i wrote this somewhere in the South China Sea between Pusan, Korea and Qui Nhon, Vietnam in my second tour of duty in 1970 before getting out the first time…or maybe it was the third if you count NROTC at Vanderbilt and the following Navy Reserve stint (another story or two to be told someday, someday). i revised it in 1996 and again in 2013 when i included it in A Pocket of Resistance: Selected Poems . i wasn’t going to include poems in my posts today, but this seemed to capture some thoughts i have about now.

buffalo bob and jeezus

where do we live, in heaven or hell; why not either? ho jeezus.
is it restlessness, human nature, or abject and terribly humane stupidity driving us toward
life in a fast lane leading to no exit from the super highway down the road. oh
yes.
my problem is i was/am an innocent, well unarmed to seek a feasible answer while
the world runs amok,
looking for the next best thing to change,
which really bears no difference to the last change where
we reel, rockin’ n’ a rollin’ way ’til the break of dawn, shoobey doo wah.
christ,
mohammed,
errol flynn,
joe dimaggio,
mickey mantle,
willie mays,
gone to
other things of which we know not but are unwilling to admit
other than our own interpretation.
mister aspiration: don’t hide your arm, and smoke a lucky, and tell the truth.
tomorrow, someone may ask us where we’ve been:
homer: long game winning ball or the iliad.
christ.
live well among the cedars of the limestone-pocked hills where the cherokees
did not cherish nobility anymore than the white invaders who
bought, sold and still try to own the negras
who changed their name several times to avoid their own perception of embarrassment or
the other coast where high desert promotes the same silly-ass idea of superlativeness which invades places, our spaces
having no climate but drinkable water. ho, santa ride, ride, ride Rudolph,
have you heard of
mr phinneas t bluster and, god bless her, princess summerfallwinterspring? maybe buffalo bob and howdy doody had it right all along
after all.

i wrote this as i was returning from Korea after a year of taking Republic of Korea troops back and forth from the war. Spending about eleven days at sea, five to six days in Vietnam ports, two days in Pusan, Korea, and about six in Sasebo, Japan in a cycle which had created…well, some creativity in my heart and on paper. Some of it was not so cheery. This was one of those.

the dark side of the hill

I was walking down a small-town street
on a cold, harsh Sunday
when from a corner of an alley
a huddled, gnarled old man
leering from under a soiled and torn fedora
spoke to me:
“I have been to the dark side of the hill,
my boy,
“I can tell by your gait,
you are headed there;
frivolity and adventure
are what you seek,
but it’s not there, son;
it’s not there nor anything you would want to find.”

I paid no heed, passing away
from the old man,
continuing to pass through
the sun-reflected snow
to the zenith of the hill,
and on.

the wind is biting
on the dark side of the hill;
there is no sun
to disperse the cold.

now, on some small-town street
on a cold, harsh any day
in the corner of an alley,
a huddled, muddled, gnarled old man
waits.

i have been to the dark side of the hill;
my gait is altered.

i have been putting off writing this because, quite frankly, i’m a bit scared. It is not of my nature to write just for me. This is not a piece of writing i suspect many who read  my usual stuff will enjoy. i try not judge how people react to my writing except when they attack me for the rare political comments i make because it doesn’t agree with their political position. As i told my friend Cyril Vaughn Fraser this past weekend, i am nearly always aware of who might be reading and tailor my writing based on my perception of how they will receive it. Not this one. This one was written by me for me. i hope you will go along for the ride.

Friday, March 10th, while whiling away the hours waiting for the 6:00 p.m. start of the Vanderbilt, UCLA baseball game at Jackie Robinson Stadium in Los Angeles, Alan Hicks and i suggested to Cy Fraser we should go to the Getty Center, John Paul Getty’s gift to LA and the world, a campus including the Getty Museum and the Getty Foundation dedicated to research and preservation of the arts. Alan and i had been to the Getty before. We knew Cy’s inquisitiveness would make the visit worthwhile.

When we got off of the tram from the parking facility and walked up those magnificent stairs to the entrance hall, before we reached it we saw the large hanging sign announcing “Museum of Obsessions,” the celebration of Harald Szeemann, the renowned and visionary Austrian,  structured in “a surprising series of thematic interests: avant-gardes, utopias and visionaries, geographies, and grandfathers” (Thanks, Getty Center). Of course, being men we laughed at the title and said we had to go see the “Museum of Obsessions.”

We veered off to the research center where the Szeemann exhibit was located. And in we went.

Now i have not been a fan of modern art. i have tried. Especially since i learned Alan and Jim Hicks mother, “Becky” Tarwater was an item with Jackson Pollock until that smooth talking Tennessee doctor rode into the big city and swept his East Tennessee sweetheart away, did i attempt to understand…futilely. But i’v kept trying.

Alan (and i) are into the Impressionists. Alan had read on the program about the tour in the East Pavilion about Degas. He moved through the Szeemann exhibit quickly to get to the tour. i studied for a while. Cy was trailing. When i finished, Alan was anxiously (almost: i don’t think i’ve ever seen Alan anxious except watching Vanderbilt sports events). We sat looking out over the parapet to the magnificent garden below. He said he must leave. i said i would like to go, not for the tour, but to see the Impressionist art collection. We discussed how. He called Cy. No answer. We determined Cy must have left his mobile phone in the car. i said i’ll go back, find Cy, and tell him where we will be. Alan said so long and headed for the tour. i went back inside. Found Cy. Told him the plan. Then i realized it wouldn’t work. We would be too scattered. i decided to wait.

i returned to my seat underneath the arbor, breathed deeply, and watched the few visitors who had wandered down, mostly in curiosity, to check out the “Museum of Obsessions,” and the staff, seeming a bit too smotheringly (my word) academic in their conversations as they walked past in supposedly deep discussion when they were likely talking about where to eat a late lunch. The world seemed to go away, and i floated there for a while with the world gone and me in timelessness.

i rose from my floating and went back inside. Cy was sitting on a stool watching a video about one of Szeemann’s projects. Enraptured was the description that came to my mind. i asked him about a placard explaining that minute segment of Szeemann’s rapture. Cy confessed he had left his reading glasses (yes, we are getting older and it’s confirmed with the added contraptions to our lives, but we refuse to believe, or at least accept such restrictions, only wearing the contraptions, like my hearing aids, for convenience, not admitting defeat). i loaned him mine as he had loaned me his to read the menu the night before. i decided to stay as it only made sense to have a mobile phone with Alan and a mobile phone with Cy and me. While Cy watched the video with us interjecting, sharing our thoughts on the enormity of Szeemann’s passion, i walked around looking at the different presentations.

There on one large wall was a piece of modern art. It wasn’t particularly pretty. In fact, it looked like someone had wandered through an automobile junk yard — like the one on Murfreesboro Pike outside of Lebanon where Mike Dixon and i found the hose for his ’53 tank green Studebaker when his hose blew after a ball game in 1961 — collected bits of knowledge, recorded that bit of knowledge on the small pieces, and hung them on the wall. It was a big wall. i studied it and found brownish grey cardboard pieces of different sizes between the collection of strange stuff. The cardboard pieces contained typewritten notes. i determined the notes were about the person who had first hung these pieces somewhere, which had then been collected by the note writer.

i saw the bakelit explanation placard to the left of the exhibit, went back to Cy and borrowed my reading glasses, returning to the placard.

The artwork was created by Ingeborg Lüscher, Szeemann’s partner and eventual second wife. The word captured the essence of Armand Schulthess’s life long obsession. Armand retreated to his home in the woods  in Auressio, Switzerland to gather “all human knowledge.” He began to collect knowledge, recording them on tops of tin cans and other small metal and fabric pieces and hanging them on trees, mounting them on rocks, and amassing them in his home along with hand written notes hand bound in bundles of text. On those small pieces of cardboard intertwined with Schultess’s collectibles, Ingeborg writes small sketches of Armand and his existence in his Gesamtkunstwerk (German for an “encyclopaedic” or comprehensive artwork (Thanks,  http://www.spacesarchives.org/explore/collection/environment/der-garten-des-wissens-the-garden-of-knowledge/). Schultess called it all the garden of knowledge.

The art and Ingeborg Lüscher’s notes on the cardboard pieces struck me in a different way. i began to think more about the definition of art and admiring not just the works in Szeemann’s “Museum of Obessions,” but the artists who created these pieces and who not only saw their creations as art but devoted their very lives to creating them above all else. Just like Schultess. i went back through the gallery and studied more of the works there. i began to connect. i could see art. Meaningful art. A place i had never been.

i breathed deeply.

i told Cy such devotion to their art is something i’ve never achieved (except once in a long while when i went into a frenzy, a passion, and wrote without heed to punctuation or really even what i was writing but connecting to connections with things that said something to me but perhaps, no most likely did not connect to others, writing for me with no intention of sharing, which of course i did, am, and will: but those pieces and such experiences are rare in my life) because i nearly always had, have specific readers in mind when i put something on paper or a computer screen. It was not contrived but it was purposeful, and i still don’t know why i have this compulsion to write on any level nor why i want others to read my stuff…yeh, my stuff, whatever that piece of words may be, purposeful or from another realm, and that’s okay, and i found myself writing in my head as i went from artwork to artwork, marveling at these incredible, devoted people who ignored our cultural parameters, put aside the petty bickering humans seem intent on pursuing, and even experiencing rejection of the worst form: Schultess’s garden was mostly destroyed by his heirs after he died with only pieces, like Lüscher’s work in the Getty, remaining, and was even put in a mad house for the insane, or whatever we choose to call such abominations.

And then we left. We found Alan and headed to the ballgame, Vandy against UCLA, hotdogs, fan friends, dressed in black and gold: a different world, the one we live in.

And i promised myself i would return more often…to the Getty…to the spot i was in breathing deeply and writing for me, writing stuff deeply important to me, which may read like balderdash to others, writing to write to feel to create to breathe to live.

Like the sea. Like standing behind the centerline gyrocompass in a storm with green saltwater pummeling the bridge, ordering course changes and speed to accommodate the spirit of the sea, the majestic lady, which will never be completely understood but always awed.

And i will return to the world of concrete, HVAC stucco houses, belching automobiles promoting ill will, and golf, and baseball, and parks, and the beach, and the museums, and the diners, and cleaning the bathrooms, and shopping in the stockowner’s stores, and living okay, no well, enjoying it all, except missing where i was in the breathing, living, writing world those other folks like Szeemann, Lüscher, Schultess, and who knows how many others that breathed and lived in a different world.

Yes, he would have been 101 today. He was a lesson in life for me.

i met him when my future fiancé introduced me to her father. JD and i had moved Maureen’s furniture out of an apartment into Ray’s garage while she looked for a new place to live. He was there when we unloaded the furniture.

Ray was an engineer. He was a lover of golf. He loved fun and laughter. He had a wry sense of humor. He became much more than a father-in-law to me. We became close friends. He played golf with my Navy buddies and me. We did projects together. We rode to hell and back to various places, arguing all the way about which route was quickest. He was usually right. We would stop at his favorite places and have a Beefeater on the rocks with a twist. He loved to get to Navy golf courses early so he could have SOS for two dollars. i escorted him through the last year of life before cancer claimed him. Three weeks before he died, he bought a new set of golf clubs. He demanded he would go to his last Chargers’ game, a pre-season exhibition and sit in his season ticket  by himself about a month before he was gone. He played almost all of the holes on the Pine Glen executive course at Singing Hills with Jim Hileman and me two weeks before he left me. He gave in and didn’t play the last hole. i was with him before the morphine took total control his last morning and we talked about things that didn’t matter but they did and i will never forget.

He had a raspy voice. He smoked too much. Everyone in his extended family loved him…for good reason. Most of all as far as i am concerned was he loved his family. One of the most loyal men i have ever met. He was, as i said, a good friend. A good man.

Ray Boggs, we had ten years together. Too few. i needed to learn a bit more about Life 101.

Last week, i returned to a time of innocence.

No,  not “The Age of Innocence.” That’s a movie. i’m talking about the time of innocence. Mine.

And it wasn’t me being innocent, not by any means. But it was my time of innocence. I was a small country town boy in a world of which i was not familiar, and i embraced it hook, line, and sinker without having a clue, even though from my perspective, it was a time i was the smartest i ever was or ever will be. Now, i know too much to be smart.

Three Vanderbilt attendees, 1962-1964, one of whom actually graduated, gathered together in a different world and a different time, like 56 years of time, this weekend far, far, away from that campus on Nashville’s West End. Our lives took us to different places in different ways and made us different from each other.

We have never accepted being different. The core, as this weekend demonstrated, was, is, and will be the same. We embrace our differences. And learn.

We have had our troubles, suffered personal loss, are much less spry with much less hair…okay, okay, Cy still has his hair, but it’s white.

i left home in the late morning Wednesday, drove through Camp Pendleton while a major Amphibious Landing Exercise, a “PHIBLEX” was underway. It brought back other memories, good ones, of organizing, coordinating this rather amazing show of strength through of Navy, Marine, even sometimes Coast Guard joint maneuvers, on that small stretch of shoreline and small area of the camp where I-5 runs right through the middle of the great divide between San Diego and Los Angeles (Thank Heaven!). But those are stories for later. The helicopters launching and landing on the assault ship and landing zone, the Marine track vehicles with one body of the crew projecting from the hatch running pell mell toward the training village, kicking up dust like nobody’s business, remains and an awesome, no,  a majestic sight to behold.

An hour later i make a couple of swoops through the flight arrival area of John Wayne Airport when Cyril Vaughn Fraser, III hops in, and we continue the northward trek to Long Beach Airport where we add one Mister Alan Hicks to the mix.

Thus began a visit to my age of innocence.

We checked into our Air B&B in San Pedro, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. It was about perfect for three old guys. It was a middle to low income neighborhood within walking distance to the downtown, filled with good dining of a number of ethnicities. So we ate, visited the Getty, the Queen Mary, the Ports of Call, and found them all good and interesting.

The three of us enjoy exploring the world of people around us.

And…

We went to college baseball games: Vanderbilt vs. Long Beach State (nicknamed “Dirtbags” and you have to love that) at Blair Field in Long Beach, a lovely old ballpark, which generated recollections of Sulphur Dell, the Nashville  park for the Vols of the AA Southern Association: Boys and girls chasing foul balls, peanuts, even beer, friendly opposition fans, good times.

Vandy lost, 4-3 on pitching woes, errors recorded and mental, and silent bats at the end of the game.

i loved it.

Thursday, kicking around. No game. Lots of catching up. And then, the highlight of the day:

The Queen Mary “Observation Bar.” We sat at the large windows looking over the bow across the bay at the city sky scape of Long Beach. Visiting  the ship, walking the decks, and especially having a drink in the bar makes me feel like i have escaped to an incredible era long gone. This was about the fourth time, i have gone to the Queen Mary. Once Maureen and i spent the night. i thought the stateroom was quaint, romantic, beautiful. Maureen thought it was too small (It was a bit cramped but my goodness, it’s a ship, i thought) and having to maneuver in the tiny head was difficult. For her, i can understand that, but it was a piece of cake for me. In fact, it beat an officers head on a FRAM destroyer. i want to go back and take a tour or two, but i am perfectly happy wandering the decks, dreaming about running into Cary Grant or Greta Garbo and joining them for a drink at the bar. If you are ever around Los Angeles, you should visit if you like to dream.

Then on Friday before the UCLA game, we hit the Getty. i have a post pending on that adventure…later. But we concluded with the UCLA game for Vanderbilt. Jackie Robinson Stadium. Baseball doesn’t get much better than that. The Commodores beat a team ranked higher than them. The Vandy fans almost matched the number of UCLA fans. Met most of them, and those ‘Dore fans are fun. Being men and hungry, we went to a nearby sports bar in

Westwood (You know? Home of John Wooden, the Wizard of Westwood), and the yesteryear college bonding got a shock. Crazy, crowded banks of televisions on banks of televisions with sports events no one was watching because the gazillion gabby students were fiddling with their smart phones. Needed that. Takes one down to earth.

A note: i need to thank Maren Hicks. When we checked into our Air B&B, i immediately pulled out my socks to show to Alan and Cy. You see, i made a small donation to Vanderbilt Athletics, and they, in gratitude, sent me some socks, Vandy socks. i was proud of them but also thought it was quite funny. Alan looked disappointed. He dug into his backpack explaining Maren had received an extra pair and sent them with Alan for me. Well, the first game against the Dirtbags, i had not slowed down enough to change into Vandy socks. The Commodores lost. i wore my pair to the UCLA game. Vandy won. i knew about the high probability of rain Saturday and wore other socks. When Sunday came, i put on the socks Maren had sent. Vandy beat TCU.

So i’m pretty sure Vandy could win the rest of their games this season all the way to the College World Series championship if i wear my or Maren’s Vandy socks when they play.

i always knew Maren was magic.

Saturday was rain, but it was a magic day anyway. Alan and i went to USC knowing we wouldn’t watch a game, but we watched the coaches discuss cancellation while we watched the undeniable front moving toward us relentlessly on Alan’s weather radar app. The Vandy fandom was evident. They began gathering in the stands an hour before game time. Then, those coaches decided to begin with a rain delay. The teams retreated to their dugouts while the stadium’s audio kept playing music. So the teams picked their best players and a dance competition from opposing dugouts began. It was fun. For Vandy fans. USC? Not too many to enjoy the dance. Once they determined there was no way to play a baseball game, Alan and i retreated to an old haunt.

Alan was the “Director of the Southern Gateway” for the Maritime Administration for five years. He was a geographic bachelor in Long Beach, commuting on the weekends back to San Francisco to be with Maren and daughter Eleanor. i began working for Pacific Tugboat Service and traveled to Long Beach almost weekly to conduct training and safety inspections. We made it a night. i would stay with Alan in his bachelor apartment. We would play nine holes of golf and then go to dinner, most frequently at the Whale & Ale, a British pub in San Pedro. Saturday, we returned. Nostalgia. Good British food. Nice folks, older, like us, maybe more. i kept thinking of how things change, how we bring in new, fancy, cleaner, neater stuff, but we throw out decorum, a certain way of doing things.

Sunday, our fourth joined us for the final game, “The Dodger Stadium College  Baseball  Classic” was a double header. Vandy beat TCU,7-4, in their final game near the Southwest corner (i don’t count Los Angeles as being in the Southwest corner; Camp Pendleton

separates us, and the concrete expanse of LA is a world unto itself). Walt Fraser, Cy’s brother and a running mate of mine from the past, came over from his home in Pasadena to join us — i must pause here to comment the organizers and  Dodger management hosed this event up as much as possible; it was almost impossible how to get tickets, almost; the visiting teams didn’t get blocks of tickets; USC and UCLA did (we got ours at the UCLA game); parking was not available until thirty minutes before game time; the gate security couldn’t tell us the right gate to go to when; it was almost as if they didn’t care about fans from the visiting teams, the ones affected by such poor management; LA arrogance and another reason for me to never be a fan of the Dodgers after they left Brooklyn. But the game, the time together for the four of us, the Commodores playing class baseball made it a damn near perfect afternoon (except for the $15 beer).

And then it was over. i hit the freeways back to the Southwest corner.

The experience caused me to revise my take on city traffic. As my daughter Blythe once so wisely observed, “If you are going to make money in the traditional fashion, you are going to have to live in a place, a city where traffic is a problem.” i agreed then and i agree now. In the past, i have chastised Houston, Seattle, San Antonio, Washington, Austin, and others for bad, bad traffic. LA and New York City were givens. But after this past week, i must proclaim LA is the worst. i never really drove during “rush hour.” Most of it was on the weekend. There was never any of that LA crawl of thousands of cars going no where. But it was constant and it was expansive and it was always. Driving in LA requires total focus because there is enough traffic everywhere all of the time some bozo might take you out. i think i wore a good two or three millimeters off of my molars, grinding them without stop. Bonkers, i tell you, bonkers.

In spite of the traffic, the five days were simply magic from the past. Friends like we hadn’t skipped fifty-six years. Frat brothers and more sharing an old house (ah, the spirit of Maple Manor, another story). Innocence of a different kind revisited. As Bob Seger sang and i have repeated many times, “i wish i didn’t know now what i didn’t know then.”

Magic innocence. Revisited. Thanks Alan, Cy, Walt, and thank you, Maren. i really believe those socks are magic.