Roger O Green

Lydster: messages from my daughter

homework

Sometime between 2016 and 2020, my daughter gave me several strips of paper with messages on them. I rediscovered them when I was in the (lengthy) process of straightening my office.

They reminded me of a similar present I received from my friends for – I believe – my 16th birthday. I think they’re still in this house somewhere.

My daughter wrote:

We watch the news. I think the watching, but also conversing about both the stories and the coverage choices, helped inform her social conscience.

You help me leave for school. First, I made sure she was awake. I used to take her on the bus to preschool before I went to work. Later, I made sure she had food, money, and homework, especially in the lower grades.

When she first went to middle school, I helped her navigate how to take alternate buses so she could avoid the rowdies on the designated buses. But by eighth grade, she decided that the loud bus was more tolerable than spending the extra time to take two buses.

You help me with my homework. In particular, history and math. As I recall, math was complicated even in fourth grade because of the wording of some of the questions. While I remembered a lot of AP American history, there were details that I had never heard. I tried to help her with AP Statistics, but I couldn’t recall it well enough, so I got her a tutor.

Hey, Ricky!

You and I Love Lucy. In 2016, my wife, my daughter, and I went to the Lucy-Desi Museum in Jamestown, NY. She took a bunch of photos, a few of which showed up in my blog post. She got a Lucy cup. Subsequently, we bought the box set of I Love Lucy episodes, which she watched for several months.

You tolerate your life. I’m not positive what this meant. It’s true that I was unhappy and dissatisfied at work in the latter years but needed to get to retirement age so that I could quit. I didn’t often directly tell her, I don’t think, but indeed she overheard conversations I had with her mother.

I was delighted to come across these messages.

Compassion, Int’l: Sunday Stealing

tulips

This week’s Sunday Stealing is Compassion, Int’l, which refers to this organization. What the quiz has to do with the entity, I am uncertain.

1. Do you ever have funny dreams at night?

If by “funny,” they mean weird, strange, bizarre, then yeah. And I can have them when I take a 30-minute nap. I remember them for a time but forget them if I don’t write them down. That said, one recent one involved my late father.

Just last night, I played handball, two on two, but we played with full-sized cars that bounced instead of balls. (I used to play racquetball regularly from 1983-2010.)

2. If you could make a law for your country, what would it be?

A salary ratio so that the rich don’t continue to get richer.

3. What would you do if you were invisible for a day?

I’d sneak into some corporate entity and sneak out their documents proving their culpability in, e.g., polluting the air or water or creating other risks for people and/or animals. Then I’d leak ’em to the press. (Or should I post them on my blog first? Hmmm.)

4. If you could be someone else for a day, who would you be?

Elon Musk. And I’d give away 90% of his/my money to worthy entities feeding the hungry, fighting disease et al.

5. What would you like to change about yourself?

I want to eliminate some pain.

6. What is your daily routine?

Currently: I get up, post my blog to Facebook, do Wordle, Dordle, Quordle, and Octotordle, vote for my niece Rebecca Jade in five categories, vote for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame candidates, and check my email. Weigh myself, and take my blood pressure and pulse. Feed the cats, then feed myself. Then it depends.

Perfection

7. What would your perfect day be like? What would you be doing?

Seeing a movie at a cinema, watching a play, or singing in the choir, and then getting a massage.

8. How old were you when you learned to read?

IDK. I don’t recall not reading.

9. What is the most interesting thing you know?

I don’t know that it’s INTERESTING, but I know all of the US Presidents, in order and year of inauguration

10 What makes you nervous?

Being late to take a plane or train.

11. What is your favourite flower?

Tulips. It’s an Albany thing.

12. Have you ever ridden on a horse or any other animal?

Yes, on June 9, 1975, I rode a horse. It was the day after I had my first hangover. Not recommended.

13. What time do you go to bed?

11 p.m., or maybe later if I have projects to finish.

14. What time do you get up?

7:15 a.m., when the cats want to be fed.

15. What is something that is always in your refrigerator?

Eggs, 1% milk, cottage cheese, grapes, and apples.

Fellow Pisces, friend Mark

comic books

There are very few people for whom I can tell you the date we met. Friend Mark is one of them.

On Sunday, September 12, 1971, my parents dropped me off at the State University College at New Paltz (NY). There was a meal in the basement of Bliss Hall, and I met Mark while standing in line.

We discovered we were both staying at Scudder Hall, he in 110, me in B2. We hung out in each other’s room a lot that year. He would perch on his desk like Snoopy sometimes did on his doghouse, looking like a vulture.

The next night at a mixer, he introduced me to his high school friend, the Okie, who I would marry.

I discovered he collected comic books. For a time, I thought this was strange, but eventually, I started buying my own at the convenience store in nearby Highland. Eventually, we frequented the Crystal Cave, an actual comic book store in downtown New Paltz, where we met future FantaCo dudes Raoul Vezina and Tom Skulan.

In the spring and fall of 1972, he and I went to several antiwar demonstrations in New Paltz, Poughkeepsie, Kingston, and New York City. He was part of the auto brigade that tried to block the New York State Thruway; I was in his car. He was present when I got arrested in May.

At least once, he tried to teach me to drive on that same Thruway stretch between New Paltz and Kingston, but he said it was a terrifying experience.

SPAC

He and his then-girlfriend MK52 were in the car on August 22, 1974, when the Okie, by then my wife, chastised me for the 110 miles (177 km) from New Paltz to the Saratoga Performing Arts Center when we were going to see Joni Mitchell.

I was the best man at his October 1976 marriage to MK52. When I was adrift in late 1977, I ended up staying at their apartment in Schenectady, NY, from December 1977 to March 1978.

In the early 1980s, Mark worked part-time as a bartender. This helped him to appreciate sports and dance music far more than he did when I first met him.

He, along with his cousin Lawrence, started a Mid-Winter tradition almost every February for decades, usually at Mark’s or his friend Barry’s house. The photo is from an event a few years ago. I’ve been to at least two dozen of them over the years.

Mark was a groomsman in my final marriage in May 1999, despite hating wearing a tux. For the record, he looked nice.

In the buildup to the Iraq war, there were massive antiwar demonstrations in over 600 cities all over the world on February 15, 2003. I came down on a bus from Albany to New York City, where between 100,000 and 500,000 people showed up. Somehow, I ran into Mark and his child, who had come down from the Mid-Hudson.

Friend Mark and I see each other regularly; generally, he drives up to Albany from the Mid-Hudson. We talk and solve the problems of the world in a few hours.

There’s undoubtedly other stuff I’ve either forgotten or do not wish to incriminate one or both of us.

All Quiet On The Western Front (2022)

World War I

The current iteration of the film All Quiet On The Western Front is the third World War I film I’ve seen in the last four years. I watched 1917 in January 2020, and the documentary footage of They Shall Not Grow Old a year earlier.

There’s a bit of surface similarity between Grow Old and All Quiet. In each case, the potential recruits, from Britain and Germany, respectively, are led to believe that going off to war will be an adventure. They’re so cheerful marching off to battle. But they soon discover they’re mired in a slog of trench warfare.

All Quiet is a remake of the 1930 film of the same name, which I have never seen. The original won the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director, Lewis Milestone, and was nominated in two other categories. The new film is up for nine Oscars, including Best Picture.

The characters even share the same names. Felix Kammerer plays Paul, the Lew Ayres role. Albrecht Schuch is Kat, played initially by Louis Wolheim. I did not know there was also a 1979 TV movie with Richard Thomas and Ernest Borgnine.

At some level, the charge by the soldiers, which happens thrice, looks almost exactly the same in the new film. Perhaps it’s to show what is explained in the epilogue, that tens of thousands of soldiers were killed to gain or lose only a few hundred meters of territory. This caused me slight confusion for a time.

Recycled

Even in the “quiet” moments, one sees the horrors. The uniforms are stripped from the dead soldiers and shipped to a factory where women sew up the holes created by bullets and bayonets. Often, the names of the previous wearer have not been removed until after the recruit notices the old nametag.

Still, nothing showed the utter pointless insanity of war more than a segment near the end.

The new All Quiet On The Western Front is an excellent movie worthy of its BAFTA win. But it inevitably has lots of wartime violence, some of it up close. Occasionally, the participants consider their actions’ emotional and moral consequences. Then there’s the next skirmish, and a soldier has no time to think.

The eyes. The image that will linger in my mind is often the blue eyes of the living and the dead on faces caked with mud.

Song of Scheherazade

cf. Rimsky-Korsakov

The Final JEOPARDY answer for Tuesday, January 10, 2023, was in the category CLASSIC TALE CHARACTERS. “In one 19th-century translation, she ‘perceived the dawn of day and ceased’ speaking nearly 1,000 times.”

To my mild surprise, no one got the correct answer. The contestants answered Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty, and Echo.

I knew immediately it was Scheherazade, though I wasn’t positive I knew how to spell it. While I read a story about this Arabian Nights tale, my greater recollection was from the music, which is often the case with me.

Specifically, there is an album by a group called Renaissance. It put out an album called Scheherazade and Other Stories. The title track, Song of Scheherazade, which took up the entirety of Side 2 on the LP, ends with these lyrics:

Scheherazade bewitched him
With songs of jeweled kings
Princes and of heroes
And eastern fantasies

Told him tales of sultans
And talismans and rings
A thousand and one nights, she sang
To entertain her king
She sings, Scheherazade…

Natal day present

I had heard the album several times when I was in college at SUNY New Paltz. But I did not own it.

As I noted seven years ago, in the winter to spring of 1977, I had graduated from college. But adrift, I ended up crashing at my parents’ house in Charlotte, NC. I was pretty miserable, helping sell costume jewelry and other geegaws. (If I had used a word as sophisticated as “geegaws” at the craft fair, I would be chided for allegedly putting on airs.)

My family asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I requested that Renaissance album, and I received it. But it was clear when my father heard it, he didn’t think much of it, which merely fed into my melancholy.

After the JEOPARDY show last month, my wife reminded me how much her college friend Alison played that album in heavy rotation. This prompted me to buy the CD, which now came as a three-disc (2 CDs, 1 DVD) set.

The first time I came to the end of the album, I wept, partly from the beauty of Annie Haslam’s voice and maybe a little from a sad memory.

The classical side

This story reminded me of another piece of music titled Scheherazade, written in 1888 by Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov. A 2007 NPR story by Scott Simon explained the power of music.

“For centuries, composers have tried to spin tales in music. My understanding of how important the concept could be was cemented by Leonard Bernstein when I went to a New York Philharmonic rehearsal. Bernstein raised his hands up and asked, ‘Do I have to tell you the story of this Haydn symphony?’

“These typically reserved musicians were practically jumping up and down, nodding their heads in anticipatory glee, like children at storytime. Bernstein was the consummate storyteller, often elaborating on or, dare I say, even fabricating some of the finer details for dramatic effect. But the memory was indelible for me, and the lesson was clear: It’s all about the story.”

Listen to:

Renaissance album

Renaissance side two

Several versions of the Rimsky-Korsakov