Lisa Mednick Powell: News

We ended our gig last night with "Dead Flowers" as usual. So it stuck in my head all night. And in the morning I got to thinking about my days as a florist in D.C., New Orleans, L.A., and Austin.Valentine's Day was always busy. Guilty rocker husbands and boyfriends would come in and get roses for their ladyfriends and wives, sometimes for both. Hey, what goes in the vase stays in the vase.

Friends would call and order flowers and use that as an excuse to talk about songs or about each other. I would hold the telephone against my shoulder and listen while pushing the broom, winding myself up in the telephone cord as I swept up leaves, flower petals, ribbon fragments--all of it trash and all of it so pretty. I always went home with some fully opened roses that wouldn't sell. And I went home with nicks and cuts and thorns embedded in my hands. Always I took home somebody's love story. Some days I felt so responsible: if those roses did not last, how long would the fella last with the lady he was courting?

So, here are some words about flowers.

First, one from Ted Roethke who grew up working in his father's greenhouse. Then, Loren Eiseley--an essay fragment.
And a strange little surprise at the end.

Weed Puller

Under the concrete benches,
Hacking at black hairy roots,--
Those lewd monkey-tails hanging from drainholes,--
Digging into the soft rubble underneath,
Webs and weeds,
Grubs and snails and sharp sticks,
Or yanking tough fern-shapes,
Coiled and green and thick, like dripping smilax,
Tugging all day at perverse life:
The indignity of it!--
With everything blooming above me,
Lilies, pale-pink cyclamen, roses,
Whole fields lovely and inviolate,--
Me down in that fetor of weeds,
Crawling on all fours,
Alive, in a slippery grave.



How Flowers Changed the World (Excerpt)
by Loren Eiseley

"...The truth is, however, that there is nothing very “normal” about nature, Once upon a time there
were no flowers at all.

A little while ago—about one hundred million years, as the geologist estimates time in
the history of our four-billion-year-old planet—flowers were not to be found anywhere
on the five continents. Wherever one might have looked, from the poles to the equator,
one would have seen only the cold dark monotonous green of a world whose plant life
possessed no other color.

Somewhere, just a short time before the close of the Age of Reptiles, there occurred a
soundless, violent explosion. It lasted millions of years, but it was an explosion,
nevertheless. It marked the emergence of the angiosperms—the flowering plants, Even
the great evolutionist, Charles Darwin, called them “an abominable mystery,” because
they appeared so suddenly and spread so fast.

Flowers changed the face of the planet. Without them, the world we know—even man
himself—would never have existed. Francis Thompson, the English poet, once wrote
that one could not pluck a flower without troubling a star. Intuitively he had sensed like
a naturalist the enormous interlinked complexity of life. Today we know that the
appearance of the flowers contained also the equally mystifying emergence of man..."

Then there's this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_ptqXqjsZw

Sorry, no poems today; only songs. Guess I'm feeling lazy--or tired. Gonna turn 54 on Monday, as far as I know.

Oh, and also? On Monday? An ASTEROID going to buzz the Earth, which makes us Dinosaurs very nervous.

Here is my favorite version of this Steve Young song, even though it was The Eagles who had the hit with it. I believe they did some good with their version, It was beautiful, of course, and sung with no Autotune, thank you--and Mr. Young bought a house with the proceeds if I remember the story correctly, which I might not.

Enjoy these; Steve is the real deal. In fact I'll hit you twice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgqoTDRLhfc&NR=1
You might (or might not) remember that Waylon had the hit with this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cHtpkAqb4Q
________________
Very spacial thanks to my rocket scientist bro-in-law, Joel, for this link:

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news172.html

Because of (or in spite of) the fires raging around here, in canyons and on ridges--- and in the too-close-for-comfort vicinity of decades-old radioactive waste from Los Alamos...I have been thinking about what survives conflagrations of various sorts. We can see the fire from our yard at night. The fire has also encroached on thousands of acres of Santa Clara Pueblo land and the Pueblo governor has declared a state of emergency.

Anyway, the first poem features a tenacious critter that, according to the poem, has bones and teeth that reach back through the ages to ancient fires and wars.

The second poem is for what survives invisibly--as in social justice surviving all the blows against it...and maybe it is for Independence Day as well.
Happy Fourth and please be careful with them fireworks...

The Oldest Living Thing in L.A.
By Larry Levis

At Wilshire & Santa Monica I saw an opossum
Trying to cross the street. It was late, the street
Was brightly lit, the opossum would take
A few steps forward, then back away from the breath
Of moving traffic. People coming out of the bars
Would approach, as if to help it somehow.
It would lift its black lips & show them
The reddened gums, the long rows of incisors,
Teeth that went all the way back beyond
The flames of Troy & Carthage, beyond sheep
Grazing rock-strewn hills, fragments of ruins
In the grass at San Vitale. It would back away
Delicately & smoothly, stepping carefully
As it always had. It could mangle someone’s hand
In twenty seconds. Mangle it for good. It could
Sever it completely from the wrist in forty.
There was nothing to be done for it. Someone
Or other probably called the LAPD, who then
Called Animal Control, who woke a driver, who
Then dressed in mailed gloves, the kind of thing
Small knights once wore into battle, who gathered
Together his pole with a noose on the end,
A light steel net to snare it with, someone who hoped
The thing would have vanished by the time he got there.

Poem for South African Women
by June Jordan
(from about 1980)

Our own shadows disappear as the feet of thousands
by the tens of thousands pound the fallow land
into new dust that
rising like a marvelous pollen will be
fertile
even as the first woman whispering
imagination to the trees around her made
for righteous fruit
from such deliberate defense of life
as no other still
will claim inferior to any other safety
in the world

The whispers too they
intimate to the inmost ear of every spirit
now aroused they
carousing in ferocious affirmation
of all peaceable and loving amplitude
sound a certainly unbounded heat
from a baptismal smoke where yes
there will be fire

And the babies cease alarm as mothers
raising arms
and heart high as the stars so far unseen
nevertheless hurl into the universe
a moving force
irreversible as light years
traveling to the open
eye

And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea

we are the ones we have been waiting for

In keeping with the latest news reports and what the mainstream media tend to focus on...this week's themes are regret and rage.

Anything piss you off lately?

Which do you regret more? Something you did? Or something you didn't do when you had the chance?

First:
Dumb Things
by Paul Kelly

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWhj4sVeVD0
Second:
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
by Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Sublime words about life, love, and soul--from two of the best poets who never met (but what if they had??)
Scroll with care...let it all sink in...think, but not too much...then go watch the Three Stooges or something.

Soul, Wilt Thou Toss Again
by Emily Dickinson

Soul, wilt thou toss again?
By just such a hazard
Hundreds have lost, indeed,
But tens have won an all.

Angels' breathless ballot
Lingers to record thee;
Imps in eager caucus
Raffle for my soul.
_________

And Bob D. (on the same subject, perhaps?) with my favorite-from Oh Mercy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFGFcJsxXlU&feature=related
If I can Stop One Heart from Breaking
--Emily D.

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

What Good am I?
written by Bob Dylan, performed by (shh! it's a surprise!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ki7drLpEk9M&feature=related _________
Plus, also, in addition--a Bonus (today only I promise):
OK I never do this. But if I may, just this once, let me exploit this forum to promote one of my old songs--(for educational purposes only).
Check out my 'answer song' (from 1992) to "Man in the Long Black Coat."
Go to http://www.lisamednickpowell.com, click on "music" and then "Artifacts of Love," then listen to The Blue-Eyed Men.

Yup, I have them.

Well I just got back from the city of dreams. When Paul Sanchez hugged me and said "Welcome home, baby," I felt that I had truly come home. Enough moisture in the air, plenty oxygen, one drink felt like two--no, wait; it was the other way around...anyway, Alison and I sang some old two Headed Dog songs, plus a couple of my new ones, and, best of all, her new songs. Thanks to everyone who came out and laughed and sang with us. Dancing and singing along to Tommy Malone and the Mystik Drone was probably the highlight, unless you want to count Cyril Neville playing trap set behind a couple of really good guitar players, listening to Danny Barnes or Emeline Michel at the Fairgrounds...jogging through the cemetery on Prytania or standing on the Mississippi bank feeling the breeze and hearing the calliope. Maybe those giant oysters at Houston's? Or the berled shrimp later on? Or the crawfish bread?Or the jasmine and gardenia smells in the air at night?

And yes, there are a lot of things that have changed. I could see it even this long after the flood. And some things that are still wrecked since the flood. Heard plenty of Katrina stories. My people are tough. I do wish I had gone back sooner.

So good to see everyone and hear the music again.

A Plastic Orange Raincoat, a Little Drool of Blood, & Chaos on the Girl
(a personal history based on the Beaufort Scale )

0 calm win d speed <1 mph calm; smoke rises vertically
I don’t know exactly when it started. Maybe it was the day I held the Washington Post up over my head and let it drop on the doorstep, scaring the birds and hoping to wake the inhabitants of the house. I was the paper girl. Before the sun cleared the trees, I rose and delivered. I wore my plastic orange raincoat and green Wellington boots. The headline that day was something about taped locks, about the Democratic National Committee headquarters in some fancy hotel. What happened after that we know, of course, when, maybe for the last time ever, layers of corruption peeled away and crooks were exposed. All through that spring and summer and into the next fall, we watched and waited while the White House crumbled. The self-proclaimed mighty few became prey and spectacle to the restless many. Of which I was one.


1 light air wind speed 1-3 mph direction of wind shows by smoke but not by wind vanes

Or it could have been before that, when my parents announced they were going to split up. What it came down to was my father splitting. He told me a few years ago that he couldn’t stand my mother’s incessant complaining. I can understand this; she is intractable and I fear I have inherited this unpleasant trait. It served her well in her career, however, where intractability can be an admirable trait.
My father moved across town, then to New York City, then to Europe—moving further and further away from my sister Amy and me. She cried and cried the day he got remarried. We found out when a neighbor called our mother after having seen the announcement in the local paper. He stayed out of the country for a long time, living in Copenhagen. We had to go to Canada to see him for some reason to do with taxes. All I know is my mother drove us to Windsor, Ontario from our home in Ann Arbor—more than once in the snow. I will not wait until they are both dead to say that I believe my parents did the best they could. Considering.

2 light breeze wind speed 4-7 mph wind felt on face; leaves rustle; wind vane moves

We lived in Denmark before that. We were there when Kennedy was shot. My memory’s freeze frame: Amy and me sitting on the floor of someone’s living room and hearing the words in Danish "Kennedy er skud" barking out of some radio or TV. They loved him there. And they hated Nixon more than they loved JFK. I remember stealing black tulips from someone’s garden, but that had to have been in the summer—before the assassination. After that we went back to Michigan. My mother hated Denmark, but I loved it. I was five years old, and went to first grade at the International School, where they taught us Esperanto, along with Danish and English.
When my mother took her sabbatical and went to Israel to study gender roles on the kibbutz, Amy and I went to Denmark again, where my father and his wife, Birgitte, were living. I smoked a tobacco pipe and rode the trains at all hours. At fourteen I could buy beer from the hot dog vendors but I was probably too young to babysit my tiny half-brother, Thor. I did it anyway and did the best I could. When Sara came along I often changed her diapers. She has a PhD from Harvard now.

3 gentle breeze wind speed 8-12 mph leaves and small twigs in constant motion; wind extends light flag

Our house in Ann Arbor—blue-gray with a periwinkle bedroom I shared with my sister. In a way, it is the house I have somehow tried to get back to since January of 1968 when my mother got hired to teach at Howard University in Washington D.C. Before we moved from that house, Amy and I buried our doll furniture in the dark hiding space between the lilac hedge and the low juniper bushes. By the birch tree whose white bark I used to peel and write notes on. I have looked for that house and those trees ever since. The elms were cut down, one by one, over a few terrible summers. We never understood why; they looked perfectly healthy to us.
And I remember staring up at telephone lines, wondering about voices humming through them and if the wires were real—in fact, I thought maybe I was dreaming all the time and I would wake up to discover I was really a caveman and none of the world I knew was real.
Something real I do remember: books. I stayed up past my mother’s bedtime, reading under the covers with a flashlight...The Secret Garden, The Velvet Room, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, the entire Nancy Drew series. And something else real: the smell of worms when it rained and the smell of rotten apples near the woods we walked past on the way to school. But we moved.

4 moderate breeze wind speed 13-18 mph wind raises dust and loose paper; small branches move

We moved to an apartment in Washington and my mother went off to teach at Howard and from our balcony over the tiny patch of green behind the building that was our new back yard, we watched smoke on the horizon. Finally, in April, the event happened that closed the school and blew up the city. Martin Luther King was gunned down in Memphis.

5 fresh breeze wind speed19-24 mph small-leaved trees begin to sway; crested wavelets form on inland waters

The slow funeral march of 1968. We were nascent hippies, Amy and I, wearing beads and sandals, going to marches with our mother and her dashiki-clad students. We marched against the Vietnam War and we marched for civil rights. The funeral that was1968 buried Bobby Kennedy next, his funeral train crossing the country. Am I weak? I can not think of that film footage without a tear. People of every kind lined the tracks as that sad slow train rolled by with Bobby on board.
And I can not stand at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial without a lump in my throat. Because I know about what happened there. Words that meant something were spoken there. We don’t hear words like that anymore. Every year, when they replay Martin’s "I Have a Dream" speech on the radio, it makes me cry.
But the "I Have a Dream" speech was cotton candy compared to some of the other MLK speeches. I believe we could stand to hear some speeches like that, now.

6 strong breeze wind speed 25-31 mph large branches move; overhead wires whistle; umbrellas difficult to control

We moved from D.C. to Bethesda, Maryland. My first suburb. We had a split-level house and, for the first time, Amy and I had separate bedrooms. We learned Morse code and knocked secret messages on the wall between our beds, late into the night.
Around that time I was beginning to buy 45 rpm records. "Chicago" by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young was one of my favorites.
So your brother’s bound and gagged,
And they’ve chained him to a chair...
Inexorably, music began to consume my waking hours. The piano lessons continued and I practiced daily—and enjoyed it. But what was taking over was rock and roll. I bought "Proud Mary" and "Me & Bobby McGee" by Janis. I listened to "Rubber Soul" over and over again until I knew every line and every word...and I bought "High Time we Went," by Joe Cocker. And "Maggie Mae" by Rod Stewart. (And why, every time I enter a drug store, do I have to hear Cheryl Crow singing "The First Cut is the Deepest?" Didn’t Rod Stewart own that song with his voice that cuts and cuts and cuts?)
I took the Beatles’ break-up personally. I followed the solo paths of George and John—one the seeker, the other the keeper of slow-burning chaos.

7 moderate gale or near gale wind speed 32-38 mph whole trees sway; walking against wind is difficult

At age fourteen, I bought my first LP. "Hot Rats" by Frank Zappa. All the Beatles albums we had were courtesy of my mother, who also introduced us to Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Stan Getz, and Harry Belafonte. But it was when she brought home the Beatles that we were entranced. Wait a minute. My first album, the first one that was really mine? That was "Meet the Beatles," a gift from my Grandfather Harry for my sixth birthday. Harry never sat at the table. I have no memories of dinner with my mother, father and sister. But I do have memories of Grandpa Harry standing at the table, skinny, wired, telling jokes with a cigar dangling from his mouth.
The way my uncle tells it, Harry’s father "bugged out" when Harry was just a kid. Harry ran around and got in trouble—just a street kid on the Lower East Side, and later he joined the Communist Party. He was a hat-cutter, then a writer for the WPA. But he never held a steady job. When the Depression hit, he drifted down to Alabama and became a Chiropodist. According to the story, he helped some people, made their pain stop. Finally, at age 60 or so, he became a TV repairman. He died of cancer at age 78. I think I am like him in some ways.

8 fresh gale or gale wind speed 39-46 mph twigs break off trees; moving cars veer

My maternal grandfather, Sam, was a more serious type. He once told me "Never stop fighting for what you know is right." He had been a union organizer for the I.L.G.W.U.
He and his father slept where they worked—in the sweatshops of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He and my Grandmother Ida met as they sewed facing each other at their sewing machines. The foreman separated them because they spent too much time talking. Eventually, my grandfather retired from Christian Dior, probably with the pension he fought for as shop steward. He always ate Corn Flakes because that’s the first breakfast he had at Ellis Island. He and his father sent money home to his mother and sister in Poland—the money never got to them.
At my Grandfather’s funeral, an old man approached me and said, "I was from his shtetl. I saw his mother killed by a Cossack. He hit her in the chest with his rifle and killed her." It was a miracle to meet this old man. I can not understand why my mother never goes to her parents’ graves.

9 strong gale wind speed 47-54 mph slight structural damage occurs; shingles may blow away

Watergate wound all through my high school sophomore and junior years. Mrs. Hendry let us watch the hearings in History class. And I devoured Watergate. I read Hunter S. Thompson, Timothy Crouse, and Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men. I was going to become a journalist, like the ones in Crouse’s Boys on the Bus.
At the same time, I was also learning to play the sax, and dying to play in a rock and roll band. But at that time, girls didn’t join bands. My mother was busy inventing a new field of study within her field of psychology. Psychology of Women was beginning to catch on as a discipline. She was a pioneering feminist scholar. She wrote a groundbreaking essay called “Stop the World; I Want to Get On.”
When I started junior high, girls had to wear dresses. Sometime during my freshman year, they began allowing girls to wear pants. I had these jeans with plastic rhinestone studs down the sides. I had patched them to look exactly like Neil Young’s jeans on the cover of "Harvest." I loved Neil Young. I loved his lyrics and wanted to write songs like his. Ragged but right. (Years later, I saw him backstage at Farm Aid, where I was performing with one of the many smaller acts.)
My mother forbade me from wearing those jeans to school. So I carried them to school in my book bag and changed in the girls’ room after I got there in the morning. And I want to emphasize the following truth: we students never stood for the pledge of allegiance. We stayed in our seats. It was one of the low voltage ways in which ALL OF US protested the war in Viet Nam. Of course there were other, higher voltage ways as well—ways in which we created chaos and upper atmosphere disturbances of a loud and frenetic nature—ways in which we got, as they say, our ya-yas out—ways that are gone from this modern world, deemed too dangerous, even for the daring. We were thinkers, you see. We lived in a world of imagination, and anyone who couldn’t ride with us, well, they were off the bus.

10 whole gale or storm wind speed 55-63 trees uprooted; considerable structural damage occurs

That year, 1975, Ford pardoned Nixon. That was not, as he put it, the end of the "long national nightmare." It was the beginning of a new nightmare. It was only the end of accountability, checks and balances, and, perhaps, the end of high noon, the end of the true cowboy way.
I got two gifts when I graduated high school. A manual Olivetti typewriter and a Conn alto saxophone. In my dreams they still rise from behind the sofa and grapple with each other.
I went to a big university in the Midwest to learn about Freedom of Expression. I studied Journalism and History. In the back of one of my classrooms, was some faded graffiti: "Free Bobby!" That would have been Bobby Seale, the man who’d been bound and gagged in that Chicago courtroom. I studied Great Books and American Film. I loved Jack Palance in "Shane." And Jimmy Cliff in "The Harder They Come." But more than anything, I loved the records and eight-track tapes in my dorm room. The Band. Little Feat. Bob Marley. John Coltrane. Willie Nelson. Lightnin’ Hopkins...

11 storm or violent storm wind speed 64-72 mph
widespread damage occurs

I quit college to join a rock band. The punk scene in D.C. was not cool enough. I followed others who felt the same way and moved to New York City to become a black-clad denizen of CBGB’s basement, throwing empty beer bottles against the wall. I spent whole nights out on the fire escapes of my horrible tiny apartments, giant shadows of ailanthus altissima —the botanical name for the invasive tree-of-heaven, with its heart-shaped leaf scars—cast against the greasy bricks of the neighbors’ walls...I am not sure I can make the reader understand the chaos I brought on myself...Those fire escape hours, banging on my Olivetti, after hours of squawking punk jazz on my saxophone and bloodying the keys on my tiny electric piano...hours of breaking open black beauties and snorting the asphalt innards of those rough and nasty capsules...the chaos was upon me. It expanded time, and time expanded me.
I became uprooted and tumbled through empty streets, making long shadows on rain-greased bricks. The chaos was upon me. It blew at my back, and I drifted south and then west.

12 hurricane wind speed >72 mph
widespread damage occurs

I explain this, all of this, so you will know why I couldn’t stop myself from taking the red Sharpie marker out of the drawer of the front desk, where I was Administrative Associate and Assistant to the Dean of the Executive Education Office of the University of Texas School of Business—and, with that red inkpen, drawing a little drool of blood, extending from the corner of President Bush’s mouth and traveling down his chin, on the cover of the Financial Times. The Financial Times, that baby-aspirin-colored British biz rag that came to our desk for free every day. My supervisor’s supervisor called me in— her version of a military tribunal—and threw the newspaper down in front of me. "DO YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THIS??"
"Yes. Yes I do, in fact. Looks appropriate wouldn’t you say?"
I had been about to be permanently vested in the Texas State Retirement System. But I didn’t care. Bush’s cruel governorship had bled the state dry and little remained of our once generous benefits. Once again, I was blown ahead of my own chaos...Time to move on.

You will be missed.

So sorry about this. We lost a mischievous smile and a great songwriter/ guitarist/bassist/singer... Duane was such a charming spirit--not to mention a true believer in Rock and Roll. I loved his music and the fact that he never gave up. A "Vanishing Breed," indeed.
I will always have good memories of playing with him at Molly Malone's in L.A., and of traveling across TX for some gigs in the summer heat. He cheerfully put up with the lack of AC in my old Nissan truck.

We just went out to hear Ian MacLagan, and Darren Hess was playing drums. After the (FANTASTIC) show, Darren and I reminisced (we go way back as it turns out!) (of course at this age almost everything goes way back, don't it?) and I reminded him of a recording adventure for which Ronnie Johnson recruited me, and I was sure Darren had been there, and then I remembered a poem I wrote for some poetry workshop I had to take during my recent foray into higher ed (more on that later...) and I decided now to post it here. Remember, if you were there, I have my license to write "creative memoir..."
So here goes:
***********************************
Ooh La La (for Ronnie)

If you haven’t been shopping, with a migraine
in the snack foods aisle
at a brightly-lit convenience store in a cold dead city,
choosing between the salt and vinegar chips,
and the jalapeno-flavored crackers shaped like tiny fish,

you wouldn’t notice
when Rod Stewart’s voice
breaks through the dappled haze
of your pain and nausea:
I wish that I knew what I know now
when I was younger;
Ronnie Lane’s opus.

And if you haven’t played B-3
on one of Ronnie’s last recordings,
and afterwards he’d called you saying,
Dahling you played wonderfully on my song--millions of people will hear it!
and at the time you knew it was a soft little lie,
because you knew he was dying...

Then tears wouldn’t jump up inside you like the devil
as you finger the foil bags
of the cheaper brands,
comparing the fat content and the prices,
thinking about the vitamin B6 content of
potato chips
versus the salt content of the crackers shaped like
tiny fish--

you wouldn’t remember singing
in the basement studio of a weathered grey house
perched beside the Colorado River
not the one in Colorado, but the one in Texas
they dammed to make Lake Travis,
where aquatic plant life
interferes with recreational boaters
who drink too much and pull up to the dock
at The Pier Bar and Grill, where you
have played Up Against the Wall Redneck Mothers, (or maybe
London Homesick Blues?)
for empire-building drunks who would rather hear Free Bird,


you would not have a wheel upon which
to sharpen the slim silver daggers
that already menace your head;
no, you would only have a lunch break,
you would take no notice of the public address system,
the words and music
wouldn’t take you anywhere
special,

and you wouldn’t wonder to yourself:
if you did know then what you know now,
if you’d broken the shiny dreamspell
of stage lights and smoke, if you had
(In the one same morning that belongs to all the different nights)
woken up rude, to discover
that keeping it real
was just too damned expensive,
would you have pulled the plug?

No, you would just buy your vinegar chips
or your crackers
and cold cola drink
and you would go back to
your stupid job--

but you might still wish
that you knew
then
what you know
now.

i am sure that the crowds of happy people were happier than I could detect from watching TV; they looked ecstatic. And Aretha's hat was the best supporting actress. Not to mention the voice that came out from under that hat. Friends who were there say it was wonderful to be among those people, and I know that not all of my friends are comfortable in a crowd. And another friend wrote to say that there was not one arrest that day. This is what happens when people are happy. I anticipate good things, but only if the obstructionistas will keep their snouts out of the way!
What I like best is the sense of anticipation world-wide now that Bush is outta there. Remember, some of us lived in TX and had dubya as governor for a few years BEFORE he was president!! For me, the Bushes could not board that helicopter fast enough!

The Martins ,I was over there across the fence -- it was getting late and I was supposed
to be home for 6:00. Daddy was not coming home tonight and my brother
went to a basketball game ,so there was no pressure to get back early.
Brett Martin and I were playing baseball.I throwing,he batting. We were hot, so we
went inside to get some water. Brett’s parents were hovering around the
television. The screen door slammed after us. Mr. Martin looked at us and said
"Martin Luther King is Dead".
FXP

I was eight. I was probably watching Gilligan's Island. I have no memory of hearing news of MLK's death, though I'm sure my parents were plenty shaken up. Sounds like a good project. Good luck with it.
R. Black

My family was gathered in front of the TV (in the manner of all good
families in the 1960s) watching _Bewitched_ when the news came. It was a
fantasy or dream episode in which Samantha 'fessed up to being a witch and
she, Darren, and Tabitha were subsequently interned in a Gitmo-style
military camp. The network (ABC?) broke in with a special report (by the
end of 1968, I had learned to dread those special reports), announcing Dr.
King had been slain in Memphis. My older sister, who had been dividing her
attention between _Bewitched_ and a magazine (_Look_, I think), looked up
and said simply "This is Armageddon." Nearby DC quickly went up in flames.
In the years to come, I would waste far too much time watching reruns of
_Bewitched_, but I can't remember ever seeing how that episode ended.

Pat Williams

I grew up a Diplomatic brat in Bonn, West Germany between 1964 and 1970. I didn’t watch German television news as a kid, because I couldn’t grasp the sophisticated and serious language. Instead, I experienced the era’s historical events through photography’s lens....

...I remember feeling empty when I saw the now famous shot. Several well-dressed men stand on a balcony. Arms and index fingers extended, they point frantically to the opposite building. Their suit jackets freeze in unbuttoned panic. Dr. Martin Luther King reclines in a pool of blood at their feet. Grainy white curtains across the way part ominously, revealing a pitch-black gash that seethes violence. The sky is a flat emotionless grey of taut, still heat, like the barely contained foreboding just before a thunderstorm explodes. Without color to differentiate one form from the next, the heavens merge with the scene it contains. The spatial compression amplifies the photo’s stifling claustrophobia. That same oppressive shroud hovered above the year’s subsequent tragedies in photo after black, relentless photo. (Maureen Clyne)

I remember Dr. King very well, in fact was privileged to hear him
give the sermon at Temple Israel in my hometown in Connecticut. I
also saw him give speeches and watched news reports about him on TV
when I was in high school. I wanted to go to the March on Washington
but was underage and not allowed to go.

I heard of Dr. King's assassination by word of mouth, since I had
just dropped out of college and was living on the streets at the
time. Of course I remember immediately seeking out radios and
friends (and store windows) with televisions to learn more. I
remember the riots that followed, despite Robert Kennedy's speech
asking for calmness, which I also remember hearing played over the news.

Personally I remember feeling horrified, yet somehow numb and
resigned, after the assassination of President Kennedy, which still
felt very recent at that time. Then soon after came the death of
Robert Kennedy, so of course all three are linked in my emotions and
memory, as I'm sure is true for many others.

(submitted by Mandy Mercier)

From Rob K:
I went to my storage space and looked for but could not find the poem
I wrote that very day about Dr King's assassination. It was published
by our school newspaper. I was in eighth grade in a 99.99% white
suburban New Jersey Jr High at the time. The dismal announcement was
made over our school PA system. Disingenuously the administration
added after announcing the tragic news that we would not have classes
the next day. I still hope to this day that that was the reason that
Dr Kings death was met with cheers and applause by my fellow
students. I can still hear it ringing through those prison hallways
today. On the other hand my reaction was more to my classmates'
callousness and indifference. I realized then and there that I never
could or would be like them. I also remember thinking a few weeks
later when Bobby was murdered that there was no going back, that
America would never be innocent again. (I guess meaning I would never
be innocent again.) Knowing more about Dr King's murder now, I curse
the FBI for their complicity. I think the FBI's harassment of Dr King
is one of the most shameful aspects of our recent past.
Aloha


Dear Lisa,

When I heard the news, we were in the old Esso service station off Ridge
Road in Greenbelt, Maryland (I was eight years old and fascinated with the
green dinosaur on the sign). We must have been getting our '57 Chevy
repaired, since at that time my father wouldn't buy a new used car until
the old one was well past 10 years old. I can picture the cluttered
service station office. There was a transistor radio with the news on.
There were some crackely words about somebody named King, and my parents'
faces suddenly turned ashen. I asked what was wrong, and my father said
that Martin Luther King had been assassinated. I'm sure I had no idea who
he was, and I probably didn't know what "assassinated" meant -- though
I
do remember how just 2(?) months later, when Robert Kennedy was killed,
the concept seemed terribly familiar to me already. Anyway I'm sure many,
many questions followed in that service station office. But I don't
remember the answers so much as the looks on my parents' faces as they
tried to explain things to me. And what I remember best was the scary
feeling of entering into a weird, eerie new world in which great people
could be shot dead -- just like that.

(I'm looking forward to seeing the compilation of responses...!)

Love,
Joel

I don't remember where I was. I was 9 or 10. It wasn'ty until I moved to the south that I started feeling the power of that event. Civil Rights Leaders like Rep. John Lewis and Andrew Young were known to drink their beers at the same tavern as me. They had known Martin Luther King personally. His legacy is so strong here.

(Juliet Charney)

Patty Sauer:
I was twelve when Martin Luther King was assassinated. The house my family lived in was literally being built around us when I was growing up. Most of the men building it were black. Some of the best brick layers in the area lived in Gum Springs which is only 3 or 4 miles away from where I grew up. Gum Springs is the oldest African American Community in Fairfax County, formally established in 1833. The foreman of my dad’s crew was from Gum Springs and his name was Mr. Williams. Mr. Williams was a quiet extremely disciplined African American who laid brick like no other man. His work was art. He and my dad were very close. Unfortunately for us, Mr. Williams’ crew members weren’t as talented, consistent and/or as trustworthy. Imagine about an acre and a half of land on a dirt road in rural Alexandria in 1968. Then imagine a very lovely german woman attempting to supervise a group of 5 or 6 black men whom may or may not have been drunk at the time all by herself. Even though Mr. Williams was the foreman he could not be there all the time and my father had a 9 to 5 job Monday through Friday! Perhaps Mom and Dad were nervous about the situation but they never spoke of it. If they ever did speak of it, I never heard a thing. Sometimes I would feel a lot of tension, but at that time I had an older sister that wanted to kill me and a younger brother that tortured animals. I was too stressed to know one stress from the other. One thing I do know, no one in my family ever used the "N" word and we were taught to respect all fellow human beings.

On the evening it happened, my father was late coming home from work. Mom attempted to hug him but dad turned away. He was crying which caused mommy to cry too. I ran to hug both of them and to bring them together and I felt warm hugs back from them both. I remember thinking why do bad things have to happen before good things happen? Dad didn’t hug me often and someone important dies and he hugs me. It seemed really really sad to me on so many levels. Even though I felt so loved at that second I don’t think I ever cried as hard. When my mother asked me why I was crying I said that’s what life will be all about over and over. She asked me what I meant. I said great people dying.

Hi Lis,

I was a Copenhagen at that time. I recall many Danish friends stopping by to deliver their expressions of sympathy.

The news was a shock but we were 3000 miles away which buffeted the shock.

Love

Dad

hey lisa- nice to hear from you.
your request for memories of 4-4-68 really made me think about where i was. but more than that, it reminded me of where i come from, and it's not pretty. i had just turned 10 years old. my family "didn't follow" politics or even current events. this was something that upitty (smart) people did. i wasn't aware of a civil rights movement, let alone a war in southeast asia. in my house it was referred to as " the n----r problem". or sometimes "the hippie problem". i used to hang out in the den and watch t.v. while my mother and stepfather played this board game called "WA-HOO" with their friends. needless to say, there was drinking and loud talking involved. i remember the broadcast being interrupted for the special report that king was dead. i didn't know who he was, but could sense that it was big. so many people in tears. this was obviously a man who was loved and respected by many. i went in the dining room and told the grown-ups what i had just heard and seen on t.v. they hardly looked up from their game and i remember what they each said like it was yesterday. i will not repeat it. this still breaks my heart. this was my family. these were my role models. i was their little kid. fuck.


Ralph Adamo:

Funny -- I guess it's the 40-year part that got me
thinking about this, which I have not on most of the
past King assasination anniversaries -- but I was
sitting in a room in Loyola's Danna Center, upstairs,
part of a small gathering for one of Loyola's
'Consortium' events, featuring a half dozen visiting
writers. The writer for the evening was a black man
from an island nation, who spoke with a deeply British
baratone, and during his remarks, someone (the chair
of English I believe) burst into the room, sweating
profusely and looking awful, and told us he had very
bad news...The program did not continue. We all sat
stunned for a long time. The speaker (I'm sorry, can't
get his name back, a novelist then in his early 40s)
finally said some things, quietly, as if talking to
himself.

That's about it. My memories of RFK's assasination are
actually much more vivid and continuous, if you decide
to continue with this line of recollection. I can tell
you the whole thing was easily the beginning of the
end of my belief in politics and almost in words
themselves.
(Dr. King stuff was on NBC news just now, and my son,
who has been taught about him in 1st grade said hey
what's he doing in color. Then later Brian
whatshisname the anchor said isn't that something,
seeing him in color after all these years of thinking
about him in black and white.
Notice though, these days nobody stands up and says
stuff like that. Nobody talks at all really except for
fools, and then the occasional politician.)


I was on a vacation with my family in a Corvair station wagon traveling through the South. I remember we'd visited Lookout Mountain, and bought souvenirs, my next eldest brother Jim insisting I get the rebel cap because he got the Union one, and we couldn't have the same one. We continued on to Alabama to visit friends of my parents and it must have happened then, because the trip was cut short and we hurriedly drove back home to Ohio with reports of sniper fire on Interstate overpasses and my souvenir packed away somewhere out of sight. I didn't really like it anyway.
( Mark Patterson)