Tell Me A Story

My Favorite songs are often ones that could be the great novels or scripts for whole movies – The story songs.  Now this is a tradition in folk music and old ballads, but there are modern incarnations and here are some of my favorite “stories in song”

I’ll kick it off with a May December Romance in Crimes of the Heart written and sung by Amanda McBroom

Then a couple with nothing in common but their dreams – John Buchino’s “Sweet Dreams” sung by Barbara Cook

Next up a pair of “Star Crossed Lovers” only this time on meaner streets than Shakespeare’s Verona. Mark Knopfler with Romeo and Juliet (Had a hard time picking just one Knopfler song as he is a modern master of the art – Check out “Done With Bonaparte”

Shotguns at the ready Bonnie Raitt takes you on a wild ride on the freeway to chase down a runaway.

Now a slice of real life. Leonard Cohen’s song Chelsea Hotel #2 that is supposed to be about his encounter with Janis Joplin written after her suicide. Warning for the sensitive about such things, it kicks off with a graphic sexual description but if you love Cohen, you are used to that.

Daddy Was A Drunk

This was written for Father’s Day fourteen years ago. It seems a good time to repost.

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It will be Father’s Day on Sunday. Sons and daughters will be out there doing nice things for their fathers or those whose fathers have passed on will be saying nice things about their dads. They have fond memories of the males who helped make them. What do I remember most about Bob White? Daddy was a drunk.

That fact colored the whole of my life from 1944 to 1971 … more than a quarter of a century of alcohol until his last attempt at sobriety took hold and he became a recovering drunk for the last ten years of his life until 1981. For the ten years from 1971 to 1981, I got a once a year visit that usually included a “you are just like your mother” lecture when he was trying to work the “make amends” step and I was tolerant as he tried to talk to me while I stubbornly sipped a cocktail in front of him over dinner. Can we say this was a difficult relationship?

I’ve been known to write poetry, so what did I write about my dad?

Daddy sold the piano that was my life
Thirty years late he died
I said that I forgave him
I think he knew I lied

So given all the above, particularly the gypsy existence and the emotionally devastating (though I didn’t say anything) loss of the piano, why did I cry for three days when his last wife called to say he had died and I wasn’t able to get to Arizona? Why did my son who never comes unglued come totally unglued and get into the only fist fight of his life while in the Army in Germany? Why do I send daisies (gowans in Scots) to him every Memorial Day for Auld Lang Syne? Why did I make a trip to Scotland just to see where he was born, and why to this day do I still miss my daddy? Because at some point in our lives most of us become orphans. In order to grow up you finally have to see and accept your parents as human beings with all of their failings and virtues. This is a love story about my daddy.

Let’s start with the simple things. From birth to 17 I may have spent six years total in his presence and that is as a result of adding days together not much living with. So why do I remember daddy holding my hand as we climbed the stairs to the club house at Hollywood Park, Santa Anita, or Del Mar and why to this day do I love horse racing? Why do I remember learning to dance with my feet on his shoes and to this day I love dancing. Why do I remember him soused and still able to count cards at blackjack or points in Cribbage at lightning speed because he was a mathematical genius, and to this day I love to play cards (His great granddaughter that he met when she was six weeks old got the math skills). Why did he send me postcards from every state line on Route 66 that he crossed when I was seven? To this day I love getting behind a wheel just for the sheer joy of driving and want to echo as much of that trip as possible, even though it scared me to death when he rolled a car while driving drunk. Why do I remember that he borrowed a mink stole from a girlfriend so that I could wear it to the Balboa Bay Club on my 16th birthday and dance to “My Funny Valentine” with my father? To this day that is my one of my favorite songs. And for all the drinks that caused all the pain, I still love cabarets and piano bars and all the dark places with candle lit tables where you can actually hear the lyrics to a well written song.

Interspersed with all of the above are a whole lot of ugly memories that you don’t need to know except that he was a kind, gentle man who never raised a hand to anyone he loved. Embarrassed them horribly – Yes and made them angry – Yes. Life around this man wasn’t easy. He was literate, funny, musical, all sorts of charming – enough to get himself married three times for ten years each, not to mention the girlfriends in between.

So I’m 65, two years older than my dad when he died, and Sunday is Father’s Day. Last May he would have been 91. Not impossible as his father lived to be 89. If alcohol and the damage it did to his heart hadn’t done him in, he could have been here to see his grandchildren and great grandchildren. He isn’t here. That is a shame, because my son and I are the only ones left to remember and laugh every time we watch the “Show Me The Way To Go Home” scene in Jaws, because it was one of his favorite songs when drinking, and why Amanda McBroom’s song Errol Flynn always gets to me. If Ms. McBroom and I ever meet we can talk about memories of daddies and Union Station. In the meantime, here she is singing her love song for her daddy and in many ways mine as well. You see. I loved my daddy and daddy was a drunk.

How To Read To A Child

Somewhere between the day I was born and the Christmas before I turned three, I picked up a new book just given to me and read a poem out loud for the first time. Well to tell the truth, the little, obnoxious brat I was sometimes known to be at the time, grabbed the book from my mother and said, “I’ll read it to you this time!”. I can even remember the very first poem:

A

A was once an apple pie,

Pidy

Widy

Tidy

Pidy

Nice insidy

Apple Pie!

Now I was bright, one of those non-children children who look at adults speaking baby talk as if they have lost their minds, but not genius level smart – just a bright kid. So why was that child an absolutely hopeless bookworm before ever entering the first grade. Well a storyteller did it. It’s all her fault that my house looks like an exploded library.

All the manuals tell you to read to a child every night. They don’t tell you that this is your chance to practice all those acting skills you’ve been saving up for when Hollywood comes to call with that multi million dollar contract. Bees buzz, the wind howls, wigglies and squigglies crawl up legs and arms. Carriages rock back and forth as high speeds carry you away from danger. Shadows and gloom descend, swords flash and slash, and animals of every kind oink, honk, neigh, moo, and whinney. What good is a dragon if your eyes don’t open wide when it breathes its terrible fire, and how can a princess go to a ball if you aren’t dancing around the room.

…And I’ll huff and I’ll puff

…Open Sesame

…The better to see you with my dear

…An Elephant’s faithful one hundred percent

There are picture books and then there are just written books where the storyteller paints the pictures. You’re competing with the TV set for goodness sake … instant noise, instant music, and instant pictures … ones you don’t have to work to see, but a great storyteller shows a child black letters on white paper and says … “here there be magic.” All the miracles of the universe are waiting to dance across your brain, you just have to see the pictures the letters are painting.

… the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas

… By the laughing big, sea water

So the next time you read to a child, rub the lantern to release the genie and look up as the smoke billows to form the huge, smokey shape. quiver under the covers in fear of the growling, giant stalking the room with a fee fi fo and fum. Shriek, laugh, sigh, whisper, and moan, and then at the absolutely most appropriate time kiss first the left eyelid and then the right eyelid, and then the forehead as you send baby out to sail among the stars with letters in their head that spell:

Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes,

And Nod is a little head,

And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies

Is a wee one’s trundle-bed.

If all else fails and nodding does not occur … remember the warning to ill behaved children …

The Goblins ‘ll get you ef you don’t watch out!

Cassandra Grousing

Reading bits of Homer and got to thinking about the legend of the poor cursed lady of Troy and what she might have had to say if she finally lost her temper.

Don’t you dare ask me, “What am I thinking?”. That’s all I need right now, another test. What am I thinking? What am I thinking? If you don’t know, why in the hell should I? I can tell you what direction we are heading because of the way you think, but specific words – forget it, Turkey! (Turkey: North American bird consumed on Thanksgiving. North America: A place some when from now. Thanksgiving: Oh never mind. It will get here eventually.).

Back to the way you think. Most of the time you don’t, which explains the mess we’re in. What mess? This one, dummy. Uh, no, the one that will be. But really, it is now – to me. About the mess we’re in. You know how you hate to make decisions that might hurt someone’s feelings, and you hate to hurt pretty ladies most of all? Right? Of course I’m right. I’m always right. So being the dolt that you are, you get sucked into judging a beauty contest. You’ve never judged a contest, you say. You will – trust me.

Boy did you get rooked – will be rooked. You took a bribe (Apple Pie Anyone?), ran off with the little roundheeled bitch, and now we have those hundred ships in the harbor. No ships in the harbor? Look later, they’ll be there. Just because the blind poet upped the number, doesn’t mean the ones that are there aren’t dangerous. I shouldn’t knock the author. Not everyone could turn a cheating wife into an heroic epic. It was a good book even with the exaggerations. You’ve read it of course – no of course you haven’t. Note for shopping list: Buy Ajax cleanser, packet of Trojans, I’m going to need them. When am I?

So here we are in this clear and present danger (clear and present to me). Why do you bother asking questions when you don’t believe a word I say? Go search some entrails! Now there’s depth for you. When you’re done, we can all make blood pies! How in the hell did I get this job anyway? I’ll tell you how. I made a mistake. I repeated something I heard, only the person hadn’t said it yet. Victimized by a fast thinking slow talker! It’s a wonder I don’t give up talking altogether the way everyone used to sit around waiting for me to say something meaningful. If I said, “Tell the piper to stuff a mute in it!” Someone else would say, “I was just thinking the music was too loud.”

Then everyone was on the bandwagon with, “She’s done it again; she’s done it again.” Like hell I had. THE MUSIC WAS TOO LOUD! Of such things are reputations made.Not that I wasn’t talented you understand, but I pretty much stuck to the common place – she’s jealous, he’s angry, he’s vindictive etc. so my prediction rate was unusually high. Nothing you couldn’t get from a good course in body language (has that been invented yet?) – no, well someone will get around to it. Don’t fold your arms that way. I have all the rejection I can handle right now.

Back to the subject. I had this talent before that buttinsky masquerading as a god got into the act. I mean I was giving feminine intuition a good name. There was always the problem of seeing something first and then waiting for the dum dums to catch up. Now that can really put a dent in an oracle’s good humor. But, it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle what with all the glory when they found out I had been right all along. That’s something else the reporter of these events will get wrong. Didn’t his editor ever tell him to check his facts? I had the gift before that womanizing creep of an immortal stepped in with his indelicate proposition. Just because I told him to take a hike – after all, he wasn’t going to be a god long enough for me to worship him – he gets all ticked off. Now I might as well talk to the walls! What makes you think you’re an improvement on a wall?

So, as I was saying. I have this little mental quirk that everyone wants, but no one understands. Note to myself: Check and see if those guys at Duke have made any progress. Here I am on my little extrasensory soapbox with no one paying any attention, waiting for my palace to go up in smoke. What’s that old joke? If it weren’t for the honor, I would rather walk! That one hasn’t been told yet? If you haven’t heard it, stick around a few thousand years.

By the way, would someone call the fire department? Call: Alexander Graham Bell, where are you when I need you? Fire Department: Read my lips, ef-eye-are-ee Department – people in red suits who put out fires. You understand “fire”? I’m glad to know we’ve invented that. What fire? The one we’re having next month, dodo. That’s which one. I wonder if there’s time to fly to Paris instead of trying to talk to him.

Idiots! I’m surrounded by idiots! The arms shipment from the US will not (repeat WILL NOT) arrive in time. And to think, I used to like horses.

Signing Off,

Cassandra

The End of Then and Beginning of Now

Mother’s Day

I put up an Ellis Island post quite a while back, some commenters have expressed interest or asked questions about how to start family trees. Just for a feel of how to start, I’m putting an old column: Finding Jessie to celebrate Mother’s Day. I hope newer readers like it.

FINDING JESSIE

David, William, Robert White

This is a love story, an adventure tale, and a mystery. It is not your usual boy meets girl, though that is here, nor love of family, though that is here as well. It is not swashbuckling though a long ocean voyage was involved, and don’t call Miss Marple because no one gets murdered by the third paragraph, even though there are several deaths. This is a personal genealogical journey, a how to investigation, and the way a hobbyist’s obsession can turn into a love affair.

By Scottish tradition, I was named after my father’s mother. On my birth certificate is my name, Janet Jamieson Durward White. This is where all genealogical research starts. What do you know? Now backtrack. What other information is on this little piece of paper? Mother born in 1918 in Kansas, Oklahoma (yes there is a Kansas in Oklahoma, but that is another story). Father: Robert White born in 1918 in Wishaw, Scotland. I decided to concentrate on the Scottish line because of simple curiosity.

My parents were divorced when I was quite young, and though I spent time with my father, the contact with his family virtually ceased in my early teens. What names I knew teneded to be first names: an Aunt Effie, a cousin Mary Margaret, and brief visits to my grandfather. Without surnames, the slate is very blank. I had my new computer and the barest of information: Grandfather: William Hunter Gibson White (a faded, pipe smoking, lover of horse racing whose house I managed to nudge off it’s foundation in an early learning to drive experience). He was a handsome, white haired image from my youth whom I had last seen in 1960. I wasn’t present when he died in 1971. Then my grandmother: Janet Jamieson Durward (no image at all because she died some time before I was born).

Trying to reconstruct memories almost 40 years later was difficult since my father was now deceased. Being a researcher by trade, I made some leaps of faith … when in doubt ask questions of anyone you think might know the answers, and don’t be afraid of looking stupid. Polite stupid people get help. Armed with that new computer, the search began by joining a major server and fining their genealogical group to post a first “HELP!” message. I learned about GENUKI (the mailinglist for people interested in the United Kindom). GENNAM (a mailing list where you can post surnames), the RSL (a mailing list and search location on the net); FHC’s (an incredible service provided by the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints); The National Archives for the United States (to get immigration records); and the NRH (the depository of official records for Scotland). Even better, a really nice person in Scotland just happened to be going to the NRH and offered to find information on my grandparents. One letter to the national Archives giving them an approximate ten year range for immigration (I knew my father had entered the States as a young child) brought my grandfather’s arrival certificate, ship’s passenger list, declaration of intent, petition for citizenship, and oath of allegiance. The first of many surprises: My grandmother’s nickname is Jessie. She’s Janet on one paper and Jessie on another. She and the children arrived a year after my grandfather on a second ship, he on the Cameronia and she and the boys on the Letitia. He had come alone to live with his sister in 1925 before bringing his family over in 1926.

The nice man in Scotland reports in with another surprise, Janet “Jessie” has even more to her name: Janet Jamieson Turner Durward, and I have now acquired the names of great grandparents and find out that Jessie’s father died in a railway accident. There is not only a death certificate but an FAI (Fatal Accident Inquiry). The appropriate certificate numbers are requested from NRH and in less than two weeks I have birth certificates for father and grandparents, plus another Scottish contact offers to look for and finds the newspaper articles on my great grandfather’s death. This explains the remarriage of my great grandmother now appearing on my grandparents’ wedding certificate.

This genealogy stuff is a snap! And, pride goeth before fall. California has a death index by date and in short order I have my grandfather’s death certificate from 1971. From the citizenship papers I know Jessie died somewhere between 1934 when they were issued and 1944 when I was born. Unknown is the actual date because my dad died in 1981 and while living refused to talk about his mother except to say she died around Christmas and proceeded to get drunk at that time of the year, every year, year after year. This was one of the banes of a fragile childhood, and in many ways I wasn’t just seeking a genealogical chain but trying to recapture the man who had been my father. While he was living I never received a Christmas present. They always arrived sometime in January. There is something hidden here and no one to ask even the stupid questions. The county of Los Angeles is no help. After checking out every Janet or Jessie White on the death index, they report that there is no record of one born in Scotland dying somewhere between 1934 and 1944. To top it off, the cemetery where my grandfather was buried had no record of a Janet or Jessie White. Why did my father and uncle choose to bury him in a small place in Glendale when all other members of the family that I could find were at the much larger, “Forest Lawn”? Where was Jessie? Little did I know that this would be a five-year search and become one of the most emotional experiences of my life. In the interest of speed, I opted for a semiprofessional, “hobbyist”, willing to track down my family members at the NRH in Scotland and steadily built up several lines back to before 1800, but still no “real” information on what because obvious.

For some reason in 1925 Scotland, all the brothers in a large family and their wives and children just packed and moved to the United States. what happened to all the other White brothers in California and to the sisters and their families. What had happened to Jessie? Sources were now all starting to come together. I’m posting regularly to Genuki, Gennam, RSL, and visiting my local FCH (Notice that I’m tossing around the initials like a pro). The wives and children are becoming numerous in my chosen computer program, but they are just names and dates, and I still haven’t found my grandmother nor made any contact with any still living descendants in my search. Based on the information gathered another leap of faith … two speculative messages: “Does anyone have any information on a White/Beveridge or Durward/Mclaren marriage at the turn of the century?” This was because of an odd memory of an overheard conversation where my grandfather is saying “Mac …” while talking about what I thought was an old friend and then seeing that one of Jessie’s sisters is married to a McLaren. One of the witness names on the citizenship papers is Beveridge, but a Clara not an Effie as I remember from my early years, but I now have information that Maggie White married a Beveridge. Wahoo!!!!! A Mclaren reports in. That is my great uncle, and he is still living in Dalkeith, Scotland. Here is the address!!! I write a letter, trying not to sound too presumptuous and including the line being traced as known with the requisite self-addressed, stamped envelope in the hope of a reply. Then wait, and wait, and wait.

Robert White with Owens and Calderwood cousins

Genealogy is often big moments followed by interminable waits. What comes back is not a letter, but a packet. My hands are shaking as I open it and pictures fall out. This wonderful “cousin” has delved into his attic and in my hands are pictures of my grandfather in his 30s, my father as a smiling boy of 10, and unknown cousins with inscriptions on the back. All of these were sent back to Scotland in the late 1920s or early 30s. In my grandfather’s beautifully schooled handwriting on the back are names of the cousins (Effie Owen and Jenny and Effie Calderwood) and bit of a hint, of the changes on a picture of himself: “These are my work clothes (suit and hat). Much different than what I wore in the coal pits.” But there was no picture of Jessie, just one of my father and uncles with their Aunt Maggie in a doorway. Instead there is a memorial pamphlet for a funeral for January 3, 1935. Janet Jamieson Turner Durward died on December 29, 1934. Her pall bearers were her husband, her three sons and two of her husband’s brothers. She was a member of Eastern Star and Daughters of Scotia. She was interred at the same small cemetery where her husband would be buried almost 40 years later. Now why did they not know she existed? Why is there no record in the State of California. What happened to Jessie?

Back to the computer. I now have names to post courtesy of the photographs. On the net at “Genealogy’s Most Wanted”, I post the names of the Calderwood girls and get a reply. “I think this is my Aunt Effie.” A late-night phone call from an elderly lady saying, “I’m Effie Calderwood and my father was really interested in genealogy. We have what he got together here somewhere; I’ll send you a copy. On the subject of Jessie, “I was only a child, but it was a long illnes … I’m not sure, I’ll ask my sister, Jenny.” Another packet in the mail. “Interested in genealogy?” … 30 years of research handed to me on a silver platter for their part of the family, but Jessie was still missing. Enclosed is a letter from Jenny. “I remember that she died at Los Angeles County Hospital, pernicious anemia, I think”. “I remember Uncle Willie would sit by her bedside and hand feed her what he had cooked.” I call the hospital and ask for archives only to find out that they destroy hospital records once they are seven years old. I hit the net again and prevail on the person who has already visited that small cemetery in Glendale to visit it again now that I have a death date, a story, and a plea. They come through. They have a Jeannette White who died on that date and was buried on the correct date. Another lesson learned. Bureaucrats make honest mistakes in spelling and dates and then proceed to set those mistakes in stone by making them part of the “Official Record”. It was a county burial because the family was impoverished due to the depression, buried in an unmarked grave by the County of Los Angeles in a place separate from her husband who died in 1971 whose grave is also unmarked and unattended. Why did my father and his brother just “dispose” of their father even though they were financially able to do more. I contact Los Angeles County Records with the “wrong” spelling. They have the death certificate and with a credit card exchange, they will send it to me in two weeks.

And now, as Paul Harvey would say, “The Rest of the Story”. This is where mere names and dates become people. In 1907 when she was only seven, Jessie’s father had died in in a horrific rail accident. The family was left impoverished following death and there were several daughters who seem to have taken the death hard and made life decisions for good or ill very rapidly afterwards. Finances improved when the mother, Jane Turner Durward remarried the janitor of the local school, Mr. Torrance, in 1917. The eldest girl Isabella was already married and when her sister, Elizabeth, had a child out of wedlock in 1915 before marrying Mr. McLaren in 1919, the childless Isabella took the child to raise separate from Elizabeth’s later five children. Sometime in 1915, William White started courting Jessie Durward. He was a coal miner and she was a car conductress. He was 23 and she was 19. They had known each other all of their lives because various cousins in the same area of Scotland had lived close together, courted, and married. In 1917 on the 17th of August according to the rites of the Unified Free Church, they married at School Lodge (the tied house belonging to Jessie’s new stepfather), Main Street, Wishaw. They would live with the family for at least the first year because my father was born in this home in May of 1918. In fairly short order, the family expanded with David in 1920 and William in 1922. The economy of Scotland is going downhill in a great big hurry. A description of mine conditions at the time sounds appalling to our modern sensibilities and even as a Colliery Fireman, William’s wages were not good.

The Great Strike will happen in 1926. Seeing the inevitable, William and his brothers James, Stephen and Robert will opt in 1925 to join their sister Maggie in Los Angeles. In preparation, William and family visit various cousins including Elizabeth and James McLaren, the parents of the James McLaren who remembers playing with his cousin, Rabbie, while the adults say good-bye and who would more than a half century later send me the cherished packet of pictures. Jessie would stay in a house near Glasgow while William settles in the U.S. A year later Jessie comes to her new home, but she isn’t well. More and more, the boys come into the hands of Maggie White Beveridge, while the two men worked at the nearby Firestone factory. William would come home and cook the blood rich liver according to the medical advice of the times. Jessie slowly became totally bedridden while her husband worked and Maggie cared for the boys. William fed her, hoping against hope that his Jessie would recover. There is no doubt that he loved her deeply and what is more, his generous, open-handed sister did not begrudge the care she gave to her nephews along with her own son and daughter. William followed through with his application for citizenship, dutifully listing his wife and children even while knowing in June of 1934 that his wife was fading. They lived in an enclave of Scottish folk who had immigrated about the same time. They were friends and relatives of the Beveridges, Calderwoods, Owen, Murray, Anderson, Simpson and all those other Whites. The great depression had hit and while he was working, jobs were scarce and low paying. (If you don’t like the wages, there are hundreds to take you place.) On December 18, 1934, Jessie was taken to Los Angeles county Hospital. Her condition steadily worsened into Bronchial Pneumonia on December 24 and cardiac failure brought the end on December 29. Her sons are 16, 14, and 12. They would all become accountants and alcoholics though my father and Uncle David finally recaptured their lives.

At sixteen only a few months after her death, Robert would enter the Army, finally becoming a Chief Warrant Officer before retiring at only 37 and spend the next 25 years as a tax accountant. David would stay at home for a few more years, serve a stint in the Army during WW II, and then go to work as a corporate accountant. Willie, the youngest, would quite simply become a bum, brilliant, charming and funny, but my last memory of him is as an elderly (at only 40) thin and toothless man. William White would never remarry. He never again talked about his lost wife to his sons, and those sons became ever more alienated until they buried him in an unmarked grave in 1971. In 1997, I kneel on the grass. There is no marker. I’ve been directed here by the cemetery office staff who know such things. In my hands are my smiling, carefree father at age 10; pampa in 1928 in his new suit hopeful of a new beginning; and a pamphlet that says a woman died December 19,1934 when she was only 40. For no reason I can quite explain, tears run down my cheeks as I mourn for a man who has lost his beloved, the boys whose loss of a mother would blight their lives for the next 40 years, and a family that had been shattered, put itself back together and not only survived but thrived in later generations. I had found Jessie only to say good-bye to the grandmother that I had never met but whom I came to love as well. These flowers are for you. REST IN PEACE.

Weighty Marbles

Look into the face of Mary and see what the sculptor of the pieta did in 1499. Across her lap is the body of her 33 year old son, but her face is that of the teenage girl who first heard an angel announce that she was about to become an unwed mother. She had no guarantee that Joseph would marry her. She lived in a culture that severely punished anything that was considered immorality in women, yet she accepted the duty placed on her, and this is the way that duty ended with her beloved child dead in her arms not knowing yet where this road will end. There is grief on that face, but there is acceptance and trust in the future as well. Michaelangelo takes a block of hard, cold marble and makes you see the passion, glory and the ultimate end of doing one’s duty no matter where it leads as a simple act of faith.

In 1972 a man by the name of LASZLO TOTH damaged the Pieta with a hammer. He was never charged with a criminal offense. On 29 January of the following year he was declared a dangerous person and was ordered confined to a mental hospital. On 9 February 1975, the Hungarian-born, Australian geologist was released from the hospital and deported from Italy as an undesirable alien. His act of madness had it’s own result. The Vatican announced that the team of restorers attempting to repair the damage that Toth had inflicted on the Pieta had discovered a previously unknown secret signature of Michelangelo on the palm of the Madonna’s left hand – an “M” fashioned from the skin lines reproduced in marble as another mark from the genius who brought her to life once more.

Several centuries later another great sculptor took on a similar subject. Marble was not August Rodin’s favorite medium, yet he produced many famous ones such as The Kiss, The Lovers, and The Hand of God. Instead of marble he preferred the casting in bronze and one of his greatest is the Fallen Caryatid.

Years ago, Robert Heinlein used this bronze of the Caryatid in Stranger in a Strange Land to attempt to show beauty where apparently there was none. His words:

This poor little caryatid has fallen under the load. She’s a good girl—look at her face. Serious, unhappy at her failure, not blaming anyone,not even the gods and still trying to shoulder her load, after she’s crumpled under it.

But she’s more than just good art denouncing bad art; she’s a symbol for every woman who ever shouldered a load too heavy. But not alone women—this symbol means every man and woman who ever sweated out life in uncomplaining fortitude until they crumpled under their loads. It’s courage…and victory. Victory in defeat, there is none higher. She didn’t give up…she’s still trying to lift that stone after it has crushed her…she’s all the unsung heroes who couldn’t make it but never quit.

So there you have two young girls, one in marble and the other in bronze trying to lift marble, who were asked to shoulder burdens way beyond their years. In the process they become examples to all of the glory that comes from simply doing what is right when it is necessary.

Squeezing Out A Memory

Reprint of an old blog article

Mother and one aunt lived in Los Angeles, one aunt in Fowler, two aunts in Fresno, and the last of the six Pifer girls in Chowchilla: A sisterhood chain down Old Highway 99. Their children (the cousins) migrated up and down that road every summer almost at will to mix and match, occasionally by bus or train, but usually by car driven at speeds unheard of today except by cars being chased by police while TV station helicopters whirr overhead.

Going north, you climbed up the grade from LA to Gorman and then started the long twist of the grapevine hitting the great drop above Bakersfield where it was pedal to the metal on an empty road, only slowing down for the tinier three block main streets equipped with stop signs and cruising through Bakersfield to look at the bridge that it recently took Buck Owens to save.

With that drop came the heat in an age when auto air conditioning was high speeds and open windows. When the heat became too great we started looking for them. The great orange blobs dotting the landscape and the howls would start: Stop, please stop …. oh please, please, please.

In the searing summer heat of the San Joaquin, those orange blobs had an elixir of such heavenly proportions as to make children weep when without halting one faded in the rear-view mirror. When you stopped there was the flimsy wooden Mammoth Orange stand with a window. It meant shade, a glass filled with ice and fresh squeezed juice from oranges that had been on the trees just that morning. In the blazing sun and rural valley dust, it was the most remarkable drink ever served with just the right acid bite to quench thirst.

It is over fifty years later now. But every once in a while, you will see one of the giant oranges dusted and boarded up. Only a few still exist, and almost too late there is a move to preserve the few that remain in museums, while a couple are still trying to stay open for business, just in case you find yourself in Chowchilla or heading over Pacheco Pass to Los Banos you might still see one.

To this day, when I order a breakfast juice or a champagne Mimosa for breakfast or brunch, I judge the quality of a restaurant by one question, “Is your orange juice fresh squeezed?”



Five Songs

I was born in 1944, so this week you get five popular songs from that year.

Don’t Fence Me In. Only Cole Porter could write triplet rhymes for a country song.

I’ll Walk Alone

Once upon a time the San Fernando Valley was all farm land.

The two best band singers of the era who went on to individual careers. This one was nominated for the Oscar.

Best known singer of the WW II Era – Vera Lynn