Elsewhere

"The mechanism of human destiny – that intricate weave of chance and fate and free will, as distinctly individual as a fingerprint - is surely meant to remain life’s central mystery, to resist transparency, to make blame a dangerous and unsatisfactory exercise.” Richard Russo, “Elsewhere”

“Elsewhere” is a memoir about the relationship between favorite author Richard Russo and his mother, Jean, who sought to escape the upstate mill town of Gloversville and lived either with him or nearby her entire life.  By turns hilarious and sad, the book contains events and personality traits similar doings and characters found in Russo’s novels.  Taking away his mother’s huge pill supply while she was in the hospital, Russo felt “like the parent who’d disposed of the weed he discovered in the back of his kid’s closet.” After his mother dies and her ashes are scattered at sea, Russo belatedly realizes that she exhibited the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder and that he was not so different from her as he once imagined.  Fortunately, Russo’s adult compulsion – fiction writing - enabled him to make a comfortable living.

Russo wrote that, unlike many university-trained novelists, he valued plot, paid attention to pacing, and had little tolerance for literary pretention. His literary references- to Kafkaesque nightmares, Jane Eyre’s madwoman in the attic, Jim Thompson’s crime fiction characters helpless in the grip of relentless forces, Melville’s Bartleby saying, “I prefer not to” – are easily grasped. And, finally, as per Thomas Wolfe’s acknowledgement, Russo realized that he couldn’t go home again, not even for Jean’s family memorial service.  He described his final sighting of the house on Helwig Street where he grew up:

    The hazardously sloping back porches, up and down, had been amputated, and nobody had even bothered to paint over the scars. The back door I was in and out of a hundred times a day as a boy now opened into thin air, a four-foot drop to a rectangle of hard brown earth that the house’s new owner couldn’t be bothered to seed.  After that, I no longer had the heart, or maybe the stomach, to bear witness, so strong was my sense of personal failure.

I enjoyed returning to my home town of Fort Washington every five years or so, when best friend Terry Jenkins and I would retrace neighborhood haunts. For many years our old homesteads were in decline.  In my case a German couple whom I expected would be model owners took more interest in building a second home in the Poconos.  Once, Terry talked them into letting us inside; the rooms seemed smaller and shabby, and I spotted a photo of some relative, surely, in a Nazi uniform.  On our last tour new owners had spruced up the lawn and garden, painted the side fence and garage, and left the magnolia and Japanese trees in their full splendor.  The Jenkins estate now had two houses on it, but we copped an invitation to come inside the 150-year-old original (at least as far as the first floor) and were impressed with the new décor with several doors removed and the screened-in porch now the main family room. Terry recalled that his old man had arranged for one screen door to face out and the other in so their collie, Taffy, could exit and enter at her pleasure.

Many former Gary residents share Russo’s reluctance to visit the neighborhoods of their youth, at some point having become determined to live elsewhere.  That was not the case with former Catholic priest and longtime Gary teacher John Sheehan, who nonetheless wrote a volume of poems titled “Elsewhere, Indiana” (1990).  The title poem goes:

Gary
a tenuous misshapen T

gerrymandered for planners

who live elsewhere

your streets torn up by heavy trucks

that make money for peopl

who live elsewhere

your “urban renewal”

twenty years old

only just begun

high-paid planners

mostly gone elsewhere

profits gone elsewhere

ain’t nobody here to say

enough money where their mouth is

how you can really be

a good place to live

for those who can’t very easily

go no elsewhere

         except maybe somewhere even worse

than this here where


like high-rise Chicago
one thing Gary
your kids growing up
if they can dodge bullets
that enrich profiteers
elsewhere
can look out their windows
and walk out their doors
to somewhere

Gary, Indiana
where
in spite of mammoth trucks
bisecting tri-state expressway
and abandoned buildings
they can see trees and squirrels and birds
and every manner of God-given beauty
in the trash-lined dunes and swamplands
 
but they can’t see the lake
unless they get out to Miller
and it’s hard to find the river too. 

Ray Smock responded: “Gary's story is the story of American exploitation and capitalist greed.  Far too many places in this country are just like Elsewhere, Indiana. The whole damn country is Elsewhere."

Muralist Felix “Flex” Maldonado described a labor of love in honor of the Region first responders that now exists in Gary’s Miller beach neighborhood:

    10 days.. 10 days of scorching sun, sweating so profusely it burned eyes while i painted, sweaty masks, ankle breaking rocks, rain storms disrupting my flow, mosquitos biting so bad i couldn’t stand it.... but i carried on because, knowing all this, i knew i would finish one day.... but not for these individuals who CHOOSE to struggle through worse conditions EVERYDAY.. This mural is a tribute to ALL first responders who put their lives on the line so we can try and live a little better life- my “heroes”, as I like to call them... i dedicate this one to you.

    Thank you Pat and Karen Lee, of Lee Companies for allowing me to bring this long awaited vision to life. you have made the community and this world a better place...

    if you see a first responder, tell em “FLEX” said “thank you”.. @ Miller Beach Indiana

Destiny and Power

“It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.” William Shakespeare, “Julius Caesar"

Jon Meacham’s flowery biography, “Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush,” begins with a variant of Shakespeare’s sentiment about fate and free will by William Jennings Bryan.  “The Great Commoner” and three-time Democratic Presidential candidate said, “Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice.  It is not a thing to be waited for; it is a thing to be achieved.”  Reading through Meacham’s biography of George H.W. Bush, I felt the pangs of nostalgia for a time when there was a modicum of civility in American Presidential politics.  That’s not to say that the competitive elder Bush did not play dirty when necessary – he brought up furloughed murderer Willie Horton so often that campaign manager Lee Atwater joked that people mistake him for Michael Dukakis’ running mate.  On the other hand, out of office, he found that he liked and respected his successors Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and certainly lived life to the fullest, celebrating his ninetieth birthday, for example, as he had done on his eightieth, with a skydive.  Meacham’s opus concludes with an episode that took place not long before that, when a hurricane was about to hit the Maine coast.  As power went out and winds approached 50 miles per hour, Bush’s chief-of-staff Jean Baker could not find him until alerted that he was outside on his scooter by the shoreline.  Barely able to stand, she reached him and asked what he was doing.  Meacham wrote:

  He looked at her with a puzzled expression, as if the answer were obvious.

  “I can’t see anything from the house,” he replied just audible over the whooshing weather, “and I don’t want to miss anything.”

 1967 Monterey Pop Music Festival poster

Michelle Phillip and Justin Russell of The Head and the Heart

It’s the fiftieth anniversary of the Monterey Pop Music Festival, a symbolic event that ushered in the psychedelic “Summer of Love” and was the inspiration for Woodstock, Altamont, and, at present, Bonnaroo and Coachella. In 1967, concert-goers were treated to performances by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Who, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, Ravi Shankar, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Eric Burden and the Animals, Booker T. and the M.G.’s, the Mamas and the Papas, and many lesser lights.  Returning a half-century later were Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead, Booker T., Eric Burdon, and the still radiant Michelle Phillips, formerly of the Mamas and the Papas, who joined the Head and the Heart and sang “California Dreamin’.”  Wish I’d been there.

Ron Cohen’s “Folk City: New York and the American Folk Music Revival,” co-authored with Stephen Petrus, got a somewhat favorable review in the Journal of American History, but – a pet peeve of mine – critic Ulrich Adelt adds his two cents about things that might have been examined more closely, such as the career of Jean Ritchie, sometimes called “The Mother of Folk.”  The Appalachian dulcimer player is credited with bridging the gap between the traditional and modern folk tradition.  The youngest of 14 children born into a musically-inclined farm family, Jean moved to New York around 1946 and worked at Henry Street Settlement. Through folk song collector Alan Lomax, who recorded her for the Library of Congress, she performed at hootenannies and became a regular on Oscar Brand’s WNYC radio show.

Delia, Phil, and Becca

Over the week-end Phil and Delia enjoyed a second honeymoon on Mackinac Island.  A half-century ago, my family took a Great Lakes cruise from Detroit to Duluth that included a stop there. Dave and Angie took Becca to show choir camp at Heidelberg University, but rain cancelled their plan to visit Cedar Point Amusement Park. 

Saturday at Chesterton library I picked up Depeche Mode’s new CD “Spirit,” featuring “Where’s the Revolution” and “Going Backwards (to a caveman mentality).”  In the serials room I read Dan Wakefield’s account of his high school days at Indianapolis Shortridge (class of 1950) in Traces magazine (the Hoosier novelist was friends with future Senator Richard Lugar; both were columnists on The Daily Echo).    

Dan Wakefield goes home

At Chesterton’s European Market an entertainer had set out a bongo drum next to his tip jar, and kids took turns banging on it – an ingenious gimmick that seemed to pay off.  Sunday at Miller Market Jef Sarver was back belting out the Animals classic “House of the Rising Sun” and other favorites, including a healthy diet of Eagles tunes.  I was eating a taco with Omar Farag when Councilwoman Rebecca Wyatt said hello and at first mistook Omar for brother Bobby.  Karren Lee told me that husband Pat had been in a cast for six weeks after missing a step on stairs and screwing up his knee.  He’s now started therapy with Toni’s instructor “Yoga Dave.”  Toni once made that mistake and broke her foot.  I did the same thing going into the basement shortly after we moved into the condo and fell forward, scraping my knee (the affected area is still discolored).

photos by Samuel A. Love

The Emerson portion of the Poetry Project kicked off with members of the Progressive Community Church, Emerson alumni, and former and current neighborhood residents. Samuel A. Love wrote: “We finally met the legendary Mayor of Carolina St, Keith, who is literally the last man left on the block and carries a great history. We enjoyed the energy of the joyful noise coming from the church while we painted. And we're glad the cops quickly realized we weren't ‘the two white guys seen looting out the back of the building.’ We'll be helping to finish securing the building and covering the boards with the people's words.”  What a shame that the historically significant school had been abandoned and left to deteriorate.

 Rosietta Brown

Barbara Walczak’s Newsletter reported the passing of bridge player Rosietta Brown, 81, for years active in the American Bridge Association, an African-American organization formed in 1933 at a time blacks were denied access to many bridge tournaments. Her friend Juwanna Walton wrote:

  I would always complain that I couldn’t remember all the different bridge rules.  You scolded me very harshly.  You told me, “Stop saying that you can’t remember – yes, you CAN!  You just have to get serious about your game, stay focused, and play as often as possible.”  I must say, that after taking your advice, I have seen improvements in my game.

  I am very grateful to you, Rosietta, for taking the time to be a mentor to e and for the role model you have become to me.  I grew to appreciate your valuable advice and from there a beautiful friendship was formed.  You told me to always remember that bridge should be a game of fun.

Rosietta Brown worked for many years as a travel agent and visited over two dozen African countries.  She donated clothes, books, toiletries, and school supplies to African children.

Arriving early to Gino’s, the hostess told me that several history book club members were at the bar.  Ken Anderson bought me a beer, and the owner gave me a free plate of delicious pasta and salmon.  Jim Pratt, a Republican and George H.W. Bush admirer, reported on Jon Meacham’s “Destiny and Power.” I noted that Bush’s greatest moment was not bragging about the fall of the Soviet Union and that his biggest political failure was not replacing Dan Quayle on the 1992 ticket with general Colin Powell.  I stressed how Bush was not averse to employing dirty tactics; everyone was familiar with the Willie Horton ads, and I added how he accused Michael Dukakis of being a card-carrying member of the ACLU.  Ken Anderson made the analogy with Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting charges.