R.I.P. 2017: Legacy and Endurance

We can match memories to many names of the music makers who died in 2017, like Della Reese and Keely Smith, Tom Petty and Walter Becker, Fats Domino and Chuck Berry, Greg Allman and Glen Campbell, Rosalie Sorrels, Al Jarreau, J. Geils...

We can match memories to faces even if we don't always recall the names: Harry Dean Stanton, Martin Landau, John Hurt, Glenne Headley, Bill Dana, John Heard, Dina Merrill, Barbara Hale, Powers Booth, Robert Hardy, Richard Hatch, Bill Paxton, Robert Guillaume and many more, as well as iconic names and faces: Jerry Lewis, Mary Tyler Moore, Jeanne Moreau.

I'll remember Adam West as Batman, and also as the genial guy with great stories who stopped by my office in Pittsburgh, because the wife of the promoter who brought him to a convention in the city worked there.

Jeanne Moreau was the queen of the New Wave and French films generally in the 1960s and 70s, which is when I was avidly watching them.  She is best remembered for the film I remember her best: Jules and Jim.  Her magic on film is mysterious.

Director Jonathan Demme was most famous for Silence of the Lambs but I remember him for Stop Making Sense, the Talking Heads movie, after which he made a Bruce Springsteen film and at least three with Neil Young, as well as Melvin and Howard (one of Jason Robards' last great films) and Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia.  A director with range, documentaries, live action (concerts) as well as features, like Michael Apted or Martin Scorcese.

Though George Romero was a Pittsburgh director, I first saw Night of the Living Dead in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a highly educated and film savvy audience.  It was the first time I'd been in an audience of adults and heard screaming.  The Pittsburgh locations, accents and characters (come one, Chilly Billy as a newscaster?) took me out of the story from time to time but mostly I was gripped like everybody else.

Later when I was back in Pittsburgh the alternative newspaper I wrote for had second floor offices in a relatively isolated building on the South Side.  There were film editing suites on the third floor.  Friends working late in the newspaper office reported hearing chilling screams coming from the third floor, but soon learned this meant that the Romero editors were working up there.

Though these are famous people, people who worked in mass media, whose work reached millions over many years, in the end their legacy is personal, and different for each person they touched.

2017 saw the death of several iconic figures of the Civil Rights movement: organizers Roger Wilkins and Roy Innis, and "comedian"/conscience of the movement Dick Gregory, as well as American Indian activist Dennis Banks.  They fought for dignity, opportunity and equality, and their influence is reflected in individual lives--in kids who went to college who otherwise probably would not have had that ambition or opportunity, and so on.  Legacy in a lot of individual stories.

And so it is for the rest of us.  Legacy for ordinary people or less well known and less widely influential people resides most directly in children whose lives are nourished, guided or simply touched or inspired in some way. But legacy can move laterally through friends or even single encounters, and eventually touch complete strangers. In the end we have no idea whose lives we touch, and how that might play out through a generation or two, and therefore what our accumulated legacy might turn out to be.  "The only thing you can do for other people is inspire them," Bob Dylan once said.  An impression, a phrase, an example, who knows what endures in someone's memory, or someone's life?

I have a laptop I don't use very much, except when I'm traveling or my desktop is out of action.  So when I opened this laptop during our Christmas trip, I came upon an email I'd forgotten about, which I received last Christmas. (That is, I'd forgotten where it was.)  It was from Bill Thompson, my friend who died in 2017.   So it was as if I was receiving another, a last, holiday message from him.

Last Christmas Bill was happy, and eager to share his good tidings.  Both his daughter and her husband had serious surgeries.  She emerged from hers cancer-free, and her husband who came within a hair's breadth of dying from heart failure, had three stents installed, and passed his stress test with flying colors.

"Granddaughter Vivia demonstrates daily that life and learning are a joy," Bill added.  "My Christmas is merry.  I want to share my joy with you."

He knew the weight of the 2016 election and all it portended was on me, and he wanted to be encouraging.  He wrote:

There is talk of resistance and I support it. My life has taught me that resistance starts with endurance.

The world need poets and articulate visionaries. We need you. Endure.

I want to share my joy but the joy transfer app is not in the app store. We need one.

So endure my friend.

Tidings of Comfort and Joy

Bill

I remember that I emailed him back, noting that I'd had good news as well: after some concern from her doctor about complications, my niece Megan's pregnancy was now predicted to end in a normal delivery in about a month.  Just weeks before, another niece (her sister Sarah) had given birth to a healthy baby boy.

The doctor turned out to be wrong in one respect--Megan's baby boy was born two weeks early but quite healthy.  A year later, both boys and both mothers are thriving.

So we endure.