With Hurricane Irene traveling up the East coast this past weekend, I was reminded of another hurricane from September of 1960.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Donna
The elementary school was only two blocks from my house, and one morning, the worst morning of the hurricane, it was extremely dark outside and high-velocity, slant-wise rain repeatedly strafed the school windows. Our third-grade teacher was trying to put an educational spin on the impending disaster, telling us students about the "eye" of the hurricane where everything was suddenly "calm." That seemed troubling somehow. You would think the hurricane would get worse the deeper you penetrated inside it. I guess the whole trick was getting to the center, and then you would be OK.
We were dismissed from school by mid-morning and all the kids had to be picked up by their parents, even kids like me who lived two blocks away from school. I recall a stream of water overflowing the curb and washing the sidewalk, A day or two later after Donna had finally ended, I walked through the local park with other kids looking at all the uprooted trees. There were many willow trees that had fallen because willows have fairly shallow roots. I was thankful my father had removed the willow tree in our yard the previous summer because that tree would have certainly come crashing down our house.
But the most exciting thing about Hurricane Donna for an 8-year-old was the loss of electric power. My parents lit several kerosene lamps throughout the house (I wonder how many people have kerosene lamps in their homes anymore, because kerosene is highly flammable for one thing). My family ate dinner by kerosene lamp or candlelight and I went to bed early, snug under the covers with a flashlight for reading comic books. Naturally I welcomed the loss of power as an adventure, as fun, especially in the dark, while my parents and other relatives and neighbors seemed put out and bothered and inconvenienced. Now, a mere half century later, in the "Silicon Age" with our utter dependency on all things digital, the loss of electricity seems more cataclysmic than ever.
And now for a little bathos. . .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wb9KMnzzAII
Thank you, You Tube . . . Forget Olivier, Jones and McKellan etal . . . I decided to skip them because it would be difficult to compare their stellar interpretations. I love this guy, whoever he is---more of a beer-budget Lear, a working man's Lear, than the vaulted Dom Perignon or Chateau Rothschild performances of The Masters. It's more like "The Duke and Dauphin" characters from Huck Finn. And I always liked the Spanish or Italian lilt of "hurricanoes" better than our current, more tin-eared "hurricanes." We continue to say "tomato" and "tomatoes," not "tomates." I say we petition linguists and usage experts everywhere to restore "hurricanoes" to its once lofty place. But not pronounced Hurri-"canoes" as in those lightweight (but not as light as kayak) vessels we paddle. Hurry, the waters are rising, man the canoes! "Oh, Fool, I shall go mad!"
Memory is not a single lane; it's more like a highway. All names used in this blog have been changed.
Monday, August 29, 2011
Friday, August 12, 2011
Where do the Children Play?
Routes 4 and 17 made up part of my childhood playground. There were drive-in theaters and driving ranges. There were stores but it was well before the onslaught of mall mania. Stores like Two Guys, Modells, Great Eastern Mills, Packards and Sears.
My friends and I used to explore the reeds and marshes to pick cattails along Route 4 up in north Hackensack.One of these marshes terminated at a grassy embankment behind a golf driving range. A dozen or more of the balls had been hit beyond the fence and they lay scattered at our feet, like discovered treasure. What was inside of a golf ball? We had taken apart baseballs before, peeling back the hide and stripping off the strata of woven rubber bands until you reached a small and very hard indian-rubber ball. It reminded me of pictures in the science books about the Earth: the hide was the crust, the rubber bands the mantle, the indian rubber ball, the core, but not molten like the core of our planet. But a golf ball was already small and compressed---what could it possibly be made out of?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETPrBz5YiLs
As we gathered golf balls, we heard a small vehicle approach. It was a golf cart driven by a young man wearing a hard hat, and the guy stopped the cart and leapt out and began charging towards us. We were laughing hysterically, obviously for being in trouble, but on an unconscious level we were laughing at the ridiculous pose of this helmeted functionary who took golf balls and, by extension, his job so seriously.
On Route 17, at the confluence of Maywood, Rochelle Park, Lodi, we played beneath overpasses to a backdrop of highway noises, a cosmic drone that I could hear from my house a mile away. (actually that cosmic drone was the confluence of Routes 17 and 4, which I liked to call the "Belly of the Beast"). Where we played on 17 was a mixed industrial and residential area. There were the usual tires, hubcaps, shopping carriages, broken glass, newspaper and cardboard that had been jettisoned along the highway. We would find intact, seven-foot cardboard boxes that once held refrigerators. We would crawl into one of these boxes and try to flip the box over, keep it rolling. When the walls of the box finally split apart, we would tear off separate sheets and use them to slide down the grassy highway embankment---cool, sleds without snow! We'd have races to see whose sled went the farthest, and the cardboard sleds became slick with grass stains and the pressure of our weight, their undersides like a gray-green shellac that made them slide faster.
Some time around 1980 an EPA or DOE study discovered that Thorium232 had been getting dumped along this same stretch of highway for about two decades---yes, those same years that we enjoyed our cardboard box recreation, young boys frolicking in industrial waste.
For those of you who no longer remember your Periodic Table:
http://www.chemistryexplained.com/elements/T-Z/Thorium.html
232 of course being a trace isotope (I read that in the link ;)
Ah Stepan Chemical, we hardly knew ye down there in South Wayward behind all those neat Cape Cods.
http://www.em.doe.gov/bemr/bemrsites/macw.aspx
So Stepan (or Ballod) took over waste removal from Maywood Chemical Works to remove Thorium from the Lodi Brook, and what did they do? They dumped it on their property to spread along Rt. 17 and an AEC Study in 1968 said, "That's OK" So, let me see if I've gotten this right---just move the radioactive material---what, a few hundred feet? quarter mile?---and dump it on privately held, non-residential land. Wow. Sounds like The Daily Show..... Oh, that Thorium232
Sooooooo here is the strange black stuff we were sifting through our fingers and flinging handfuls of at one another. And I had thought it was only dust from old roofing shingles. Enough said....
My friends and I used to explore the reeds and marshes to pick cattails along Route 4 up in north Hackensack.One of these marshes terminated at a grassy embankment behind a golf driving range. A dozen or more of the balls had been hit beyond the fence and they lay scattered at our feet, like discovered treasure. What was inside of a golf ball? We had taken apart baseballs before, peeling back the hide and stripping off the strata of woven rubber bands until you reached a small and very hard indian-rubber ball. It reminded me of pictures in the science books about the Earth: the hide was the crust, the rubber bands the mantle, the indian rubber ball, the core, but not molten like the core of our planet. But a golf ball was already small and compressed---what could it possibly be made out of?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETPrBz5YiLs
As we gathered golf balls, we heard a small vehicle approach. It was a golf cart driven by a young man wearing a hard hat, and the guy stopped the cart and leapt out and began charging towards us. We were laughing hysterically, obviously for being in trouble, but on an unconscious level we were laughing at the ridiculous pose of this helmeted functionary who took golf balls and, by extension, his job so seriously.
On Route 17, at the confluence of Maywood, Rochelle Park, Lodi, we played beneath overpasses to a backdrop of highway noises, a cosmic drone that I could hear from my house a mile away. (actually that cosmic drone was the confluence of Routes 17 and 4, which I liked to call the "Belly of the Beast"). Where we played on 17 was a mixed industrial and residential area. There were the usual tires, hubcaps, shopping carriages, broken glass, newspaper and cardboard that had been jettisoned along the highway. We would find intact, seven-foot cardboard boxes that once held refrigerators. We would crawl into one of these boxes and try to flip the box over, keep it rolling. When the walls of the box finally split apart, we would tear off separate sheets and use them to slide down the grassy highway embankment---cool, sleds without snow! We'd have races to see whose sled went the farthest, and the cardboard sleds became slick with grass stains and the pressure of our weight, their undersides like a gray-green shellac that made them slide faster.
Some time around 1980 an EPA or DOE study discovered that Thorium232 had been getting dumped along this same stretch of highway for about two decades---yes, those same years that we enjoyed our cardboard box recreation, young boys frolicking in industrial waste.
For those of you who no longer remember your Periodic Table:
http://www.chemistryexplained.com/elements/T-Z/Thorium.html
232 of course being a trace isotope (I read that in the link ;)
Ah Stepan Chemical, we hardly knew ye down there in South Wayward behind all those neat Cape Cods.
http://www.em.doe.gov/bemr/bemrsites/macw.aspx
So Stepan (or Ballod) took over waste removal from Maywood Chemical Works to remove Thorium from the Lodi Brook, and what did they do? They dumped it on their property to spread along Rt. 17 and an AEC Study in 1968 said, "That's OK" So, let me see if I've gotten this right---just move the radioactive material---what, a few hundred feet? quarter mile?---and dump it on privately held, non-residential land. Wow. Sounds like The Daily Show..... Oh, that Thorium232
Sooooooo here is the strange black stuff we were sifting through our fingers and flinging handfuls of at one another. And I had thought it was only dust from old roofing shingles. Enough said....
Thursday, August 4, 2011
"I've seen the best minds...."
For a couple of years in Portland in the mid-1970s I became fairly involved in poetry readings---both as a writer and as an audience/listener. I didn't read poetry; I mostly read fiction, or more accurately, prose. I had a few poems in the can but they weren't especially good enough to share except in a workshop or class. Most of the fiction I read was either in the form of short stories, fragments of longer stories, or brief, imagist one- or two-paragraph pieces that one of the other poets had dubbed "word pictures." The clipped pieces were closer to prose poems (think Rimbaud on a bad day), but they were quite effective. I quickly discovered that not everything written for the printed page worked well as spoken word, and writings that were not especially publishable often seemed a better fit for live reading. I began to shape my material with readings in mind. I felt more like a stand-up comic, using and punching up stuff that worked, and discarding what didn't work, relying more on writings with potential to entertain, as opposed to being merely "literary."
The people who showed up at readings were often more interesting than the poems and fictions being read, and that is not to denigrate the poems and fictions---most of them were not by any means dull or poorly crafted. There were an assortment of characters and something vital about interacting with a community of poets and writers. These characters ran the gamut from the earnest academic to the raging bohemian. There were the local luminaries whom everyone turned out to see. There were older hacks still laboring unrecognized and under appreciated, and you sometimes wondered what would become of them, though you already knew. There were upper-bourgeois patrons and dabblers who veered toward the dramatic in their recitations. There were unrepentant hippies and beatniks. There were men and women of all ages, gay and straight, black and white, but mostly white. In the more informal settings many of us would get exceedingly drunk and there would arguments of great import about the merit of a certain piece, or more so regarding the worth or talents of a given writer. Sometimes one drunken poet would pick a fight with another. There were also readings where poets competed against one another---contests, slams. If you have ever read Roberto Bolano's "The Savage Detectives" he delineates these times and passions eloquently and in surgical detail, though he was dealing with Latin America and Spain, and not the U.S.
I recall one reading where I had tried out a new story that I thought was my best effort at the ripe old age of 23. The room was mostly dark and wrapped in a curtain of smoke, and I couldn't really make out any faces in an audience of 20-30 people. But at one point the room fell silent, and I had paused at a section break in my story, when I heard a female voice shout: "What a good story!" And that was enough for me. It felt like I had just done a jazz riff. I finished the story and everyone politely clapped, but I cannot describe the adrenalin surge I received from that single outburst, how in that instant everything I had done in my life with the written word was validated and affirmed. I had similar reactions reading another work.
A few months later I would tape two reading segments of 30 minutes each for the local public alternative radio station. In the second show I also included another writer. Although radio helped me reach a wider audience and gain a little notoriety, my heart wasn't in it at first. At that time I was intimidated by recording equipment, and I missed the improvising one had gotten through reading or performing live. But my radio show had started a trend: the station, having done strictly music or talk until then, was enthusiastic and soon other writers and poets were reading or recording on this station; some sharing their own work, and others reading stories or poems of mostly famous writers.
It was a time in my life I am happy and grateful to have experienced. These days you can also read your work on You Tube, and that seems fine too. I'll close this post on a personal favorite You Tube reading.
tThe Laughing Heart
The people who showed up at readings were often more interesting than the poems and fictions being read, and that is not to denigrate the poems and fictions---most of them were not by any means dull or poorly crafted. There were an assortment of characters and something vital about interacting with a community of poets and writers. These characters ran the gamut from the earnest academic to the raging bohemian. There were the local luminaries whom everyone turned out to see. There were older hacks still laboring unrecognized and under appreciated, and you sometimes wondered what would become of them, though you already knew. There were upper-bourgeois patrons and dabblers who veered toward the dramatic in their recitations. There were unrepentant hippies and beatniks. There were men and women of all ages, gay and straight, black and white, but mostly white. In the more informal settings many of us would get exceedingly drunk and there would arguments of great import about the merit of a certain piece, or more so regarding the worth or talents of a given writer. Sometimes one drunken poet would pick a fight with another. There were also readings where poets competed against one another---contests, slams. If you have ever read Roberto Bolano's "The Savage Detectives" he delineates these times and passions eloquently and in surgical detail, though he was dealing with Latin America and Spain, and not the U.S.
I recall one reading where I had tried out a new story that I thought was my best effort at the ripe old age of 23. The room was mostly dark and wrapped in a curtain of smoke, and I couldn't really make out any faces in an audience of 20-30 people. But at one point the room fell silent, and I had paused at a section break in my story, when I heard a female voice shout: "What a good story!" And that was enough for me. It felt like I had just done a jazz riff. I finished the story and everyone politely clapped, but I cannot describe the adrenalin surge I received from that single outburst, how in that instant everything I had done in my life with the written word was validated and affirmed. I had similar reactions reading another work.
A few months later I would tape two reading segments of 30 minutes each for the local public alternative radio station. In the second show I also included another writer. Although radio helped me reach a wider audience and gain a little notoriety, my heart wasn't in it at first. At that time I was intimidated by recording equipment, and I missed the improvising one had gotten through reading or performing live. But my radio show had started a trend: the station, having done strictly music or talk until then, was enthusiastic and soon other writers and poets were reading or recording on this station; some sharing their own work, and others reading stories or poems of mostly famous writers.
It was a time in my life I am happy and grateful to have experienced. These days you can also read your work on You Tube, and that seems fine too. I'll close this post on a personal favorite You Tube reading.
tThe Laughing Heart
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