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Galen Green
msmth2210@aol.com
mythoklast@mailstation.com
(816) 807-4957 (voice mail)

Wednesday
November 7, 2007
(the late Marie Curie's
140th birthday)


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When I Close My Eyes, I Can See . . . . .



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"I am constantly struck by the strangeness of reading works that seem addressed -- personally and intimately -- to me, and yet were written by people who crumbled to dust long ago."

-- Stephen Greenblatt (author of Will in the World [2004] and founder of the school of literary criticism called New Historicism, which is the idea that the only way to really understand a work of art is to examine everything that was going on in the world of the artist at the time the work of art was created.)


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Dear Shannon (& Co.),

When I close my eyes, I can see our old neighborhood, nestled there in what was then the northeast corner of Wichita, Kansas, there in the middle of the so-called "Cold War," there on that gentle, almost imperceptible slope, downward from its crest along Gentry Drive where your family lived, across Fairmount Park where so much of our becoming took place, across the aptly named Hillside to North Lorraine where Margaret & Harry & Lois & Kevin & I lived in our dinky gray hovel, and where that lovely antique fortress of a red brick schoolhouse named "Fairmount" rose up to mold to its will the wet clay for our fresh little heathen selves, and on downward, ever so gradually toward the west to those rickety neighborhoods where Wichita's African-American families found themselves ghettoized back then, and on across the haunted rail yards, the tall white grain elevators, the mysterious, fragrant, glowing petroleum refinery, the pungent, mooing cattle pens, and on across Broadway (Highway 81), on down to the muddy banks of the Arkansas River, which connected us even then in my boyish imagination to the mighty Mississippi and thus to the vast and mighty oceans of the whole wide world.

Remember the swimming pool at Fairmount Park where so many of us kids in the 1950’s first learned to hold our breath and float and kick! kick! kick! and cup our little hands to propel our little bodies forward, and then bake in the midday summer sun on the concrete banks before jumping back into that icy water?

When I close my eyes, I can see that Fairmount Park shelter house on a sweltering summer's afternoon, with all its windows open wide and all its fans turned up on "high," as we kids stand around in a circle where the day-camp counselor is leading us in a rousing chorus of: "Do your ears hang low? Do they wobble to and fro? Can you tie them in a knot? Can you tie them in a bow?" -- etc. . . and I can somewhat see the supposedly Native American style "comb holder" I made for my father out of brightly colored plastic “bison sinews” and strips of extremely low-grade pre-cut little rectangles of rawhide, there in the day-camp crafts program, artfully crafted to keep our dutiful mothers relatively sane. (In the case of my adoptive mother Margaret, this formula proved only partially effective. But that's another story for another day.)


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Remember the skies above Wichita in the 1950's & '60's -- how they were forever buzzing, humming, roaring with aircraft of every size, shape and description? Being of the male persuasion, naturally what impressed me most were the Air Force jets; and of those, the huge, silver, lumbering B-47's and B-52's which I knew my daddy had helped to build "out at the plant," which was his name for the sprawling Boeing Aircraft facility adjacent to McConnell Air Force Base, way off in the southeast corner of the city, where Harry worked as a toolmaker from the summer before Pearl Harbor until sometime during my freshman year at Wichita State.

As has already been noted, our childhood -- yours and mine -- overlapped the middle part of the so-called "Cold War" -- the height of the Cold War, as historians and journalists now refer to it. But, besides these ubiquitous military jets, the skies above Wichita seemed to be ceaselessly humming, sputtering, whining, whirring, moaning . . . with the engines of other airplanes, put together by other daddies who worked at factories with names like Beech and Cessna. Wichita, back then, had been dubbed "The Air Capital of the World," so that I suppose any child of either gender would have found the never-ending air show high above our heads a source of constant distraction, if not exactly entertainment.

When I close my eyes, I can see the sidewalk where I walked to school five mornings a week, strewn with what, back then, we called "IBM punch cards" (because we were aware of only one computer company and naively believed them to do only one thing, which was to process by the billions these mysterious punch cards, approximately the size and shape of a Series E United States Savings Bond, with the encoded data of each card rendered as a series of tiny rectangular perforations approximately the size and shape of those notorious Florida "chads" which played such an historically memorable role in the 2000 Presidential (Gore v. Bush) counter-election. Never having actually touched a computer punch card before, I found them utterly fascinating and began picking up as many as I could carry, until my fascination wore thin.

As it turned out (And please correct me if I'm wrong about this.), the scatter of techno-litter I can still see today, when I close my eyes, was reportedly part of some Top Secret Cold War military experiment. That's all anyone ever made known to me; and even that may have been totally bogus. As I recall, we good citizens of Wichita were asked to turn in any of these cards that we found. I don't remember if we were to leave them in our mailboxes for our letter carrier or take them to school and give them to our teacher. It was all extremely vague to me, at the age of 6 or 7. Does any of this ring a bell? My hindsighted guess is that it may have had something to do with wind-drift patterns and potential threats of chemical terrorism -- or that the megalomaniacal paranoids in the military community just wanted to see if we'd actually do what they told us to do.

But while we're in that "neighborhood": Do you remember those metal dog tags we all wore on chains around our necks for several years in the mid-1950's? Was that a nationwide project or merely local? I recall having it emphasized to me on innumerable occasions that, because of the presence of McConnell AFB and of Boeing Aircraft and of the ICBM silos in the immediate vicinity, our fair city was considered to be a prime military target, in the event (Heavens forefend!) that World War III were to break out. Therefore, when Miss Robertson (or Mrs. James or whomever) told our class that the dog tags were to help the police find us if we got lost (the way I did, when trying to find my way back home after walking you home one afternoon) . . . when the teacher fed us that line, the only image which came to my geopolitically focused young mind was of all our hopeful little bodies burnt to a crisp in a thermonuclear attack launched by the Soviet Union, with nothing but our blacked little skeletons and those nifty metal dog tags remaining. But, given my father's vividly vocal obsession with biblical apocalypse, this image was, for me, even at the age of 7, neither new nor especially horrifying.

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But enough (for the time being) about the Cold War component to our childhood in Wichita. Let me close my weary old Irish turtle eyes once again and see what else I can see this time. Ah, yes! There's a more pleasant image! Remember the Pied Piper Bookstore? Of course you do! A couple of doors south of the broadcasting studio of the university's radio station, KMUW, just off 17th Street on Fairmount. No brief description of the Pied Piper could possibly do it justice. It was, of course, "housed" literally in what had been someone's tiny wood-frame house, which actually had, if I recall correctly, a basement, though I don't recall ever being allowed to go down there. The Pied Piper was, of course, on the surface of it, just another used bookstore, a vanishing breed here in 21st century America. But to a hungry-minded little boy growing up in a fairly dull Midwestern city during the Eisenhower years, it was a feast of curiosities and of satisfactions for my curiosities.

When I close my eyes, I can see the inside of the Pied Piper Bookstore as it appeared to me that very first time Steve Sowards (who else!) took me there for my initiatory tour and to introduce me to the owner/proprietor, Jack Whitesell, and his dozen or so cats who lounged around amidst the dusty old books and periodicals or sunned themselves in the windows or nursed a new litter of kittens in the some dark corner, clear at the back of the store, between the moldering boxes of ancient National Geographics and Pre-World War II Life Magazines. Steve & I would have been in the 4th or 5th grade at Fairmount Elementary at the time.

Just in case you never had the pleasure of hanging out for an hour or two in the Pied Piper (way back before Jack finally managed to smoke himself to death sometime in the late 1970's and the store was closed down) I'll describe it for you simply as a very loosely organized jumble of relatively low-quality books and magazines which nobody much wanted but which Jack's loyal customer base of several hundred of us would buy from, every now and then, as much for the sake of pity and/or solidarity as anything. Beneath its tobacco-smoke- cat-urine- moldy-paper- -wreaking surface, the Pied Piper was, at heart, about its spirit and atmosphere, more than about any given element of its molecular reality. I suspect that it stood for an imaginary bohemian zeitgeist which its most loyal patrons (Galen Green foremost among them, from 1959 till 1976 or so) longed to inhabit as a temporary escape from Wichita's more dominant zeitgeists such as the aforementioned bastions of America's military-industrial complex or "Cowtown" or that so-called "amusement park" ironically named "Joyland."


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To be continued . . .

Galen

November 12, 2007


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P.S.

Hello Shannon –

Received your very welcome note this morning, just as I was about to send this fifth installment off to you (& yours). Will make every effort to respond in my sixth installment to your most recent thoughts. Thanks so much for taking the time to connect. And thanks again for being exactly the “audience” I need to impel me to write down these reminiscences which I should have recorded long ago. Please feel free to share them with Chris, Steve, etc; as I’m sure you can tell they are, ultimately, intended for a more general audience. Incidentally: from Nov. 16th thru the 26th, my personal schedule will be a bit crazy, so please e-mail anything during that period to both the e-mail addresses at the top of this installment. (Thanks!) Meanwhile, here are the words to a song I wrote back in 1986, in that cemetery on what used to be the northeast corner of Hillside & Kellogg, before they “improved” it. It was near the house at 621 S. Lorraine, which we moved to in the summer of 1965. The song itself could be said, I suppose, to be about a far more general overview of that thing called “the old neighborhood.” Wichita is a stranger to me now. We haven’t been back there since 2002; and before that, not since I moved here after Margaret’s death in 1990 – except for an hour or two when driving through. Do you still have ties there?

Will write more soon, God willing. Enjoy the song. Let me know how you’re doing? Until next time, stay well.

Happy Thanksgiving,

Galen


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IN THE CEMETERY ABOVE THE INTERSTATE


As I walk amidst the human debris of my city,
These gravestones fail to dazzle my blood.
But a sharp wind from Milwaukee does,
And so I choose to muzzle
Myself with my collar turned up, still I wince,
As I squint out over these labels I am.
December’s bright wind grows intense.
Upon my face, here among the damned.

Once, lost tribes walked in frazzle of genocide,
Here, where immense engines rise and fall and sizzle
Their songs to sing our circumstance.
The far horizon, like a clam of earth and sky,
Seals around the sticky slime of life.
I look out at them, these driven dead,
Hell-bent for nooky.

My tearing eyes take in each ounce of landscape,
Here where the worn-out lacky
That was my father makes perfect sense,
Inside this earth, this fortune cookie.
These pickled corpses cannot guzzle
Another drop of wind or whim,
For they have felt the final fizzle
Snuff out their fuses, sans “BLAM!”

These granite markers, cold and numb,
Endure this wind, this flow, this rinse
Of human madness and the slam
Of storm and war and arrogance.
I wish I had a cup of saki
To warm my hands and light my nozzle.
For this is the weather for playing hockey
To the tune of winter’s icy chisel.

A pine tree sways like a furry lance.
The yellow grass is a sea of bristles.
Far off, the city hums, and hence,
I think of you. This brief epistle
I share with you like a Christmas ham
Is meant to bring you peace when we
Are far apart in Vietnam
Or any hell from which we might wish to be set free.



Words and Music by Galen Green c 1986

Performed on Peasant Cantata c 2003
Excerpted here from The Toolmaker’s Other Son
(rough draft copyright 2005 by Galen Green)