CANDIDATES, TAKE NOTICE

I've already suggested here that voters ascertain NOW if their choices of candidates have naturally colored hair and not wait months to notice and start speculating about it THEN. Now I wish to tell those candidates with solid black hair how to disguise that look. Just have your hairdresser add some permanent highlights. These will most likely be a dark brown shade. You will look younger with the highlights than without them. 

After you have moved into the White House, we trust you will be too busy to think about such trivial matters; just let the White House barber take this burden off your shoulders (and off your scalp). 

When you are in residence about twenty months, a little gray on the temples will be a distinguishing look. You will have earned it. If your hair doesn't begin to go gray by the end of your first term, some will argue that you've been playing golf too often and letting the job go.

YOU  MUST  GO  BACK

 If less can ever be more, perhaps going back may help you in going forward. If the urge to go back is there, how can you relax till you do? I don’t mean going back home. After all, plenty of people have made that pilgrimage, only to report you can’t go home again. But I write of something much bigger and much more important to one’s fulfillment as a writer, involving geography. Here are three brief stories to illustrate what I do mean.

 The first story perhaps the whole world knows about now. A National Geographic photographer, Steve McCurry, had to go back to Pakistan to look for the young woman he caught on camera in 1984, just one child among several he photographed in the school tent at a refugee camp. What captivated him, when he saw his finished pictures, were her enormous sea-green eyes, in a land where eyes are so brown, they look black. A portrait that “sears the heart,” her picture ran on the cover of the June 1985 National Geographic. 

McCurry went back and found the girl, now a married woman and the mother of three children, but with the same “haunted and haunting” eyes. These eyes haunted McCurry for seventeen years.

Many people might think this silly, a waste of time and energy. But I understand the man and applaud his efforts. In addition to intriguing people like me, it made a good story for National Geographic and for television. One might say, if you could use a little excitement in your life, go back somewhere to finish a dream or a story, but not back home. Home would be too subjective a destination; you need to be objective about this.

The second story appeared as an episode during an escape on foot over the Pyrenees Mountains during World War II, before America got into it. In Yours Is the Earth, Margaret Vail, an American married into the French upper crust, stays in France as long as she dares, to be as close as possible to her husband, Robert, in a German prison camp. She waits so long to leave France that her only way to escape is to travel on foot with her four-year-old daughter Rose-Hélène, across the Pyrenees Mountains into Spain, in a group of eight, with a guide.

When they rest for the night in the house of strangers, sitting by the fire and listening to their hosts and each other talk, after Rose-Hélène is asleep, Margaret hears the lady of the house say the young man who appears not so intelligent is smart. “He has read that book over there,” she says. Margaret Vail wants to get out of her chair and see what the book’s title is but she is too tired to make the effort. She leaves the house the next morning, before day and without learning what the title is.

Margaret Vail determines at that point she will return someday to that house in the Pyrenees to thank the people there more thoroughly for their kindness and help. She also wants to find out the title of that book.

When I read this, perhaps ten years after Vail wrote it, I too wanted to know the title of that book. This wish nagged me so, I finally wrote to the author, in care of her publisher, to ask her the title. That began a most pleasant period of correspondence with an American lady in France, who had her husband back from the war, but who lived in a huge ancestral house on vast lands where everyone spoke French and some working on the estate could not even read their own language. Robert knew English because of his private schooling and Rose-Hélène grew up speaking both French and English equally well. Yet Vail was lonely for communication with a native of her own language. In her first letter to me she said she had not returned to the house in the mountains, and still didn’t know the title of the book, but she was still planning to make that return journey, with Robert.

I’m sure she never did. If she had, during the years we wrote to each other, she would have told me. We corresponded until one day her light blue, dark-blue-lined envelope with family crest arrived with only an almost incomprehensible bit of scratch saying she’d had a stroke and could no longer write. I doubt she was able to make such a trip after that.

I did not have to travel to go back, for my return would have been entirely through Margaret Vail. I merely wrote to ask her if she had gone back. But I believe my need to know the book’s title was as great as hers. Her never satisfying her desire to know has not put closure to my frustration.

Perhaps all three of us presented here were unreasonable but I’ve never heard reason is a prerequisite for what writers do. Margaret Vail was a journalist before her marriage. The photographer’s job must be akin to writing. All three of us merely followed some drummer others didn’t hear. What did it do for us?

Only one of us three truly went back. Photographer McCurry was bound to have experienced some disappointment, possibly enough to shatter a dream he was happier with than he was with the reality. But if it was only all in a day’s work, he was successful and may live happily ever after.

Margaret Vail could have forgotten all about her anticipated going back when her illness struck. And yet, in the strange ways of the human mind, going back to that cabin in the mountains to learn the title of a book might have been the very thing that stayed with her, while she forgot everything else. Who can know what goes on in the brain of a stroke victim?

As for me, I have remained frustrated over not knowing that book’s title. I will probably never be normal again—if I ever was—until I write this story as fiction in a geography I know, not an escape from Hitler, but from something else. The most exciting aspect of such a story for me will be choosing a title for the elusive book

We must go back—not to experience full memories that can be merely recalled and, if your brain is alive and well, fall short of joy and cause useless nostalgia—but go back only for the memory that never was finished and needs to be. If such an unfinished memory should actually be “back home,” go back just for it and avoid all roads that would lead to nostalgia. When we do that, we are still looking to the future, for we seek knowledge of the unknown, one constant attribute of a true writer. It helps to keep you young, to boot.

THE CHARLESTON

Back in the Dark Ages, the 1920’s, the Charleston was the dance to learn and do with its costume to facilitate the technique. It amazes me that it never resurfaced in recent years. Not the least of it were the skirts that came to the knees and flared out with great drama; the low waist that came down on the hips where suitable decoration trim (beads, ribbons, etc.) dangled; a plain high-necked sleeveless top supporting a long string of pearls without benefit of a 40-D cup bra. Shoes looked high-heeled but were merely shaped that way and rather low. To top this off, the hair was bobbed, cutely. The bottle blonde was a rarity, perhaps looked upon as non-virtuous; the brownette was adorable and popular in this outfit. And if any dance can be good exercise for the body, this one must take the lead. It never stands still but is constantly working the knees and elbows, guaranteeing that one dances alone and the partner doing the same. I doubt Elvis could have managed this one.

What in the world did the men wear for this dance? I never noticed them! ♥

THE FIRST LINES

The first few lines of a story, a book, or a film, are perhaps the deciding factor as to whether we will indulge in it or not. Occasionally I will watch those first few minutes of a favorite film and then shut it off. I don‘t enjoy the remainder of the film as much as the first part. Two such favorites are from “My House in Umbria” and “The 39 Steps” (2008 version).

These two films are nothing alike; one has a young man herding his goats in the hills of Italy with a bit of modern civilization in a sportscast at his ears when a motorcar intrudes, carrying the main character of the story. The other begins in a men’s club in England (London, I presume) where a young man among all those old guys gets fed up with such a life and wants to head back to his work on another continent when a neighbor intrudes with a top-secret message for him to deliver; the messenger has only minutes to live.  

But I have yet to run across a story that starts with a bloodcurdling scream of one second’s duration. But one of mine does, and it’s finished. Maybe I’ll run it here soon. Then again, maybe not. There is enough scream-worthy material in the news these days to take our time. Yesterday it was in Tennessee; tomorrow it may be your birth state, as mine was yesterday. But wherever it is, it hurts too much to be writing.

But back a minute to the two films mentioned above. “The 39 Steps” in my most-read blogs is Number One with 656 pageviews (April, 2011) and I haven’t written up the other one. ♥♥♥

A POWERFUL WHISPER

It is stated in Hitler’s Last Days that Martin Bormann, the head of the Nazi Party’s Chancellery, could “slit a throat with a whisper.” A close-up photo of him shows a face of gentle innocence. With that, I plan to leave this subject and get on to the next book 

HITLER’S LAST DAYS

This book Hitler’s Last Days reads fast, for it is loaded with photographs. Even two non-contiguous pages are entirely black. I promised to write here only what seemed to be new material for most of us readers. For that, the book begins with a startling quote from Hitler, “I do not see why man should not be just as cruel as nature.” He was, and more so.

He ordered deaths not only for Jews, but also for homosexuals, gypsies, cripples, and others. I recall reading (in another book) about a deformed man who came through the line, who was immediately put to death so that they could boil his body in a big kettle outside, and get rid of his flesh so that their doctors could study this imperfect carcass which was then put on display to demonstrate how Jews didn’t deserve to live. This is the worst true story I’ve ever heard of in the genocide of any class of people.

The day before Hitler committed suicide, he married his long-time mistress Eva Braun. I wonder what good he thought that would do. Help him get through the Pearly Gates? He left a will, part of which is in the book, but we find nothing in it referring to an afterlife. He was only 56 when he died. For the occasion, he tried one of the cyanide capsules on his dog Blondi. She died instantly. Then Eva Braun, who chose to die with Hitler, sat on the end of a sofa, and took the pill. She died instantly. Then he sat on the other end of the sofa and when he died (instantly) he slumped toward Eva. He had just committed his last murder. 

THE LAST DAYS

“The Last Days” can have several different connotations, the most common one probably being a reference to the end of our time on the earth.  Some human beings, being human and imperfect, likely cast the thought aside for they just don’t want to think about such a time.  This Blog is not about that except its application to a book I’m reading, Bill O’Reilly’s Hitler’s Last Days. I am looking for those little bits of information that I might have missed in my lifetime of wide reading. But I will not say what I learn unless I come across something that the average person might not have heard.

And that brings me to “Downton Abbey.” The Director (I think that is who he was) announced recently that in the upcoming and last season for that program there is one person who will not be in the series. One can guess, or perhaps some of you have read elsewhere WHO, but I think it’s not the dowager grandmother (Maggie Smith who has said she must be 110 by now), but someone notorious, just this very dictator, Adolf Hitler. I am glad if he’s not going to be in the story. Anyway, who would want to play that part? It’s not so long till next January, when, soon afterwards, we will find out WHO. ♥

INSIDE INFO

If you are in a quandary about which candidate is your choice of the dozen or so who’ve announced for the GOP nomination, go slowly at this point. There may be others yet. This many running is almost phenomenal. In the meantime, listen to the smartest man on television, Charles Krauthammer, on Special Report (Fox News). He is on a panel and the others always speak first. He is absolutely brilliant, with a Doctor of Medicine degree, psychiatry his specialty, I think. I wrote about him in 2013 on this very Blog, and my readers quickly climbed to 235. He is soft spoken and I turn up the volume for him, not for the others. A Pulitzer Prize winner (journalism) he comes up with fascinating facts and interpretations we need to know before we vote. The book that won him the Prize was Things That Matter, a wonderful read.  ♥♥♥

THE U.S. CONSTITUTION

If the "scholars" now trying to change our Constitution would just study a bit more, they might run into the correct interpretation, the one that our Founders meant. The separation of "church and state" does NOT mean the separation of God and state. It refers to religious denominations. Read The Federalist Papers to discover what our Founders meant. No one in this country seeking a Federal job should have the job without passing a thorough test on these papers.