On Turning 75: From 2021

How It Happens

 The sky said I am watching

 to see what you

 can make out of nothing

 I was looking up and I said

 I thought you 

were supposed to be doing that

 the sky said Many

 are clinging to that 

I am giving you a chance

 I was looking up and I said

 I am the only chance I have 

then the sky did not answer

 and here we are 

with our names for the days

 the vast days that do not listen to us

— W. S. Merwin

 “In Blake, we recover our original state, not by returning to it, but by re-creating it. The act of creation is not producing something out of nothing, but the act of setting free what we already possess.” --Northrup Frye

Photo: Trinidad Head June 30, 2021

This is all I posted for my 75th birthday, curious choice for one of the Big Ones--three-quarters of a century.  On the day I was feeling somewhat wounded because no one but my partner contacted me.  I got cards and a call on subsequent days, but that day felt pretty empty.  Had my life come to nothing?  Nothing is the key word in both the Merwin poem and the Frye quote.  

On Turning 76: from 2022

 

I didn't post for my 76th birthday in 2022, so this is from the handwritten entries in a notebook. 

Turning 75 had something regal about it but 76 is just terrifying.  Several times I caught myself thinking "I'm 67, not so bad," then realizing it's 76.  76!  Maybe a Marx Brothers approach to soften it: 76! That's the spirit!  The spirit of 76!\

I climbed Trinidad Head.  Felt slower, but I felt better having done it.  It was sunny when I started.  At the top, on the bay side, I could see four layers of mountains, including the blue blur in the distance.  On the way down, at my power spot facing the ocean, I watched an enormous cloud bank at the horizon move towards me, white in front but gray behind.  Before I'd made it down, the sea was already gray against a darkening sky, with but a bright line at the horizon.  

Also on the way down I was passed by a fellow geezer walking up--he recognized my cap as a throwback Pittsburgh Pirates logo.  He thought 70s but it's really 60s.  

This past week I was going through mail from the earlly 1970s for a project and found old birthday cards.  So regardless of what comes in the mail tomorrow, I will have cards to look at from my mother, my grandmother and my sisters.  I feel sorry for people these days who don't get mail they can keep, or don't keep what they got.  Maybe you have to be 76 to feel that.

On Turning 77: Repost from 2023

 

My power spot on Trinidad Head which I climb every birthday.  BK photo.

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

 The irony hasn’t escaped me: under the ancient marquee of CaptainFuture’s Dreaming Up Daily, in recent years I have been writing primarily about the past. 

 In particular this was brought home to me by an email I received from Jay Matson, poet, entrepreneur and a student several years ahead of me at Knox College.  He signed it Captain Past.  It seemed a more accurate moniker for what I was writing, as well as for the subjects of his recent poems.

 Sometime around 2005 I adopted Captain Future as a screen name for my posts on Daily Kos and a few other similar sites, as well as in other contexts.  I also began this blog around then. The purpose I had in mind for it was to highlight positive ideas and information for a better future—hence, dreaming up daily.  Even when I got sucked into the morass of contemporary politics, the perspective was to see things as they affected the future.  But I did get sucked in, railing against Bush, the Iraq war, torture, etc., then advocacy for Obama, then immediately unmasking Homemade Hitler in 2016. 

 Those posts, heartfelt and certainly justified, are the fodder of history, and as writing are painfully ephemeral.  I did focus at appropriate times on major threats to the future, such as nuclear weapons and especially, primarily, the climate crisis. Occasionally I highlighted positive steps towards a better future, and certainly tried to articulate principles necessary for pursuing it. Some of these posts remain very relevant. 

 But I also continued to respond to the latest news, to people and events that quickly faded.  And I did that, helplessly and stubbornly, for more than 15 years, from the time that blogging was all the rage through the time that “nobody blogs anymore.”

 At the same time, I was exploring aspects of the past, especially my own, in writing that mostly didn’t make it out of the computer.  When I retired and turned attention towards writing projects on past and future, I discovered that my most natural form, and the way I could actually write something whole, was the kind of blog post that I had developed, solely on my own, over those years.  That my blog readership dwindled over the years was somewhat depressing but in the end irrelevant.  Writing these posts here and elsewhere, or essays or whatever they might be called, was its own reward.

 So I did a version of my Soul of the Future project as a series of posts here, but also the History of My Reading and more recently the TV and Me series, which concerned the past.  These evocations of the past increasingly took over this blog, partly because I was feeling more and more alienated from the public present. 

 For especially in the past few years I began to see, to feel acutely, that the world around me has changed so thoroughly that I mostly don’t have a place in it.  Just about everything is significantly different.  I can’t imagine how I would be making a living in this present.  Then again, I can’t imagine how I even would have been able to go to college, or lived in the places I lived.  Which leads me further back, to not even imagining how I could have been born at all.

 Obviously, approaching my 77^th birthday, I have many more days behind than in front of me.  But in this more profound way, my life is almost entirely in the past. I’ve always felt somewhat alienated, as if I might be an alien.  Now it’s pretty clear: I am definitely from another planet, the one that used to be here.  (For one thing, it had more birds.)

 Eventually I may be relegated to a very narrow present moment existence.  But for now, I live powerfully in memory.  Why do we have memories?  They seem an extension of the first requirement of any creature: to know what is food and what is not.  Anyone familiar with dogs or cats will understand how the first function—and perhaps the first step-- of memory is remembering where and when you find food, a vital skill for survival.  So for me, in various ways, memory is related to sustenance.

 What about that future I am supposedly captain of? In many ways, I cannot even conceive of an actual future anymore.  AI in particular has me throwing up my hands.  But in one essential way, the future is all too clear.  Captain Future’s mission was to relentlessly persuade about the need and possibility of acting in the present to further a better future, and specifically to meet the challenge of the oncoming climate crisis.

 I have been writing about the climate crisis since 1990. For the years I wrote about it on this blog, it was the quintessential elephant in the room (forgive me for using one of the many mindnumbing clichés that no longer have much power.) But today the climate crisis is no longer the elephant in the room.  The climate crisis is the room. 

 The climate crisis is no longer avoidable: it is the present and will be the present for the imaginable future.  A few data-driven experts who previously sounded alarms have recently moved the zeitgeist towards believing that the clean energy initiatives especially embodied in the Inflation Reduction Act will mean the United States at least will significantly lessen predicted levels of CO2 emissions in the near future, thereby preventing the worst case level of global heating.  But even if that works out, it does not stop what is happening, and will happen for decades to come.  The climate crisis is not “solved,” (whatever that means.)

 Even if future heating remains below levels that UN climate scientists designate as catastrophic (and that itself seems unlikely), those levels are approximate and truly uncertain.  Add to this the real world fact that when effects have differed from those predicted by climate models, they most have proven worse in reality than in what amounts to educated guesses.    

 I repeat, the elephant has not left the room.  The elephant is the room.  The future world is a hotter world, with accelerating consequences.  Even this spring—April and May—there are or have been intense and long-lasting heat waves in southern Asia, Europe, North America, and always Africa.  There are massive forest fires already in western Canada and Siberia.  Torrential rains have flooded out towns in a region of Italy—the worst flooding in that country for a century.  A heat dome settled over the Pacific Northwest—when a similar event happened in a summer month, it was called a once in a thousand years event.  That was two years ago.  Most ominously, the upper levels of the oceans are consistently hotter than they’ve been since measurements began 40 years ago, leading to an array of devastating current and future consequences.  The UN predicts the oceans will continue to heat up until at least 2300 just based on the effects of global heating to the present.

 These events, this suffering and death, this destruction, is going to get worse, year after year. (For instance, the World Meteorological Organization has just predicted a 98% chance that the next five years will be the hottest five years on record.) The financial and social costs of coping with them are eventually going to override denial, and demand shocked attention.  Eventually it may even happen that wars will be recognized for what most already are—climate wars. And the migrations that the wealthy countries are already unable to cope with in a civilized manner might even be recognized as directly or indirectly involving climate refugees. 

 The point isn’t that this is a doomsday scenario—the point is that it will eventually and inevitably be the context for everything in the future—including every individual decision on education and profession for the next generations, and eventually on where and how to live.

 To meet the challenge of the global climate crisis required a level of maturity in humanity and its societies that once seemed possible, since it would not have required anything more than heeding those who have foretold the possibilities and the consequences.  But it didn’t happen in enough time to prevent climate distortion, and now nobody really knows where things are going to end up.  Again, this is the context for the work, the hopes and fears, and the lives of those who will live in this future, as it quickly becomes the present.

Apart from the omnipresent threat of thermonuclear extinction in the mid-1960s, this country and the world in general seems less institutionally stable than it seemed when I started college.  Despite "progress" in some areas, there seems to be regression in many more. The global battles between self-righteous reactionaries in their various forms and the self-righteous revisionists in their various forms makes for a peculiarly unstable world, especially in social and political institutions that people otherwise would rely on in times of common crisis. 

 It’s possible to exaggerate how widespread this is in America, but the extremes are jolting.  Guns of unprecedented destructiveness are a bigger part of US life than at any other time in its history, or was ever even imagined.  The return of child labor makes the huge gulf between rich and borderline poor look like the early 19^th century London of Dickens novels. Margaret Atwood’s Gilead society from The Handmaid’s Tale seems more possible than ever, only we’ll be calling it Florida.  And so on. All this at at the precise time we can’t afford to go backwards, to make more trouble for ourselves. But that’s what we’re doing, and expending a lot of energy, resources, attention and social capital doing it, diverting it all from where it is truly needed.  This makes us dangerously vulnerable and fragile as a society, as a civilization.    

 The climate crisis, the onrushing extinctions of other lifeforms, the unsustainable distance between the obscenely rich and everyone else—these are the meaningful vectors now creating any future context I can imagine.   The addition of AI and other technological wonders only magnifies and exacerbates the chaos that also becomes the background if not the foreground of future life. 

So I don’t see much of a role for this Captain Future anymore, except following the lead of Captain Past. I doubt I’ll have much to say about contemporary politics anymore—it’s all the same drone, and out of my old hands.  What I may be able to offer is my particular perspective from these many years I've been around.  My own past now reaches back beyond the experiences of the vast majority.  Perhaps it’s an inevitable discovery of my time in life, or perhaps it’s an historical truth (or I suspect, something of both), but I feel more continuity with my parents and grandparents time than this present I find myself in, and certainly any future I can foresee. That’s certainly not what I expected in the 1960s.  In any case, this perspective is all I’ve got to contribute, aside from bearing witness.

 I may have observations on aspects of the present based on those perspectives, as well as more recollections (I hope to continue and even finish my History of My Reading series, which should go faster through the decades than it has so far.)  I may finally get around to writing about words, another long-planned project.

 I’ll still check the numbers of “readers,” though what’s officially counted may be mostly bots, and who knows who goes uncounted.  Readers may encourage me, but the absence of readers will no more than temporarily discourage me.  The words are what’s real, and somehow I can only abandon my pieces by publishing them. Though I still hope to explore other forms of publication (even as I suspect them of being just as dubious) I will likely continue publishing in this hapless form of the blog.  

 If I do it under this marquee, it’s because Captain Future is a product of the past.  When I started using it as a screen name I actually had no idea that there were Captain Future stories, since they’d been written and largely forgotten in the 1940s.  When I learned that the idea for Captain Future was the result of a visit to the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the World of Tomorrow, that had always fascinated me (and which my mother visited), the link between past and future was made.  In a sense, I am now such a link.

On Turning 78

 I've posted reflections on various birthdays on one or another of my various blogs through the years.  It occurs to me to re-post them in one place: here at Blue Voice.  These posts will appear consecutively but, in traditional blog fashion, in reverse chronological order.  So I begin with the latest: reflections on entering my 78th year, as of a few hours ago.

Not too long ago Margaret emailed this poem to me from another room. It’s called “Otherwise” by Jane Kenyon:

 I got out of bed

 on two strong legs.

 It might have been

 otherwise. I ate

 cereal, sweet

 milk, ripe, flawless

 peach. It might

 have been otherwise. 

I took the dog uphill

 to the birch wood.

 All morning I did

 the work I love.

At noon I lay down

with my mate.  It might

have been otherwise.

We ate dinner together

at a table with silver

candlesticks.  It might

have been otherwise.

I slept in a bed

in a room with paintings

on the walls, and

planned another day

just like this day.

But one day, I know,

it will be otherwise.

 

 The details differ but these are our days now. They are made up of repeated activities almost ritually enacted. Some are personal habits, some are best practices prudently repeated, others are simply what we do now. Many of ours happen to be enforced by our ritually-minded dog. He has his own personal rituals as well, that sometimes become part of ours.

 We cherish these elements of the day, more often consciously at this age. They approach the sacramental. For we know that at any moment it could be otherwise, and that someday, it will.

 As it happened, shortly after I received this poem I dipped into a volume of interviews with poets done by Bill Moyers called The Language of Life (1995.) I flipped through the pages, reading randomly, until I came upon the interview with the eminent anthologist and poet Donald Hall, and remembered that he and Jane Kenyon had been married.  He was devoted to her.  An interview with her was also included in this volume.  Both were probably done when Moyers did another documentary just on them in 1993, in their New England country home, which had been in Hall's family for generations. 

 At the time, Donald Hall had just survived two serious cancer surgeries. It was between those two surgeries that his wife Jane Kenyon wrote “Otherwise.” Hall was 64, and told Moyers he didn’t expect to live to 70.

 That isn’t what happened. Donald Hall lived until 2018, a few months shy of his 90th birthday. But even though Jane Kenyon was nearly 20 years younger than he, she contracted a very aggressive form of cancer and died in 1995, the year the Moyers book was published. So Donald Hall lived nearly 20 years longer, but without her.

 So we live now, gratefully, in the charmed space before the coming catastrophes. When it seems catastrophe may be coming for this country and this planet, of a kind we could never before even contemplate, not even in the years of the nuclear arms race. And inevitably catastrophe will come for us personally. It may not come for years or a decade or more, but it can come at any time. 

 When we retired eight years ago we did not travel. Many people do, but we had no desire to travel. Personally, I traveled enough in my working life, and those experiences still haunt my dreams. I may still fantasize other places, but the realities of travel grow more difficult every day, and not even primarily because of age. Although I suspect many people our age are less keen on going places.

 In fact for us, all public life has diminished. Covid had and still has a marked influence. We shop for food, we go to the beach or the forest or the shores of the bay. We walk but usually in the neighborhood with our dog Howdy. Mostly we are at home: Margaret, Howdy and me.  Margaret and I are both introverts who had occupations that required some very extroverted activities.  Now we don't.  Howdy likes it that way, too. 

 There is Zoom, and Margaret is on that pretty frequently. I’ve seen my doctor on it, participated in a few conversations with her family, that’s all. For me the drawbacks of social media outweigh advantages I can see. 

 I do miss focused opportunities to communicate something more or less meaningful from my life—a legacy still alive. It’s a cliché now—that the old have a lot to tell, a lot to share, and an eagerness to do so, but usually no one who is interested in hearing it. I know it was a long time before I was interested in the lives of my parents before my time. Or anything before my time. It was a long time before it even occurred to me that they might have anything relevant from their lives to tell me about what I was going through in my own. And by that time, they were gone. 

 To some extent I was right—when I was principally concerned with “career” in areas they had no knowledge of, and of navigating relationships including those that might lead to marriage, the rules of the games had changed so much—and they were also related to those places and strata that my elders didn’t know. But later, approaching middle age say, there were probably a lot of common areas, experiences and so on. Or if I knew more about their lives—what they were like, what they thought and felt at different points in their lives, I could draw my own conclusions. 

 It’s also context: now that I’m interested enough to research the past, the years in which they lived their lives, I have contexts in which their answers might make sense. I would experience the story. (This too is not uncommon; apparently as we get older, we become more interested in the historical contexts and events of our parents’ generation.) 

 As for telling my story or any part of it, even in fragments sharing anything learned in my life, well: Now I am so distant from family, I don’t see the next generation in their middle years or the generation following in their childhood. Or my sisters as they follow me into the 70s. And I share so little with the worlds in which Margaret’s children and grandchildren live, I have little to offer them, though I have a small positive place in their lives, I believe. 

 My status as a writer is so distant in time now that it no longer exists, so even in that regard I am not ever asked to offer anything from my life and experience. It is also distant somehow in space, for I have seldom been asked in the 28 years we’ve been here. I gave one talk derived from the mall book to a church service, one talk about the Federal Theatre Project to a theatre audience, and that’s it, over nearly three decades.

 At this point, my byline hasn’t been seen regularly for nearly a decade, but even when it was, no one thought to ask me anything. So I project my memories through the Internet, or at least (so far) very selective ones. I have my say to cyberspace, where potentially millions could read it, but which only a handful do. Many of those I suspect are my contemporaries. We talk to ourselves. 

 As for legacy beyond my life, what could it possibly be, and for whom? My writing disappeared along with the periodicals that printed it. My book may be re-purposed as a history (I’ve given up hope that it will ever be considered as literature) but only for a few. A few—a few at a time—it all I can hope for. A reader here or then who stumbles across something on the Internet. I know it happens, I occasionally hear from them in some way. I have no idea how long the servers will keep my words accessible, but it could be a kind of legacy.  At least for awhile.  

 People don’t seem interested in legacy anymore, unless from someone famous, whose possessions become negotiable currency as well as talismanic objects. In this age of de-cluttering, people don’t seem to keep things: no more attics of generational keepings, nothing that becomes more magical as the years go by.

But my world and this world grow increasingly different.  I have as few hopes of relevance as of anyone listening.  I haven't stopped writing, however.  That kind of faith is hard to shake.  It's too much a part of me, a big part, a defining part.  For better or worse, richer or poorer etc.

 For me the past is present, part of the rolling present, part of the texture of the days. Some of it doesn’t last. I read of pasts I haven't experienced and that process can delight me.  I seem to have absorbed something added to my perspective, but that can matter only in its function of adding texture to today. It’s the same with legacy, I suppose. We have no control over anything but the present, and only within ever increasing limits. So we adapt and we live as best and as happily as we can, until it is otherwise.

Howdy Doodle

 

It was four summers ago—nearly five—that Margaret drove the six hours or so to the Bay Area, to an animal shelter that specialized in small dogs, especially the small crossbreeds such as goldendoodles (golden retriever/poodle.)

 This was the end of a process that began with her joking suggestion that, after two cat companions over the years, we might get a dog.  The joke soon became serious: she wanted a dog, a small one but not (I was assured) a very small, yappy dog. 

 We visited local shelters, where small dogs were in short supply.  She applied to other places, and ran the gauntlet of questionnaires (with more intrusive questions than would otherwise be tolerated) and phone interviews.  Eventually she qualified to be notified of possibilities, and visited with several dog candidates nearby.

 But the one she was sure she wanted was at the end of that long drive.  He was a rescue dog, a small poodle crossbreed of indeterminate type, found starving in a drainage ditch in the Sacramento Valley.  Because he was black he was less desirable to adopters.  Margaret had to promise to have a fence completed around the backyard in order to get him, and so she did.

 By the time the two arrived back here in Arcata, they had definitely and definitively bonded.  The shelter had called him Ace, not a name we ever considered keeping.  Margaret walked him in the mornings, but we took him together on his afternoon walk.  He got to the point that he let me hold the leash, as long as Margaret was in sight.  He liked that I walked faster. 

 On one of our first walks, Margaret was speculating on what kind of a doodle he might be.  “A Howdy Doodle,” I said.  Margaret is one of the few people who get that joke anymore, since she too is of the Howdy Doody Time generation, every evening at 5 on the family TV.  But she also liked it as a name.  And so he has been ever since: Howdy, and more formally, Mr. Doodle.  

When Howdy stretches to his full height—dancing and twirling before meals—he is maybe two feet tall.  He weighs in at 10 pounds.  His local vet suggested he has some terrier in him, and that seems right.  He has that tenaciousness.

  Evidently the poodle crossbreeds are popular because their hair is hypoallergenic.  And it is hair, not fur, so it grows. It doesn’t take long for Howdy to look a lot huskier than he is.  He needs grooming fairly frequently, if for no other reason than the hair interferes with his traction when walking. 

 The autumn after he arrived, I went back to western Pennsylvania for a long overdue family and friends visit. While I was gone, the fence was finally completed, and Howdy got to explore his yard.  Almost immediately he found a nest of angry ground bees, and both he and Margaret got stung.  That was pretty much the end of his backyard forays. He mostly won't leave the porch without an escort.  So much for the fence.

  When I returned from this trip, I assumed my nearly two weeks away would have eroded some of the progress I made gaining Howdy’s confidence, but much to my surprise, the day after I returned he allowed me to take him on his afternoon walk; for the first time, just the two of us. 

      Margaret took him to a few training classes and maybe once to a dog park and a few doggie dates, but Howdy wasn’t engaged.  After he identifies the smell of a particular dog he pretty much loses interest.  He doesn’t know how to play, either with other dogs, with us or with play objects.  He’ll sit on the beach beside Margaret and watch dogs chase sticks but it has no appeal. He goes to sleep.  Sometimes with me he’ll get into play position, and then doesn’t know what to do. If I toss a ball down the hallway he might retrieve it once.  But if I do it again he ignores it.  I guess he was just trying to be helpful, but if I keep losing the ball, it’s more polite not to notice. 

 He is however very smart.  He can functionally count to three and possibly four.  He knows quite a few English words and a few Italian expressions (particularly “aspet”, short for “aspetta,” which means wait, or just a minute.)  He remembers our several walking routes and always knows the way home. 

 Howdy is utterly devoted to Margaret.  I can come and go but he must know where she is at every moment.  He was with us for only about seven months before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and for a long time we were seldom out of the house, except for his walks and other outdoor activities.  Since we’re both retired, this didn’t change much since. So the three of us as constant companions became the way of life he knows.

 Howdy is completely indifferent to cats—they barely register as lifeforms—but he himself has catlike characteristics. He finds that spot on the floor where the sunlight falls for his morning nap.  In particular, he adopts and insists on daily rituals.  He of course knows his mealtimes and walk times, and reminds us with plenty of time to spare.  But we each have other rituals with him, some of which he invented. 

 For example, I share part of my morning biscotti with him. Howdy has figured out that the first smell of coffee is the tip-off.  But he doesn’t always show up right away.  He stays in the living room (or even goes back to it) as I get my coffee cup, the milk for my coffee and the biscotti, all on the kitchen counter.  Then I walk over to the dinette table, passing the doorway to the dining and living rooms.  As I do, Howdy comes running in to intercept me, jumping and twirling.

 Early in his residency, he watched me slice an apple in the evening.  It turned out he likes apples a lot, but only without the skin.  So now my evening ritual is to cut small pieces for him, and I get all the skins.

  I’d noticed that he likes to bring his chew into the living room whenever we are sitting there, especially after dinner.  I thought this might be pack behavior, so in our apple-time I started looking at him while we both chewed on the apples, and he looked back.  He seems to enjoy this.

 I made up an “all gone” gesture for these occasions, which he understands and accepts totally.  He’s also  learned to look where I point my finger, and not just at the finger itself.   

 We used to range far afield in our walks but for various reasons, including a lot of new construction, we restrict ourselves to a half dozen regular routes in and around the neighborhood that we alternate (and alter) at Howdy’s discretion.  There are routes he found himself, and there are routes for some reason he doesn’t like. He can be stubborn but we’ve both learned to compromise. 

 I let him lead our walks, and go at his pace, which usually involves a lot of sniffing and marking, followed by brisk business-like walking.  I read in a book about animal senses that dogs should occasionally be taken on “smell walks” like this, but for Howdy, almost every walk with me is a smell walk.  He evidently has a constantly revised map of the neighborhood in his head consisting of smell trails.  I’ve watched him associate a smell with a dog he hadn’t seen before, then just turn away.  He would rather follow the trail of another dog than meet that dog. And of course he's constantly marking his own trail.  But he's not just mapping territory; he also seems to enjoy smelling flowers and aromatic plants.  

 However I do guide our walks in other ways, to keep him safe and out of trouble. I talk to him, but most of our communication in this regard is through the tension on the leash, to which he responds easily, most of the time. 

Howdy was very quiet for his first few months here but he is now comfortable enough to bark at the UPS truck and others who come too close. He’s also taken to barking at us at times, maybe a little frustrated we don’t get the nuances of his language. He wants to talk, too. Otherwise, he does constant perimeter checks for crumbs, and sleeps a lot.  I see him most relaxed when he is nestled between us on the couch, especially when he’s getting simultaneous rubs.

 So far I’ve learned that while a cat rules the household, a dog becomes its center, since he requires (and insists on) more active attention, and also gives it.  Through this troubling period of Covid, Howdy has held us together happily.  It’s the three of us now.  

Origins: Easter and April Fool's Day

 Easter is what’s known in Catholicism as a moveable feast—that is, it doesn’t occur on the same date every year.  This religious holiday had been observed on different dates and days of the week until the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 decreed it would be observed on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox (the first day of spring.)  So it never falls earlier than March 22 nor later than April 25.

 Easter is the most important holy day (or holi-day) in Christianity, commemorating the resurrection of Christ after his crucifixion.  In my Catholic schooling in the 1950s, it was the end of a drama that began four weeks before with the beginning of Lent, with the liturgy supplying the events and observances between. 

As for the timing of the observance and even the name, the early Church superimposed it on the Saxon festival to the goddess of spring, whose name was Eostre.  Some theorize that persecuted Christians celebrating their holy day at the same time as Eostre made them less conspicuous. 

 In any case, most of the other familiar elements of Easter echo the fertility rites and symbolism of the original holiday, like the rabbits (as in “breeding like,” the hare was the animal associated with the goddess Eostre in Saxon lore) and eggs (an ancient custom of exchanging actual eggs turned to chocolate in the nineteenth century.) 

 Some Easter eggs are worth more than others, like the gold and diamond décor of the Faberge egg, or the decorated eggs in Germany inscribed with a child’s date of birth, which functioned legally as a birth certificate in the 1880s. 

My Italian grandparents had various Easter traditions involving pastries and baked goods, but for the first time this Easter I had a Hot Cross bun, courtesy of our local Quaker meeting, of which Margaret is a member.  This bun tradition goes back to the Saxon feast of Eostre.  When the Catholic Church absorbed it, the bun indeed carried the design of a cross. 

Because of this year's calendar, Easter was celebrated just one day before another spring holiday.

April Fool's Day

 April Fool’s Day is always April 1, and that's a key to its specific origins. It has roots in many cultures that reach as far back as history goes, and probably farther. Part of its complex pedigree is a meaningful relationship to the American Bill of Rights.  But most directly, it's about New Years.

The historical roots of the day include ancient festivals of spring which often had some component of comedy, trickery and release from ordinary rules, which in the western world at least usually included orgies of gluttony, drunkenness and sexual licentiousness.

 The probable direct ancestor of April Fool's Day is more specific—when France adopted the Gregorian calendar in the sixteenth century, New Year's moved from April 1 to January 1. But old habits are hard to break, especially if they began  in 45 B.C., when Julius Caesar set up the old Julian calendar. Some gullible Parisians were tricked by clever neighbors into celebrating New Year's on what was now the wrong day.

Out of this was born the classic cry, April Fish! Which is something that did not cross the Atlantic when the calendar was later changed in America. No one is quite sure what the fish thing is about, but the day is still celebrated that way in France.  Still, the first April Fool's Day jest was probably, "Happy New Year!"

But the more important aspect of this history relates to the tradition of the licensed fool. For centuries, most European and some Asian countries had them, popularly known as court jesters. From imperial Rome through the medieval period and the Renaissance, official fools were not only a popular and well known presence in royal courts, but for part of that time were also employed by cities, clergy and wealthy families.

Their duties ranged from song and dance to pratfalls and acrobatics, ribaldry and general foolishness. At times no fashionable dinner party was complete without a fool hired to insult the guests. But the key element of the "allowed fool" was his (and occasionally, her) freedom to do and especially to say anything to anyone.

The official fool also has roots in an aspect of the aforementioned festivals, which featured a Lord of Misrule— a commoner who took on the trappings of the king or bishop or town mayor for a day. As far back as the tenth century, these became elaborate performances, mixing entertainment with social comment, and topical plays or burlesque sermons that satirized the real rulers of state and church, who had to at least pretend to enjoy it. These events became hugely popular, but nobody was fool enough to criticize the powerful if there were going to be reprisals. So the tradition included immunity for the fool.

When kings hired permanent court jesters, political satire as well as pointed personal remarks were part of their repertoire, and the tradition of immunity came with them. Archibald Armstrong, one of England's last and most political jesters replied, "No one has ever heard of a fool being hanged for talking, but many dukes have been beheaded for their insolence." So it happened that the only people in Europe with the absolute right of free speech were kings and queens, and fools.

This fact was not lost on others who were agitating for that kind of freedom for all. The original document of the Magna Carta, England's first great challenge to absolute royal power in 1215, was decorated with the figure of a court jester. From the late 15th century until well into the 17th, "societies of fools" flourished in France, composed of young men who criticized the government and agitated for freedom while wearing the traditional court jester motley.

America never had court jesters, though some of its first expressions of freedom and identity were in the foolery tradition, from the burlesque of the Boston Tea Party (a bunch of Anglos badly costumed as Indians who struck a blow for political independence by dumping tea into cold water) to some early symbols such as Yankee Doodle and Uncle Sam. 

 "Yankee" was a British ethnic slur which New Englanders turned into a badge of honor, and Yankee Doodle Dandy was a clown figure (what else can you say about a guy who sticks a feather in his cap and calls it macaroni?) made immortal in the song sung at key moments in the American Revolution, including at the British surrender. A similar figure, a Yankee "wise fool" stock character popular in early American stage comedies, was a source for Uncle Sam.

Americans also pride themselves on being straightforward, so there's a companion tradition of mistrusting the tricky. But today our Zeitgeist depends so heavily on some forms of deceit--spin, disinformation, oversimplifying and the straight-faced lie--that selectively moralizing about other forms rings hollow.  Injustice wears clothes of obscurant nomenclature, and success by any means necessary is our guiding morality. Mendacity is a trick of power.

The heart of the fool's relation to free speech is speaking truth to power. For awhile we may have thought that serious journalism was going to do that, but when the most powerful owns the most presses, and the line between editorial and advertising becomes more and more imaginary, it's looking like a piquant hope.

The rich and powerful can easily ridicule the countrified (the original meaning of "clown") and unsophisticated, but the figure of the fool deflects the ridicule back upon the pretentious and corrupt. Freedom to criticize the powerful is at the heart of both the fool tradition and free speech.

The pretensions of power are automatic, perhaps the inevitable product of consciousness equipped with opposable thumbs. Our particular social systems depend on some forms of deceit while moralizing about others. Historians are dishonored for missing quotation marks, but not if the history they write is dishonest bunk. Paradox or irony shade into hypocrisy as we deny freedoms in the name of protecting freedom.

Today April Fool's Day is just about our only nod to this tradition. You can play tricks on people any day of the year, but the idea is that on this day, you are allowed to.  But since most of today’s jokes will be made online, it looks pretty much like every day on the Internet, where intentional misinformation is standard. This is the scarier side of information without authority, and often without conscience.

Since laughter seems to override anger, wit is often its own protection, at least temporarily. The cosmos itself seems designed with persistent uncertainties, which is perhaps why many religious and cultural traditions make the trickster a major myth.

Historically and perhaps in practice, the freedom of the fool makes way for freedom of speech in all its aspects. Humor often seems to make the truth clearer and perhaps easier to acknowledge. We have to be tricked into seeing what we would rather not see. We can have tricksters without truth, and in our entertainment-dominated society we mostly do. But rarely can we fallible humans have truth without tricksters.

Origins: Chewing Gum

ad from the 1930s

 Every year, for who knows how long, Knox College seniors in Galesburg, Illinois (though apparently only men) would receive a mimeographed note in their campus mailbox.  I got one my senior year of 1967-68.  It read:

  “ Mr. Lester Smiley, Vice-President of the American Chicle Company, will be on the campus Friday, February 23.  He would like to hold a group meeting for those men interested in a job opportunity with their company. The interviews will be held on Friday, February 23 in the College Placement Office.  Mr. Smiley is a Knox College graduate and, as you know, we have placed many Knox graduates with American Chicle.”

 I can quote this notice so precisely because I experienced it as a bit of found poetry, and literally stapled it into the draft of the play I was writing, “What’s Happening, Baby Jesus?”  When the play was performed that May, freshman Michael Shain came out in a business suit and recited it, with the cheerful addition: “So come on out and keep America chewing!”  It got one of the bigger laughs of the show.  

Rockford High yearbook 

For decades, American Chicle made chewing gum in Rockford, Illinois, and (at various times) in Newark, Brooklyn, Cleveland, New Orleans, Portland, Oregon and around the world. They don’t make so much of it anymore (in fact, after being swallowed up by a succession of bigger companies—even though swallowing is something you shouldn’t do with chewing gum-- a company by that name no longer exists.) Chewing gum has apparently dropped out of fashion, at least for awhile. But for a long time, America kept on chewing.

 “Chewing gum” as we know it began in the USA, though humans everywhere have been chewing stuff without swallowing it for a very long time.  Some Indigenous peoples in South America (for example)  chewed particular plants for energy and stamina, and/or to get high.  Chewing tobacco is another such instance.

 People chewed various leaves, nuts, twigs and gummy substances for millennia, as breath sweeteners and digestive aids, to stave off hunger and thirst, and just for the fun of it.  Denizens of the far north chewed whale blubber, and Europeans chewed animal fats, sometimes in social hours at the end of meals (hence, perhaps, the expression “chewing the fat” to mean convivial—and trivial—conversation, though the origins of this phrase are obscure, based on what seem to be barely educated guesses.)  By the nineteenth century in America, chewing wax was the popular if not entirely satisfactory favorite.

 But the substances we know as chewing gum had their origins in the 1850s.  For some of us you could say the story starts with Davy Crockett.

 Just about anyone who went to Knox College—or any college-- in the 1960s would have experienced the Davy Crockett craze of the 50s, centered on TV films starring Fess Parker, shown endlessly on the Disneyland anthology hour.  The last of the three supposedly biographical tales was about Davy Crockett joining the heroic band defending the Alamo—150 or so men facing 1500 Mexican soldiers.  After holding the Alamo for ten days, Davy Crockett and his compatriots were all killed in the battle or executed afterwards.  The general of the Mexican forces, who was named but never seen in the Disney film, was Santa Anna.  We knew that name. 

 Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna was not only the General of the army ruthlessly intent on putting down a rebellious attempt of Texas to secede from Mexico—he was also at the time the President of Mexico.  In fact he was President of Mexico at least five times.  He was also the General that soon after the Alamo, was defeated by Sam Houston’s forces, and thereby lost Texas.  Later he was the general (and president) who provoked and then lost a war with the entire United States. 

 Santa Anna’s career was marked by idealism, hypocrisy, vanity, charm, chicanery, avarice, incompetence and betrayal, and by a remarkable ability to survive.  He was also in it for the money.  His brief last term as president was a mockery of a monarchy.  After he was deposed he went into exile, and ended up for a time in—of all places-- Staten Island in New York, where he cultivated a partner in a get-rich-quick scheme.

 There are several versions of this story. In one, he brought with him about a ton of chicle, the sap of the manikara zapota or sapodilla tree, an evergreen found in jungles of southern Mexico and Central America.  His American partner (or employee or go-between-- the exact relationship varies with the telling) was Thomas Adams, a photographer and inventor.  Santa Anna liked to chew the chicle, so Adams was tasked with finding a market for it—as the basis for rubber tires attached to buggy wheels.  Santa Anna convinced him it was a great idea.

  No one was interested.  Then Santa Anna decamped, leaving Adams with a ton of chicle.  He recalled how one of his sons picked up the habit of chewing it from Santa Anna, and got another son, a traveling salesman, to try selling it as a chewing substitute for paraffin wax.  Probably unbeknownst to him, the product had been test-marketed for ages by the Aztecs, who chewed this chictli.  But after a little success, Adams gave it the American mass-production spin by inventing a machine in 1871 that divided the chicle into strips. He also invented the first gumballs. 

An enterprising druggist in Kentucky began adding flavor to the gum, though the taste was medicinal.  Adams then created a licorice-flavored gum he called Black Jack. It was the longest surviving brand of chewing gum, still sticking to the bottom of movie theatre seats almost a century later. Adams sold Black Jack and another venerable brand, Tutti Frutti, through vending machines in New York.  Later he would market Chiclets.   

In the late 1880s, a candy store owner in Cleveland named William J. White, who supposedly invented chewing gum all over again when he mistakenly ordered a barrel of Yucatan chicle, added a peppermint taste. Then other brands familiar to my generation began arriving.  Physician Edward Beeman began processing pepsin for its stomach-soothing properties, and heeded a suggestion to add it to chewing gum: Beeman’s Pepsin Chewing Gum. It was still marketed as such in the 1950s and possibly longer.

 In 1890, Adams brought together several existing manufacturers, including Beeman and White, to form the American Chicle company. Eventually it would become an international giant. Together with production and product refinements (the first Adams chewing gum was the consistency of taffy), chewing gum became a lucrative product. 

Helping that popularity along was a former soap salesman named William Wrigley, Jr., who introduced his Spearmint gum in 1892, followed by Juicy Fruit in 1893.  Wrigley was also a pioneer in advertising and publicity—perhaps giving rise to the expression “selling it like soap.” 

 Wrigley headquartered his own company in Chicago, which became enormously prosperous, presenting the city with the Wrigley Building and the classic ballpark Wrigley Field for his Chicago Cubs baseball team. 

Another company that formed around this time was Beech-Nut, which started out as a baby food company but soon branched out in some weird ways, into chewing tobacco, for instance.  Beech-Nut also entered the chewing gum market with their peppermint, spearmint and Doublemint brands.    

 Like the first manufactured cigarettes and American chocolate bars, the presence of chewing gum in the rations of American soldiers during World War I created a larger market when the soldiers returned, in addition to giving Europe a taste of America. So it was in the 1920s that chewing gum began to be a defining feature of American life, and began its spread to Europe and beyond.  Even Coca Cola briefly got into the act with its own gum.

 By my childhood in the 1950s and adolescence in the early 1960s, chewing gum was a somewhat controversial but still ubiquitous part of the every day.  The brands we knew and chewed included some of the age-old: many early brands failed, but bright yellow Juicy Fruit packages were everywhere, and Black Jack and Cloves rattled down from the lobby vending machines at the movies. 

Chewing gum brands were heavily advertised, including on television (Double your pleasure, double your fun, with Doublemint, Doublemint, Doublemint Gum!) Though chewing gum became associated with rebellious teenagers (teachers generally frowned on it, and institutions hated the mess) it was mainly marketed to adults.  New additives, it was claimed, helped clean teeth and breath as well as calm nerves. If a stick of chewing gum stuffed in your mouth seemed too vulgar, there was cinnamon flavored Dentyne, in a different sized package and divided in petite pieces, marketed as a dental—and mental--health aid.

 There was chewing gum for everything: Aspergum contained aspirin, there were nicotine gums; my father regularly chewed tablets of an antacid gum called Chooz.  By the 1970s there were sugarless gums, marketed as dieting aids. 

My generation got the gum habit from childhood bubble gum.  It had a separate and later history, because it took longer to create a gum that produced durable bubbles. But the techniques were finally perfected, and the Fleer Company began selling Dubble Bubble in the 1930s, though with sugar shortages it devoted its entire production to the armed forces in World War II and didn’t resume domestic sales until 1951.  Around then, Topps began selling Bazooka bubble gum.

 In my childhood we got Dubble Bubble and Bazooka in small, fat squares, wrapped tightly and individually. Both brands were wrapped on the inside with paper containing a comic strip or panel.  For Bazooka it was the adventures of Bazooka Joe.  Dubble Bubble’s hero was called Pud.  Both also included fortunes; Dubble added interesting “facts.”  

In the 1930s, Fleer also started selling packages of bubble gum with cardboard photos of major league baseball players.  By my 1950s childhood, Topps had joined and perhaps surpassed them.  Those packages were single thin rectangles of gum slightly smaller than the cards that we all collected, treasured, traded and played with.  It was also our early form of gambling, as you did not know what players you were getting in each package.

 We also got football cards, with pictures of professional football players (much less popular than baseball players--college and even high school football teams were better known then.)  Eventually there would be cards of many different kinds: from Davy Crockett to the Beatles, Star Trek and Star Wars, and yes (I reluctantly admit) the Brady Bunch. 

A switch from bubble gum to chewing gum exclusively was part of the transition from childhood to adolescence, and the Beech-Nut gums in particular were part of that, if only for sponsoring Dick Clark’s Saturday night music show starting in 1958, which featured many of the current stars lip-synching to their latest singles.  Though this was black and white television, I still remember the dark green package of spearmint gum he would display.

 Chewing gum in a bewildering number of new tastes continues to be sold around the world. Still, as the 20^th century wound down, chewing gum began to lose its cultural flavor.  It was less fashionable, a little déclassé.  Beemans got a boost when the Tom Wolfe book and the 1983 film The Right Stuff revealed it as famed test pilot Chuck Yeager’s favorite ritual before a dangerous flight.  But that didn’t slow the trend downward.

 

Still, even some celebrities kept chewing, if somewhat secretly. A home movie camera caught JFK chewing gum. Perhaps one of the last public gum chewers was John Lennon, who famously was seen chewing gum while singing “All You Need Is Love” to an international TV audience. Though there's enough gum around to keep the famous Gum Wall at Pike's Market in Seattle fresh, it's not as fashionable as it used to be.  By the 24^th century, gum is so unknown that when offered a stick of gum by a libidinous desk sergeant in a 1940s holodeck simulation, Doctor Beverly Crusher committed the cardinal rookie mistake, and swallowed it.

 The fortunes of those great chewing gum companies has followed, along with the disappearance of many classic brands.  American Chicle is gone, Beech-Nut is back to making just baby food.  Though now a subsidiary of a candy company, only Wrigley remains an international giant in chewing gum.

 But such is the power of nostalgia for classic chewing gum brands that a wrinkled up package,  a decades-dry stick or related item can fetch tens, hundreds, even thousands of dollars.  And of course it’s become a cliché of my generation to bemoan the bubble gum baseball cards that were thrown away with the other detritus of childhood.   A 1952 Mickey Mantle hauled in $12.6 million. Chew on that awhile.

Gallery

American Chicle Building in Portland, Oregon.

Thomas Adams (and sons) put their name on several products, and the Adams name was used for others long afterwards.  This is one of the brands that didn't last.

Baseball players were known for chewing substances other than chewing gum.  Nevertheless,  Beech-Nut did a series of endorsement ads with prominent players--none more prominent than Stan the Man. 

The classic Dubble Bubble...

In the effort to give chewing gum legitimacy, especially in the early days, companies made various health claims.  Beemans however was sincere--he was a champion of pepsin, and many other companies later used pepsin in their gum, and featured the word prominently in packaging and promotions.

When I tried to recall specific baseball cards I actually had in my collecting years, I could remember of course the prominent names, like Mickey Mantle, Roberto Clemente, etc.  But the actual card?  For some reason the first I recalled was the Gene Baker card with the dark green background.  Gene Baker is a forgotten player from the 50s and early 60s, but his last team was the Pittsburgh Pirates, which I followed religiously, especially in the 1957,58, 59 and World Championship 1960 seasons.  When he came to the Pirates in the Dale Long trade in 1957, I kept waiting to see him but he rarely played, hobbled by injuries and better players in front of him.  He'd been a shortstop, converted to second base in Chicago (sharing the infield with the great Ernie Banks--the two of them were among the first black players in the NL after Jackie Robinson) and a utility infielder in Pittsburgh.  He was on the 1960 team, used sparingly to spell Don Hoak at third and pinch-hit.  He soon retired but stayed with the Pirates organization, and became the first black manager and coach in organized baseball (in the minors), and if only for part of one game in 1963, the first black manager in the Major Leagues.