Horrible Commercials and a Show Idea

After not watching hardly any football during the regular season, I have followed the action during the playoffs starting last weekend and again yesterday and today. The games have been pretty good as far as that goes, but for the love of all that is holy—the commercials have been painful to watch. There’s one in particular that is so imbecilic and grating I have been reduced to hitting the mute button.

I have Verizon. I have been happy with them for as long as I can remember even having a cellphone. But their commercial featuring the Einstein character makes me want to find a new carrier. I’m sure you’ve seen it. Some woman is sitting atop a huge VERIZON in the middle of what looks like a college campus. What its doing there and why she is sitting atop it are not explained. Then something very sad happens. A really fine actor who was absolutely fabulous in the HBO mini-series where he played John Adams, strolls into the scene with a ridiculous wig on complaining that his cell service has “gone kaput”. Why the great Paul Giamatti would stoop to this infantile spot boggles the mind. Verizon must have agreed to pay him crazy money to coerce him to so debase himself, leading me to think that perhaps that money might have been better spent lowering my outrageous bill.

Anyway, the woman sitting on the VERIZON display holding a Thesaurus in her hand then jumps down to extol the virtues of Verizon’s wireless plans. Einstein declares her “brilliant!!” then shuffles off to sign up leaving the bike he wasn’t riding to start with behind. The only good thing about this moronic ad is that it is only thirty seconds. Positively dreadful.

Then there are the endless promotional ads for all the shows that network television has to offer, the shows that nobody watches. They all seem to be some version of crime detection, either forensic or otherwise. All feature huge explosions. I have not been persuaded to watch any of them. I WOULD, however, watch a detective crime drama where they are trying to solve murders that take place in redneck communities. Let those hotshot forensic scientist try to solve a murder where everybody’s DNA is the same and nobody has dental records!

Nurse Lucy

As many of you know, Pam has been down with COVID for almost a week now. She’s fine and her symptoms aren’t terrible but it has wiped her out. Consequently she has spent a lot of time in bed trying to get her strength back. Of course, in hopes that she wouldn’t give it to me, we have been sleeping in separate bedrooms for a week and basically trying to avoid each other whenever possible. So far its worked, I am still COVID-free. But this radical change in the status quo has presented Miss Lucy with quite the conundrum.

Our Golden Retriever craves normalcy. She also much prefers it when all three of us are together in the same room. (For anyone on my side of the family, they will understand when I say that we should have named her “Christina”.) Well, this past six days have been anything but normal. On the first night that Pam slept in Patrick’s old room, Lucy was quite perplexed. You could see it on her face…what the hekkin deal is dis? For most of her life she has slept in our huge king sized bed with us. But, when forced to make a choice, she quickly kicked me to the curb. Every night since Pam has been sick, Lucy has slept with Pam in her “sick room.” But that’s not all. Pam has spent much of her days in that room as well. Almost the entire time, Lucy refuses to leave her. A couple of mornings ago, Pam slept late so I had to let Lucy out of the sick room so she could eat breakfast and do her business. Once she was done, I sat down at my desk in the library, while she headed back upstairs. After several minutes I heard her whining at the top of the stairs. Then it dawned on me that I had pulled the door shut to Pam’s room. Lucy was whining for me to open it so she could go back to manning her post!

I managed to get this photograph of her at some point one day. Pam was busy on the computer but still in bed…and there was Lucy, faithful and true.

Dogs understand us better than we understand ourselves. Their intuition and instincts are phenomenal. We do not deserve them.

MLK Speech given September 12, 1962

In lieu of a main item today, please take a few minutes to read (or listen to) Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech commemorating the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln issuing his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Delivered in New York City on September 12, 1962, King’s address made sure to celebrate the United States’ founding ideals—and the ideals Lincoln espoused in the Proclamation—before turning to the myriad ways the country was failing to live up to them. Here are some key passages:

If our nation had done nothing more in its whole history than to create just two documents, its contribution to civilization would be imperishable.

The first of these documents is the Declaration of Independence and the other is that which we are here to honor tonight, the Emancipation Proclamation. All tyrants, past, present and future, are powerless to bury the truths in these declarations, no matter how extensive their legions, how vast their power and how malignant their evil.

The Declaration of Independence proclaimed to a world, organized politically and spiritually around the concept of the inequality of man, that the dignity of human personality was inherent in man as a living being. The Emancipation Proclamation was the offspring of the Declaration of Independence. It was a constructive use of the force of law to uproot a social order which sought to separate liberty from a segment of humanity.

Our pride and our progress would be unqualified if the story ended here. But history reveals that America has been a schizophrenic personality where these two documents are concerned. On the one hand she has proudly professed the basic principles inherent in both documents. On the other hand she has sadly practiced the antithesis of these principles.

The unresolved race question is a pathological infection in our social and political anatomy, which has sickened us throughout our history, and is still today a largely untreated disease.

How has our social health been injured by this condition? The legacy is the impairment of the lives of nearly twenty-million of our citizens. Based solely on their color, they have been condemned to a sub-existence, never sharing the fruits of progress equally. The average income of Negroes is approximately thirty-three hundred dollars per family annually, against fifty-eight hundred dollars for white citizens. This differential tells only part of the story, however, the more terrible aspect is found in the inner structure and quality of the Negro community. It is a community artificially but effectively separated from the dominant culture of our society. It has a pathetically small, grotesquely distorted, middle class. There are virtually no Negro bankers, no industrialists; few commercial enterprises worthy of the name of businesses, the overwhelming majority of Negroes are domestics, laborers, and always the largest segment of the unemployed. If employment entails heavy work, if the wages are miserable, if the filth is revolting, the job belongs to the Negro.

And every Negro knows these truths and his personality is corroded by a sense of inferiority, generated by this degraded status. Negroes, north and south, still live in segregation, housed in slums, eat in segregation, pray in segregation and die in segregation. The life experience of the Negro in integration remains an exception even in the north.

The imposition of inferiority, externally and internally, are the slave chains of today. What the Emancipation Proclamation proscribed in a legal and formal sense has never been eliminated in human terms. By burning in the consciousness of white Americans a conviction that Negroes are by nature subnormal, much of the myth was absorbed by the Negro himself, stultifying his energy, his ambition and his self-respect. The Proclamation of Inferiority has contended with the Proclamation of Emancipation, negating its liberating force. Inferiority has justified the low living standards of the Negro, sanctioned his separation from the majority culture, and enslaved him physically and psychologically. Inferiority as a fetter is more subtle and sophisticated than iron chains; it is invisible and its victim helps to fashion his own bonds.

This somber picture may induce the somber thought that there is nothing to commemorate about the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation.

But tragic disappointments and undeserved defeats do not put an end to life, nor do they wipe out the positive, however submerged it may have become beneath floods of negative experience.

The Emancipation Proclamation had four enduring results. First, it gave force to the executive power to change conditions in the national interest on a broad and far-reaching scale. Second, it dealt a devastating blow to a system of slave-holding and an economy built upon it, which had been muscular enough to engage in warfare on the Federal government. Third, it enabled the Negro to play a significant role in his own liberation with the ability to organize and to struggle, with less of the bestial retaliation his slave status had permitted to his masters. Fourth, it resurrected and restated the principle of equality upon which the founding of the nation rested.

When Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation it was not the act of an opportunistic politician issuing a hollow pronouncement to placate a pressure group. Our truly great presidents were tortured deep in their hearts by the race question. Jefferson with keen perception saw that the festering sore of slavery debilitated white masters as well as the Negro. He feared for the future of white children who were taught a false supremacy. His concern can be summed up in one quotation: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”

Lincoln’s torments are well known, his vacillations were facts. In the seething cauldron of sixty-two and sixty-three Lincoln was called the “Baboon President” in the North, and “coward”, assassin, and savage in the South. Yet he searched his way to the conclusions embodied in these words; words already quoted this evening: “In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free, honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve.” On this moral foundation he personally prepared the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, and to emphasize the decisiveness of his course he called his cabinet together and declared he was not seeking their advice as to its wisdom but only suggestions on subject matter. Lincoln achieved immortality because he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. His hesitation had not stayed his hand when historic necessity charted but one course. No President can be great, or even fit for office, if he attempts to accommodate to injustice to maintain his political balance.

The Negro will never cease his struggle to commemorate the Emancipation Proclamation by making his emancipation real. If enough Americans in numbers and influence join him, the nation we both labored to build may yet realize its glorious dream.

There is too much greatness in our heritage to tolerate the pettiness of race hate. The Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation deserve to live in sacred honor; many generations of Americans suffered, bled and died, confident that those who followed them would preserve the purity of our ideals. Negroes have declared they will die if need be for these freedoms. All Americans must enlist in a crusade finally to make the race question an ugly relic of a dark past. When that day dawns, the Emancipation Proclamation will be commemorated in luminous glory

Telling Stories

I remember my English teacher in high school telling me that there was a story hidden in every photograph. Take this one for example.

What is she looking at? What is she thinking? Definitely a story there, I just haven’t written it yet. 

That’s what The Tempest has been about for all these years, a place where I could tell stories of one kind or another. Its always been a part of my DNA, this love of stories. My mother could spin a yarn at the drop of a hat. Mom’s stories always had at least some relationship with the truth, but the best parts were the embellishments. I might not have always paid attention during Dad’s sermons, but whenever he started using an illustration from his life I would hang on every word. During the last couple of years of his life I had a front row seat for a treasure trove of stories he suddenly felt compelled to share before he died.

Stories are our way of trying to make sense of the world. They attempt an explanation for our existence, an answer to to the big why. When I was a child it was nursery rhymes and Doctor Seuss. The great richness of Bible stories were read and reread. Eventually I was introduced to the short stories of Ernest Hemingway and Edgar Allen Poe, and finally the plays of William Shakespeare where I discovered that stories were art. I’ve never recovered.

Then, there’s this guy…

This is a piece of cheap pottery I had when I was a kid. I can’t for the life of me remember where I got the thing or who gave it to me. But it used to sit on my dresser when I was a teenager. For reasons that remain curious, I took it along with me when I moved out of the house after college and it survived into the early years of my marriage. One day around thirty years ago I was going through a rough patch at work and was exhausted after a long day of rejection. About the time I should have been going to bed I glanced at this cheap piece of pottery and felt compelled to take out an empty three ring binder from my briefcase. I picked up a pen and starred at the old man for the longest time. Then I began writing a story. It would over the next several months evolve into the first long form story I had ever attempted to write. A few days ago I was looking for something in the bottom drawer of my nightstand when I found that three ring binder. I opened up the dry and slightly yellowed pages and began to read. 

Its fascinating to read something you wrote while a much younger man. I had forgotten much of the story, but as I read, it all began to come back to me. Much of it was sloppy and disjointed but the power of the narrative resonated with me in much the same way it did that first late evening when I began writing it. So, now I have a new project to work on. I’m going to rewrite this thing chapter by chapter hopefully improving it with more mature and experienced prose which hopefully will include more  properly constructed sentences! I might even publish the chapters here on The Tempest. If only I could figure out a way to make you guys pay for it!

Should be fun. Story-telling always is.

A Boy’s Last Innocent Summer

The summer of 1968 was far too much for the boy. He was not able to take it all in, to process all the new things. So, he went fishing instead. He picked up the cane pole his Dad had bought him for his birthday back in the spring, before everything. It was in two pieces, long and skinny, the color of cherry wood. There was a red bobber tied two feet from the sharp hook at the end of the line. He could hear them clicking against each other as he walked down the gravel road that led to the pond. It was about a mile from home and his Mother didn’t know where he was, only that he had promised to be back in time for dinner. Her last words to him as the screen door slammed shut were, “If you climb a tree then fall out and break your leg, don’t come running to me.” She always laughed when she said it, and she said it every single time he left the house on summer days in 1968.

It was his tenth trip around the sun. There was a birthday party for him in April. All his family were there and most of his friends. It was fun right up to the moment when one of his uncles  announced that someone had been shot in Tennessee. All the adults gathered around the car radio and listened to the news while smoking cigarettes. The boy watched them from across the back yard and remembered the day when bus number 44 carrying his older brother and two sisters came home early from school because somebody shot the President. But this time the conversation coming from the grownups seemed different. Nobody was crying.

Someone said, “Its a terrible thing and all, but if you ask me the man was asking for it.” Then his mother shot back with, “That’s a shameful thing to say. He was a decent and brave man.” Then another, “This country is going straight to hell.” The boy heard this a lot, especially after dinner when his father turned on the RCA to watch the news. Everything was going to hell.

He didn’t understand any of it and didn’t care to. He liked it better when his parents were thinking about anything else besides the news. He thought about asking one of them what was going on in the world but each time the subject of “the country” came up, it would end up in shouting. So, the boy ignored the crackling static of the radio and the stern gray man with black rimmed glasses on the RCA.

When June came around it was his sister’s turn to celebrate a birthday. June 5th. Everyone gathered over at his grandparent’s trailer in the back yard of his uncle and aunt’s house. Everything was fun until his grandfather’s soap operas got interrupted by one of those “Special Reports” which seemed to be happening every other day. This time there was a shy, smiling man speaking into a microphone in a big room filled with cheering people. When he was done he walked off the stage and made his way through the crowds who all seemed to want to shake his hand. All the while a man was talking in the background. Everyone gathered in the tiny space of the trailer where grandpa smoked his pipe and watched his stories and strained to hear what he was saying. Then something happened and suddenly everyone was running and the man’s voice got louder but he was even harder to hear. The boy saw the grownups all lean in closer and cover their mouths with shaking fingers. Someone else had been shot. The shy smiling man. Then, there he was, lying on his back in a pool of blood. His mother began to cry and quickly led all of the kids back outside. He thought, is this going to happen at every birthday party now?

Then it was July and there were no birthdays in July.

The boy found the worn path that led down to the pond from the gravel road. He walked through weeds almost as tall as he was on either side before breaking into a clearing where he could see the blue water. The sky was bright and clear and it was early enough in the day before it got hot. He found the spot, a place worn down to dirt. Someone had laid a couple 2x6 planks at the water’s edge for people to stand, but today he had the place to himself.

He took his mother’s garden spade from his back pocket and walked along the pond’s edge to the soft soil where the earthworms lived. Three spade fulls of spongy soil yielded five fat night crawlers which he shoved down in the pocket of his shorts. He could count on hearing about it from his mother when she got around to doing the wash. He stood firmly on the wood planks and watched a couple of buzzards circling high above him. He would have given anything to be a bird, to be able to soar far above this strange new world.

After assembling the pole into one ten foot piece, the boy reached into his pocket and grabbed one of the squirming worms, held the slippery skin still enough to find a thick one inch piece, then bore down hard with his fingernails until the worm had been reduced to a bleeding mass in his hands. Then he slipped the still squirming piece onto the sharp point of the hook until the point was completely covered. In one smooth motion he slung the hook and bobber out into the water where it settled fifteen feet off shore. The ripples sent out from the entry of the line into the water settled down and soon the bobber lay still on the surface. Then he began the wait. It was why the boy so loved fishing—the waiting.

“Why do you like the waiting?” People would ask him.

“Because it gives me time to rest my head,” he would answer and all the grownups would laugh.

What they didn’t know is that his head needed resting. The thoughts in that ten year old head were colliding with a world where people shot each other out of the clear blue and everybody had something to say about it except him. News would come about people he didn’t know far away, people he had never met and nobody else had ever met. But the news would make people sad or angry and sometimes his mother and dad would cry. Something was happening that seemed a thousand miles from the little pond hidden behind the tall grass, under the giant power lines. He could hear them popping and hissing far above his head. They drooped slightly over the surface of the water from the giant metal monsters from which they were strung, one in the distance to the north and the other behind his head to the south half obscured by the tall oaks. They looked like silver stars with legs. His dad had told him that if it weren’t for those silver stars and the popping and hissing wires we would all be in darkness. It was the same thing the preacher always said about sin, how it always left you in darkness. It was one of the million things that the ten year old boy didn’t understand.

The waiting ended with the dancing of the bobber slowly across the water then the plop when it disappeared under the ripples. He tugged firmly upward, but not too firmly. His dad had taught him to be careful to not pull the hook out of the fish’s mouth too soon. But when he pulled, the hook was set and the tip of the long pole bent nearly in half under the strain. A yellow perch the size of his dad’s giant hands danced on the end of the line as it lifted out of the water. The sun reflected off its golden scales as it wiggled back and forth in the air. When he got it on the ground he removed the hook which was barely attached. He had been lucky not to lose him to all the wiggling. Then he slipped his thumb into his gasping mouth, picked him up and held it high for a closer inspection. It was a beautiful creature, this fish. His scales looked like a painting of a fish. Its spiky tail, a dark and dirty green color. He was fat around the middle and the large eyes staring at him gave off the impression that the fish considered the two of them equals, and at a crossroads. “Do you put me on a line or in a cooler and take me home to eat, or do you put me back where I belong?”

When the boy turned his eyes away from the fish and the sun he saw the splash of red in the tall grass near the earthworm patch. He hadn’t noticed it earlier. It was probably an empty bait container left behind by some kid too lazy to dig his own worms. He threw the perch back in the water, laid his pole on the ground and walked toward the red.

It was matted and and water-stained by rain. No telling how long it had been laying like this in the open. He picked it up. It was heavy, a magazine, the back cover facing up, an ad for a Corvette. He turned it over and saw a beautiful women wearing a red blouse smiling sweetly. 

Playboy, May 1968.

He had heard of Playboy. All ten year old boys had heard of Playboy. The closest he had ever come to one was passing by the magazine rack at 7/11 on the way to the ice cream case in the back. But now here was one in his hands. He looked around to be sure he was alone and felt his heart beating faster in his chest. He slowly opened the swollen and moldy pages and saw an ad for Miller High Life. Then a thick page in the middle, more substantial and dryer than the rest. He took the thick page in his hands and noticed that it was more than one page. As he opened it, one page became three and the boy felt the heat of the day burning on the back of his neck. There was a woman holding a guitar in one hand, her other hand resting on her bare thigh. The sunlight reflected off the first two female breasts he had ever seen. They stood out above the guitar like ripe fruit and the boy wondered if he was in heaven or hell.

He knew enough about the female body to know that he shouldn’t be gawking at a naked one. He quickly shut the magazine and threw it back on the ground where he had found it. The image of the woman with the guitar would never leave him for the rest of his life. When he got back to the wood planks he was sweating and feeling warm and alive. His hands were shaking when he baited the hook. When he began the wait he looked up and saw three buzzards circling, lower now in tighter circles. The bobber was still and the boy’s head was no longer resting. All he could think about was how fast life had suddenly begun to move. People getting shot. Adults arguing. Women with no clothes and beautiful breasts smiling at him.

By the last week of August the summer had gotten dreadfully hot and dry. After Labor Day he would be back in school. The long summer was drawing to a close. Now the RCA was on and everyone was watching a big auditorium with tall signs with the names of the different states. The people under the signs wore crazy looking hats and looked to be having a great time even though they were crammed in the place like sardines. Then the screen cut to the streets outside where men with white helmets were swinging big wooden sticks at groups of wild-eyed angry people and carting them off in dark vans with the word POLICE on the sides in big block letters. His mother and dad were horrified and began praying that Jesus would return but this time not someday but today, right this very minute.

That night as he lay in his bed in the dark unable to sleep, his older brother was turning the dial of his transistor radio slowly, stopping each time he heard the new song he liked which seemed to be playing all over the dial. 

“Do you think the country is going to hell?” The boy asked?

Across the room his brother answered, “I think the country is already in hell. We’re just trying to find a way out.”

Once again he found the song he liked and started singing along softly. The boy listened and thought about the woman and her guitar. He thought of the men in the white helmets and the violence raining down on the heads, backs and arms of raggedly dressed boys in the streets outside the auditorium.

Now the singer was screaming and sounding frantic. He asked his brother, “Is this song happy or sad? I can’t decide.”

“Listen to the words, you dope! ‘Take a sad song and make it better.’ There’s nothing sad about this song. It’s more like a celebration.”

“But, why is he screaming?”

“Go to sleep. You’re too little to understand a song this great.”

Just before the boy drifted off to sleep he wondered what it would be like to be able to understand the world like his big brother did. He wasn’t sure he would like it, this ability to understand. Maybe he would rather not know whether the country was going to hell or already there. Maybe he didn’t want to know why people shot each other out of the blue or why men with sticks beat people bloody in the streets. Maybe he just wanted to go fishing and give his head time to rest. He thought of the fat perch with the glistening scales asking the question about its fate. He needn’t have worried. 

I always throw the fish back.

The Future of The Tempest

I am discovering that I have begun running out of things to write about in this space. For one thing I’ve been doing this for eleven years now. That’s a total of 2,731 posts. I have expressed opinions on practically everything, and on some things, two or three different opinions. I don’t apologize for that. If your views and opinions don’t change over eleven years, you’re probably not paying attention.

But, its getting harder to do. I’ve written a ton about politics, mostly making fun of it. But the past four or five years have so poisoned the well, I’ve lost interest. Nothing I could possibly have to say about politics would be nearly as funny as politics itself. 

I’ve written a lot about sports, especially baseball. Ironically, my interest in sports—even baseball—has waned a bit. The staggering amounts of money being thrown around at athletes has had some sort of cumulative effect that has made the actual games less interesting. I’m not even sure why. I suppose its harder to identify with people who will over their careers earn more money than the the gross domestic product of Haiti.

I’ve chimed in on most of the hot-button social issues that have boiled up over these past eleven years, like gay marriage, abortion, and the designated hitter. I have persuaded nobody.

I’ve written about Maine. For many of you I’ve written too much about Maine. Although I never tire of the subject, at this point there’s repetition. As beguiling as it is, how many different ways are there to describe fog drifting across a glassy lake at sunrise?

I’ve written about my family. I told all of you what it was like to have your mother die in her sleep and to care for your Dad for two years after. I’ve gone on and on about my wife, extolling her many virtues. I’ve bragged about my kids, boasted about my siblings. But I also can appreciate the eleven year sinking pit in Pam’s stomach every time she sees one of my blogposts, wondering what embarrassing thing I’ve said. Sometimes I worry that she might secretly resent being the subject of so much public comment.

I’ve written about my dogs. Murphy, Molly and Lucy have dominated this space, for which I make no apologies. Even my GrandPups, Jackson and Frisco, have gotten plenty of publicity here. The reason is simple. Dogs, unlike practically everything else in this world, are incorruptible.

I feel myself slowing down at The Tempest. Writing fiction seems more fun and more stimulating. That’s where I see my writing headed. Stories.

So, 2023 will bring diminished output here. Instead of my normal 200-250 posts a year, maybe half that— unless some completely insane thing happens that demands my attention.