Shapeless Shadows

"The difficulty to think at the end of the day

When the shapeless shadow covers the sun.”
  Wallace Stevens, "A Rabbit As King of the Ghosts"

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) wrote the above lines, quoted by John Updike in “Rabbit Is Rich,” shortly before he died. Born in Reading PA, near where Updike’s novel takes place, Stevens told the publisher of Poetry Magazine that one morning he spotting a rabbit outside his bedroom window digging at bulbs and since then wake up worrying about the rabbit and wondering what it was having for breakfast.  The poem contains these lines:

      And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light

      In which everything is meant for you

     And nothing need to be explained

     Then there is nothing to think of

When the days run together, it’s difficult to know what day of the week it is. I used to conclude my day watching CNN or MSNBC but it is hard to have it on more than a few minutes, with news of the virus worsening daily.  Chris Cuomo, CNN host, has tested positive and reports on his deteriorating health from his home.







CNN and other networks told folks not to do April Fools day pranks, that they would be in poor taste given the pandemic.  Agreed.  I have stopped doing them even since I told Alissa when she was a kid that I had chopped a tree down that she liked and she started crying.  She got more than even with me in years to come.  Post-Tribune columnist Jerry Davich once wrote a column claiming he was running for mayor and many people took him seriously. Dave once claimed to be resigning from teaching, and it backfired as many students were very upset. Sam Love posted a clipping of an article he wrote 22 years ago for the IUN student newspaper about a mysterious odor coming from the Raintree Hall men’s room, even purporting to quote a student claiming that he goes over to Hawthorn to relieve himself rather then go in there.

I received an email from Chris Sakelaris, a 1960 Froebel grad, who once lived at Eleventh and Harrison prior to construction of the Slovak Club and recalled Gary Aldering Settlement and Dixie Dairy.  His family attended St. Anthony’s near Fifteenth and Van Buren, which, he said had a dozen or more pool tables in the basement and an elderly gent nicknamed Pops collected ten cents a rack for from players.

In “Rabbit Is Rich” Harry turns on the radio on the ride home from the Toyota dealership and hears “Stayin’ Alive.” Updike wrote:

    The Bee Gees are white men who have done this wonderful thing of making themselves sound like black women. It’s the John Travolta theme song.  Rabbit still thinks of him as one of the Sweathogs from Mr. Kotter’s class but for a while back there last summer the U.S.A. was one hundred percent his, every twat under 15 wanting to be humped by a former Sweathog in the back seat of a car parked in Brooklyn.

The news, circa 1979, comes on with stories about Skylab, Three Mile Island, long gas lines, and then this:

   A Baltimore physician was charged with murdering a Canadian goose with a golf club.  The defendant claims, the disinterested female voice twangs on, that he had accidentally struck the goose with a golf ball and then had dispatched the wounded creature with a club to end its misery. The voice concludes, “A mercy killing, or murder most foul.”

At the country club Harry brought up President Jimmy Carter’s so-called malaise speech, where he talked about the country’s crisis of confidence and that most people fear things are going to get worse, not better, in their lives.  As Harry concluded, “Nobody is going to the moon much these days.”

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I watched “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” on HBO.  The theater where I first saw it is closed down until further notice. It takes place in the fall of 1969, a time like 1979 and today when it seemed like an era was ending and shapeless shadows were covering the sun. The Age of Aquarius had given way to crazed hippies following the likes of Charles Manson. The Brad Pitt stuntman character picks up one of them, an underage teenager who calls herself Sunshine, labels cops pigs and believes the system beyond redemption and that all but her tribe are blind.

A dog across Sand Creek Drive barks every time a jogger goes by, even sometimes when I open the garage door, as far away as we are.  We don’t hear him when inside but it must be annoying to neighbors.  When we lived at Maple Place, a young woman who lived alone across the street from us sometimes left her dog out all night when she wasn’t home – to keep away burglars, I guess.  That damn dog would bark incessantly, every time a racoon or some other wild animal came within sight.  We’d complain and she’d not do it for a while but then fall back into doing it again.

I’ve enjoyed posting high school memories on Facebook and getting replies from former classmates.  Unlike college, we came from many different backgrounds; and although there were cliques, we ad friendships beyond them.  One of the most unique guys was self-proclaimed atheist Charles Thomas, who threatened to write an expose about the rest of us.  He lived in a farmhouse near Susquehanna Avenue and had goats or sheep, can’t recall which. Vince Curll and I would visit him.  His mother was really cool, and he had a younger brother who, I believe, had gotten a girl pregnant.  Charlie, as we called him, never dated, or socialized with any other student, so far as we could tell. His mother was naturally delighted to see us. Charlie never attended any reunions, but after he died a hospice care nurse who’d met him came to one, saying what a nice man he was and that she wanted to meet some of his friends.  Since Vince never attended reunions either, she ended up talking to me. I was vert tactful, said he’d been quite a character who loved getting a rise out of people, and gave her directions to the farmhouse where he’d lived.

The navy has relieved Captain Brett Crozier, captain of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, of command after he warned that the corona virus was spreading aboard his ship. Rather than wait for his warning to make its way up the chain of command, he distributed numerous copies, and the press got ahold of the story. A hero to his men, Crozier paid the price for ensuring that the navy would take action as soon as possible.