It was the Southwest corner’s version of crappy today: high of 68, light breeze, but there were several white clouds in the blue sky. Bummer.

However, the last two weeks, we have had rain. This is good, you see. We haven’t had any rain like for the last four hundred thousand millenniums. However, the weather guessers are predicting doom, not good. For you see, they know the rain is good, but it makes things grow, and for weather guessers who are trying to keep their watchers and listeners on edge, it means there will be more vegetation to burn when the fires come again. Weather guessers have a penchant for making things bad regardless how good they are…sort of like some clown saying a few clouds make it crappy.

But one thing that is good about the rain it clears things up. Yesterday, going from the mainland over that beautiful blue arch of the Coronado, San Diego Bay Bridge, it was clear. So clear, Maureen and i could see for miles, all the way to the horizon, crystal clear, no marine layer. We could see all of the Los Coronados Islands, all of them, and the hundreds of sailboats off the coast with their spinnakers unfurled, catching the wind, and the white sails in the bay, the dark blue-gray of the ocean and bay sparkling.

We were going to see a play: “Camping with Tom and Henry,” a fictional comedy-drama about Thomas Edison and Henry Ford taking Warren G. Harding on a camping trip in 1921.  Thought provoking, relevant to today, funny, and sad. It was the Sunday matinee at Coronado’s Lamb’s Theater.

i like drama, plays. i don’t have anything against movies. In fact, my wife and two daughters are aficionados when it comes to movies. Most of my friends enjoy movies. Me? Perhaps i’m too critical, not into making gore as realistic as possible, not enthralled with graphics, not into making something as much like life as possible. After all, life can be pretty miserable at times. Oh, i loved oaters and spaghetti westerns. And i even liked some comedies, even some chick flicks like “You’ve Got Mail,” and “French Kiss” but then again, i was in love with Meg Ryan before she did that thing with her face which seems to be a popular things now a days with women. You know that skin stretching, bio something, they do that make them look like mannequins, distorted mannequins. And i remain a big fan of Christmas movies, almost all of them, “Silverado,” and “Hidalgo.” “Star Wars” sort of wore me out, and the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit movies failed to match my imagination when i read the books a long time ago and several years after that and pretty much every three or four years after that until they came out with the movies with that wimpy Frodo. And Maureen and i could watch “The Quiet Man” pretty much end on end until the end of time. And yeh, there are several others but i really don’t even know who the actors are now a days unless they are in a television commercial they run during sports events. Sorry. i’m glad other people enjoy them, even wish i did sometimes, but it ain’t me, babe.

But plays? There’s an edge there in live drama. And they have to project. You can get wrapped up, but it’s not reality and you know it. It’s your imagination and theirs and you can see it and feel it. No, i’m not talking about all of those silly things with flying wires and fantastical makeup and smoke and mirrors. i’m talking about acting, drama, real, no kidding, no retakes acting. i like it.

And we went. And i enjoyed the hell out of it. And we went over to our friends’ house afterwards. Pete and Nancy Toennies. And we all went to dinner at the Bleu Boheme in Kensington and i refrained from ordering the mussels, something i’ve never done before, and i even refrained from a martini, which goes well with such an atmosphere and had some wonderful pork dish which i cannot pronounce because i can’t do French well and Maureen is used to saying all things French for me (and then giving me shit about it, which i deserve) and the world was fine, beautiful, and mine for a day.

But i’ve been thinking about that rain. i love the rain. i especially love Tennessee rain in August when the heat and the humidity are draining you and you know you are going to early football practice and lose ten or fifteen pounds of water weight and you walk out the front door of that little house with the Chinese elm in the front yard and you can smell the rain on the wind and there is a coolness, perhaps just in your mind but you can feel it and you can smell it and you see it coming moving like wisps of relief in your mind and the world stops for a moment to let you smell and feel the rain.

i used to like to run in the rain. i loved running in the rain on the beach. One day about a million years ago, i took my usual run at lunch from the Naval Amphibious School, Coronado. i chose to run the long route around the island. i was not much further than a block or two from my start when it began raining. i continued. i kept at it, rerouting to extend my running in the rain, around the island and then when i got to back to the beach i chose to run between the beach and the Hotel del Coronado before the development men and the investment men gussied it all up and raised the prices to keep the riffraff like me from going and i ran on the sidewalks about a foot in water and i got to the end of the hotel property and they had put up a temporary fence to keep the riffraff like me from running through that water but i had fooled them by coming from the other way but the fence was still in the way so i climbed the fence because those California folks weren’t about to be out in that rain and i ran back to the base, late because my run of forty-five minutes had been rerouted into water running, fence jumping hour and a half and i was beat to hell but totally exhilarated like that time in Sri Lanka when the Aussies took us out in the country for a “Hash House Harriers” run and they let us out of the bus and the trail started out running on the berms of rice fields and up the hills into the unknown and it started to rain and we ran down the hill following the trail through a village of mud huts with grass roofs, no shit, and could look in the glassless windows to see life as we didn’t know it so we kept running through the rain where the old man in the white robe and a white beard looking like a guru motioned us to run into a dead end canyon and when we turned around and came out he was laughing like a mad man and the rain got harder and the incline increased until we came to a bluff where the only way down was to slide down the side by holding onto the vines so we wouldn’t plunge to stupid death and reaching the bottom we ran on the road for another mile after the last nine or ten or lord knows how long with the detours and the old man and the mud huts and we were knee deep in the monsoon rain and we reached the covered shelter where the buses were parked but we ran into the shelter and grabbed the steaks off the Aussies’ barbies with our hands and grabbed the Fosters out of the ice bins and drank and laughed like crazy with the Aussies and…oh yes, i could go on no doubt but i remember the rain. i wrote about it once because of two women. One is with me today. The other might have been here instead in a different world with a different end or i might have been there in a different world with a different end but it didn’t happen sort of like a parallel and less dramatic Sayonara  like Michener wrote and the movies butchered it and i am glad i wasn’t like the movie or how i would dream it would turn out then but when it rains i think of both of those two women like when i wrote this:

Tennessee Rain

You never smell the rain coming here. It just arrives, usually descending from an established grayness. Sometimes it comes in a sudden sweep but always from the west, expected, not interrupted in its journey as the land abuts Balboa’s folly to the west.

Back down in the heart of Tennessee rivers, hills and lakes, the rain has no season but comes of its own accord, its own rhythm, its schedule not dictated by some seasonal order.

It is more whimsical. There you can smell the rain coming. It clears the nostrils and lungs, smelling more fresh than wet, more cleansing. Out here, there is oil from the earth, dust from the desert air to the east, and salt from the sea that mutes the feel of coming rain, chokes off the smell of fresh rain. Back in Tennessee after the smell awakens your attention, you can see it rolling across the hills in sheets, the sight of it sweeping across the country embellishes the smell of the rain.

Today is a warmer version of Tennessee rain. In the summer, i would infrequently walk hatless in the Tennessee rain, but only alone. Many years ago, i would walk the beach or countryside of Virginia or Newport, Rhode Island in all but the coldest, breath-of-sleet rain. One year on the island of Kyushu, i walked the harbor roadsides of Sasebo in the rain, the only time i have pursued such an individual, quiet joy with someone else.

Delicate and tiny, Kosyko was exquisite with her dark hair wet but tightly clinging to her skull exposing her delicate neck; you know Japanese think the neck of the woman is a key to beauty. It rained a lot on Kyushu. The rain and her parents tragic fate in Nagasaki may have contributed to my love for her .

Here, over on the island that has covered its charm with tourist dollar chasing, i used to run in the rain. This was before encroaching baldness made a visor look out of place on my head. i would wear an old visor from Texas A&M – where i never walked nor ran in the rain and never smelled it either – to ward off the rain drops from my eyes.

This afternoon, i would like to walk with my lifetime love in the rain. We would not talk, i envision and more or less say to hell with all but us. She would be just as exquisite as tiny Kosyko with her hair clinging closely to her skull exposing her delicate neck and the Japanese had it right. i would not love her more. i already have pegged out that meter. i could just have another way to love her again.

i wish that she could smell the rain coming in Tennessee with me.

It is late, i mean really late for me. i am on a roll. Haven’t been on a roll like this for a long time. Feels good. Maslow’s level of self-actualization is burning the night oil. While rolling, i hit some poems i posted earlier. Then, i stumbled across this one. i am not sure if i sent it to Cy or Walt and i am almost positive it has seen no other eyes until i post this. Cyril Vaughn Fraser, Jr. was a good man. My friend from lord knows how many baseball games and even more one-on-ones in the Castle Heights gym, Mike Dixon, also worked at Dupont, and he immediately waxed eloquent on Mr. Fraser’s reputation at the Old Hickory plant when he learned of my connection. Here are my thoughts when my mother notified me of Mr. Fraser’s passing.

on the passing of Cyril Vaughn Fraser, Jr.

i sit here wondering in the dark of the cool, just north of the border august night
down mexico way about not a thing in particular except the southern lady i call my mother who has been calling me today because she doesn’t trust those infernal phone message machines; won’t have one in her house; she says can’t abide talking to a machine; she says there is too much to worry about without having to worry what people say when they aren’t talking to you but some machine; she says she’s right. i know she’s right on, having two of  those damnable machines myself.

my mother, the southern lady who makes fried corn and meat loaf you would kill for and tennessee country ham all the doctors and my wife says you shouldn’t eat along with the biscuits and gravy and butter and jelly and buttermilk damn near everything good, calls early on and damn near wakes me up because daughterwifeme made an end run to disneyland to shake hands with mickey and hear pocahontas rewrite history again where a chicken sandwich costs a sight more than chicken and white bread costs that tastes oh so much better back in fox hollow before it became a housing development before it was named fox hollow and just a farm with a tin roof house and earth covered hill of an root cellar in the back where foxes don’t run now or ran then but then much chickens ranclucked; the old man did run foxes that is in Tennessee, just down the road from where the man used to live that my mother called about:

that man died, she said.

Cyril Vaughn Fraser, Jr. died, she said; read it in the newspaper obituaries, she said.

gone.

notjustlikethat as ee cummings would like us to say, like most of us would want it to be, but pretty damn quick by government standards; she told me the services, cremation, all of those attendant necessities that follow death like a disease were pretty much done she said, and being the southern lady and my mother, she told me where the funds in lieu of flowers should be donated

78, she said the paper said in the article in the paper she was sending me. dead.

Cyril Vaughn Fraser, jr.

my first look at culture or what i thought it should be

proper, but dry humor, Mr Fraser, Virginia kind of drawl in the comfortably small house with everything in its place on the quiet neighborhood corner of Jackson’s old plantation called old hickory where i ran around with his boys and was introduced to upper gentility, another world from the limestone rock just below the surface of hill farming middle tennessee just up the road all along the Cumberland demarcated by the white washed fences common on Andrew’s old land.

it did seem cooler there especially when Mr Fraser would invite me to have a “martin” with him, which was a martini poured from a beefeater’s bottle straight from the freezer from whence he and the lady neighbor partook on the front porch one summer late afternoon until she had to ride her Saint Bernard across the street to home and hangover heaven

blue shirt sear sucker suit weejuns gone.

lately, his older boy told me his father had moved across town like our other friend Bivo to higher cotton, which is appropriate for a man with a new wife and all long after his boys and me were amidst all the hellbentforleatherlivingwithoutanet, but not to the edge of those that followed

i remember him smallish precise dapper gentlemanly southern who had a thing for Michigan in the summer, questing for knowledge and appreciating with his· sons as well as the crackle of the love of life i remember

gone.

most sad for me; his boys, whom i consider among some of my best friends passing through my times, especially the older boy for Cyril Vaughn Fraser, Jr. was a friend also who could laugh and enjoy youhimusthem without reservation as long as there was a quest for knowledge.

dead

gone.

sad.

the stars across the border grow dim; the added weight on my shoulder makes me weary thinking someone must carry that love of life and knowledge and gentility on to others

i do see the lights of the city south of the border smiling, and thinking of how i would have liked to have taken Mr Fraser on a tour of this Eden which some ways even makes Michigan in the summer pale a bit.

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.