Scanned Photographs

Talk about being overwhelmed. A couple of years ago Jonathan and I went through some 4,000 photographs that I've been carting around since the photography bug bit me as a kid, and we shipped them off to ScanMyPhotos in California for scanning. The preparation process is a bit involved to get it right. I was terrified to part with the photos, even via the most secure shipment method, but the time had come to step into the brave new world, and jettison the hardcopy versions that just take up space.

These all were returned along with DVD disks which, although I've seen them all, I have yet to fully organize. But in the meantime, I had discovered still another +/- 4,000, mostly in boxes in back of closets, so buried I did not know they were there. I had suspected missing photographs as ones I took with my childhood Brownie and with my father's Speed Graphic were not among the first batch. I had sadly reconciled myself to losing them, but they were among this last batch, including a "self portrait" I took with my first camera in the hallway mirror of the first house we lived in, crossing my eyes to make a big impression. I was about 9 or 10.

There were also some photographs not scannable (those smaller than 3x3 and those in poor condition), so I digitally photographed them. Furthermore, several hundred 35mm negatives turned up, mostly B&W when I did my own developing, and they were able to be scanned by ScanMyPhotos. I've been pleased by the service, their turnaround usually in a week.

So, in total, I'm left with about 10,000 images all needing review and organizing, probably something I'll never really finish doing. But as I go along with the task, from time to time I'll post some here. That will be a idiosyncratic, eclectic mix, but that may be the only way to get some of them out "there."

I'll start with this sequence, shots of me -- I'm in my mid 40's -- attempting to stay on a windsurfer off our Norwalk Islands anchorage. I remember the incident well -- I was as successful doing that as I was water skiing. In spite of being on the water much of my life, water sports eluded me. It was embarrassing at the time, but laughable in retrospect. I made up for it in other sports, anything involving a ball. Good eye/hand coordination but lousy balance.....


Finally, a scan of my all time favorite photograph. When Jonathan was born, I was working with my Nikon F and I set up a studio in the garage. I took photographs of him in his Oshkosh jeans. My mother, who was a very good artist, did an oil painting of another picture I took seconds after this one (her signature "Grandma Penny" is on the left sleeve).

Play Ball!

Build it and they will come. But how? It took my first visit to the new Yankee Stadium in the Bronx to clearly see the growing disparity between the haves and the have-nots. We can build a stadium while our infrastructure is allowed to crumble.

My son, Jon, and I had been talking about going to the new stadium for some time, my having taken him to his first Yankee game at the old stadium. And when I used to go there decades before as a boy, I sat in the bleachers – 50 cents a seat. In those days my Yankee heroes, Mantle, Rizzuto, Berra, Ford, etc. made salaries that hardly approached six figures.

When we went to games with our sons in the 1980’s, occasionally we would go to the Stadium Club before the game and one time Bill White and Phil Rizzuto (after they became announcers for the Yankees) were having dinner at the next table. Phil was joking with Bill, calling him a huckleberry, when he asked the fellow diners whether anyone had some aspirin. My wife produced her handy pill box and offered Phil a couple so we talked for a while with him – my father graduated from the same high school as Phil and in about the same year. I wonder whether today’s players would be as friendly now that they are paid the same as elite entertainers.

The trip to the stadium on the New Haven railroad, changing at 125th street for a short express to Yankee Stadium at 153rd street, underscored the new two-world order, the trains the same ones I rode on to Grand Central some 30 years ago, on tracks that were built long before that, the air conditioning barely working, the transportation infrastructure hanging threadbare. The return trip was even worse, typical delays, waiting at 125th Street station, and making a connection that was so packed the standing room only did not even provide a space for putting down one’s bag. Amazingly, everyone just seemed resigned to this reality, along with the extreme shuddering of the train because of the poorly maintained track bed, conditions that would not be tolerated in most other advanced countries. Perhaps not coincidentally, the day we went to the stadium there was a major water main break in the Bronx, 100 year old pipes bursting and creating a river in the streets. Maybe we can get another 50 years out of them?

While the funds or motivation for rebuilding our infrastructure seem to be lacking, that does not apply to tearing down the old Yankee Stadium to rebuild one with Disney-like features. Good seats are now all corporate owned at astronomical prices and as an individual you can bid on those that are posted on such sites as StubHub, but with after tax dollars while corporate holders buy them as a deductible corporate expense. Why bother closing such tax loopholes that subsidizes professional sports?

The prices for food and drink are commensurately expensive, a cup of $12 beer or an $8 hot dog. A Yankee cap is a mere $27. Perhaps that is what is meant by trickle-down economics –corporations buy tax-deductible seats at preposterous prices, that revenue (with those from broadcasting) shifting to MLB owners and players, and then trickling down to those people employed at the ball park to move hugely inflated priced merchandise and food to the masses. Everyone wins!

But if one can look past those economic realities, there is the intrinsic beauty of the ball field, a near facsimile of the old stadium and its rich history, and that certain feeling when, after the national anthem, “play ball!” settles in one’s mind, harking back to a time of innocence. It is nice to remember, and to share the day with my son, but sad as a society we have become so divided, with no clear vision of economic priorities.

Irving Writes about Writing

In the corner of my home office is a “must read” shelf of novels and short stories, some are ones I want to reread, but most are either new titles or ones I just did not get to during my working career. While many of these I already owned, or buy used from Amazon’s affiliated vendors, I allow myself the luxury of acquiring new clothbound editions written by my favorite writers. Two such recent purchases were Anne Tyler’s Noah’s Compass and John Irving’s Last Night in Twisted River.

When I finished my last book, given to me by my wife for Xmas, a wonderful, informative compendium, Geniuses of the American Musical Theatre; The Composers and Lyricists by Herbert Keyser, I debated about my next book, eyeing that new Tyler and Irving title, among the others I had squirreled away for the “right moment.” Impulsively I picked up the John Irving novel. Not sure exactly why, as I really ENJOY reading Anne Tyler, even if she writes about the same flaky characters in their Baltimore environs. Sometimes I feel like I am one of them, an accidental tourist on the journey of life.

Enjoyment would not be my motivation for reading Irving; rather, I would call it a COMPULSION and perhaps that is why Twisted River, once in my hands, became the choice du jour. Irving’s characters are not ones I easily identify with so I follow them somewhat dislodged from the comfort zone I am normally within Tyler’s or Richard Russo’s worlds.

And, indeed, Twisted River has a panoply of larger than life characters and Amazonian or Rubenesque women, the latter including Injun Jane, Six-Pack Pam, Carmella Del Popolo, and Lady Sky just to name a few of the colorful names. And then there are the men, who are often generically referred to as, “the cook” or “cookie” (Dominick), “the writer” (Daniel), “the riverman” or “the river driver” or the “logger” or the “woodsman from Coos County” (Ketchum), and the “constable” or the “crazy cowboy” or the “crazy cop” (Carl). In typical Irving fashion, there are scores and scores of supporting and minor characters.

Irving makes me feel as if I am entering a nightmare; so from the opening pages of Twisted River there is that sense of foreboding. His writing makes me stop here and there to figure out relationships, or potential relationships, as if I’m moving through molasses at times, but he is such a superior storyteller that you are drawn in and the story itself takes over.

He paints a portrait of three generations over the last fifty years and in a number of places, Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire, Boston, Toronto, a twisted river of American life, Irving painting one part of the picture, jumping to another part of the canvas, temporally and geographically, circling and backfilling, bringing the story back to the beginning at the very end. It is an odyssey for the characters and for the reader. As Irving and I were born in the same year, the historical background of the novel is the one we’ve both lived at the same moment of our lives. The political history of “an empire in decline” is an omnipresent part of the novel’s subliminal setting, the arrogance of power from the folly of Vietnam to the Iraqi invasion.

Many of the usual Irving themes or symbolism are here: the bears, wrestling, New England, hands (or lack of), tattoos, accidents and fate. But, of all his novels, this may be the most illuminating about Irving himself and the craft of his writing. He even describes his Cider House Rules as another work of fiction in this novel called East of Bangor.

The main character in Twisted River is Daniel Baciagalupo a.k.a. Danny Angel, his pen name for most of the novel. Danny is Irving’s voice about writing, revealing his own tricks of the trade such as the following:

Maybe this moment of speechlessness helped to make Daniel Baciagalupo become a writer. All those moments when you know you should speak, but you can’t think of what to say – as a writer, you can never give enough attention to those moments.

All writers must know how to distance themselves, to detach themselves from this and that emotional moment, and Danny could do this – even at twelve

One day, the writer would recognize the near simultaneity of connected but dissimilar momentous events – these are what move a story forward….(He was too young to know that, in any novel, with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.)

Childhood, and how it forms you – moreover, how your childhood is relived in your life as an adult – that was his subject (or his obsession), the writer Danny Angel daydreamed….

I particularly appreciated Irving’s attention to Danny’s experience at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Some of my favorite writers have taught or have been taught there, luminaries such as John Cheever, Philip Roth, Richard Yates, Raymond Carver, Kurt Vonnegut and, of course, John Irving.

One of Danny’s teachers there is Kurt Vonnegut* a kind man and a good teacher. Describing Vonnegut’s criticism of Danny’s punctuation problem gives Irving the opportunity to reveal the major influences on his (both Danny’s and Irving’s) work: Mr. Vonnegut didn’t like all the semicolons. “People will probably figure out that you went to college – you don’t have to try to prove it to them.” [B]ut semicolons came from those old-fashioned nineteenth-century novels that had made Daniel Baciagalupo want to be a writer in the first place….Danny would be at Exeter before he actually read those books, but he’d paid special attention to those authors there – Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville…And English novelist Thomas Hardy naturally appealed to [him], who – even at twenty-five – had seen his share of what looked like fate to him. Danny (and Irving), says of his former teacher: Danny like[d] Kurt Vonnegut’s writing, and he liked the man, too. Danny was lucky with teachers he had for his writing….

Ketchum (the woodsman) is an idealized alter ego of Irving, perhaps the man he sees himself as being outside the world of writing, while Danny’s father (the cook), a kindly man, protective of his son, is the idealized father who Irving never met. Irving loves these characters, and the stories of all three men are so tightly interwoven we mourn their aging in the novel as if they are one.

The reoccurring themes of Irving’s novels, the vulnerability of childhood, and the inevitable loss of innocence, Irving’s pessimistic distrust of human nature are evident here as well:

Danny Angel’s novels had much to do with what the writer feared might happen. The novels often indulged the nightmarish – namely, what every parent fears most: losing a child. There was always something or someone in a Danny Angel novel that was ominously threatening to children, or to a child. Young people were in peril – in part, because they were young!”

But what was political about [his] other five books? Dysfunctional families; damaging sexual experience; various losses of innocence, all leading to regret. These stories were small, domestic tragedies – none of them condemnations of society or government. In Danny Angel’s novels, the villain – if there was one – was more often human nature than the United States.

It is well known that Irving works from the end of a story to the beginning and so does Danny: As always, he began at the end of the story. He’d not only written what he believed was the last sentence, but Danny had a fairly evolved idea of the trajectory of the new novel.…That was just the way he’d always worked: He plotted a story from back to front; hence he conceived of the first chapter last. By the time Danny got to the first sentence – meaning to that actual moment when he wrote the first sentence down – often a couple of years or more had passed, but by then he knew the whole story. From that first sentence, the book flowed forward – or, in Danny’s case, back to where he’d begun.

And so it is with Twisted River, a work that is a mirror within a mirror as it is Danny Baciagalupo who becomes its author in the end, Irving bringing together all the themes and characters in a coda so powerful that I found myself emotionally choked as I concluded the novel, especially relating to one of Irving’s culminating thoughts: Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly – as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth – the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives. It left me bewildered as to how I could have been so unprepared for such a reaction, other than being in awe of Irving’s gifts and the knowledge that we are all bobbing along on a twisted river, a circle of life.

* In my working days we had published The Vonnegut Encyclopedia, subtitled An Authorized Compendium as it had the full cooperation of the great writer himself. I had asked Vonnegut whether he might inscribe a copy to my son who was in high school at the time and already an admirer of Vonnegut’s writings. I was both deeply moved and amused by his inscription:



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Block Island Days

Perhaps some things are better left alone. For instance, I recently visited the offices where I used to work. The building was brand new in 1979 when I leased those offices, at first the 2nd floor of the three story building, eventually occupying the entire building and the one next door as well. The last time I was in the building was about eight years ago. Since then the interior was reconfigured leaving a maze of cubicles and now the company has changed ownership. The offices are being closed and there remains just a skeletal staff in the transition phase. So, it was a bittersweet return, seeing a few people with whom I had worked, reminiscing about the “old times.” As I left the building this one last time, it was with a sense of sadness I thought I had already overcome.

You can’t go home again. There are certain memories you should put away in the museum of your mind, leaving them perfectly preserved in their protective cases.

In a sense, the many days we spent boating to Block Island have become such a treasure. Perhaps that is one of the reasons when we last left the Great Salt Pond of Block Island a few years ago, I suspected we might never return. Not having gone back, that sense of not wanting to revisit what had such an impact on our lives, has been reinforced with each passing year.

Those were our adult to later middle years and now, with our children grown, and with the rigors of boating becoming more challenging as we age, not to mention the explosive expense of fuel and dockage, Block Island is now just a wonderful memory.

For us the journey began in our little 28’ boat in 1984 -- ‘Spindrift’-- equipped with not much more than a compass and a VHF so our ninety mile trip from Norwalk, CT through the infamous “Race” with its frequent fog, turbulent water and numerous fishing boats to navigate around, into the Block Island Sound, exposed to ocean swells, and finally into the Great Salt Pond of Block Island, was an adventure. We relied on compass headings and visual sightings of certain buoys, zigzagging our way there.

The first couple of years of venturing to Block we tried the docks at both Champlain’s and the Block Island Boat Basin, the advantage of the former being its salt water pool that our then 8 year old Jonathan loved, and the latter their floating docks – easier on and off the boat and no rafting (boats tied together, strangers trouncing across your boat to get to the dock).

Here I must detour in the story of our Block Island days. At this time we befriended Ray and Sue who have a son about the same age as Jonathan. Then we were at the same Marina, Norwest Marine in Norwalk. I briefly mentioned Ray in my article on Crow Island but I failed to mention how critical he has been to the story of our boating life.

Ray was my boating mentor, and there could be no better one. Ann and I have joked that if we were marooned on a desert island, he would be the one person we would want at our side. Give him a roll of duct tape, rope and a few other materials and he will build you a cathedral. In boating you can find yourself in unpredictable situations and Ray has frequently bailed us out. One time we arrived at Block taking on water because one engine’s muffler had burst and in the infinite wisdom of the boat manufacturer, this was below the water line. No problem for Ray, who immediately sized up the situation and decided to temporarily plug the exhaust with a large plastic coke bottle, a perfect, secure fit, stopping the leak until we could replace the muffler.

Continuing the story, my friend John was flying over to Block where he had left his boat with his wife Cathy and their two children, and he said, no problem, picking up a replacement muffler and between Ray and John, the repair was made, a perfect example of boating camaraderie and cooperation.

Ray showed us the path into Crow Island, long before the GPS made it a more accessible destination and it was there that our families spent countless weekends. Due in large part to his encouragement, in 1985 we bought a 37’ powerboat, and as a much younger man, I fearlessly took our new ‘Swept Away’ all over the Long Island Sound and its ports on Long Island and Connecticut sides, plus Newport, Cuttyhunk, Edgartown, and Nantucket for several summer vacations in subsequent years.

We cruised to those ports without Ray and his family as by that time he was convinced that there was only one port really worth going to, settling down for his summer vacation on their 44’ ‘Rascel’, at Block Island, and, specifically Payne’s Dock.

So, on our way back from one of our more distant ports we would stop at Payne’s to visit for a few days and, gradually, like Ray and Sue, we found ourselves spending more and more of our vacation time at Block until, we too, found ourselves going there for our entire summer vacations.

Payne’s is an enigmatic place, a community like no other we’ve visited on the water. It’s not just a dock, but an ongoing event, the same boaters showing up at about the same time, and settling into routines as mundane as hanging around waiting for the coffee to be made at the top of the dock, ordering a few or more of the homemade donuts we lovingly referred to as “sinkers”, sitting around the ancient wooden picnic tables sipping coffee in the frequently fogged in morning, to the evening libations at rickety Mahogany Shoals. Payne’s rafts boats during the crowded weekends but always seems to be able to match up compatible boaters. To watch Cliff Payne and his “dock geezers” move around boats, slipping them in and out of tight quarters was to watch a comical, sometimes nail biting, but effective chorography.

One weekend our older son, Chris, surprised us by biking 75 miles from Worcester, MA to the Block Island Ferry at Point Judith, RI, arriving with enough energy to join us and friends at Ballard’s in Old Harbor for lobster and then we all danced the chicken. Chris clucked and flapped his wings, none the worse for wear after his long bike ride.

After morning tasks, our families would dinghy to the eastern side of the Great Salt Pond, leaving our little boats, cross the Corn Neck Road causeway and settle in at Scotch Beach on the Atlantic Ocean for the day. Block has been called the Bermuda of the north for good reason, the water crystal clear, the waves perfect for body surfing which the kids did most of the day (OK, the adults too when we could grab their boards). Then, back to our boats, shower, and its cocktail time and pot luck dinner on someone’s boat.

We called fluke fishing at the mouth of the harbor “meat runs” as we were sure to catch that night’s dinner. Again, Ray was the leader of the pack, both in organizing those fishing parties and filleting the fish like a surgeon, squeezing every drop of edible fish leaving the waiting seagulls disappointed with the remnants tossed off the dock after surgery was completed.

Then there might be a “cook off,” the ladies preparing the fluke different ways, or sometimes as teams. To watch my wife, Ann, and Ray’s wife, Sue, cook in the galley was exhausting, pots, pans, plates, being passed back and forth in tight quarters, those beautiful, sun baked faces, flush with a cocktail or two, we expectantly awaiting the outcome of their culinary skills. Frequently, meals were served to accommodate an entire boatload of friends, everyone balancing plates and drinks in the cockpit. These feasts continued night after night, always with high praise heaped on the amazing kitchen crew!

Once we went tuna fishing off of Block. But I was the “accidental fisherman,” mainly going along to photograph the activities. The party thought it might be a good joke on our way back, after everyone had caught a yellow fin tuna in the 80 pound range, to watch me try to reel in one, using a stand-up belt (no fighting chair on the boat). They laughed as I struggled with the reel and the belt kept falling to my knees as my waist was too small, but I had the last laugh as I finally reeled in a 200 lb blue fin tuna. I couldn’t lift my arms for hours. Most of the tuna was sold at the dock at Montauk but we filleted one for ourselves and grilled it on the dock at Payne’s that night.

When not cooking up, we would pile into one of the cars that one of the family’s brought over on the ferry (this became the main means of transportation to the beach after our boys turned driving age), and went off to one of the many joints on Block Island, ending up at the one and only Ice Cream shop, which brought us to the Old Harbor, where the shops were. And when not at the beach, there was always a bike ride around Block, challenging because of its steep hills.

At one point we figured out ways of staying longer at Block, leaving our boats and families, taking the short flight to Westerly Airport where we would leave a car to commute back to our Connecticut offices for a few days to attend to business. On a couple of occasions we charted planes to Bridgeport Airport to attend to business, stretching out our Block Island stays.

Over the years we became part of the Payne’s “family.” Our son Jonathan thinks of Block as a second home and many of his friends are from the Block Island experience. At first Ray’s boat and mine were in the “pens” with easy on and off via our transoms, but later we went to the end of tees, our transoms facing each other. In our last boating days at Block we were rafted to Ray’s boat, the one they live on now, their 56’ ‘Last Dance.’

While our own boating lives have changed considerably these last few years, Block Island remains the prized destination in our boating memory.

Fathers, Sons, Distance, and Memories

My older son Chris called today as well as my younger son Jonathan to wish me a happy Father’s Day. Nice to hear from them, but it was a reminder that life has become more complicated, more mobile and, for many, gone are the days of being able to get together for such occasions. Chris is in Worcester, Ma, 1,163 miles from here and Jonathan is visiting Shanghai, China, 8,195 distant miles (mileage courtesy of WolframAlpha, the “computational knowledge engine” – a useful site).

Their absence reminds me that when I was their age, we were able to visit my father as we lived only fifty miles apart. So, in addition to missing my sons, my thoughts are with my Dad who died some twenty-five years ago. I wish I could turn back time and tell him how important he was to me, in spite of our going our separate ways in life. There was always an expectation that I would join him in his photography business, which I did not. I wrote a piece about him soon after he died, sort of an apology in the form of an explanation. I posted that a couple of years ago but I include it below, with love, to my Dad…

Up Park Avenue we would speed to beat the lights from lower Manhattan in the small Ford station wagon with “Hagelstein Bros., Commercial Photographers since 1866” imprinted on its panels. The Queens Midtown Tunnel awaited us.

It is some summer in the late 1950s and, once again, I’m working for my father after another high school year. In the back of the wagon I share a small space with props, flood lamps, and background curtains. The hot, midtown air, washed by exhaust fumes and the smoke from my father’s perpetual burning cigarette, surround me.

My father’s brother and partner, my Uncle Phil, occupies the passenger’s seat. They have made this round trip, day-in and day-out since my father returned from WWII. Their discussions no longer center on the business, but they speak of the city, its problems, the Russians, and politics. I think of where my friends and I will cruise that evening in one of their cars, a 57’ Merc, probably Queens Blvd., winding up at Jahn’s next to the RKO on Lefferts Boulevard.

Over the years, as a summer employee, my father believed I was being groomed for the business, the fourth generation to carry it on. My Uncle was a bachelor and I was the only one with the name to follow the tradition. There were cousins, but none at the time had any interest in photography, so the obligation fell to me.

This was such an understood, implicit obligation for my future maturation, that nothing of a formal nature was needed to foster this direction. Simply, it was my job to learn the business from the bottom up, working first as a messenger on the NY City streets, delivering glossies to clients for salesmen’s samples and for the furniture show (the primary commercial product photographed by my father). Then I graduated to photographer’s assistant, adjusting lamp shades under the hot flood lamps so the seams would not show, and, then, finally to an assistant in the color lab, making prints, dodging shadows to hold overexposures of glass tables. Osmosis was to be my mentor.

At work I see my father, as the camera would reveal contrasts with different filters. These were normally invisible to me. At home he was a more contemplative, private person, crushed into submission by a troubled marriage. But I see him strolling down the halls of his business, smiling, extending his hand to a customer, kidding in his usual way, “How’s Biz?” he would say. His office overlooks the reception area and there he, my Uncle, and his two cousins would preside over lunch, a burger and coffee from the nearby luncheonette.

In spite of my obligation to learn the profession from the inside, I inveigled his support to go to college – with the understanding I would study business. By then I think I knew that this would be the first step to take me away from HIS business, a step, once taken, would not be taken back. The question was how to reveal this to him.

But as silently as I was expected to take over the business, my retreat was equally stealth. We both avoided the topic as I went to college and I continued to work there during the summers. Once I switched majors from business to the humanities, we both knew, but still, no discussion. This was territory neither he nor I wanted to visit at the time.

My reasons were clear to me. In the hallways of the studio he was larger than life but he was also provincial in his business thinking. He, his brother, and his cousins had developed an inbred view of the future of photography. Like Willie Loman, they had bet the future of their business on producing prints for salesmen, unconscious to the developing mass media and its impact on door-to-door sales. Entering the business would mean conflict with beliefs that were sacrosanct, a battle I would surely lose. So, I kept my silence and progressively moved away.

Why he never brought up the subject I will, now, never know. Ultimately, I married, and began a career in publishing, with an office, ironically, only three blocks from his studio. I still joined him for lunch occasionally, with his greeting me when I arrived, “So, How’s Biz?”

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Serendipity

Most books I read come to me because of my previous knowledge of the author’s work or the recommendation of a review or by someone I respect. And such is the case with Firmin but the way it came to me was through a chance chain of events befitting the role of chance in the book itself, a serendipitous journey of the book into my hands. My son, Jonathan, had recently been in Sardinia, quietly enjoying a cappuccino in a local café and a woman was nearby, tearfully finishing Firmin and they struck up a conversation. “Here,” she said, "take the book and read it; you’ll love it,” offering him her worn paperback copy of a UK edition with a sticker on it, “Choose from any 3 for 2 at Waterstone’s.” At first Jonathan politely demurred thinking that it was probably some maudlin potboiler, but she was insistent and so he accepted. He read it on the plane when he left and suggested I read it when he last visited, so via happenstance the copy wound up with me.

Now, if I could imagine a Venn diagram of my 30-something son and my literary taste, there would be a majority overlap of books we both care deeply about, but the non-shaded area of books we do not mutually enjoy is meaningful enough to raise doubts regarding a book about “a well-read Rat” with a debonair soul who lives in the basement bookstore on Boston’s Scollay Square in the 1960’s. But Jonathan said: “trust me on this one” and as it is a book about books as well, I read it and I’m glad I did. It is quite a find under the proverbial radar.

Interestingly the subtitle of Sam Savage’s work has morphed from “Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife” in the UK edition to “A Tale of Exile, Unrequited Love, and the Redemptive Power of Literature” in the American edition. Both are accurate but I suppose the latter makes it more marketable. Below there is the review of the book from Publisher’s Weekly. There is also a brief, amusing You Tube promotion of the book that warrants attention.

Like most novels narrated by a rat :-), it is a metaphor of life we human rats endure and bring upon ourselves, with themes of Hardy and Dickens running beneath the surface of lovable Firmin’s narrative. It is a highly imaginative work, one you are doomed to compulsively read to the end in one sitting and at times a SOL (smile out loud).

And, for me, what is there not to love about a rat who is a voracious reader and plays the piano as well? But, Firmin’s narration touches so many truths for me: “A rat’s life is short and painful, painful but quickly over, and yet it feels long while it lasts….I always think everything is going to last forever, but nothing ever does. In fact nothing exists longer than an instant except the things that we hold in memory. I always try to hold on to everything – I would rather die than forget….One of the things I have observed is how extremes coalesce. Great love becomes great hatred, quiet peace turns into noisy war, vast boredom breeds huge excitement. Great intimacy spawns huge estrangement.”

And those are but a few.

From Publishers Weekly
Savage's sentimental debut concerns the coming-of-age of a well-read rat in 1960s Boston. In the basement of Pembroke Books, a bookstore on Scollay Square, Firmin is the runt of the litter born to Mama Flo, who makes confetti of Moby-Dick and Don Quixote for her offspring's cradle. Soon left to fend for himself, Firmin finds that books are his only friends, and he becomes a hopeless romantic, devouring Great Books—sometimes literally. Aware from his frightful reflection that he is no Fred Astaire (his hero), he watches nebbishy bookstore owner Norman Shine from afar and imagines his love is returned until Norman tries to poison him. Thereafter he becomes the pet of a solitary sci-fi writer, Jerry Magoon, a smart slob and drinker who teaches Firmin about jazz, moviegoing and the writer's life. Alas, their world is threatened by extinction with the renovation of Scollay Square, which forces the closing of the bookstore and Firmin's beloved Rialto Theater. With this alternately whimsical and earnest paean to the joys of literature, Savage embodies writerly self-doubts and yearning in a precocious rat: "I have had a hard time facing up to the blank stupidity of an ordinary, unstoried life." (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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That Infamous Day

9/11. It has been seven years but it seems like yesterday. We all remember where we were at that moment. The only comparable moment in my life is where I was when President Kennedy was assassinated.

On Sept. 11, 2001 we were on our boat in Norwalk, Ct., a clear somewhat breezy day with a deep blue sky. We had the TV on and, in complete disbelief, the tragedy unfolded before us all.

Although some fifty miles away, we could see the smoke drifting south from the Twin Towers. To this day I still feel that sense of incredulity. Did this really happen here? My son, Jonathan, had been interviewed only a couple of weeks before by Cantor Fitzgerald, on the 102nd floor of One WTC. They lost 685 employees on that fateful day. Jonathan had taken another job. Is it merely coincidence and accident that governs life’s outcomes? Or Shakespeare’s more cynical line from King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.”

My older son is the poet of our family and this is what he wrote on that very day. One line in particular resonates: “If Hell opened up, and swallowed my life, it could not compete with what witnessed, I.” May we never forget:

9/11/2001
By Chris Hagelstein

Terrorist troops and bodies strewn
in Twin Tower screams, destruction loomed.
News stations on a journalistic mission
under our Flag's lost transmission:
America's Death.

Judgement of Religious Decree
driving Boeing bombs with air fuel
circulating vultures from above the sea,
smashing their prey
on this plain sun-filled day.

Television digital debris rained on video,
Looping the same sequence of carnage.
The surgery of media controlled the flow
but the State of Blood remained unknown.

Prayers beneath each citizen’s eyes
were blessed wells now, for those who died.
No ceremony or speech could render a conclusion:
Those wired images played seemed like an illusion.

An Eye of some god was seeing us All
for each one's Blindness, was another’s Call,
and in the skies above Manhattan, masked in smoke
exhumed old gods of hatred and hope.

If Hell opened up, and swallowed my life,
It could not compete with what witnessed, I:
Buildings falling and heroes crushed:
As day burned to night
and life --- to dust.

Still, yet, in my hearts dismay,
Born here, I stand, no less bleeding
than those who survived this day:
For America is my body and my sea
executed on the stage of history.

Wanderlust

Our younger son, Jonathan, is a traveler, while our older son’s avocation is that of a writer (see Chris’ Why am I a Writer at the end of http://lacunaemusing.blogspot.com/2008/03/words-do-this.html).

It is hard to believe Jonathan is now 31 and Chris is 43 as it seems like mere moments have passed between these two photographs, the first Jonathan looking up in admiration of his older brother in the early 1980’s and the other of me flanked by them just this last Xmas holiday.

This summer, between jobs in private equity, Jonathan decided to take a trip he's always dreamed about. Last week he flew to Brussels and then was on his way to Egypt, Giza and the Pyramids, Cairo, Jordan, Petra, Lebanon, Syria (Damascus), through Israel, Bulgaria, Turkey, onto Greece where he is boarding a boat for a cruise of the Greek Islands, then to India, Delhi, to Kathmandu in Nepal, and two weeks traveling by boat, bus, jeep, and yak all throughout the northern cities of India, Agra, etc., ultimately hiking through the Himalayas. Whew! Most of his travel is being done with frequent flyer miles, a backpack and, except for parts of India, on his own. Talk about Wanderlust!

I suppose this is indeed the time to undertake such an ambitious trip before the responsibilities of a new job and perhaps marriage and family intercede. I never had those options, although my work entailed a number of international trips and contacts. In fact, on some of those trips I would bring my wife, Ann, and Jonathan. One I think he found especially impressionable was a trip to Japan when he was only twelve. The Japanese library market sought our professional and scholarly books and so my travels occasionally brought me there and I became close to the Japanese booksellers, particularly our distributor. My Japanese host and the head of the distribution company, Mitsuo, admired Jonathan’s inquisitiveness and took him under his wing. We travelled with Mitsuo and his wife to a spa hotel northwest of Tokyo where Naruhito, the Crown Prince of Japan, had stayed. There on the eve of the 1990 New Year, we were treated to a special weekend where we were the only Westerners, sleeping on handcrafted tatami mats, eating traditional Japanese food. My host challenged me to guess the identity of the dinner appetizer – something that tasted like steak tartar to me. He laughed when he told me it was raw horsemeat, a delicacy in the region. Luckily, I had sufficient Sake to wash it down. Not so at breakfast that consisted of seafood, rice, and fermented foods. Jonathan ate adventurously.

The high point of the weekend was the spa. First indoors we had to bathe sitting on a small stool, using a bucket with water, soaking and scrubbing ourselves until clean. Then, with nothing but a bathrobe, we walked outside into the cold night air, with snow on the ground, disrobed, and plunged ourselves in the hot springs. A bamboo curtain separated the ladies from the men. We could talk to our wives but not peek. Jonathan took to this so naturally while I had to be coaxed into the hot pool, simply because the temperature difference was so great.

In fact in two short weeks, Jonathan was beginning to find himself around Tokyo with little difficulty, using public transportation, and we let him explore a little. Ann and I remember sitting in our hotel room at the New Otani Tokyo, after he had left to go to the Ginza to see the latest electronics, watching him from our 30th floor window, a little speck on the street, crossing a bridge to the underground. Amazing we thought (perhaps as much surprised by our permissiveness as by his courage).

So it is no wonder that as a student at Bates College, Jonathan choose to spend his junior year abroad, living in Kyoto with a host family, attending Doshisha University, immersing himself in Japanese. We visited him there and were favorably impressed by his rapidly developing language skills as he took us to Temples and local restaurants. Today he has a good working knowledge of the Japanese language and of course the culture. Immediately after college he again returned to Japan, initially with the thought of job searching there, but, having mastered Japanese, Jonathan was intent on learning more about Asia, particularly China, so he choose to teach English in Guanjo, China and in so doing, developed conversational abilities in Mandarin. Several years later he returned to China to complete his MBA, finishing his last semester at Beijing University. By this time, his Mandarin was as fluent as his Japanese.

While working at a major financial firm for several years, he planned his vacations for other points in the Far East, including Viet Nam and Cambodia, always choosing the more challenging trips to the leisurely ones. So it is no wonder that given this new two month window, he has planned a demanding itinerary.

A little more than ten years ago he turned 21. At that time I wrote him a letter which I still stand by today. It almost sounds prophetic.

Dear Jonathan,

Today you are 21. There were other watershed years, your 13th, your 18th, but, for some reason, this is the really big one -- at least from my perspective. Why? Maybe, symbolically, it marks the true demarcation between dependency and non-dependency and, therefore, has as much meaning to Mom and me as it does to you -- as you move away from our lives and into your own. In other words, your 21st is also a reflection on us and the roles we have played while you were growing up.

I feel a deep sense of sadness in one respect. I could have been a better parent, maybe had a better relationship with you. In my defense, though, the time, which I thought, was so timeless, suddenly disappeared and here we are at this moment. In my next life, maybe, I will be more conscious of time and how fleetingly, even suddenly, it passes. I held you in my arms one minute and the next we touch mostly in cyberspace.

But, enough about my perspective as the best thing about turning 21 is something you might not think about much: the future. In many respects I wish I could skip ahead for one moment and see your life when you are my age. The possibilities, the possibilities.... And, it's all about choices -- you'll have many more than we had but, still, you have to make the choices. These relate to not only career tracks but also ethical, behavioral, and life style choices. I am not going to sit here and say anything about what you should do but I will note that these choices are being made every day by you whether you are aware of them or not. The Gestalt of those choices is the person you will become and the life you will lead. May it be a happy and productive one.

It is only fitting, I think, that you are going off to Japan in a few days. What a start to becoming 21. Leaving the cocoon of your childhood and going out into the world. But, your Mom and I will always be there for you -- even after we are not there. May you always feel that love. I gave you a poem, once, by Robert Mazzacco. No doubt you read it quickly and it became one of those victims of the moment. I'll close this note quoting that poem. I could never say it any better and I admire the ability to say something so profound is such small space:

Dynasty
Family voices; you still can hear them,
ever so dimly, there in your own voice:
your father's voice, even your mother's voice.

The older we get
the more you'll hear them,
though no one else does.
Just as you still can see them, all over
your body, though, of course, no one else must:
family scars and family kisses.

- Robert Mazzacco