Gratias ago tibi, maiorum meus

And all that is left of her soldier boy true,

Are his sword and his cap and the red, white and blue.

If you are able to read them, those are the words on the front of this post card. On the back, this is handwritten. "May Happiness Be Thine."  There is no stamp, so the card cannot have been mailed. In the address area, all that has been written are these words: "To 5378. From 4315." Nothing else about the card is known, but it has the appearance of originating sometime between the 1880s and the World War I era. I would hazard a guess that the flag has 48 stars, which would place it between 1912 and 1959, so probably the first world war period is the most likely. If it were not for the presence of the word "boy," I would speculate that the woman is a grieving wife. But, the word "boy" might place it in the context of a mother mourning a lost son.

A day to remember & to honor

I have noted Memorial Day a few times here before, and do so again today wondering what I can say that I have not said in an earlier post.

I suppose all I can say is that I hope everyone will reach into their inner-most feelings to offer a sincere and a heart-felt thank you to each and every individual who has worn a uniform in defense of their country and a prayer for those whose lives were lost.

There are two film presentations here. One can accurately be described as an emblematic Memorial Day offering. It is commentary by James Mattis, a retired four-star, Marine Corps general and one time Secretary of Defense, and includes words from poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Semper Fidelis, Chaos ....

The poem, "Dulce et Decorum Est," by Wilfred Owen is here, as well, read by Tom O'Bedlam. The poem centers upon a chlorine gas attack during the "War to End All Wars." The title of the poem came from Ode 3.2 of the Roman poet Horace and the closing lines, "Dulce et decorum est  /  Pro patria mori," which translate to this: "It is sweet and honorable to die for the fatherland." Owen was killed in action on November 4, 1918, during the crossing of the Sambre–Oise Canal a week before the signing of the Armistice which ended the war.

Make of the poem what you will ....

Over the years, Memorial Day has evolved so that it also has become a time for remembering departed family members and ancestors, as well as for honoring members of the armed forces who demonstrated "freedom is not free." As you read this, I will be about 150 miles from my "camp" putting flowers on a few graves and thanking the occupants for being part of the chain which brought me into the world.

Gratias ago tibi, maiorum meus ....

"Someday baby, you'll be blue ...."

      

Bobby Vee and Dion DiMucci and Eddie Cochran were among the early stars of rock 'n' roll ....

  

The early rockin' years

Where were you on February 3, 1959?

Cannot remember?

Were not born yet?

Never mind. I am not telling, either. I simply always have wanted to start a post like that and figured this is a good opportunity.

According to rock 'n' roll mythology, that is "the day the music died." It was the day Buddy Holly (Charles Hardin Holley) and Ritchie Valens (Richard Steven Valenzuela) and The Big Bopper (Jiles Perry "J.P." Richardson Jr.), were killed in an airplane crash after performing at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, the evening before.

The musicians were in the midst of their "Winter Dance Party Tour," which included stops in places like Mankato and Duluth and Montevideo and Saint Paul, all in Minnesota, as well as a number of other Midwestern "ballrooms." Ordinarily in those days tour transportation was by bus, but for various reasons that night, Holly and the others were en route by flying for the next concert stop in Moorhead, Minnesota.

They never made it. They died in an Iowa cornfield.

Lesser known about that tale is the fact that another musician's success story began with the death of Holly and the others.

Robert Thomas Velline, a 15-year-old high school student from Fargo, North Dakota, who became professionally known as Bobby Vee, was one of the musicians who filled in for the missing performers at the Moorhead concert. Vee and a band composed of Fargo schoolboys calling themselves the Shadows answered a request for musicians to play in place of those killed in the Iowa crash. The group filled in for Holly and his band. Their performance was a success and started Vee's career as a popular singer/song writer.

Some of Vee's notable songs are "Suzie Baby" / "Devil or Angel" / "Rubber Ball"  / "Take Good Care of My Baby" /  "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes" ....

Another significant name in the world of rock was on the tour. Singer/song writer Dion Francis DiMucci had chosen not to travel on the plane which crashed, and did perform. Dion still makes music, and my assumption is most "elders" of the rock community have heard any number of his songs and probably danced to "Runaround Sue."

All this stuff evolved from having stumbled onto Bobby Dylan singing "Suzie Baby," one of Vee's most popular songs, on a video from a concert in Saint Paul a couple of years ago. Vee was among those in the audience. In 1959, while Dylan still was Robert Zimmerman, he performed twice with Vee as the piano man using the name Elston Gunnn. Incidentally, my opinion is that Dylan's rendition of "Suzie" is the worst cover I ever/ever/ever have heard. Simply pathetic ....

The question popped into my mind: Is Bobby Vee still alive? The answer is no, he is not.

Vee continued performing live until 2011 when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. His final recordings were released in 2014. He underwent treatment for Alzheimer's in a long-term care facility in Rogers, Minnesota, near Minneapolis. He died from complications of the disease at age 73 on October 24, 2016.

So, just for fun and a feel for some "old time rock 'n' roll," here is Bobby Vee singing his song, "Suzie Baby," and a taste of New Yorker Dion with "Runaround Sue." Another rock star born and raised in this neck of the woods was Ray Edward "Eddie" Cochran, originally from Albert Lea, Minnesota. Present, too, is Cochran singing, "Long Tall Sally." Cochran was killed at age 21 on April 17, 1960, in a single-vehicle accident in England just as his career was beginning to blossom.

By the way, Suzie baby .... where are you?

Today is the day ....

Since I have not been in a "mood for creativity" for some time now, I decided to utilize the work of others to take note of Mother's Day in the United States and several other countries. The illustration is a painting by Claude Monet, one of my "favored," and shows his wife, Camille Doncieux Monet, and their son, Jean. The piece is entitled "Woman with a Parasol" and was done in 1875. Also included is a poem by Carl Sandburg. It is the third of three published in 1916 in "Poems Done on a Late Night Car" under the title of "Home." Finally, there are two videos, the first written by John Lennon about his mother, Julia, and the second composed by James Coats in 1942 and performed here by Dolly Parton / Linda Ronstadt / Emmylou Harris. It is called "The Sweetest Gift" -- with the gift, of course, a mother's smile for her child. My own mother departed in 2012 and I miss her and appreciate her more with each passing year. I do not think of myself as having been a very good son, but I did make it a point to call her each and every mother's day even when I was far/far away .... there should be a message in those words, and today is the day ....

"Poems Done on a Late Night Car .. Home" by Carl Sandburg

Here is a thing my heart wishes the world had more of:

I heard it in the air of one night when I listened 

To a mother singing softly to a child 

restless and angry in the darkness.

Sort of another advertisement ....

Among the lessons of history ....

Sort of a riddle: What can be old and new in the same instant of time?

How many answers exist to such a question, I have no idea, but one answer is an author or a book from years past being read for the first time by an individual. In that light, here are two authors, one long dead and the other very much alive while writing in a historical context: Sinclair Lewis and Diane Wilson.

Lewis, as every English major born and raised in Minnesota presumably knows, arrived on earth in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, and wrote a number of stories including "Main Street,” which is 100 years old this year. He was here from 1885 to 1951, when he died in Rome. There is a new exhibit at the Minnesota History Center designed to make his life and work more recognizable. It is something I believe everyone would benefit from seeing ....

 Lewis was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his novels "Main Street," "Babbit" and "Arrowsmith." He won for "Arrowsmith," but turned down the prize. In 1930, he became the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Lewis lived in a number of places in Minnesota including Summit Avenue in Saint Paul, Minneapolis, Duluth, Mankato and Lake Minnetonka. Nine of his novels and six of his short stories were turned into films, three of the novels twice. His second wife, Dorothy Thompson, was a well-respected journalist who interviewed Adolph Hitler and was the first reporter expelled from Germany for anti-Nazi commentary.

Diane Wilson grew up in Golden Valley, Minnesota, and is a member of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Ojibwe. "The Seed Keeper," is her second novel and third book. She currently lives on 10 acres near Shafer. Wilson's great-great-grandmother, Rosalie Marpiya Mase, was a full-blood Dakota who married a French-Canadian fur trader, Louis LaCroix.

In short (more-or-less), the story evolves from how Native American women sewed seeds into the hems of their dresses and hid more in their pockets to be able to plan corn and other food in their new homes when they were forcibly marched from the Lower Sioux Agency to Fort Snelling after the Dakota War of 1862.

According to a quote from Wilson in a Saint Paul Pioneer Press article by Mary Ann Grossmann .... "Their actions in protecting seeds to be sure there was food for their family teaches me what we need to do today to protect seeds for future generations. That story wanted to be told."

 "The Seed Keeper" begins in 2002 when Rosalie Iron Wing returns to the cabin where she was raised by her father, who taught her to hunt and to prepare dry meat and fish. She finds carefully-stored old seeds in the cabin and plants them. From there, the story moves between her contemporary struggles to grow crops from the old seeds and 1862. Other characters enter the book and start telling the story in traditional teachings of how we have relationships with food and the effects of assimilation.

"It took about 10 years for me to get at that magical, mystical part of seed that gets people to fall in love with them. I am awed by the brilliance in that single seed that holds the spark of life. It knows when to be dormant, when to come to life. It knows what to do. It's beyond comprehension."

The unnamed author of Ecclesiastes may have been correct when he wrote: " .... there is no new thing under the sun."

But, we do not know what we do not know and we all need occasional reminders about things we already should know. As someone who is in awe of the complexity of life, I plan to read Wilson's book and hope many others will, as well ....

Ken Burns & Lynn Novick explore Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway with his four wives, clockwise from top left: Elizabeth Hadley Richardson  / Pauline Marie Pfeiffer / Mary Welsh / Martha Ellis Gellhorn ....

Some after-the-documentary thoughts

Episode 1: Thought it was well done and I enjoyed watching it, but no new data and I learned nothing I did not already know. 

Episode 2: Repeat of last night in that I enjoyed watching it, but learned nothing I did not already know about "Old Man" Hemingway. 

On the other side of the coin, from my point of view Martha Gellhorn has been the least interesting of Hemingway's four wives and I never really paid any attention to her. Listening to excerpts from her letters and other commentary about their relationship as presented in the film has lifted her considerably higher in my opinion. I liked being able "to see more inside" Martha and, consequently, learning more. I think "old Ernie" apparently (more than) met his match in her .... I always had sort of ignored her as the least relevant of his wives because of her reputation, but now, probably, will try to find some of "her stuff" to read.

Episode 3: Still another repeat. I enjoyed watching the film, but learned nothing I did not already know about Ernest Miller Hemingway.

Once again, however, I was "enlightened" about another of his wives .... this time about the relationship between he and his fourth and final wife, Mary Welsh. It is one thing to read about people arguing and fighting and being verbally abusive to one another; it is another thing to hear and to watch the actual words of the abusers being read while photographs of them are being shown, and with additional commentary.

Going sideways now:

I read "Hemingway in Love .. His Own Story" by A.E. Hotchner when it was published in 2015. To refresh my memory, I picked it up after watching the first episode of the Burns/Novick film. At 172 pages, it is a relatively sparse book and I reread it sitting in a waiting room while some work was done on my car. It was helpful to read about the Hotchner/Hemingway conversations while EMH was receiving psychiatric treatment at the Mayo Clinic, including electric shock "therapy."

I did a brief background check on Hemingway's four wives to refresh my memory, including skimming through Mary Welsh's book, "How It Was." I had forgotten, for instance, that Mary had been born in Walker, Minnesota, and had loved exploring Leech Lake as a young girl .... and that Pauline Pfeiffer, like Mary and Martha Gellhorn, had been a journalist. Martha, in ill-health, apparently committed suicide at age 89. Nothing else really jumped out at me.

My opinions and beliefs regarding Hemingway have changed very little other than in the sense that I now think him to have been more "mentally disturbed" than I realized.  I knew that his father had killed himself with a revolver and that his mother had given EMH the gun; I knew that his three sons all had experienced "big-time" problems, Gregory AKA Gloria, the most severe; I knew that Hemingway "fell in love" often and intently; I knew that liquor and concussions were life-long problems; I understood that he turned into a near-pathological liar as he grew older ....

Flaws and sins aside, I still like Hemingway's writing and believe him to be the most talented and significant fiction writer, before or during or since his emergence. I think the primary reasons for that were an inconceivable natural talent coupled with a relentless work ethic and a fearless approach to push beyond existing literary and cultural boundaries.

It never has been necessary to like someone to appreciate their work and to accept the quality of it ....