Category: Just Life in General

SSW for March 25, 2021

[Potential spoilers! If you’re not caught up on your Suspense episodes (as of September 2, 1942), go listen to “The Hitchhiker” first. Then come back here!]

The “drive-in” today, like last week, brought another bout with eternity, this time through Lucille Fletcher’s “The Hitchhiker,” a Suspense episode on Sirius XM’s Old Time Radio station. I saw the title as I was flipping through the stations, and I had that immediate thought: “Do I want to go there?”

I knew the story and I knew the effect. Orson Welles. The driving. The narration. The other-worldliness. The common, relatable story of a cross-country trip. The impenetrable story of crossing over—not the Brooklyn Bridge, but the breach between here and eternity. Has Orson, or Ronald Adams, as his character was named, made it to his destination yet? Is he still making that cross-country trek, picking up hitchhiking women, crashing into a field of cows? Or did he, soon after making that phone call home, succumb to the Hitchhiker’s “Hallo!” and find out “who he really was” and where he was going?

My first reflection is the moment of indecision in me to listen to the episode this morning. In a flash of a moment when I read the title on the radio display, all the thoughts above ran through my mind—one of those flashes of eternity in an instant—and I hesitated, not sure it was right, at 5:12 AM, to be entering into reflections of the sort that this story would, yet once again, arouse and confound in my mind and soul. My first thought is: this instantaneous thought process would not have been possible just a few years ago, before the time of radios that sent written messages—words denoting station and program and song titles—across a display screen. So here is how the modern world is separate from the world of the Hitchhiker, the world of September, 1942. Yet, as I listened, my dominant thought was how unchanged our worlds are: a mother saying goodbye to her son getting in his car on a journey. And indeed, there’s so much about the journey and the situation that is unchanged: the sound of the engine accelerating, the highway sights, the roadside cafes, the radio, and the narrator’s drifty and precise observations as he makes his way over monotonous terrain and terrifying preoccupations in his mind. This does sound a lot like my morning commute.

The difference/similarity between 1942 and 2021—the driving, the moment in time, the eternity—is one of those recurrent themes, those instantaneous flashes of big meaning, that appear in my mind, time and again as I make my way through the story. I can’t help feeling I’m somehow with Ronald: we’re both driving; we’re both terrified; we’re both talking our way through somehow (and sometimes, alas, with aggressive thoughts, though mine don’t verge, fortunately, into contemplations of murder, as Ronald’s do, in his time of greatest crisis). My car is very different from his—I with my radio-messaging-display and quiet electric motor—he, with his internal combustion engine and manual transmission accelerating through all the gears. But the internal combustion engine is still in the forefront of my mind: it’s what I think of when I think of cars and highways. Everything about his trip stimulates feelings of familiarity and hominess. His reflection of his mother at the end brings quiet hope and familiar images. He’s read somewhere that “Love can conquer demons,” and he pictures his mom in her “crisp house dress” (that moms wore in the 40s, 50s, and 60s when we were young, when we needed our moms so, when there was such comfort there—both otherworldly and oh so simple and understandable).

Ronald drives, endlessly it seems, across so many regions of our country, with many descriptive details evoking the grandeur and monotony familiar to anyone who has gone on a road trip. It isn’t until he is in a surreal part of the great American Southwest, in New Mexico, with its “lunar” landscape and barren and sublime mountains and prairies and mesas, that he decides to make the phone call. We get the operator, speaking operator-speak, something none of us have heard these many years, yet still so familiar. Ronald has to request “Long distance”—as indeed there was a time, long ago, when local and long distance were different services needing different operators who had to talk to each other—and, essentially, “build” or link a connection across a network or series of networks to reach a place really far away. Ronald was attempting to reach a place far away—but not just physically far. Wherever Ronald was—and it wasn’t New Mexico—he was connecting to Brooklyn, and he did get connected—to his confusion and woe.

But I get ahead of myself. That call, with all the operators, and the coins falling in the slot with the familiar ding, so perfectly inhabited that space between the familiar and the surreal. While the new technologies of electric cars and radio displays did not essentially change the experience of driving and all its attendant fears and possibilities and routines, the new technology of the cell phone, once again, has made narrative drama and suspense all the more difficult for writers. I forgot how dramatic a pay phone could be! Ronald’s call was expensive, even by 2021 standards: $3.85, to be deposited in coins, one at a time: 15 quarters and one dime. We hear each one fall—but not only that, there are instructions from the operator: “After you deposit $1.50, please wait. When I have collected the money, you may deposit the next $1.50.” So, we hear the six coins fall—and the suspense builds through this most quotidian of processes. The operator collects and gives permission to continue. Six more coins, six more dings. Then the final four coins—and that most familiar and most shocking of phone calls.

The story ends, and I have to shut off the radio before there is any disruption to the mood of fear and worry over the eternity—or end—of Ronald’s fate. But I recover soon, as it occurs to me that perhaps Greg Bell has some provocative notes on the story. So I turn the radio back on, and it comes on right away, since radios nowadays no longer use tubes that need to warm up—and it’s Orson Welles I hear. He’s talking about the war effort … in a most visual way that would require its own essay to depict. He pronounces the first syllable of “Nazi” as though it were “gnat” (gnat-zi)—a pronunciation I haven’t heard before. So, the thematic mixture of familiar/other (or different)-worldly continues. Welles is encouraging people to buy war bonds—to lend Uncle Sam 10 cents on the dollar … possibly through a payroll savings plan. He has much to say about it, with a fine statement about the preferability of US bonds over Nazi or Axis bonds—on our wrists. So we’re right there, in September of 1942, just about 10 months into this war, with such a long way to go, an eternity, but still the movement from Brooklyn to New Mexico, and ordinary life and transitions to eternity are happening at home, on the radio, as though no war ever disrupted and took over life as we know it.

The Hitchhiker—strange and right there (always appearing, always surprising)—is a moment in time, and a forever, out of time. Greg Bell comes on and reminds us of Lucille Fletcher’s stature as a suspense writer (she of “Sorry, Wrong Number” fame). I think of her relationship (wife) to the great musical composer of Suspense, Bernard Herrmann, who was, it so happens, the musical composer for tonight’s episode. Fletcher, we learn, wrote the Hitchhiker specifically for Orson Welles, and sure enough, Orson Welles, put his usual genius right there and made it become what it needed to become: a piece of terrifying moment in time, across time, repeatedly casting us into the familiar, made just unfamiliar enough. Ronald describes it when he is traversing New Mexico, near the end. In his loneliness, he looks out on the gloomy landscape and his movement across that country, which he pictures in terms of the indifference of a fly walking across the face of the moon. And then he calls his mom.

SSW for March 18, 2021

And now Part 2 of this semester’s notebook begins. I reflect: the process is becoming more a “thing,” certainly for me personally: I’m doing what I ask my students to do: think all week about possible topics; plan for a good session; start early so I have momentum; try not to think too much about specific lines of possible development—so as not to forget them by “writing” them (in water, like John Keats’s name); try to keep open to the late discovery of a topic; try to let the discovery energize me; try to get some work done that needs getting done; try to find the meaning in life, as in “what, really, needs to be done?”

I’m still facing the abyss, looking into eternity … trying to make sense of it all … trying to make sense of this single moment in time. I read in the news about water on Mars—there was a lot of it, apparently, but we’re talking about 3 billion years ago. That’s literally something that some scientists have said: Mars was such and such 3 billion years ago (but now all that water has gone somewhere—in the rocks below the surface? Into outer space?). Three billion years ago: That’s so long before any of my three topics of today: vaccine purgatory, Nancy Sinatra, and really going back, Cicero, who, ancient as he is, still is not all that close to even one billion years ago. All these billions of years bang against the limits of my comprehension and imagination, kinda like the trillions of dollars being spent so lavishly and stingily and carefully and crudely in President Biden’s Coronavirus stimulus package. I think of Terry’s comment about how he conceives of amounts like that: he can’t. So, it has no meaning. And we’re probably all in Terry’s boat, as we throw up our hands at the seas of thousands and millions and billions and trillions, and figure it must all work out somehow—whether it’s through making things up (printing money? declaring victory and moving on? Imploding in insolvency?) or just hoping for the best.

My three topics cover some range: the news of the day, the heartstrings of a daughter’s devotion; the connections to eternity and fleeting urgency and eternal resonance—if disguised in continuing preoccupations that have no hope of permanence, despite how persistent they’ve been in continuing on. As for this last, I’m think of Cicero, who both seems so relevant and so completely gone from existence.

A good starting point—a theme of my notebooks lately—is the “drive in”: I drive in on Cicero Ave., so Cicero the man is “right there”—kinda—living on, despite the avenue having nothing really Ciceronian about it. It’s large, I suppose, like the man. I can’t stop thinking of Cicero’s mortality: He was 63 when he died, my age, and he had accomplished so much. How can not every human relate to Cicero? He was given privilege at the start of his life born into the “middle class”; he had family he loved (Brother Quintus in De Oratore); he achieved greatness in oratory, law, and politics. And he died before his time—because he was so important. He had to be murdered. So, he never had the chance of fading away, becoming irrelevant and forgotten. I remember you, Cicero; I read your treatise of “oratory”—one of many you wrote on that topic, and I can see your development in theory, your love of your brother, your admiration for your mentor, Crassus, your nostalgia for an earlier, happier time. I think of the reflective, “end of life” tone of De Oratore, a book written while you were in your mid-fifties—still a man with a lot of living left, but nonetheless, a man who was looking back, looking to teach, looking to create a dialogue of friendly and different voices trying to figure out just what is it about persuasion, performance, public life, responsibility, exploitation, strategy—all the stuff that goes into, surrounds, comes out of effective, responsible, service-oriented speech? I feel you right here, in my mind, Cicero. Yet, I also feel those nagging questions: Why all this effort? Why are we remembering you? Why did you have to be killed, after such a valuable life, at a point in your life when retirement beckoned, with those pursuits away from the forum and Senate—the reading, and math, and music, and leisure you talked about in De Oratore?

Maybe my sadness in reading you this year is my connection to you, at age 63 this year—this pandemic year, when thoughts of mortality are heavy in the air each day, despite me being almost one week into my post first-dose vaccination. Yesterday’s front page Tribune story was about people my age—or a tad older: the 64-year-olds who were too young to be in that over-65 1a group, first to be vaccinated, but who, as folk approaching their mid-60s, were also in a somewhat increased risk group because of age. The article spoke of the state of “vaccine purgatory” some people this age felt—both too young and too old, kinda neglected or not taken care of, as they wait their turn for a vaccine. But who, at whatever age, does not think this way? We are all in purgatory—waiting, uneasy, unsettled. For though we may have led full lives—who knows? Will some Mark Antony put the hit on us?

The article spoke of a couple who had retired last year. The man pictured and his wife were enjoying their retirement, but yet there was this cloud over them. Was it the fear of pestilence and death that was afflicting people like them all over the world, and no place worse than right here in America? It could be. The Page 1 picture was flattering—I looked at that 64-year-old, and thought: Yes, he’s got some miles left on him. If I didn’t know this was a story about his age, I wouldn’t have thought of his age. He had a smile, not too many wrinkles, some hair on top, not too thin and not totally snowy. He looked good—happy—ready for the good life. I thought: how am I looking? In some ways, I’m at my best; I certainly, as I’ve often said, don’t feel any different from when I was 18…. But I am different … by some 45 years. I didn’t have to wait, by the way, for my vaccine—such being the benefits of the hypertension and diabetes that my 45-years-post-18 have brought. So, I’ve acquired issues—but I don’t feel them. I feel connected and disconnected to the man in the paper, and I wonder how Cicero would have felt to be 63 in 2021, and part of me thinks he would have been just the same, and that’s a comfort.

The warmest comfort in this drama of “grasping at something that lasts” in the midst of disappearing-water-on Mars after billions of years, comes, however, with the melancholy confirmation today, on the ride in down Cicero Ave., that Nancy Sinatra, after 14 years of being “Nancy for Frank,” will be airing her final show this Sunday—thus, closing off a significant portion of her life, and concluding this picture she has created of … what? A daughter’s love? A music expert’s analysis? An insider’s look at the context behind the art?

I was so surprised at how touched I’ve been by her show these many years. Have I been an XM customer that long? My first satellite radio predates “Nancy for Frank”; it even predates “Siriusly Sinatra,” as the station was called “Frank’s Place” back then. The station has evolved over the years and across the name change—with all of the changes improvements, with one exception (where are you, O, Jonathan Schwartz?). Nancy’s tenure doesn’t seem to be situated in time: she exists, reflecting “Sinatra,” always there, as indeed she has always been. The first child, the inspiration for Phil Silvers, the daughter, the sister, who, during her tenure on the station had to say goodbye to her brother and mother—sic transit gloria mundi—losses we all felt as family, because that’s what happened in this tenure: we became family. Nancy was herself always, and that honesty made it so easy to be with her. She didn’t need to argue a case for her father, but she lived that case so naturally and lovingly. I’ll leave to others to characterize the art of her programming, but it was artful—playing whole albums, always with attributions and stories, geeking out with Chuck Granata, signing off with “sleep warm Poppa; sleep warm, Frank….”

At first (has it really been 14 years??) it didn’t seem like Nancy—or like her voice. Such a singer she was, and such an alluring young woman—of course, in those boots. I always thought of her with that power—walking (that’s what they were made for, you see) but not only that, but walking over something, on to something. But this Nancy, with Frank, seemed to have gotten someplace—and that place was one of appreciation, love—and scholarship. I found so much more to appreciate in Frank Sinatra through the person he was through the person Nancy is. Such a gift she’s given us, in so many layers and in such beauty. We have the music—her father’s and hers, yes, and we have the context of family and memories and other artists and easy humility and pride about it, because that’s the easy truth of it. Rest well, Nancy. No sleep yet, okay? But warmth, yes.