The Breezes of Corpus Christi

My brother Bruce has died...my parents, my sister and I just saw him less than a month ago when he was visiting from North Carolina. He was only 53. Recently on the phone my brother and I talked about how nice it had been to grow up in Corpus Christi, Texas, where neither of us has lived for many years- the only real 'home' we ever knew as our dad was in the Air Force for most of our young life.... the gentle Gulf of Mexico breeze, riding around in his orange VW bug on the beach listening the the soundtrack from "Papillion" on his 8 -track- a film we always loved and saw together with my sister back in 1973. Bruce said recently he would like to retire there one day....
All today I was thinking of a song that always reminded me of Bruce, -a B.J.Thomas tune written by Jimmy Webb called "Song For My Brother"-here are the opening words:

Wooden planes
propellars spinning in the West Texas wind
we ran behind
we hoped our little flight would never end
You were my brother
and i knew you were my friend
I wish that we
were chasing after wooden airplanes
once again



Around 1977, when there was a real interest by NASA to contact any alien lifeforms in the universe, and an electronic 'hello' was sent off into space at a frequency they felt another life form might detect, Bruce had that message taped to the inside roof of his VW bug. I'm sending out a message -I hope you know how much I love you Bruce.be well. he's part of the universe he always loved now...

beautiful bells

I was in downtown Westfield this morning and out of the bell tower of the First Congregational Church came "Somehwere Over the Rainbow"....oh, it was so beautiful.....

Art Tatum quote

There is no such thing as a wrong note.


Art Tatum

Tatum O'Neil: A Paper Life

Although this autobiography is a few years old, I have just started reading Tatum O'Neil's autobiography.I hesitated because I thought it might be a self absorbed Hollywood bio, but I have always admired Tatum O'neil since seeing her in the film "Paper Moon" (1973) and this book is great. She is who I thought she might be-very honest and very smart and compassionate. She begins her autobiography, for instance, by following her parents lives growing up that may have contributed to their individual failures as parents. She takes responsibility for her own failings as a parent and tells of her struggles to overcome addiction and heal her relationships.... a really interesting and insightful exploration.- also interesting that she was named Tatum after jazz pianist Art Tatum....

those who wish

Those who wish to sing
always find a song.


proverb

a prayer for my brother

My brother , Bruce, had what appears to be a stroke on Tuesday....what I wish for you, Bruce, is whatever you believe you need-deepest in your soul, not the day to day stuff that has tormented you but the answer beneath it all, which only you know...

looking for something

"All my life I have lived and behaved very much like the sandpiper-just running down the edges of different countries and continents, 'looking for something'.

Elizabeth Bishop



I like this particular picture of poet Elizabeth Bishop-it is the most innocent picture I have ever seen of her....it captures the sweetness beneath her sadness...

I wasn't going to mention Falwell's death but....

.....Scott Santis did this really funny and apt editorial cartoon....

wonderland...

I was watching one British version of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland today, from 1973, with a wonderful score by John Barry. I wanted to see this version because I remembered one Barry soundtrack number from when I was a teenager, Curiouser and Curiouser, and really wanted to hear it again....it is beautiful and haunting tune...this picture is from the famous illustration of Carroll's book by John Tenniel from 1866....it is only now I see how much Alice loved and respected cats-she keeps wishing her cat was with her as she goes about through wonderland and the Cheshire cat is such good and honest counsel...

"But I don't want to go among mad people, Alice remarked.
"Oh you can't help that, said the Cat. "We're all mad here.
I'm mad. You're mad.'
How do you know I'm mad? said Alice.
You must be, said the Cat,'or you wouldn't have come here."


(from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, 1864.)

Terry Ryan, author of "Prize Winner of Defiance"

Terry Ryan has died- she wrote a biography/memoir about how her mother, Evelyn, won hundreds of commercial jingle contests in the 1950's and 60's to feed her family and stop them from being evicted from their home (her husband, Terry's father, was an alcoholic). She is pictured here with actress Julianne Moore who played her mother in the film version.

I love Mt.Tom

At least for me, one of the most healing things to do is to hike up to Mt.Tom from the Rt.141 side in Easthampton....it is a steady uphill hike for about 15 minutes but the reward is to see the incredible view once you reach the top. I love Mt.Tom. I have felt a spiritual connection to it since I moved to the area about 10 years ago...everything changes and precious things go away forever, but there it is, always there and saying everything will be ok. here are a few shots I took up at the top....

Flannery O'Connor's Letters

Here is a pic of Georgia writer Flannery O'Connor with one of her beloved Peacocks...some of you may be aware that she died from Lupus. Yesterday, some of her letters were opened to the public at Emory University- letters she wrote to a a close friend Betty Hester. I am not sure why a discovery that writers or artists in general were more 'open minded 'than they were thought to be, surprises anyone, but it always seems to. Hester was a file clerk in Atlanta and a lesbian ( the latter is what is stirring people up, I think). Hester apparently kept every letter Flannery sent her in the 9 years they corresponded (from 1955 until Flannery O'Connor's death in 1964).

Molly Shannon in Year of the Dog

Well, I absolutely love Molly Shannon-I think she is just a very genuine and heartfelt person and willing to show how deeply that can twist you in the world we live in. She is currently starring in the film, "Year of the Dog", which I saw Friday night and found equally beautiful and disturbing. She often plays characters who are good people who something horrific happens to and they remain good but somehow really eccentric and kind of dark. On SNL, she played the infamous Catholic girl, or the woman who "is 50 years old" (as if that were a freakish thing to be, which it is in our shallow culture)-last night she hosted Saturday Night Live and relived these 2 characters in the modern context of Catholic Mary auditioning for American Idol, and the 50 year Old woman auditioning to be a stripper on the Sopranos. Her characters are always good women/people caught up in the damaging things around them. Year of the Dog is no different. Her character, Peggy, has a doggy, Pencil, who is poisoned by a neighbor's lawn kill product and she goes over the deep end. I read an interview with her in the NY Times recently where she revealed that she was in a car accident as a child in which her mother and sister were killed and her father seriously injured-that has to have contributed to her unique comic vision...she is an incredibly talented and complex person.

Blessing and Bees

I forget sometimes that Blessing is so young she has never seen some things. Today, it was bees on the flowering bushes outside my apartment window. I think she thought they were very small birds, but she alternately tried to talk to them and run away from them when they were moving around the flowers which must have seemed like they were coming toward her. I would have had the same reaction if there wasn't a screen there....it really wore her out and she had to take a long nap later.

less glamorous but more interesting

I spent a little time this weekend in Stowe, Vermont at the Von Trapp Family Lodge visiting some of my family who were there at their timeshare for a week.....here are a few pictures of how beautiful the view is. I love the rolling landscape of Vermont- so unbelievably gorgeous and healing to view and the poetic snow streams descending from the tops of some peeks off in the distance...I spent a little time trying to understand the history of the Von Trapp Family but I want to invest more time than what is presented. If one hunts around enough elsewhere, though, it is clear they were not pleased with the film, the Sound of Music. It clearly made their Lodge a 'tourist hot spot', but the complex story of their individual and collected lives is really lost once people become symbols or icons or characters. I was moved to see the simple burial spot on the grounds where Maria , Georg and several children are buried. One of the children, Martina, along with the daughter she was bearing, died in childbirth in 1951. These are the things you don't see popularized, but they are real and were fundamental losses to the real people. I found an interesting quote by Johanne von Trapp from a 1998 interview (he was the youngest of the 3 children Maria had with Georg-he was born in 1939): "I think perhaps reality is at the same time less glamorous but more interesting than the myth."

turns the dream around

"We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, we also see that our dream was our fate. It is just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there. Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected." Ben Okri