Tony Bennett 1926-2023

I must have been around 9 or 10 years old when I was allowed to play my parents records, including 45s on the black RCA 45 rpm player with the fat spindle.  Among my favorites was an extended play 45 on the Columbia label (which included an ad for Coca Cola) with six songs by Tony Bennett that included several of his first hits in the 1950s: “Because of You,” “Cold Cold Heart” and “From Rags to Riches,” along with other releases and B sides (“In the Middle of An Island,” “Come Next Spring” and “Can You Find It In Your Heart.”)  Judging from the wear on the record I played it a lot, and I certainly remember those first three hits.

 

If I knew Tony Bennett was Italian it would have seemed perfectly natural: many of the singers I heard on the radio or saw on TV in the 1950s were Italian-American, including some whose records had Italian titles and included lyrics in Italian.  We had some of those records, too, like Lou Monte’s comic songs mixing Italian and what he called “British,” and the 1953 hit “Eh, Cumpari,” in which Julius La Rosa introduces instruments of the orchestra in Italian (which was fitting, since the orchestra as we know it was invented in Italy.) 

 Another 1953 hit was Dean Martin’s “That’s Amore.” The trend reached its culmination in 1958 with a song entirely in Italian sung by an Italian artist (and composer) Domenico Modugno, that became an international number 1 hit with the title “Nel blu, dipinto di blu,” but has forevermore become known as “Volare” (and a hit under that title for Dean Martin and Robert Ridarelli, otherwise known as Bobby Rydell.)

 The Italian accented song was so popular in the 1950s that non-Italians like the Andrew Sisters, Eddie Fisher, Tony Martin and Vaughn Monroe (a local favorite as well as a big star who graduated from Jeannette High School) recorded them. My Italian grandmother had no problem accepting “Mambo Italiano” and “Come on a My House” sung by the blondish Irish beauty Rosemary Clooney. She wasn’t Anna Marie Alberghetti, but… 

Tony Bennett, often paired with Rosemary Clooney

 I remember Saturdays when we visited my grandparents, ending in the darkened living watching the Perry Como TV show.  It may have helped that Como was a local boy from Canonsburg, PA, the son of an Italian barber who had plied that trade before becoming a full-time singer.  He was part of the culture I’d been born into, when my grandparents conversed with their friends in Italian, and my mother, my uncle and my aunt spoke Italian with them especially when they didn’t want the grandchildren to know what they were saying.  I went to school with lots of Italian kids, a number of which I was somehow distantly related to.

 The 1950s were the Italian decade in music and American culture, especially if you include singers at the end of the decade and slightly beyond not usually associated with their Italian heritage, like Rydell, Dion DiMucci (Dion and the Belmonts), Connie Francis (who did record Italian favorites later in her career), Frankie Valli (of the Four Seasons) and Lou Christie (also a Pittsburgh area singer.)

 According to Mark Rotella in his book Amore: Italian American Song, more than 25 Italian singers made the hit parade between 1947 and 1954.  Even competing with early rock and roll, singers like Vic Damone and especially Perry Como had hits in later years.  I was very aware of Como's “Don’t Let The Stars Get In Your Eyes,” “Hot Diggity Dog Diggity” and “Round and Round” (a big hit in 1956), for example. 

  But it wasn’t just Italian voices or Italian language lyrics—many of their hits were based on Italian folk songs and opera. And they brought an Italian style to what became known as crooning.  That style was a combination of opera and “bel Canto,” or beautiful singing—a style that Frank Sinatra pioneered and others adopted, including Tony Bennett.

 In his 2012 book Life is a Gift, Bennett attributes some of his longevity to training in this style.  “The style emphasizes phrasing, pure, even tones, and a disciplined form of breath control.  It never fails to improve my voice.”

 “Bel canto teaches you to love every note that you sing,” he wrote.  “It’s the art of intimate singing; you’re singing into someone’s ear.”

 I remember hearing Tony Bennett’s 1962 hits “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” and “I Want to Be Around” played often on the radio, competing with “Mash Potato Time” (the year’s Number 1) and “The Twist.”  After that I lost track of him, like a lot in my generation.  But he outlasted them all—well beyond the Italian crooner years into the second decade of the 21^st century.

 Apart from sheer longevity, he had other things going for him.  Bennett was drafted into the infantry in World War II, and after a scarring experience relieving soldiers who had fought in the traumatic Battle of the Bulge that turned him into a pacifist, he began singing with a U.S. Army orchestra put together to replace the one begun by Glenn Miller that ended with Miller’s disappearance in a light plane over the English Channel.  

He then used his G.I. Bill higher education benefits in an unusual way—he attended the American Theatre Wing, as did Harry Belafonte (the two became friends later.)  Bennett didn’t try to act professionally but applied what he’d learned about the Stanislavsky system to express the story within a song.  That subtle dramatic expressiveness was a key to his style. 

Another fascinating aspect of his life and career was his close relationships with black music and black performers, partly due to his love for jazz, and partly because he was just that kind of guy, with a multiethnic upbringing in the working class Bronx.  So while Bob Hope was instrumental in giving him an early break, so was Pearl Bailey.  Bennett was the first non-black singer to perform with Count Basie.  He toured with Lena Horne and was so close to Ella Fitzgerald that they and their families had Christmas together in Los Angeles every year that it was possible. Nat King Cole, Harry Belafonte, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington were also close friends. Through Belafonte he got involved in supporting Martin Luther King and marched, not just in Washington but where it was really dangerous: in Selma, Alabama. 

with Lena Horne

His mentors (principally Frank Sinatra), seniors (Bing Crosby) and contemporaries all lauded the quality of his voice and his singing.  He was known as well as an all-around good guy.

 He had his career struggles: starting out as a singing waiter, then after success in the 1950s he ran up against the dominance of rock music that panicked record labels in the late 60s and 70s and ended the careers of most crooners. 

 He also faced at least one occasion of the prejudice against Italians that was also present throughout the 20^th century, even in the Italian decade and beyond it.  In the late 60s Bennett was in a meeting at Black Rock, the Columbia Records headquarters which was on the exact spot where his father had worked in his family’s grocery store, when he overheard an executive of his record company talking about him and saying, “We have got to get rid of that wop.”  (That prejudice still exists, when all Italians are equated with the Mafia, and a collection of the Italian decade songs is marketed as “Mob Hits.”)

  Bennett seemingly sidetracked himself at times, insisting on recording jazz albums as well as pop.  But in particular his two albums with pianist Bill Evans gave him credibility beyond the hit parade, helping him to outlast musical fashion.  His return to popularity came especially in the 1990s, including a hit performance on the MTV series Unplugged.

with Judy Garland

 Throughout his long career Bennett continued to perform in clubs and other venues, and continued his creative approach to recording.  So he was prepared for the happy accidents that so often define a career. In the late 1950s a pair of New York songwriters gave sheet music of some of their songs to Bennett’s accompanist, who stuck them in a dresser drawer and only found them two years later when he was gathering clothes for a tour.  Upcoming gigs included San Francisco and one of those songs named that city in its title, so he brought it along.

 Bennett sang “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” for the first time in San Francisco.  The response encouraged Columbia to ask him to record it for his next single.  It was supposed to just be the B side, so Bennett did it in one take.  Once released it slowly built to a major hit, winning a Gold Record, and becoming his signature song.   

When Tony Bennett died this summer at age 96, stories often lauded him as a champion of the Great American Songbook, a recent categorization of classic pre-rock songs.  That’s true but a bit antiseptic. Bennett favored songs that connected with his audience. Apart from their musical pleasure, you can imagine how such songs as “This Is All I Ask,”  “The Good Life” and “Who Can I Turn To” spoke directly to people out there in the dark, maybe nursing their last drink late at night. I imagine “This Is All I Ask” became particularly powerful as Bennett and his audience aged.

 But the wonder of his late career is his new audience, partly due to his jazz cred, and partly because he recorded duets with younger artists.   Like Sinatra in the 90s, Bennett in 2006 and 2011 made two albums of duets, and did so with the same producer (Phil Ramone, who’d produced Billy Joel.)  But there the resemblance ends. 

with Lady Gaga

 Sinatra’s voice had faded, and his duet partners recorded their parts at different times and places to Sinatra’s pre-recorded vocals.  Tony Bennett recorded live only with his duet partners singing with him in the room (they included Barbara Streisand, James Taylor, Celine Dion, Diana Krall, Paul McCartney, Sting, the Chicks, Elvis Costello, Juanes, Aretha Franklin, Amy Winehouse, Natalie Cole, Queen Latifah, Willie Nelson and Lady Gaga, with whom he did subsequent albums.) Not only did he and those songs inspire excellent performances by his partners, but his  vocals on these reinterpretations of his own hits were thrilling and new.  “Because of You” was the first of his songs I knew, and his version with k.d. lang on Duets is singularly moving. 

   In the early 1950s Bennett was often paired with his young contemporary, Rosemary Clooney; he sang with Judy Garland in the early 60s, and ended his career on stage with Lady Gaga in 2021. 

Cary Grant evidently introducing Bennett to
Robert F. Kennedy

His friends included painter David Hockney, cellist Pablo Casals and poet Allen Ginsberg. For just about anyone else, the typical stories Tony Bennett told would be called name-dropping and humble-bragging.  But his sincerity was unquestioned.  And now we have irresistible tales of Cary Grant horsing around with Fred Astaire, or Astaire dancing alone to a song on the radio when he thought no one could see him. 

 Tony Bennett’s voice was strong and supple to the end. It could and did express a lifetime. There has  been no one like him, not for this long. May he rest in peace.  His work certainly lives on. 

The Best of America: 1963 in 2023

Monday is the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963.  It was commemorated Saturday with another march and speeches in front of the reflecting pool.  It's been duly noted in some of the media. 

On Friday, the Hill website had a story related to the 1963 march, with a photo that showed demonstrators near the reflecting pool, but it was not of that march.  The signs were different--those in 1963 had a uniform style, having been printed in union shops.  Unions were big backers of that march.  And as an indication of how long ago that march was, the attire of the demonstrators was different in this photo--the casual clothes we're used to now.  In 1963 the women wore dresses and the men wore suits and ties, though jackets did come off in that hot sun.  I know these things not just from period photos, but because I was there.

The Guardian story was interesting in adding big picture information I didn't fully know--particularly the active participation of the President John F. Kennedy Administration in making the march a success, and partly through union leadership, encouraging white participation.  Attorney General Robert Kennedy worked closely with march organizers, and even brought black police officers down from New York because at the time there were no Black police in Washington.  The Kennedys also helped with the sound system, calling on their campaign expert. (Even so, it wasn't great.)

The story also quoted some participants' recollections today, and I was pleased to see they remembered how extraordinary the day felt, as I did.  It's my strongest lasting impression.  As one put it, "I felt like I witnessed the best of America." This is worth remembering now, when we too often see the worst, like the deliberate slaughter of defenseless Black people this weekend by a coward with the Nazi insignia etched on his semi-automatic.

So I'm repeating my post from the 50th anniversary. slightly expanded.  I remember a few more details, but this gets to the essence of it.  Here it is: 

 

I was 17 when I participated in what was officially called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. I was a student at a Catholic high school, and heard my own beliefs expressed by President Kennedy in his television address that June: “We are confronted primarily by a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.”

In the weekly newspaper for the Greensburg, Pennsylvania diocese, the Catholic Accent, I read about an organization called the Catholic Interracial Council that was inviting people to go to the March. I contacted the priest who was named and he talked to my parents. He must have been convincing because I got permission to go.

But I got my first indication of just how small this group was going to be when I attended a meeting, and it was two priests and me. A photographer from the Accent snapped our picture as I pretended to paint the already completed banner we would carry.

As it turned out we were the only three people from the diocese to march under that banner. We would meet other people from the Pittsburgh area, organized by religious groups of various denominations as well as by labor unions and civil rights groups.

Many traveled to the March from all over the country by bus, and a few by plane, including celebrities from Hollywood and legendary entertainer and activist Josephine Baker from Paris. I boarded a special train from Pittsburgh, one of the twenty or so originating from various places that were added to take people to the March. Recently reviewing video from that day posted on YouTube, I was amazed to see a few frames of my 17 year-old self arriving at Washington’s Union Station (at about the 11:32, 11:33 marks), walking towards the camera and trying to look appropriately serious, in my best suit, white shirt and tie.

I also looked alert. Vigilance to the possibility of violence was universal that day. From police commissioner Bull Connor unleashing police dogs on demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, to the murder of Medgar Evers outside his home in Mississippi, it had been a brutal summer in the South. It’s been estimated that over 14,000 demonstrators across the South (including high school students) were arrested during those months, with at least one death.

When I got home I wrote (in the Catholic Accent) of the “dedicated and dignified fervor” around me at the march. But high spirits were also part of that day’s rhythm. From Union Station to the Lincoln Memorial there was always singing. For me it started even earlier, when I restlessly explored the train, wandering through one quiet car after another until I suddenly pushed open a heavy door to a car literally packed to the rafters with young people. Some were perched in the luggage racks. Several at the far end of the car were playing guitars, and everyone was singing.

The march itself was like one long song. It is more powerful in my memory than the hours of speeches at the reflecting pool. Looking into the faces of the people nearest me, and all of us looking around, my feelings became a reflection of what we felt in common.

From the Lincoln Memorial, Peter, Paul and Mary sang the Dylan song I loved--it was still new then--"Blowin in the Wind."  Later we--all quarter-million of us--sang "We Shall Overcome" with them, Dylan, Theodore Bikel and the Freedom Singers.

We were astonished by our numbers, by the fact of us all there, of the reality that was completely new. The overwhelming mood was wonder. It was a sustained altered state, a living dream.

We had a sense of unanticipated numbers on the march, but the dimensions of the day weren’t clear until we got to the reflecting pool. So many people (since settled at 250,000, the largest demonstration in U.S. history to that date) and yet the transfixing feeling of peace—I don’t think anyone had foreseen this.

I saw the joy and wonder and the tears as black people of different ages and from different parts of the country saw each other there. I was also aware that in this context they could see a young white face undistorted by hate or contempt.

We’d marched and sung together, but even as an audience for the program at the Lincoln Memorial, the interactions didn’t stop-- interactions that in the mid-1960s were still rare.

Now we stood in line together at portable water fountains and toilets. We bunched and sprawled on the grass together, sweating under the same steamy sun, both drowsy and responsive to the inspiring words and music coming through the not always comprehensible fuzz of the sound system. We felt careful courtesy becoming a release into a common regard. We looked at each other.


We listened to Dr. Martin Luther King together, quoting an American hymn—“From every mountainside, let freedom ring!” We heard his American litany reach its crescendo: “Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!...Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!”

“And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring... from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’"

When a subjugated people are freed, everyone is freed--that's the message behind this day, that informs the most famous part of this speech, when he describes the dream--a dream that in some ways he saw reflected in the water in front of him.  (He'd used the "I have a dream" refrain before, and at the time I thought I had already heard it. That seems unlikely, so maybe it was just so right that it seemed like it had always been there.)

The official intent of the March was to support passage of the Civil Rights bill that President Kennedy sent to Congress a few days after his June speech. Immediately afterwards I recall commentary in the press calling it a failure because that bill was stalled in Congress (it would pass in early 1964.) Today the march is better remembered than the political reason for it.

Race has still not been erased as deep separation, nor has full racial justice been achieved. But sixty years after that day, my memories aren’t of politics or even history. They are physical. They are of a possible America glimpsed by being lived.

copyright 2013, 2023 by William Kowinski

The Little Ways That Encourage Good Fortune

 

Wisdom is having things right in your life

 and knowing why.

 If you do not have things right in your life

 you will be overwhelmed:

 you may be heroic, but you will not be wise.

 If you have things right in your life

 but do not know why,

 you are just lucky, and you will not move

 in the little ways that encourage good fortune.

 The saddest are those not right in their lives

 who are acting to make things right for others:

 they act only from the self—

and that self will never be right:

 no luck, no help, no wisdom.

--William Stafford

I can think of situations in which the final stanza is not necessarily true.  But it is worth pondering.

Sunday Yellow Sunday

 Again today the outside was tinted a pale yellow.  Helicopters again roared over us, trailing kite tails of water buckets.  What sunshine made it through the high haze reflected off car fenders with a quality of filtered light we've come to recognize as meaning our air is thinly soaked in smoke from fires, this time to the east and north.

Climate distortion can be sudden and violent, as in the wind and rain now pummeling southern California from Storm Hilary, causing floods and mudslides.  Or it can be insistent with days and weeks of hot nights and hotter days, or as now here, with watering eyes, sinuses under subtle attack, and an eerie, yellow-tinted world.  The world is baking and burning, flooding and dying.  It's become the backdrop to everything, even our distraction, our going on, and even our forgetting.   

Hawaii 911

what do you think was here   before the pineapple fields

 would you suppose that the fields   represent an improvement

 do you think they smell better   than they did before

 what is your opinion   of those square miles of black plastic

 where do you think the plastic   goes when the crop is over

 what do you think becomes of the land   when the crop is over

 do you think the growers know best   do you think this is for your own good

 --from "Questions to Tourists Stopped by a Pineapple Field" by W.S. Merwin

In the public imagination, Hawaii is a tropical paradise--perfectly warm, with dazzling beaches and lush landscape, the rainforest trees bathed in sunshine and yet wet with the morning mist.  That carefully fostered image made the horrors of the past week especially bewildering.  

A perfect storm of dry wind and heat led to a perfect storm of consequences: all-consuming fire engulfed and destroyed a town as well as its surroundings, while cell service and 911 collapsed, and the water system failed.  People were literally driven into the sea to escape, a situation eerily similar to the opening disaster in K.S. Robinson's novel, Ministry of the Future.  The dead are still being counted, while many survivors watched their homes disappear into ashes.  

El Nino and the vagaries of a passing hurricane were proximate contributors, but more long term effects made this apocalyptic.  Since 1990, Hawaii's annual rainfall has decreased by 31% in the wet season and 6% in the dry.  This part of Maui has been in drought for some time.  Clouds have been thinner (less moisture, more sunlight gets through) and storms that normally brought rain have drifted northward.  Climate distortion is largely responsible for all of this.

Hawaii had an indigenous population and culture for thousands of years, and was an independent country until eventually the United States made it an unofficial colony, and maimed huge parts of it for firing ranges and bomb testing and other military uses, while  a few companies cut down forests to establish pineapple and sugar cane plantations.

That's why this catastrophic fire was not really a forest fire: what burned were non-native grasses in miles of abandoned sugar cane fields, weeds grown as high as five or six feet tall and dried out by the drought.  It was this tinder that gave the fires their speed and ferocity. 

Hawaii may have been an exception in our imaginations, but it is not an exception in the combined effects of generations of ecological destruction meeting climate distortion.  Rainforests throughout the world, weakened by clear-cutting, are endangered by drought, and once they collapse, it's a long way back.  Many if not most municipalities in the United States, with inadequate and highly vulnerable infrastructure, and general lack of preparation, are unprepared for such catastrophe.

Somewhere, some official or headline writer is going to call this Hawaii disaster a "wake-up call," if someone hasn't already.  But of course we've had hundreds of such wake-up calls and as a society always manage to hit the snooze button.  Republicans deny these realities, while it seems to me that the Democrats'  strategy to address the climate crisis and these related environmental catastrophes-in-waiting is to do so indirectly, incrementally and almost secretly, for fear of waking up the rabid opposition.  Maybe that will work.  But I have my doubts.

Words Matter: Less Than Fewer

 

What are the human and political
implications in the difference be-
tween "fewer migrants" and "less
migrants?"

“where will the meanings be

when the words are forgotten”

--W.S. Merwin

 A number of years ago I began noticing that in print and common speech, there were fewer and fewer instances of “fewer,” and more and more of “less.”  By now, “fewer” has more or less disappeared.  And our language is the lesser for it.

 It used to be that people wrote and said “less water” but “fewer people”; “fewer fingers” but “less hair.”  There was a reason for the difference.  For generations we learned in school that you used “less” for quantity, and “few” and “fewer” for numbers of individual entities. “Less” was about measurement, “few” about counting.  Therefore: less cement and fewer bags, fewer parties and less dancing.  (There are a few complicated cases, but that's the basic--and meaningful---difference.)

 Few and fewer even held a kind of pride of place.  Because less covered more things (including abstractions etc), the words that merited “fewer” were fewer, and their individuality and specificity were emphasized.  

 Today everything is less.   I knew we reached the nadir when I recently read the expression “less units.”  That sounds like the death knell of the distinction between number of individuals (or units) and quantities.

 It’s ironic that it is happening in the computer age, which is probably responsible for it in part, with its vast power to quantify everything.  For the digital age is based on digits, meaning numbers.  Most lives now center on various but precise numbers of zeroes and ones strung together. 

 As far as I know, nobody simply decided that there was less need for fewer, but the implied argument is that the opposite of both few and less is “more.”  So why not get rid of the complication, the possible confusion and embarrassment of using the wrong word, by getting rid of the word? It’s one less word to worry about, right?  

 As “fewer” has disappeared into “less,” so “number” has disappeared into “amount.” For instance, Bill and Luke Walton are the only father and son to both win two NBA championships, or as Wikipedia puts it, Luke’s two rings are “the same amount as his father won.” 

 The disappearance of the few/less, or number/amount distinction isn’t just an American phenomenon. A quick Internet search yielded examples from most English- speaking countries, including articles from UK’s Economist (“less people, more water”) and AllAfrica.com. (“Less People Buy Bibles as Condom Sales Soar.”)

  “The use of ‘less people’ etc. is so common in British English that there seems little point in claiming it as an error,” wrote a teacher in Great Britain to her listserv. Another agreed that “fewer” is archaic.  “…Less means the same as fewer,” wrote someone in a different discussion on the subject. “ So what is wrong with plain English, simpler English?  Want to write a Victorian novel?  Use fewer.”

Apart from the dismissive scorn, the implied point is that we moderns understand that fewer words makes more sense. In plenty of cases this general notion is demonstrable, but depleting the language of a meaningful and useful word only lessens the ability to make the distinctions that a sophisticated language is built to express.  That’s important in a complex society as well as a democracy.  

The other argument for less is the natural evolution of language, but not every change is better, let alone necessary.  We’re clearly in the midst of a pendulum swing from the sternly prescriptive model to the mindlessly (or should I say robotically) descriptive, which will only accelerate as hyper-descriptive AI programs rule the information world.  Unfortunately, words are not objects of fashion.  They aren’t handbags or hats. They are text and subtext of communication and meaning, and in the end they tell us who we are.

Just as the relatively sudden elimination of the fewer/less distinction may have subconscious causes, the effects of it may also seep into how we see the world. There may even be an attack on certain values of our society reflected in this elimination.  Perhaps we need to ask what has changed with the phrase “less people.”  Is it only the grammar of “fewer” and “less,” or is it our underlying idea of people?   

In changing how we express the outcome of a count, are we changing our conception of what we are measuring?  Do we see people only in aggregates, and not in affiliations?  Do we now consider people not as integers with integrity, but as quantities that are classified according to common characteristics?  

 Perhaps in our marketing-minded society, numbers of people translate too easily into quantities of money, or of votes. If votes are just quantities, then stealing them is just theft. But if votes are individual commitments added up, to cheat is to dishonor the people who stood in line at the polls for hours in the rain.  “Count the votes” means the voters must count more than the outcome.

  Quantity applies to objects, implying a passivity, of being acted upon.  Number and counting suggest subject, capable of action:  “Stand and be counted.”  Few can become many. When quantities of money have overpowering political effects, only numbers of people can balance it.

 “Fewer” has a dignity lacking in “less.”  By treating persons as quantities we send a message of disrespect, which then becomes a deficit of self-respect.The cause of human rights is based on the individual as significant, not as an indistinguishable element in a quantity that doesn’t count. When justice or health depend more on quantities of money and power, individuals count less.

  Turning people into quantities denies their individual qualities, and their individual stories.  Individuals must be judged on their merits. They must be counted.  Quantities don’t count—they can more easily be objectified, the first step to othering.  

Where people appear most as quantities is at the border, literally.  Immigrants are not only the most conspicuous other, they symbolize the other as a mass, as quantity.  It is the fear of their quantity that haunts people now, especially a subset of those who define themselves as white people.   Think about the human as well as the political implications in the difference between "fewer migrants" and "less migrants."  As in "Fewer migrants might have drowned had surrounding ships attempted rescue sooner."  Or "There are now less migrants because the ships did not attempt rescue."  

We see what we now call “migrants” as amounts, but seldom look at any—or even pictures of any-- as individuals. If we did, we would perhaps recognize a smile like an uncle had, or a frightened child like we once were. But even if they remain as strange looking as perhaps our own ancestors, we might hear individual stories of fleeing violence, oppression and the ravages of climate disruption. We would have to see that they count as humans like us.  Or like our blood ancestors, even parents or grandparents, when they were immigrants.  This is not to deny that mass migration is a problem for nations—it will become an ever bigger one as climate distortion effects worsen and spread.  But losing a sense of individuals is a poor way to start addressing it. 

 Losing the related sense of number to the universal amount also robs us of specificity and perhaps even poetic impact.  We speak of the amorphous amount of time but the number of days—a more specific and powerful accounting of time, as in the Biblical verse: “Teach us to number our days that we may get us a heart of wisdom.” 

 Our language is less flexible and exact for losing fewer, and so are we as human beings, and as human societies.  I suppose there may be an entire generation by now that has never used or even heard the word “fewer” in many contexts.  But neither that, nor anyone’s snide scorn, will take the word away from me, because I know at least some of its value. This word matters. So I’m proud to be counted as one of the few.

Updates to Recent Posts

 Nine days after the Climate Distortion post, about 175 million people (or close to the total US population in 1960)  in every region of the United States were under heat advisories with many experiencing high heat indexes. The temperature of the ocean off Florida was 100F.  High ocean temperatures in the Atlantic may fuel storms in the fast-approaching hurricane season.  After forty days of excessive heat, the southwest was anticipating moderating temperatures but higher humidity as monsoon rains were forecast for early August.  There were forest fires in ten European countries, as well as Canada and elsewhere around the world.  Antarctic sea ice is the thinnest on record for this time of the year, beating the all time record in 2017 by a considerable margin. The era of global boiling has arrived, said the UN Secretary-General. 

Apropos of the New College of Gilead/Florida post: for the start of the upcoming 2023-24 academic year, New College of Florida announced that 36 of 100 full time teaching positions were vacant.  Six vacancies were the result of resignations, and a quarter of them followed the extreme right takeover of the board of trustees.  In Florida universities generally, the loss of faculty this year is expected to at least double and perhaps triple the normal turnover.  One senior professor at the University of Florida law school who is Black said simply: "Florida is toxic."  He said there's been no new hires of Black teachers for years.  He has left the school and the state, partly for his own safety.  More at the Guardian.

Where Everything is Music

Don’t worry about saving these songs!

 And if one of our instruments breaks,

 it doesn’t matter. 

 We have fallen into the place

 where everything is music.

 The strumming and the flute notes

rise into the atmosphere,

 and even if the whole world’s harp

 should burn up, there still will be

 hidden instruments playing.

 So the candle flickers and goes out.

 We have a piece of flint, and a spark.

 This singing art is sea foam.

 The graceful movements come from a pearl

 somewhere on the ocean floor.

 Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge

 of driftwood along the beach, wanting! 

 They derive

 from a slow and powerful root

 that we can’t see.

 Stop the words now.

 Open the window in the center of your chest,

 and let the spirits fly in and out.

 --Rumi

translation: Coleman Barks

BK photo

Popped Out

Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response, falls the Pop-Up.

 No sooner do I begin reading a news or informational website than the words I am reading disappear under the sudden blot of a pop-up.  The rude wiggling ad or automatic mini-video screen at the margins are distracting enough, but the pop-up is a total interruption and thorough disorientation.

 It’s an ad, a plea for subscription or donation, or more often these days, an opportunity in the form of a visual demand screaming in your face to sign up for one newsletter or another.  Everybody has newsletters now, it’s the latest way to get your email and pile it high with opportunities in the form of spam until you hardly bother to check it anymore.

 Meanwhile you’ve lost the continuity of whatever you were reading.  And on many sites it doesn’t stop there. A pop-up totally obscuring the text may itself soon be obliterated by another pop-up.  That’s after the ad or message at the top of the page expands until you remove it to read the text, while a message below the text expands upwards, effectively squeezing what you’re reading into three or four visible lines.

 This is of course assuming you can get any text at all, without subscribing or registering or becoming a member or whatever.  But even a subscription or a membership won’t necessarily free you.  There are Levels to these things now.  The start page New York Times for instance has at least four categories (consumer guides, food, most sports, and games) that require additional payments beyond a mere subscription.  On other sites there are levels of membership privileges. 

 But along with your subscription comes cookies (and therefore the possibility if not the certainty of tracking) to “enhance your experience” and spy on you for profit. And more spam.

 What I’ve learned along the way is that a lot of those stories I clicked on aren’t really worth the trouble. There’s a lot of eye-catching “content” out there but precious little substance.  Sometimes a pop-up breaking the trance will help me realize I’ve been duped, I’m wasting my time.  So thanks a lot, I’m gone.        

Telephone Ringing

Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth

 Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)

 It is you it is you it can only

 be you calling and I cannot answer

 in time whatever time is with no answer

 though I can hear your voice without its words

 your own voice yours alone speaking to me

 through the dark echoless ageless corridors

 of six decades out of reach and beyond

 answering if I knew what to answer

 then we laughed as we talked about likeness

 and difference and the echoes of change

 about recognition and its one sound

while we changed without knowing we were

 answering but the question was still there 

we never answered it I remember now

 as I do not answer while it keeps ringing

 while it rings on and I do not answer

 and still do not know what the question is

--W.S. Merwin

Climate Distortion

Update: Nine days after this post, about 175 million people (or close to the total US population in 1960)  in every region of the United States were under heat advisories with many experiencing high heat indexes, and the temperature of the ocean off Florida was 100F.  After forty days of excessive heat, the southwest was anticipating moderating temperatures but higher humidity as monsoon rains were forecast for early August. The world is boiling, said the UN Secretary-General.

The current heatwave in the US south and southwest (as well as northern Mexico) is expanding.  The National Weather Service predicts that this weekend about 80 million people will experience temperatures or heat indexes above 105F.  And the heat is likely to continue into next week.

When you add up everyone in the world dealing with excessive heat for weeks at a time, and then factor in those dealing with torrential rain and flood, firestorms and smoke, and all the associated problems, that number must be in the hundreds of millions if not billions.

This is the summer that climate distortion comes home.  The heat is no longer a temporary inconvenience, nor are the floods and fires.  They are much harder to ignore, and for many they are fatal to ignore. Their reality changes everyone's daily reality: how they think, plan, act and feel.  It should be motivation for institutions to make more than temporary fixes.  Gaps in public services become more apparent and must be addressed.  Even when the weather changes.

Climate distortion--though not necessarily this summer's weather--is here to stay, for a very long time.  It seems important to me to understand what's happening.  Some people call it climate change (a name invented by a Republican consultant so it wouldn't sound so "negative").  But the climate hasn't changed.  It has been distorted.  From a different point of view, some call it climate derangement.  It's colorful, but it isn't any more accurate.  The climate has not changed nor has it gone insane.  The climate is doing what it has always done in these geophysical circumstances.  But something is distorting the climate--usually making it more extreme and violent.  Something is interacting with ordinary climate phenomena, like El Nino and various other cycles.  That something is excessive CO2 and other identified gases spewn into the atmosphere by industrial age human societies, and the global heating they have caused.  

The effects of these distortions can be predicted in a general way, but not in a weather forecasting kind of way.  More days of higher temperatures in the summer, for instance, has been widely predicted for decades as an effect of global heating caused by greenhouse gases.  But distortions are inherently volatile.  Nobody knows how they will manifest in a given year.  A distorted climate is full of shocks and surprises.  There may be baseline changes within all this, but those probably won't be known until some time has passed.  But because of time lag effects, a distorted climate is here to stay.

The distortions in turn can distort various major ocean currents and atmospheric currents that play a huge role in determining weather patterns.   Then we're in the area of feedbacks and tipping points.  That's climate distortion.  They can eventually alter key features of the planetscape that affect climate, like polar ice.  They can affect life directly as well as indirectly, with cascading consequences.

Some people won't care much why this is happening, but they may face the fact that it is happening. Maybe some other people will finally listen to the basic findings of climate science.  I am not one of those who make a  rigid slogan out of "trust the science."  First of all, there is no such thing as "the science." Scientists, for any number of reasons on a scale from benign to corrupt, sometimes sell conclusions derived from bad science.  Science is not pure.  Human knowledge is much weaker than we like to pretend it is, and that's really true of western science.  You usually have to use your judgment in which "science" to believe.  

But climate science--which is really a name for those studying chemistry, biology, physics and various more complex hybrids of inquiry applied to climate--has come at its conclusions in a variety of ways, from measuring aspects of today's world to measuring aspects of the deep past, to modeling various possibilities.  Some requires sophisticated computation; but some is based on quite elementary physics and chemistry.  All of this should be clear to anyone who has read or seen An Inconvenient Truth since 2006, and there are more sciences involved now. 

For decades now, thousands of scientists of various kinds from every nation on the planet have come together to share their findings and put together a consensus in UN climate reports.  No subject has been studied more thoroughly by more people over a longer time in a cooperative way, and come to the same conclusions.  In comparison, your doctor's diagnosis is the equivalent of a coin toss.  

There are a number of practical lessons to be derived from this, including that the resistance to climate crisis conclusions is largely in the murky realm of the psychological (though it is excused and made easier and therefore more cynical and corrupt by politics.)  That should tell us that in order to address climate distortion, its effects and its causes, means exploring our inner distortions--fears, needs, desires as well as such unconscious drivers as denial and projection.  It means exploring the inner distortions related to social media, algorithms, group dynamics and so on.

Finally it means finding again the core of our beliefs in ourselves, what we're all about, our operating principles, our deep commitments and ideals, all of which may have been distorted by the rush of complexities around us.  It's not going to be easy, navigating the increasing number of hotheads around us (is it coincidence that mass shootings have gone up recently along with the temperature?) but in the end society and the individuals within societies will rise and fall on whether "you'd do the same for me" remains a transcendent impulse of what used to be called decency. 

Heat is Global

 Updates 7/18: The high temperature in Phoenix equaled or exceeded 110 degrees F for the 19th straight day, and for the eighth consecutive night did not dip below 90. On Monday, a huge dust storm blew over the city.  Death Valley CA reached 128F daytime and 120 between midnight and 1 a.m. on July 17. These are air temperatures--it was estimated that the sidewalks were 200F.  Parts of Nevada struggled to go below 100F at night.  Parts of Texas continue to be gripped by a heatwave that is challenging power reserves for air conditioning.  

But the most dangerous place on Earth seemed to be Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East, where the heat index reached 152F.  Iran is suffering from water shortages as well.  All of these are getting close to fatal combinations of heat and humidity, called wet bulb temperatures. Even in Europe, where parts of Spain topped out at nearly 115F, and Italy at 113.  The hot temperatures in Greece are accompanied by fires raging around Athens.  Triple digit heat continued in China and Japan.  One town in China recorded a Death Valley-like 126F.  

Meanwhile the smoke from Canadian fires is again pouring down over Chicago, New York and other US locations.  Intense rain in eastern PA caused a sudden flash flood--4 feet of water suddenly washed over cars on a rural road.  Only two members of one family survived.  

So for the first time I can recall, heat has been consistently in the headlines for days at a time, linked to climate disruption caused by greenhouse gases. 

On July 3, Earth as a planet had the highest temperature ever recorded.  Scientists estimate that the world was hotter than it has been for something like 125,000 years.  That's about 90,000 years before the first known human cave paintings.

  The next day, July 4, it was hotter.  Two days later, hotter still. 

The temperature rise was worst in the worst places for future prospects, like the oceans and the Antarctic, but there are days and weeks already this summer of record-breaking heat in China, India, and Africa where drought persists and spreads, and far northern Canada, where forests continue to burn, week after week.  Texas is still in the midst of a crippling heat wave, while its governor signed legislation prohibiting local governments from giving outdoor workers a fifteen-minute water break.

 Parts of Arizona were also breaking heat records, and more heat is forecast for much of the Southwest and interior California this week and perhaps for longer. Meanwhile, sudden and intense rain storms—other manifestations of climate distortion-- flooded parts of the northeastern US and southern California.  This was after dense smoke from Canadian fires choked areas of the northeast and Midwest—smoke that is very likely to return.

  This is all happening even before the Pacific ocean phenomenon known as El Nino was predicted to start bumping up temperatures; scientists forecast it would be doing that six months from now.  Global heating, augmented by other atmospheric and ocean factors, is likely to make this the hottest year on Earth.  Until maybe next year.

The phenomenon of global heating is a condition of the atmosphere that surrounds every inch of the Earth's surface. Its basically distorts the climate systems that have harbored life as we know it for, say, 125,000 years.  Hotter weather is one of its manifestations, at different places and times.  But where heat and its other expressions occur, their effects are global: everything is affected.  

 Here’s the basic fact to consider about these current manifestations of climate distortion-- the fiery winds, the relentless floodwaters, the smothering smoke, the rising tides, collapsing land, deathly drought, titanic storms, and the implacable blankets of heat: they don’t notice if your house is worth fifty thousand dollars or five million. They don’t care about your stock portfolio or your credit score. They don't read your bumper stickers or yard signs. They don’t take into account your race, political party or religious affiliation.

 You can’t threaten heat with your AK-47, and you can’t shoot it dead.  You’ll sicken even quicker in your body armor.  You can't stop it with a gene-splice or an AI program.  There isn't an ap or a hack that makes it go away.  Congressional hearings just add more hot air.

  Heat doesn’t care if you live off the grid or in a metropolitan tower.  It doesn’t care where you get your news, or whether your smartphone is the latest.  It doesn’t know if you are a banker or an influencer, a feminist or a Proud Boy, or if you hate liberals or hate baby boomers.  It doesn’t care what your pronouns are.  It doesn’t notice how many likes you’ve collected. 

 It doesn’t care that you resent the rich or fear the poor.  When the tarmac melts at the airport, neither the airbuses nor the private jets can take off.  When the asphalt sinks, the Mercedes and the Volt alike can’t get very far. When the grid goes down from too much demand, and there’s no more fuel for the home generators, not much about you matters except where you are and who will help you.

 It took an entire year to gather and interpret the data, but it turns out that last summer in Europe—the hottest in its history so far—more than 61,000 people were killed by the heat.  Some died from heatstroke, but in more cases, heat killed people with serious conditions that otherwise would have lived.

 How many strokes and heart attacks are caused by the inability to breathe caused by intense heat? How many accidents are caused by overheated brains?  How many more diseases carried by insects that thrive on heat are spreading? How many infections and chronic conditions are related?  These things may not get counted quickly or at all, or widely reported (especially if they involve so-called migrants, the poor generally, the old) or even noticed, but that doesn't mean they aren't happening. 

 The current and upcoming heat wave in the southwestern US is at least happening at a time of the year when the air is dry.  If it recurs later in the summer, with higher humidity, it could conceivably reach the most dangerous condition in which (if the AC goes) thousands and even millions could die in a few days. Poorer places in Asia are even more vulnerable to this outcome, but parts of Texas and the Midwest are likely to see both triple digit temperatures and high humidity in the coming days, and the  Southeast is always prone to that potentially lethal combination.  The Pacific Northwest may be in for its second once-in-a-thousand-years heat dome of this year.

Heat affects the body and the mind, mood and emotions, and the ability to think clearly. The heat debilitates, and it can kill you even if you don’t believe in it, and all your cyberspace friends agree. It doesn’t weaken if it polls badly.  You can’t shout it down or argue it away.  

 Of course, it doesn’t hit everyone equally—not at first.  But the effects spread and cascade, so eventually it doesn’t matter if you are a billionaire or homeless, a buffed-up model or a helpless elder. It still happens.  Even if it isn't hot now where you are, you will still feel its effects eventually.

 The heat beats down on the animals crowded into mechanical meat factories, and in the fields and forests.  It bakes the soil and kills the roots of once-future food. It boils the water and the fish in it. It scalds the oceans and the tiny organisms that provide us with most of our oxygen. It kills the bees that keep plants growing, the insects that feed the birds (though it’s relatively kind to mosquitoes) and on up the chain.  Heat doesn’t care if you’re a vegan or a vegetable.  It just is.

 There's a lot that can be done to address the effects of climate distortion, and to address its causes so it doesn't get hopelessly worse in the far future. It’s a complex crisis but with a fundamental choice.  Either society works together for all, so that chances increase that many survive, with life on the planet relatively intact and the future is better, or it ultimately becomes every being for itself, with misery and violence for most, when at best only few survive, in conditions no one wants to contemplate. 

 Not everybody has to buy in, but the appropriate institutions on every level must be strong and courageous, and focused.  As time goes on it will take many more capable and dedicated people to do this work. This is a planetary emergency that is also many national and local emergencies.  All other distinctions among citizens ultimately become fatal distractions.  Until there is nothing but confusion, anger, desperation and then just dull heat in anyone's head.    

R.I.P. Carl T. Severini 1932-2023

Carl outside home in Youngwood with his sister
Flora (my mother) and his mother Gioconda

 Carl Thomas Severini was my mother’s younger brother. He was born in 1932, one of the worst years of the Great Depression.  Nevertheless he grew to be about a foot taller than either of his parents and either of his sisters.  He played pickup football with neighborhood friends in the very small western Pennsylvania town of Youngwood, even when nobody could afford an actual football.  They used an old evaporated milk can, sealed at both ends. 

 He remembered flooded railroad tracks before New Deal era flood control projects cut down on their frequency, and he remembered watching people stream past his house on Depot St. with food baskets, on their way to catch the special train to Idlewild Park for Youngwood’s community picnic. His family soon joined them.

 During World War II, Carl participated in scrap drives, collecting cans, old nails and other discarded metal in his wagon, which he took to Holy Cross school, so it would eventually be loaded into box cars at the Youngwood depot and sent off to be re-purposed for the war effort. He remembered hearing the news of President Roosevelt’s death on the radio.

 The Severini home in Youngwood had a player piano—not uncommon in those days—and Carl began taking piano lessons when he was about 10.  By the time he started college he performed in a series of local dance bands.  

He was such an excellent student that he completed two grades in one year, and finished 10^th grade with honors at the age of 14.  Perhaps influenced by his Tom Swift novels and other futuristic fiction, he was interested in science. By the time he was a senior at Youngwood High, he told the school yearbook that his ambition was to become a chemical engineer.  He also expressed preferences for Cary Grant, the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, relaxing at the Rexall Drug soda fountain and playing basketball. He and his neighborhood friends had chipped in and bought a hoop that they mounted on a pole on First Street.

 He graduated from nearby St. Vincent College in 1952, and in 1954 he married Rose Morozowich, my beloved Aunt Rose.  They eventually would raise three daughters and two sons in a marriage that lasted for 67 years, ended only by Rose’s death.  

One of Carl’s first jobs was at Callery Chemical in Evans City, PA.  As the newest employee, Carl was often left to mind the store when everyone else went to lunch. That’s how he met Admiral Hyman Rickover, who was overseeing the construction of the first nuclear powered submarine.  He was touring facilities that might contribute to the Nautilus, and arrived at lunchtime, so it was up to Carl to show him around.

  Callery soon decided it could use an employee with a law degree to handle its patents, and offered to pay (or perhaps help pay) for law school. After someone else turned it down, Carl jumped at the offer.  He graduated from the law school of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh in 1960.  Patent law would become his career.

 He soon became a patent attorney at PPG—then still known as Pittsburgh Plate Glass-- and remained there for 32 years.  He became PPG’s Chief Patent Counsel, and served as president of both the Association of Corporate Patent Counsels and the Pittsburgh Intellectual Property Law Association.  His work involved extensive travel around the United States as well as Europe and Asia. Sometimes he would drop into antiquarian bookstores to find first editions of the Tom Swift series he’d read as a boy.  He eventually collected the entire series.  

My Uncle Carl was a major figure in my young life.  He was just 14 when I was born. To get a little perspective on that, my mother—his oldest sister—was 12 years older than him.  While I never thought of him as an older brother, his youth and the things he did—playing basketball, playing piano, going to college—were more interesting and exciting.  He was also fun.

 At some point in my first few years he worked in the summer at a drug store in downtown Greensburg, and would walk down to College Avenue to our apartment, where my mother would make him lunch. But my first memories of him are situated at my grandparents home in Youngwood, where he lived in high school and college. I recall watching him play piano, his left hand flying back and forth on the base notes while his right hand did something completely different.  Sometimes I would crawl under the keyboard and listen from there, watching his feet work the golden pedals.  If he wasn’t at home when we visited I would ask where he was.  At least once I found him playing basketball on First Street.

 We moved into our house on what was then called Lincoln Avenue Extension just outside Greensburg when I was four or so. Probably when Carl was at St. Vincent College he would suddenly show up in his car.  Though he spent most of the time with my mother, his visits were special events for me.  Once before I started school I was out in the yard writing numbers and letters on a blackboard.  He approved, but noticed that I was making the 4s wrong.  I didn’t make that mistake again.  His visits were impromptu, or a least I usually didn’t know he was coming.  Once it occurred to me that when he wasn’t there, he was doing other things that I didn’t know about.  At first I could almost understand how he had a life away from me—or that in general things could happen without me being there, then I couldn’t, and then I could again, and forever.  These are some of my earliest memories, and there aren't many more.  My Uncle Carl was part of them.

 When I was nearly 8, his wedding reception at the Roof Garden of the Penn Albert Hotel was a major event—perhaps the first time I’d heard a live band.  This was when wedding bands played Italian tunes as well as Big Band numbers from the 1940s.

  When I was old enough, Carl’s visits to our house included playing catch with baseball or football.  I threw my first forward pass to him, leading him and hitting him in stride on my first try, earning his praise.  A big moment.

 Now I notice that in the photos I have of the two of us from my childhood, we are always in physical contact.  Twice I’m perched on his shoulders, and there’s a group photo taken in the early years of his marriage.  We are all visiting his other sister, my aunt Toni, in Federalsburg, Maryland.  We’re sitting on the stoop of her house at 305 Morris Avenue (an address I remember because it was one of the first I learned—my cousin Dick was probably my first correspondent.) There’s Carl and his wife Rose, my sister Kathy and cousin Dick.  I’m sitting on a step between Carl’s legs, with his arms draped down over my shoulders.  I remember the warmth and comfort of that contact.

 Even when he and Rose moved away—to Butler, to Evans City—we would have family visits, and of course the big family meals in Youngwood, especially on Christmas and Easter.  When his first two daughters (Susan and Shirley) were little girls, and I had two younger sisters (Kathy and Debbie), our families took a vacation trip together, through New York state to Niagara Falls.  Then when I was in high school, Carl discussed colleges with me.  He was the only person I could talk to in person who’d even been to college.  He told me what only a graduate knows: that the people you go to college with will remain in your life to some degree thereafter.

 Carl and Rose’s first son Tom was born in 1959, then their third daughter Nancy ( I remember carrying her as an infant to the front door of another relative’s house.)  Steven was born when I was away, but I saw more of him when I had moved back.  Our dinners at Carl and Rose’s home in Murrysville, and later at their vacation farm, would typically involve Carl leading some athletic activity outside afterwards with all the kids, usually involving a football. I noticed that at that point we did a lot more running around that he did.

 Once when he was in Boston in the 1970s and I was an editor at the Boston Phoenix, we had dinner together atop the new Prudential Building. Over the years, Carl was present at important family moments, from weddings to funerals. He spent time with my father in the months after my mother died. When his father died he watched over his mother for decades, and oversaw her care in her last years.

 After I moved to California I made it a point to see him on my infrequent visits to family in Pennsylvania. I had lunch with him on one such visit and told him what he had meant to me as a child.

 When he was in his late 80s, Carl and I began corresponding by email regarding his early memories.  He remembered the names of grade school teachers, his first music teacher, and the bands he’d played in. He especially remembered my mother, and her kindnesses to him as a child. 

 The last time I saw Carl and Rose was a little earlier, in the fall of 2019.  My sisters and I visited them at their home in Murrysville.  We marveled how little it had changed.  The piano that had been a fixture of my grandparents’ house was still in their living room.  They looked and seemed the same, even as they told us about the many cruises they had taken after Carl retired.  Carl still had his lively sense of humor, perhaps even more so.

   We had some wine and cheese—Carl pointed out that the wine was a Montepulciano Abruzzi, made in the region when the Severini family came from and where Carl had visited several times, maintaining ties with the Old World family (though they were actually descendants of my grandmother.) Then we went to dinner at a nearby Italian restaurant.

 It was a still point in a turning world.  For as unchanged as they seemed, both Carl and Rose had experienced serious health problems by then.  In the next several years, they sold their house and moved closer to their last child who still lived in Pennsylvania. Their daughter Nancy and her husband John took care of them from then on.

 Carl had a series of heart problems and was near death more than once.  But it was Rose who passed away first last year.  Carl moved to a skilled nursing residence nearby. He celebrated his 91^st birthday in January. As this June was coming to a close he had a particularly alert week, visiting with daughter Nancy on Sunday the 25^th.  He had a good morning on Monday, and then suddenly slipped away. 

 May he rest in peace.  His legacy lives on.

The Wonder of the Imperfect

 

Nothing that I do is finished

 so I keep returning to it

 lured by the notion that I long

 to see the whole of it at last

 completed and estranged from me

 but no the unfinished is what

 I return to as it leads me on

 I am made whole by what has just

 escaped me as it always does

 I am made of incompleteness

 the words are not there in words

 oh gossamer gossamer breath

 moment daylight life untouchable

 by no name with no beginning 

what do we think we recognize

 --W.S. Merwin

BK photo

Dedications/Pledges/Commitments

 

For the past.

 For my own path.

 For surprises.

 For mistakes that worked so well.

 For tomorrow if I’m there.

 For the next real thing. 

 Then for carrying it all

 through whatever is necessary.

 For following the little god who speaks only to me.

--William Stafford

BK photo 2023

Your Daily Lear

 

--words and image by Edward Lear

And happy birthday to Janice Timko, who apparently now lives in Austin, Texas.

Your Daily Lear

 

---words and image by Edward Lear

Men Made Out of Words

What should we be without the sexual myth, 

The human revery or poem of death?

 Castratos of moon-mash---Life consists

 Of propositions about life. The human

 Revery is a solitude in which

 We compose these propositions, torn by dreams,

 By the terrible incantations of defeats, 

And by the fear that defeats and dreams are one.

 The whole race is a poet that writes down

 The eccentric propositions of its fate.

---Wallace Stevens

photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson

London, 1950s or 60s