman’s premise that autism is “a lifelong disability that deserves support, rather than… a disease of children that can be cured.” Much of the medical profession–not to mention the pharmaceutical industry–is heavily invested in cures. With support, however, autistic men and women have excelled in careers that require a focus and concentration beyond what we “neurotypical” folks have. From the monks who copied and decorated manuscripts before Gutenberg to the scientists in the race for space and Silicon Valley’s designers of cyberspace, their contributions to the arts and sciences are well-documented in NeuroTribes.

In that context, not only did Dr. Swanson cease to be a puzzle, but odd bits and pieces of my own life seemed to fall into place. Not that I–or my father, or a former employer, or a few professors, or a handful of close friends over the years–would ever qualify for the diagnosis, but autism is an umbrella term for a variety of quirks, odd habits, and mannerisms. In some cases, it’s debilitating, in others just another way of doing things. Hence, the word “spectrum.”

Stands to reason then, that anyone without the diagnosis may have a touch of it. As Silberman illustrates more than once, this applies to anyone told as child by other children that he or she is “just trying to be different” or “thinks you’re better than everyone else” because he or she doesn’t want to join them–or to any adult occasionally called “eccentric” for any behavioral reason.

To read NeuroTribes with such memories intact is to play a pinball machine that lights up with ah-ha! moments, making it a page-turner despite all the scientific lingo.

If I had to pick a single line to represent the book, it wouldn’t be from it, but from an essay Silberman wrote for Vox four years later about a Swedish teenager and environmental activist:

(T)he idea that people like Greta Thunberg have valuable insights not in spite of their autism but because of it is gaining ground as part of a global movement to honor neurodiversity, a word based on the concept of biodiversity — the notion that in communities of living things, diversity and difference means strength and resilience.

The line that follows measures the worth of NeuroTribe‘s relevance to current events:

Great minds, in other words, don’t always think alike. It’s not surprising that people who feel an intuitive love for nature and an instinctive disdain for dishonesty are now taking leadership positions in the global fight against climate change.

If just one autistic person could save me from my own negligence, imagine what the whole much-larger-than-anyone-thinks Tribe might do.

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On the cover is the international symbol for Neurodiversity.
https://neurotribes.com/
https://www.spectrumnews.org/opinion/reviews/book-review-neurotribes-recovers-lost-history-of-autism/

For Silberman’s essay on Greta Thunberg:

https://www.vox.com/first-person/2019/5/6/18531551/greta-thunberg-autism-aspergers

Postscript for film & literature buffs:

NeuroTribes has a chapter on Rain Man that reads like the recent book, Shooting Midnight Cowboy, regarding how Dustin Hoffman created the role and shaped the film. Rain Man when it appeared in 1988 was a huge breakthrough for autistic people and their families, although the battles–between support and “cure,” between tolerance for diversity and a push for conformity–continue to this day. For all that, I must confess that my only reaction to that film was to pull my copy of “Bartleby the Scrivener” out of a box and refresh myself with details I had just seen on screen–the rocking motion, the lack of eye contact, the expressionless stare, the flat voice. Herman Melville had heard and written of an autistic man some 80 years before Dr. Hans Asperger first diagnosed the condition in his Vienna clinic. Two years ago, before I saw Dr. Swanson’s obit or read Silberman’s book, most everyone on my Christmas gift list received a t-shirt with Bartleby’s signature line: “I would prefer not to.” I thought it a nice joke at the time. Only now do I realize the undeniable touch of truth to it.

About the title of this blog:

Postscript for a King

Tears were unavoidable, but the stories that drew them were all in warmth and laughter. Embraces as we left were felt all day Sunday.

Before the opening of King Richard’s Faire that morning, we gathered to pay tribute to our king of some 15 years who passed away last fall. In keeping with the spirit of a renfaire, and very much in character with the heart and soul of Tom Epstein, it was all celebration.

Memorable accounts came from the King’s Guard who walked the shire with him each faire day, from Greenman who holds faire seniority in more ways than one, from our Artistic Director and from Lord Percy and Hey-Ho the jester who were with him in skits for all of the 21 years I’ve been there, from Gamers who manage the Glen where King Richard X often stopped to throw knives at a bullseye he never missed by much, and from other staff and cast members.

Two of them are a couple who last year named their son “Rocco Thomas” for a man who helped stage the groom’s marriage proposal at the faire.

That story and all of the others are far better than I can possibly relate. Here’s hoping those folks might add their accounts to a King Richard’s page or site, to which I might then add my own.

When Artistic Director Kitsy Olson asked if I had something to say, I was taken by surprise. At King Richard’s I am an outlier in the geographical sense of the word. Up here 40 miles north of Boston, I doubt that anyone else at KRF lives within a 30 mile radius. Unlike many of them, I never performed with Tom on the stages of Providence or on Massachusetts’ South Coast. I knew him for just eight weekends a year.

At faire, I am a strolling piper whose role is to entertain mostly where lines might form. While the King and His Court preside over main events on the main stage and at the jousting field, I spend most of my time at the front gate and around the food court. Tom and I rarely crossed paths, except…

Not long after I joined in 1999, I got in the habit of playing behind the front gate before it opened. Through the cracks, I could see crowds gathering as soon as cast call was done. Before opening, the King & Court always have a skit on a balcony overlooking the gate toward the parking lot that begins with a trumpet blast. Between the end of cast call and that herald, I fill a void.

Tom noticed this early on, and before ascending the stairs to the balcony would walk toward me, catch my eye, wait for my pause, and then start whistling the Bach Bouree that Jethro Tull turned into a jazz tune fifty years ago. I joined in, and we ran through it twice before he gave me a director’s wave to continue with the B part while he turned in a flourish and went his way to the balcony.

That the space is enclosed makes for very sharp acoustics, so it’s easy to be clear and loud at the same time. Tom, easily the best whistler I’ve ever heard, could be both while sustaining a tune. Amazingly, to me anyway, his pitch and intonation were identical to mine as he leaned in to within three feet of me. The sensation was that of hearing myself in stereo. I could hear the two sounds but could not have told which was mine and which his.

Such was the story I added to the tributes. I might have added mention of driving through Morristown, N.J., in August, 2005 to the see the Revolutionary War sites. During our tributes, there was uncertainty about where Tom was born and raised before someone said New Jersey. Wish I had thought to add Morristown.

Historic sites there are impressive, as are the half dozen stone cathedrals all lined up at the edge of the town center, as if, two centuries ago, every Protestant sect was competing to reach the heavens first. Most memorable, though, were the awnings of downtown’s largest building with the name of a department store, “Epstein.”

A month later Tom would tell me that yes, he hailed from Morristown, but no, those Epsteins were no relation. Sounded like a family feud to me, as Morristown is no Newark or Camden. In fact, it’s smaller than Newburyport and barely larger than Carver.*

Whatever the truth of the matter, Tom kept in touch with his friends from Morristown High School. Not too many years ago, he made a video of himself with the KRF cast singing “Auld Lang Syne” that he sent to them for their 40th Anniversary Reunion. He also sent it to me when I asked for his help while writing a column about the two versions of the New Years Eve favorite two years ago, video link below.

At my own 50th reunion, my Central Catholic High School classmates in Lawrence, Mass., were unanimously amused to learn that I perform in a Renaissance faire. They found my writing a newspaper column far more in character for the nerd–or “egghead” as we said back then– they recalled from the halcyon 60s. That split decision makes it a delight to show anyone the thumbnail picture the Newburyport Daily News runs with my column.

Tom showed up at one cast call, I think in 2008, with a camera–not a phone, but an actual, real, honest camera–to take head shots of each of us, which he soon sent to us. That very week, my editor realized that my 1988 photo with black hair didn’t look like me anymore and asked for an update. All I had to do was forward Tom’s, and the paper’s photographer cropped out the beret and the top of the pirate shirt.

Most all newspapers put thumbnail pics of their columnists at the top of each piece, though you see them only in print, not on-line. I do believe that I am the only columnist in the country, probably the world, possibly in history–newspaper, magazine, or on-line–with a thumbnail taken by a king.

Our tributes concluded when Tom’s successor, King Richard XI, asked us to join him in singing a hymn titled “Parting Friends”:

Farewell, my friends, I’m bound for Canaan,
I’m trav’ling through the wilderness;
Your company has been delightful,
You, who doth leave my mind distressed.
I go away, behind to leave you;
Perhaps never to meet again,
But if we never have the pleasure,
I hope we’ll meet on Canaan’s land

Though new to me, many in the cast knew the song, and it was their collective rendition that conjured up memories of our king–as an actor, a singer, a joker, a whistler, a photographer, a gamer, as a cook-turned-king (who else could pull that off?), and to all always as a friend. It took a worthy king to capture so many diverse tributes for his expansive predecessor.

As we like to say in the Renaissance, “Merry Meet, Merry Part, and Merry Meet Again!”

And as we say now: “Long Live the King!”

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With Diandra at faire, as he was the other 44 weeks of the year. Photo by, again, Paul Shaughnessy.

With Lord Percy (Richard Weber), photo by, yes, Paul Shaughnessy.

*Three years later I was in Chicago where I kept looking up at signs saying “Weber Grills.” When I asked our Chicago-based Lord Percy about it, he said the same thing. Since Chicago is about 200 times the size of Morristown, I take him at his word. And only now do I recall that the largest sign that loomed over downtown Lawrence in the 50s & 60s was “Garvey-Walsh Insurance.” Family? Back then, I always said yes, but today… Anyway, the sign is long gone, so it’s a moot point, but I do wonder: Is there something about growing up in a place where your name is heralded that leads you into living theater? Could make for a fascinating psychological study, and many of KRF’s villagers are college students.

From Morristown circa 1960. No, Paul did not take this one.

A Chip in the Cookie

She thrived as one of King Richard’s Faire’s most popular characters, smiles and hugs for everyone, including newcomers on their first day. Her signature line was shouted from the shop she kept to fellow rennies walking past:

“You gonna go by without giving me a hug?”

Even I, a shy person old enough to be her dad, piping an incessant flute as an excuse not to talk, enjoyed her glow. For a few years, some at the faire thought I was mute, and I’d play a trill rather than shout “Here” at cast call so they’d keep thinking that. But Harpo Marx himself would have opened up to Cheryl.

Never got to know her outside those eight fall weekends in the realm. She lived as far south of Boston as I do north, so we never crossed paths in a supermarket or movie theater. But it was a movie that brought us into a slight acquaintance that for me would turn into a valuable alliance, though she would not have noticed.

When I recommended If Beale Street Could Talk on social media, Cheryl passionately endorsed James Baldwin who wrote the novel. My own regard for–and debt to–Baldwin appears in several past blogs and published columns over the years. I sent her one describing my reading of The Fire Next Time while in high school and how it re-directed my life. Cheryl had to notice my four word summary of it:

Wake up, white boy!

She gave me more than a thumbs up, and her thumbs were often up when I wrote on a subject that touched on race. As you can imagine, this was unavoidable for a newspaper columnist over the last four years. Cheryl, too, posted comments on race, many of them indignant, some that despaired. One three-word post, following yet another murder by law enforcement of an unarmed African-American, made me ache: “I. Just. Can’t.”

Soon after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, she posted just two words:

Wish I could have been as reassuring to her as she was to me. I did offer responses, tailored to the incident or statement that drew her outburst, but what good is Harpo Marx in a world of Donald Trump? Should have told her she had become my muse whenever I addressed the subject.

Writers do this all the time. Most writing teachers coach students to think of someone whose opinion they value and who knows as much or more about the subject. Not someone close who thinks alike, but whom they know at some distance and sometimes talk to. Thanks to our exchanges on Facebook over two years, Cheryl filled that role–my only “chip in the cookie” to borrow her own phrase for herself.

So it was that she was on my mind all day last Friday when I undertook a review of Begin Again, a new book about Baldwin. Will she find it enlightening, or does she already know his biography as well as his writings? If so, will she think I’ve done it justice? Will I whet her appetite for the book? Will I interest her in its author?

Most importantly, am I putting enough emphasis in the right places? Am I leaving something out that needs to be said? These and other questions were still on my mind as I put the finishing touches on it at noon Saturday. Before getting up to make coffee, I noticed a crooked number on the Facebook tab and took a look.

Her sister’s announcement was a shock. Unknown to me, Cheryl had a heart condition. Frozen in my seat and fixed on my screen, I then watched a flood of feeling that flows only from a renfaire. At the Zoomed gathering Saturday night, her nephew’s stories were as powerful as scenes of Baldwin. Tearful as we were, every reminiscence we shared played to the soundtrack of her robust laugh.

By the time I posted the review, I could not help but be rueful thinking that the person for whom I wrote it is no more. Then I realized that, had I not already written it, I’d still write it for her.

There’s nothing about life or death that keeps anyone from being our chip.

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As Dyva at the Apothecary, 2010, photo by Bill Benevides.

Cheryl Nicole Simmons, 1971-2021. (Photo, May 2020)

The column I sent her: http://www.newburyportnews.com/opinion/columns/garvey-s-view-can-t-put-it-off-another-day/article_41f76458-21f5-523a-8e70-c5442678af75.html

The book:

The review: https://buskersdelight.home.blog/2021/02/27/before-the-bell-clangs/

The movie:

The blog that gained Cheryl’s attention: https://buskersdelight.home.blog/2019/03/17/sweet-land-of-liberty/

As Vivid as Valid to This Day

When I saw the photo of the Republican president’s prepared remarks before him at one of the first coronavirus briefings, I was immediately transported back to a college freshman writing class 52 years ago.

Before me, before the class, was a man in his mid-to-late-20s, leaning back as he usually did in front of his desk rather than sitting behind it, expounding on George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.”

Can’t recall any real fright at the Hong Kong flu pandemic that had the world’s attention in 1968, but Prof. McHale’s point is as vivid as it is valid now as it was then:

Referring to Orwell’s warning against the use of language to demonize foreigners for political gain, McHale asked: “Why is it always ‘the Asian flu,’ the ‘Taiwan flu,’ the ‘Spanish flu’? Why isn’t it ever the ‘American flu,’ the ‘Philadelphia flu’?”

All of this came back to me twenty years later–32 years ago–when the elder George Bush’s presidential campaign mockingly attacked Democratic candidate, Mass. Gov. Michael Dukakis, for suggesting that struggling farmers in the Midwest should invest in Belgian endive as a cash crop.

In fact, it was one of nine crops that Dukakis recommended, but the foreign name was something on which Bush could pounce—nor did it hurt that “Belgian” back then was still often followed by “Congo” in the public mind. No need to say it, just let the insinuation do its work.

Nor did it matter that the Reagan administration in which Bush was VP was itself promoting Belgian endive throughout the campaign year of 1988 by offering grants to farmers on the Delmarva Peninsula to grow it.* All that was needed was to impress the foreign word on American perception.

And connect it to Dukakis who, incredibly, never mentioned the Reagan Dept. of Agriculture’s grant offerings–as if he was unaware of them.

Just as it came back to me in 1988, that class in 1968 returned full force last month.

Whether or not it occurred to McHale that few if any of us 17- and 18-year-olds knew that “the Spanish flu” ravaged the world just 50 years earlier, or that the City of Philadelphia insisted on holding a parade resulting in a spike of deaths—compared to St. Louis which cancelled a parade and avoided the same—didn’t matter.

What mattered was the choice of words, the bias of geography, the effect of racism without having to acknowledge that race had anything at all to do with it.

And that’s what I saw on the Republican president’s prepared remarks: The typed word “coronavirus” crossed out with “Chinese” written over it in thick, black Sharpie, likely the same Sharpie that directed a North Atlantic hurricane inland all the way to Alabama.

Jay McHale, who passed away two years ago this month at 77, left his students with many indelible messages, most of which might be summed up as always question authority.

Today, his most urgent, lasting message is to always question authority’s choice of words.

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Photo above is McHale with Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso during a seminar on Jack Kerouac he organized at Salem State, April 1973. Here’s how he appeared in class:

https://obituaries.salemnews.com/obituary/john-jay-w-p-mchale-1045444766

*Delmarva, the peninsula that juts south of New Jersey between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic = DELaware, MARyland, VirginiA.

A Soundtrack for St. Patrick

1670 — Gaelic & Garlic

Celtic music, says Robin Williamson — he of the late, great Incredible String Band — is “an acorn that will grow another forest yet.”

Williamson could as well have been referring to one man, four of whose songs he includes in his book, Fiddle Tunes, and we might wonder how many more acorns there are yet to tend, forests to realize.

Born the son of subsistence farmers in 1670, Turlough (TUR-lock) O’Carolan moved at the age of 14 with his parents to County Roscommon, the very center of Ireland, when his father, John, took the job of blacksmith for the MacDermott Roe family.

At 18 he lost his sight to smallpox, a common plight at the time, and as was the custom, was given a musical instrument — in his case, a harp.

His immediate show of musical talent, combined with an ebullient and outgoing nature unhampered by his illness, caught the attention of Mrs. MacDermott Roe who hired a personal tutor for him.

By the time he turned 21, she provided him with a guide and a pair of horses to tour the country. So began the career of perhaps the most celebrated itinerant minstrel in history.

Although melodic lines are all that remain of O’Carolan’s tunes, it is clear that he drew on the influences of Italian Baroque composers who enjoyed immense popularity in Ireland, such as Vivaldi, Corelli, Albinoni, and especially Francesco Geminiani who lived in Dublin for 12 years while O’Carolan roamed the countryside.

One of his most frequently played tunes, “Carolan’s Concerto,” is either homage to or a spoof of Italian Baroque — depending on the disposition of the person to whom you’re listening, or writer you’re reading.

While there is no record of their ever meeting, Geminiani, hearing of O’Carolan, wanted to test him. Choosing a composition that had yet to be played publically, Geminiani made a new copy, weakening a few passages before sending it to the harper for an opinion.

With several friends, O’Carolan listened to a rendition and joined in the hearty applause. But then he startled the room with the quip that, while it was very nice indeed, “here and there it limps and stumbles.”

When the musicians replayed it, O’Carolan stopped them “here and there” and directed a copyist to make changes on Geminiani’s manuscript. Back it went. Geminiani gasped at what he saw, exclaiming: “Il genio vero della musica!”

1738 — In the Key of Life

Another fan of O’Carolan’s music was Jonathan Swift — or Dean Swift as Irish historians prefer to call him — the translator of an ancient Gaelic text for which O’Carolan composed “O’Rourke’s Noble Feast.”

The tee-totaling Swift, however, was no particular friend of the hard-drinking O’Carolan. One night, finding O’Carolan drunk outside a public house where he had just been asked to leave, Swift thought he would try his Anglican best to reform the souse under the pretense of helping him home.

O’Carolan gave Swift an address and blubbered apologies and resolutions to the stern preacher all the way to it. Once there, a bewildered Swift protested that they had arrived at another public house. O’Carolan may or may not have heard the objections as he found his own way through the door.

In a way, the odd couple would eventually be reunited. Both have memorials in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin.

Scottish poet Robert Burns would have made the harper a far better companion if not for being born 21 years after O’Carolan’s death. Burns wrote lyrics for several O’Carolan tunes. Though one was a lyricist and the other an instrumentalist, it is fair to call O’Carolan Ireland’s Robert Burns — or Ireland’s Stephen Foster to put him in an American context.

In a modern context, his biographies and his music suggest a comparison to Stevie Wonder.

O’Carolan’s songs play in every key of life. They appeal to the highest human instincts and are flush with treasures of nature: the fall of water, the slope of a hill, the twist of a wind-blown leaf, colors of apples and pears, the sparkle of moon and stars, the mad-happy dance of flames in the fireplace, the tumble and first steps of toddlers… Even his saddest laments offer an underlying optimism, a reaffirmation of love and life.

Open to interpretations as diverse as any two tempos, any one O’Carolan song plays in many keys. How diverse? Years after Burns set the example, another Scottish lyricist turned the bold, evocative “Carolan’s Cottage” into the tender, heartfelt “Love after Marriage.”

On March 25, 1738, O’Carolan died following a long illness. While on his deathbed at the home of Mrs. MacDermott Roe, he summoned for his harp and played a tune as it came to him. The result, “Farewell to Music,” is among the most frequently recorded of his tunes, one that is often compared to the music of J.S. Bach, and was adapted with full orchestration by Chieftain Paddy Moloney for the score of the 2001 Swedish film, Under the Sun.

While he lay dying, word spread throughout Ireland, and, according to his biographer, “upwards of 60 clergymen…and a vast concourse of people assembled… erected tents in the field. The harp was heard in every direction…”

1741 — Hibernian Hibernation

Among those in attendance was Dr. James MacDonnell from Belfast who later realized that few if any of O’Carolan’s songs had been written down and were in danger of being lost. Three years later he invited to Belfast as many of Ireland’s harpers as he could find, asking that they extend the invitation to others.

These gatherings were sporadic at best. The English accumulation of wealth and influence in Ireland during the half-century following O’Carolan’s death did not at all favor Celtic culture and art — in fact, often banned it — and a society in which itinerant minstrels thrived was now unable to sustain itself.

Hence, O’Carolan’s reputation as “the last of the great Irish bards.”

1792 — O’Carolan’s Welcome Back

This changed when a 19-year-old church organist named Edward Bunting made it his mission to complete the work of Dr. MacDonnell and copy as many of O’Carolan’s tunes as harpers all over Ireland still played.

Picking up where the doctor left off, he organized the Belfast Harp Festival. Hence, the spontaneous gathering for O’Carolan’s prolonged wake was the forerunner of the two- and three-day folk festivals that became popular in America and Canada in the late 1970′s and remain so to this day.

Call it a harp convention or a compositional summit, Bunting managed to save 232 of O’Carolan’s songs — no telling how many others were lost — and dozens of songs by fellow and rival harpists, such as Rory O’Dahl, whom O’Carolan admired to the point of envy.

When hearing of O’Carolan’s remark to the effect that he wished he had written O’Dahl’s “Give Me Your Hand” more than any of his own songs, Bunting misunderstood the story and attributed the song to him with the title “O’Carolan’s Favorite.”

1950-1975 — The Chieftains Ring a Bell

The Belfast Harp Society was an immediate outgrowth of the 1792 festival and is today the oldest musical organization of any kind anywhere in the world.

In the 1950s a young son of Belfast named Derek Bell enrolled in the society’s school, taking up musical scholarship and research as well as the harp. In the archives he found the sheets of O’Carolan’s music copied out nearly two centuries earlier.

When Bell joined The Chieftains in the early 70′s, he infused their driving, rock-and-roll-esque arrangements of jigs and reels with O’Carolan’s tunes. While the Chieftains had already ignited an explosion of interest in Celtic music five years earlier, it was their match with Bell that lit the world of folk music with O’Carolan’s Baroque-Celtic tunes in countless versions, interpretations, instrumentations, and tempos.

1975-Present — All in the Family

An NPR syndicated show called Ballads, Bards, and Bagpipes once dedicated an hour to O’Carolan, and I happened to record it. Until that time I dabbled in Celtic music merely as a hobby and had never heard of any particular bard apart from the one who wrote plays.

Fascination with that tape led me to devote more time and attention to music, and before long I found that the tunes on it, including all four in Williamson’s book, were welcome entrees in jam sessions at folk festivals, pubs, parties, and most anywhere musicians gathered, unplugged.

As Williamson predicted, “another forest yet.”

In 1992 I received, via inter-library loan, a bound copy of the 232 tunes, published in 1905, and with my 14-year-old daughter by my side at the library check-out counter, opened to a random page. Across the top was a song title: “Mrs. Garvey.”

Since most O’Carolan songs are named for his patrons, it was no great surprise to me that he may have played for one of our ancestors, but — possibly thinking it was written for her Italian grandmother — my Gaelic & Garlic daughter nearly went into shock.

Twenty years later when she got married, it was equally satisfying — but still no surprise — that she requested O’Carolan’s “Fanny Poer” for the processional.

Yes, I played it along with the groom’s stepfather, a minstrel who makes Irish rounds on the South Shore, and I play more racy versions of it in the streets and at festivals.

Most of the three-dozen-or-so O’Carolan tunes that I play — “Receipt for Drinking,” “Lord Inchiquin,” “George Brabizon,” “Madam Maxwell,” “Morgan Meagan,” “Mrs. Edwards,” “Mrs. Farrell,” “Quarrel with a Landlady,” “O’Carolan’s Draught” to name a few — fare quite well in both spirited and fervent versions and most styles in-between.

As I tell anyone who stops for conversation when I busk in downtown Newburyport, Lexington, or Salem, O’Carolan’s songs seem written for me. It’s as if he knew me 200 years before I was born.

His “Concerto”? For me it’s sometimes homage, sometimes spoof, often both, and always an athletic event.

There is no record of exactly what Geminiani saw on his returned manuscript, but I’ll bet my hat at the end of a sultry, summer Saturday evening that O’Carolan instinctively knew just what the Italian had done, why he did it, and restored Geminiani’s composition note for note.

What else would move Geminiani to declare:

“This is the greatest genius of music!”

-04-

Note: Many dictionaries regard the words “harper” and “harpist” as interchangeable. Most writings on the subject of music use “harper” for one who plays a Celtic harp, and “harpist” for one who plays the much taller instrument used in classical consorts. Me? I’m too worn out from the never-ending battle between “flautist” and “flutist” to concern myself with anyone else’s border war.

About the photo: Memorials and tributes to O’Carolan appear all over Ireland, including this mural in the village of Keadue in County Roscommon where the bard spent his final days. Courtesy photo by Donal Burke from his website, http://www.burkeseastgalway.com.