Morning Thoughts: November 24, 2017

There was this man in our extended neighborhood back home. I can’t remember his name. Folks mainly called him “Good Boy.”

They called him that because he would start every greeting with, “I’m a good boy, ain’t I?” He was of indeterminate age, maybe somewhere just short of his sixties. He wandered the county in the company of two or more dogs who had an uncanny ability to determine whether one was greeting, teasing, or threatening harm to their master. They enjoyed the first, tolerated the second, and you didn’t want to fall into the third.

It’s scarcely an exaggeration to say you could smell him coming before you actually saw him, and you might see him anywhere, at anytime of day or night. You could buy a smile and harmless chatter, along with a day’s tolerance from his dogs, with no more than a cigarette and a friendly ear.

I don’t know his full history. According to my mother, he was from one of those pioneer families of the county whom a stranger would have classified as lower-middle class but whom locals knew as possessors of significant wealth. In the land where I grew up, the highest and most honored classifier of “class” was to be secretly wealthy while giving all appearances of a modest existence. A family who, particularly if it had inherited wealth, displayed opulence of any sort were so far beneath contempt as to be socially invisible.

So, it probably was true that "Good Boy" had been eligible for an education and a comfortable life, but something went wrong. My mother explained it in the common language of the day. “When he grew up, they just couldn’t do anything with him.” That was the local euphemism for “he went crazy.”

I subscribe to theory of his being educated for one reason. The man was some sort of musical savant. I know. I’ve heard him, from having worked at the swimming pool of a local country club for four summers while attending college. It wasn’t uncommon for the subject of this post and his dogs to wander onto the club grounds to watch the excitement and chat with old acquaintances.

Sometimes, when the club guardians failed to notice him, he would ease into an empty ball room, sit with his dogs beside him, and launch the club’s grand piano into sounds of breathtaking beauty. The most educated and knowledgeable person associated with the club was a head waiter who had previously taught English at our city’s African-American high school. He would identify the day’s music as Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, or the likes from the brief snatches played ere the authorities chased the performer and his dogs away.

I’ve heard that churches in the county, particularly those with powerful church-organs, locked their doors at night to keep "Good Boy" from terrifying nearby residents with midnight serenades. I can’t swear to that, but it’s too good a story to omit.

Don’t know what ever became of him. I fled Arkansas and Orval Faubus while the man, his dogs, and his music were still wandering the county. I thought of him this morning after I located a particularly exquisite rendition of a Chopin nocturne. I do an exercise I call “The YouTube Thread Predictor.” I simply count the thread of comments related to a particularly sublime piece of music and count the entries before one appears that involves either the “F-word” or an ad hominem attack on the previous commenter. It stands at about five on some pieces now, down from about ten at the end of last year. As with the so-called “Doomsday Clock,” a further rise may signal the end of civilization as we know it.

In the meantime, I’ll try to remember that one should never presume to predict from where pure beauty—or a pure lack of class—may emerge.

Growing Up Southern: September 16, 2017

We turned as the bride-to-be started up the aisle, resplendent in her white gown. In the crowd, to her left, were two girls in tank tops and shorts. Oh dear. Has respect now left the upper world?

I was relating this story to a group of friends. I commented, “I wouldn’t be surprised to attend a funeral some day at which spectators wore shorts.”

“Ahem,” said one of the crowd. “Saw that last month.”

Last night’s Bill Maher show brought this to mind. Tim Gunn, star of a TV show called Project Runway was on the show. I have just seen bits and pieces of Gunn’s show, while my wife watched, but evidently it is quite popular.

Anyway, Mr. Gunn was bemoaning the current state of dress in America. I must note that he was wearing a blazer with checks over a striped shirt, but no matter. He seems to enjoy a reputation as an

Tim Gunn has a point.

arbiter of taste, so I will bow. He referred to “the slobivacation of America.” I’m still thinking about this, not sure I fully agree with his detective work. On the other hand, one trip to any Walmart store in our country will cause one to understand his concern.

As a child of the Not-Deep South, and a sucker for discards, I’ve wound up with box upon box of family photographs. A look through them reveals on solid fact about men who lived in the land of my roots during my early youth, men who had worked digging fenceposts for 50 cents a day, but were never so poor that they didn’t own one dress suit. It just wasn’t proper. My father bought his at the Henry Marx store in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, suits of a flexible design suitable both for church or for courting the precious young thing he won and married.

As you look at those old photographs, you wonder how long it took to save enough money for the suits, shirts, ties, and hats (oh yes, hats) those men wore. Appearance must have been important for them. It held true for women as well. A young couple may have had, as they say in these parts, “neither a pot nor window,” but the man had a suit and the woman had a “Sunday-dress.”

This was the generation, by the way, that they now call “The Greatest.” Some tended the country while others chased the fascists off the planet. Many didn't wear their Sunday clothes for a while.

Something happened afterward, though. We started, as Mr. Gunn suggests, to become increasingly unconcerned about how we appeared in public. I don’t know why or when. I suspect it began the first time we allowed a surly teenager to eat at the table wearing a baseball cap. It went downhill from there and led, eventually, to a scene witnessed recently wherein a moron wearing a broad-brimmed cowboy hat sat through a church funeral without once removing the monstrosity.

It’s worse in Texas. I hear they even let young women wear short dresses with cowboy boots, Barfola.

John Steinbeck noticed the association between dress and social status in a scene he used twice that I know of, one in a collection of short stories called Pastures of Heaven and again in East of Eden. A rich landowner tells a worker that they are going to town, only to have the worker say he must change clothes first. When the landowner comments that he doesn’t change clothes for that purpose, he is met with, “Yes, you have to be very rich to go to town dressed as you are.” (Quoted from memory. My Steinbeck books are currently packed).

Anyway, Mr. Gunn made an impression. I think I’ll start dressing better and see what impact that may have. It’ll scare the hell out of the Walmart cashiers, but it may speed up my transactions at the bank. Fortunately, I don’t have to worry about attracting a women. I already found me one.

An aunt and uncle dressed
up for Sunday visiting 

Saiing To Oblivium: August 28, 2017

It almost seems unfeeling to be planning a normal day when our brothers and sisters in Texas are experiencing such horror. But, we beat on, as F. Scott said, “boats against the current.”

What we might learn from these dreadful days is that Nature plays a catastrophic game when she chooses, and we are powerless.

A bully can’t shake his hand in her face and stop the gales.

A billionaire can’t show her his bank statement and escaper her wrath.

A general can’t order his battalions to counterattack and send her fleeing in fear.

A politician can’t “whip” his party into formation and outvote her intentions.

A person blessed with uncommon beauty can’t charm Nature out of destruction.

A thief can't steal her power.

No, at the moment Nature unleashes her fury, we all equal, one of the few moments during which that is true.

What can we do? Perhaps catastrophes such as this will help convince us that neither ignoring nor challenging Nature is the answer. Perhaps the answer lies in a new reverence and a more accommodating posture. Perhaps it is time to let wisdom, education, and decency lead us away from defiance and toward harmony. Perhaps it is time to spend more of our resources working with Nature and less warring with one another. Perhaps it is time to sweep the halls of government clean of climate-change deniers, greed-mongers, and divisive charlatans. We can replace them with women of thought and prudence. (I leave men out of the equation as we’ve had our chance and it’s gone with the wind).

Heck, we might even start electing leaders on the basis of thought and hope instead of fear and hatred.

After all, the only real thing we can do it the face of a furious and unforgiving Nature is to dream of better days and better ways.

Just thinking …

Sailing To Oblivium: June 19, 2017

My late father-in-law always claimed it started after World War Two. I think the first tangible sign was when we started letting boys wear baseball hats to the supper table. Now we let grown men wear cowboy hats during memorial services.

It is this lack of civility and the abandonment of even the barest hint of social propriety that has washed over our nation like a noxious flood. It leads to women wearing the white dress of virginity to their fifth wedding. It leads to individuals wearing shorts to funerals. It leads to such acts of tackiness as putting dark meat in a chicken salad. Where have our standards of decency gone? Is classlessness the new etiquette?

We see it manifested to extremes now as individuals block supermarket lanes while talking on their cell phones, sometimes discussing, in a loud voice, intimate details that would embarrass a confessional priest. Oh, and our politicians. Let's not forget them. Just today, E.J. Dionne Jr. wrote an interesting piece about the loss of civility in the national political arena.

Civility is not merely disappearing in our lives. It bespeaks, to many at least, a sign of weakness that, somehow, makes the practitioner of it a limp-wristed pansy. A beloved and highly popular TV character’s favorite phrase is, “Never apologize. It’s a sign of Weakness.” Wow. That one will get you far in life.

That’s actually a line lifted from a John Wayne movie She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, from 1949. It was more or less a stupid line then as well as now. A better one would be “Never explain. Your friends don’t need it and your enemies wouldn’t believe it anyway.” That’s a line from a long-forgotten episode of the TV series Four Star Playhouse, delivered by the late David Niven.

I bring up films and TV shows because that is where we seem to get our behavioral guidance these days, not from Grandma’s knee but from professional wrestling shows. Too many people don’t stop, it seems, to consider one thing. As David Letterman pointed out once, these incidents at pro wrestling matches in which one of the wrestlers is removed, bloody and unconscious, from Madison Square Garden, and rushed, via stretcher, to the emergency room, are not, for some reason, reported in the next day’s New York Times. One has to wonder why.

It seems that things no longer have to be real in order to be true and effective. Maybe that is intended. Maybe it serves some insidious purpose to downgrade reality in the minds of our people. It did occur to me once that the main difference between a video game and real war is a sucking chest wound.