In my last post, I mentioned the negatives my dad had been meaning to scan for so many years.
He was an amateur photographer all his life, but really honed his interest during high school, when his mother (who also loved photography) allowed him to use the lone bathroom in their house as a dark room, doing the processing in the tub. (This did not go over well with dad's older sister, Virginia.)
The negatives were all shots taken around 1940-1942, just as my dad was finishing high school. He was drafted in early 1942, but was allowed to finish out his senior year before reporting to the draft board at Fort Hayes in Columbus. Among the hundreds of images are a couple of shots of the Greyhound buses that pulled into Grantsville, WV, to take all the local boys who'd been called up to Ohio.
While Dad (and the rest of us) had talked for years about scanning the film, it never happened, as is typical with such "One of these days I really oughta" tasks. When he was in the rehab center, though, he said explicitly, "If I ever get vertical again, the one thing I want to do is scan those negatives."
That was all it took to spur my sister-in-law Suzanne, a computer and Photoshop whiz, to action. She had been laid off from her job at Ernst & Young a few months earlier, so she said, "I'm unemployed; what else am I going to do?"
Over the next week or so, Suzanne and my brother Mark scanned and archived hundreds of images--the ones they assembled into the slide show mentioned previously. They didn't quite get to all of them before Dad died, but they've completed them since, and Mark sent a DVD of them off to Bob Weaver, the editor of the Hur Herald, an online newsletter out of Calhoun County, WV. Grantsville is the county seat, and was, at the time Dad shot the pictures, a fairly bustling town.
But the best news to come out of all of this is that Bob also plans to send the images on to West Virginia University's Historical Photographs Collection, which is truly an amazing resource. I can't tell you how happy it makes me to know that even if we didn't get this task completed in time for Dad to fully enjoy the result, others will for years to come.
Image above: self-portrait, experimenting with double exposures
As the song goes, "Little things mean a lot." And they can also add up to a big meltdown.
Earlier this week, there was a story on the WVU homepage about "Hot Rod Hundley," a legendary basketball player here in the 1950s, whose number was being retired. My dad had often told stories about Hot Rod's antics, and when I saw the story, I immediately thought, "Oh, I've gotta send this link to Dad!" And then, I remembered: Dad's dead.
A couple days later, I got a call from the "digestive specialties clinic" saying that they were ready to schedule my colonoscopy. Though I'm only 44, I get the thrill of having this procedure every five years thanks to the fact that both of my parents had (and survived) colon cancer in their late 40s/early 50s. I realized after I hung up, though, that I can't say my dad survived it anymore, apparently, since the doctors believed that the brain cancer he died of had probably metastatized from the colon cancer he had thirty-five years earlier.
I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, then, that watching WVU play its arch-rival Pitt on TV Wednesday night kind of put me over the edge. It was the first time the reality truly hit me: I'll never see my Dad again.
Often since his death, I've become conscious of certain tunes being stuck in my head--and not because I've heard them recently, and they've simply gotten lodged there. These tunes seem to float up from my subconscious, somehow. On the morning Dad died, it was "When I Look in Your Eyes." Later, "The Song is Ended (But the Melody Lingers On)."
That these songs would be archived in my brain isn't too surprising; Dad had his own dance band while in college in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and was a lifelong jazz afficionado and musician. I grew up with this music as a soundtrack, piping through the radio on WOSU's Big Band Saturday show, or from Dad's collection of 78s and vinyl.
When Tom and I first started dating, he was astounded by the fact that I knew all the lyrics to so many of the old standards, but after many years of visiting my parents' house and hearing them continually himself, he's pretty good at recalling titles and lyrics himself.
I'll never forget the tone of Dad's voice once when he told me about finally discovering a place he could go to hear (and make) music when he was in Army basic training in Texas. Having been away from home--and his instruments, and the church choir, and whatever other musical outlets he had there--for months, he was, as he said, "So hungry for music!" In many ways, I think it was the first time I genuinely understood how much music defined my dad--what a near-religious centrality it had in his life.
That was echoed again in his final days, when my brother and sister-in-law created a slide show of some old negatives that Dad had been meaning to scan and identify for a long time, and--almost as an afterthought--added a soundtrack with classics from Harry James, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and others.
We figured out how to connect Mark's mp3 player to the TV in Dad's room at the rehab center, and as Dad watched, I was astounded at his instant recall both of the people in pictures he'd taken sixty years earlier, and also of the title, artist, and lyrics of every single song that played. When he tired and we got ready to leave, he asked us to leave the music running: "I'll just drift off on that tonight."
That was just a couple of days before he died. I'm glad to know that there was music in his life even toward the end of it, and I'm even more glad that even though I won't ever be able to enjoy watching him listen to and play music himself, he's left me with an enormous repertoire of melodies to remember him by.
Sometimes, in my more woo-woo moments, I even think his spirit is communicating with me through some of these songs. I had one such experience this morning. I'd actually been dreaming about Dad, and woke up with "Serenade in Blue" stuck in my head, for no apparent reason. As I lay in bed slowly coming to consciousness, I tried to remember the words...When I hear that Serenade in Blue....da da da da da da da da daaaaa--to you? Couldn't recall the exact lyrics.
An hour or so later I got in the car to drive to the gym, and turned on the Sirius satellite radio, which was tuned to the "40s on 4" station. As I turned right onto High Street, what should start playing but "Serenade in Blue"? I listened, carefully, to the lyrics I'd struggled to recall:
When I hear that Serenade in blue
I'm somewhere in another world, alone with you
Sharing all the joys we used to know
Many moons ago
Once again your face comes back to me
Just like the theme of some forgotten melody
In the album of my memory
Serenade in blue
Whether I choose to believe that there's some kind of supernatural communication happening through the music, or that it's a total (if pleasant) coincidence, or that I'm just in a place where I'm bound see what I'm looking for everywhere, it doesn't matter. The songs make me think of Dad. They make him live, and they remind me that he lives on in me. All I have to do is tune in and listen.
Part of my job at WVU is to work with our English-education majors, both in the classes I teach--especially the young-adult literature class--and out in the local schools where they're doing their observations and student teaching.
I love this aspect of my work, and in fact applied for the job here three years ago specifically to do more of this sort of thing, which I'd started doing at UNC when we were short an English-ed faculty member or two. There are few things more rewarding than working with future teachers, and seeing (sometimes in scary ways) exactly how the content students learn in their English major gets filtered down to the high-school classroom.
And then, I come across something like this. Perusing our SiteMeter stats for this week to see how people arrived at Romantoes, I learned that someone in Port Saint Lucie, Florida, found us by Googling "the advenchers of tom scourer who is the author."
You know, Tom Scourer, by Samyul Clemmunts, better known as Margt Wayne. Sigh.
I had an interesting voice mail on my work phone yesterday, from a guy in Charleston, who said he needed to talk to me about some of the things I'd been finding out at yard sales and so on. It took me a little by surprise, and it wasn't until he mentioned some old WVU dance cards that I realized he was talking about an old blog here on Romantoes.
Apparently, one of the dance bands mentioned there had been led by his dad back in the 1920s, and he had been surprised and delighted to see his dad's name on our blog.
I was surprised, too, I can tell you. We write here on this blog a) for ourselves, b) for a small group of people who we know are readers because they comment or give us occasional feedback in other ways, and c) for a possibly somewhat larger group of more-or-less regular readers who don't comment all that often--and that's about it. But sometimes, it seems like there's other folks who find something of interest on our blog, and it was a pleasant surprise to be reminded of that.
I called him back this evening, and we chatted about this and that (everything from comic books to rescue cats), before the Mountaineers game got started.
It turned out that only one of our dance cards came from a dance where this guy's dad had played, which was kind of a shame. But the card itself is a sweet little thing, from the Pi Beta Phi Spring Formal, March 26, 1927. The band is listed, there's a dozen spaces for names of dance partners (none filled in, in this case), and lists of Patronesses, Chaperones, and Active Members of the sorority. But it's got a nice leather cover and some neat glassine endpapers in a very 1920s spiderweb design.
When we lived in Colorado, we didn't have cable tv, and were at the mercy of whatever the airwaves brought us (which was sometimes pretty interesting, in a weird way, like the news from Cheyenne). But we could get two different PBS stations from Denver, which was a first for me. One way the two stations distinguished themselves from each other was by trying to have different on-air fund-raising strategies. One station played all the Doo-Wop and Suze Orman you could ever want, and the other did even weirder things. The weirdest was probably their auctions.
Sometimes, it would be the traditional "silent auction" with different boards and where bidders would call in and talk to phone bank people and all that. But sometimes they would have real live auctions, too, with a real auctioneer doing the whole traditional sing-song thing (bidders also phoned in, but the selling was real-time). Usually they were auctioning off sports collectibles or furniture at these auctions and just about every time they were on I watched some of it.
I think it drove Rose a little crazy, of course, but as I told her, the sound of a real auctioneer has a kind of soothing effect on me. It's a sound I recall from my childhood, and I think I fell asleep many, many times as a child, listening to the song of the auctioneer. (My folks, for those who don't know it already, long had a second income from being antique dealers and I remember going to innumerable auctions, from truly rustic farm auctions up to more classy affairs).
Anyway, a couple of times over the last year or so, I've met up with my folks in central Ohio at a particular auction house where they have become regular buyers and (to their surprise) occasional employees. I've bought few small items here and there, and sold a couple of them on (for a profit, I might add) on eBay, but I've also come to see auctions like this one a little differently.
At this auction, for example, there are usually two (and sometimes more) auction rings operating simultaneously: at the right, you see what's left on one auction ring at the end of the day, working it's way towards me down this table of glass and china. Not many bidders: good for buyers, I guess, but not so good for the seller. The empty chairs face the main ring, shown at about the same time in the top photo.
Most real life auctions are like this one, of course, where an estate is being cleared out. And it's fun, still, to go and try to find a bargain, and I suppose it's good to support the local economy. And I still enjoy listening to the auctioneer patter and the jokes. But there's a sad side to auctions, too, I think. One of the things you really realize at an auction is that collections have a life cycle, too, one that is almost always closely tied to the lives of their owners. I'm not sure if that makes me more or less eager to gather my own collections, though I know I'd hate to see them auctioned off.
But maybe there's a way to see that buying something at an auction is not only a kind of recycling, but it's what any collector should want: for the things one collector loved to be bought and loved by another. So, while I hope to go to more auctions, and to find a few things I can sell on--I hope to buy some things that I can keep and love, too.
I gave up making big New Year's resolutions years ago. You know, the traditional "lose 20 pounds, learn to say no, procrastinate less, be a faultless human being" kinds of goals.
Instead, if I make any resolutions at all (which I usually don't), they're very small. It started several years back when I jokingly resolved that in the coming year, I would throw out any pen that didn't work. Inevitably, shortly into January of that year I pulled a pen out of a drawer and found it inkless. Remembering my resolution, I threw it away without guilt. (That last part is important: previously, I would've felt bad about throwing it out: maybe it would work next time. Wasn't I doing less harm to the environment by holding on to it, rather than delegating it to the landfill?)
I kept that resolution, and still throw out nonworking pens. Consequently, I almost never grab one that doesn't work. It's ridiculous, but that small choice genuinely reduced some of my daily frustration--and that's priceless.
So, I've been trying to think about what kind of micro-resolution I could make this year that might have a similar effect. Nothing really came to mind until I was walking to campus a few days ago. It was the first day of the semester, it was 8 a.m., it was snowing and gray and cold...in short, I was in a foul mood.
As I approached the intersection (ironically) of Pleasant Street and High Street, the light turned green and I stepped into the crosswalk only to nearly be run down by a college-aged driver who glared at me as she turned in front of me.
This did not improve my mood.
I used to think that Greeley was the worst town for pedestrians that I'd ever lived in, but Morgantown quickly overtook the top spot. My walk to school takes me straight up the main drag through downtown to campus, and every day it's kind of a dodgem car situation, especially at certain intersections--around the post office, in particular, but there are lots of other places where, if a pedestrian and a car are approaching at the same time, the car will cut off the pedestrian every time.
Problem is, I take this all personally. When, of course, it's got nothing to do with me. And if I'm honest, when I'm the driver, I get impatient with pedestrians, too.
I'm reminded of a great installment of the comic strip Potshots that ran in the Ohio State student newspaper, The Lantern, when I was an undergrad. It was a two-panel gag. The first panel bore the title "OSU student as pedestrian," and showed a student crossing the street, shaking his fist at a passing car and yelling, "Watch where you're going, buddy--can't you see people are trying to walk here?!" The second had the header "Same OSU student, 15 minutes later," and showed the same guy behind the wheel of a car, shaking his first at a pedestrian and yelling "Get out of the street, you moron!"
Bottom line: we're all a bunch of selfish, impatient @$$holes.
At any rate, I grumbled about the Pleasant Street incident all the way to campus, where--at the final intersection before my building--a very kind driver stopped and waved me across the street in front of him. Sometimes I'll wave or mouth "thanks" when people do that, but a lot of times, I don't because I figure it's THE LAW, not a courtesy that merits recognition. But then I thought, when most people are discourteous, shouldn't I acknowledge those who aren't?
So, that's my micro-resolution for 2010: to try on my daily walk to work to ignore the crappy drivers as much as possible, and to notice and thank the thoughtful ones. Somehow, I know that if I can do that consistently, it's likely to reduce my daily frustration level even more than tossing dead pens.
I think the very first blog I posted here was my story about "Shoe-Love" from the Modern Language Association (MLA) annual conference in Chicago a couple of years ago. This year, when I went to the MLA, I wasn't expecting to have any blog-worthy experiences, but that just goes to show what I know.
Anyway, the MLA is a typical (even stereotypical) literature conference, but one where I kind of like to go, because there's always a good crowd of Anglo-Saxonist regulars. I went, gave my paper, ran into a few folks from WVU, and ran into more folks who knew WVU folks, so it was also a reminder that the academic world is a small one. Had a long discussion about the importance and significance of books in Anglo-Saxon studies with an old friend: neither of us seemed too worried that we hadn't actually read the books we were debating about. Somehow, I'm not too happy about that, in retrospect.
Ran into an old graduate school friend, Stacy, who's always fun to see, and we set up a plan to go out to dinner after my paper (which was at a 7:15 session). Gave my paper (about a new interpretation of three runes, believe it or not), and got some positive responses to it. Anyway, after things wound down, Stacy and I and the chair of the panel ended up looking for a place to get a moderately priced late dinner, and we asked the concierge at the conference hotel to help us out.
After a few moments of mystic consultation with his computer, he told us he could just fit us in at a table for three at a seafood/Italian restaurant a few blocks away at 9:30 (25 minutes later). He printed out an online menu for us, he gave us some walking directions, and we left the hotel feeling lucky he had found us a place--since with thousands of academics milling around, many restaurants were filled up. But when we got to the restaurant, it was practically empty, and Stacy and Shari both expressed some uncertainty. But I said, "Hey, it's Monday evening, between Christmas and New Years--no big deal if it's not full. Let's try it."
So we went in, and the waiter asked if we were "three for dinner" and we said yeah, and he didn't seem to care if we had a reservation or not; we all thought the concierge had been kind of a jerk for implying that our table for three was like the last table available in the place. So anyway, we sat there, ordered some drinks, and the waiter ran through a whole list of specials, etc.
And while he was talking, I saw something moving around on the floor out of the corner of my eye. I looked closer, and sure enough it was a little grey mouse, scurrying around here and there. As soon as the waiter stepped away, I mentioned it to the other two (whose backs were turned to the mouse area) and we all decided it was time to leave: empty restaurant, mouse running around--two strikes was all we needed.
So we left and went to the Irish Pub, where there was a small crowd, the food was fine, and--at the end of the evening--the owner's cat wandered by our table: no mice in there, I think.
We debated going back to the hotel to give the concierge a piece of our minds, but ultimately decided against it.
It's no secret that the last few months have been something of a train wreck here at Camp Romantoes. So it felt like a real blessing that today--a day when the tearing of metal and the grinding of gears seems finally to have quieted--dawned bright and clear and sunny.
I put on the Yaktrax I got and never had a chance to use last winter and made my usual trek over to White Park. In the two years I've been walking there, I've marked out a pretty standard route that I follow more or less every time. It allows me to be in the woods, and away from street sounds and distant houses, as long as possible. What I've grown to love about trodding the same path every time is the remarkable balance of consistency and change it provides: same path, same general scenery, and yet radically different sights every time, depending on the season and the weather and the time of day.
In the fall, it's awash with color from the maples and oaks and buckeyes in the woods; in the spring, I love to watch the gradual creeping in of green.
And in the winter, even the bleakness is somehow lovely. Especially when everything is blanketed by snow and the light and shadow are magnified by sun and blue skies. Today as I walked I thought about how it doesn't seem that long ago that I was hiking through here to see the fall color...and how, before too long, small signs of life will start to emerge. Goddamn circle of life.
Robert Frost said it best: "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on." Relentlessly, mercilessly sometimes. If you're lucky, patiently and gently. In the woods, thankfully, it feels more like the latter.
So, since we're supposed to be thinking about peace and all that good s**t at this time of year, I'll leave you with a little video of the waterfall in White Park. I hope you find it even a little bit as restorative online as I did in person this morning. A peaceful season to all, indeed--and our very sincere wishes for a happy new year.
We didn't get hammered here as badly as folks further south and east did, but we still had a good eight inches of snow between Friday night and Saturday. Since Tom and I were both buried under final papers and exams, we didn't even leave the house until today.
You might recall that Tom has a penchant for odd snow-removal devices. Well, today he decided that a snow shovel was the best thing to use to clear the snow off the car. And he was right. We also took a push broom to it after the first pass with the shovel, and managed to clear it most of the way off.
This is definitely the heaviest snow we've had in the two-plus years we've lived in Morgantown; too bad we've been so busy that we haven't had a chance to get out our snowshoes and hike over to White Park. Somehow, I have a feeling we'll have other chances this winter.
I quote a lot of British poetry when I'm teaching the Brit Lit survey, and perhaps no lines get quoted more often than these lines from the beginning of Shakespeare's Sonnet 55: "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/ Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme."
The irony, of course, is that the fragile paper on which the poem is written seems to have little chance of outlasting the marble and gold of a princely tomb. Blogs would seem to have even less enduring power.
Still, the blog seems the place, in some ways to tell a story or two about Dave Hathaway, who seemed to love to tell stories in his own way. So I'll tell a story about him and a story of his.
First, the story about him: I'll never forget when Rosemary and I first got engaged, Rose's folks were, I think, really delighted (so was I). They had always been very welcoming to me, and always made me feel like part of the family. But after we told them we'd gotten engaged, Dave made an effort to tell Rose and I how pleased he was, and finding us together that evening he said to us, "You two deserve each other." I knew what he meant, but I've always loved the memory, because that phrase seems so often to be used for exactly the opposite effect--it's something you say to people who are (as the Wife of Bath would phrase it) one another's purgatory here on earth.
For his story, I'll tell one I only heard him tell once, although I always meant to get him to tell it again. It was one of his stories from the war, which Rose says he never used to tell when he was younger. But anyway, though he was ultimately a radio operator during the war, before his unit got to Italy, he didn't have much radio work to do, and (in the army way) he either found something to do or was given something to do. Anyway, somehow he wrangled his musical background into being assigned as a bugler.
In northern Africa, apparently, being somehow dissatisfied with the bugle as he found it, he took a blowtorch to it, apparently thinking he could maybe reshape it somehow: of course, the solder joints just melted away, and he was left with a handful of unconnected pieces. When he took it to the quartermaster, he didn't have any real explanation for what happened, and he was understandably disappointed when the brass bugle was replaced by a plastic one. The sound quality was, apparently, not very good.
Still, on the night before the unit was supposed to head off to Italy, the captain, I guess, was away on business of some sort and Dave, when it came time to play taps, couldn't resist the temptation to "swing" it, and he did, and he never got in trouble for doing it, either.
But the story doesn't end there. Some forty years later, when he went to his first battalion reunion, he told the story of swinging taps, and another old soldier came up to him afterwards with a tear in his eye. He told Dave that he remembered hearing taps that night, and hearing it swing, and it made him feel a whole lot better about getting on the boat and going to Italy the next day.
If you ever doubted that music--or breaking the rules--could sometimes do real good, I can't think of a better example.
The last time I saw Dave Hathaway, he was listening to jazz, and I think it made him feel better, too.
In my last post, I mentioned the negatives my dad had been meaning to scan for so many years. 
