The Same River

I have mentioned before on this blog a favorite poem, "The Voyage to Secrecy," by the Scots poet Norman Cameron. Late in my Navy career, I printed a copy of it and placed it deep inside my wallet.

The Voyage to Secrecy

The morn of his departure, men could say
‘Either by such a way or such a way,’
And, a week later, still, by plotting out
The course of all the roadways round about,
‘In these some score of places he may be.’
How many days the voyage to secrecy?
Always the milestones by the road hark back
To whence he came, and those in idleness
Can bound his range with map and compasses.

When shall their compasses strain wide and crack,
And alien milestones, with strange figures,
Baffle the sagest of geographers?


The destination that Cameron seeks isn't physical or even terrestrial. There are no more nowheres, no more uncharted lands. The earth has been hammered down, and although there are still plenty of hard-to-reach places, there is nowhere left where one can truly hide, not to be found.

At some time in the mid-1990s, after leaving the Navy, I replaced Cameron's poem in my wallet with the English lyrics by Norman Gimbel of a song originally written in Portuguese by Chico Barque. Antonio Carlos Jobim supplied the song's languorously lovely music.

Song Of The Sabiá

I'll go back, I know now that I'll go back,
That my place is there and there it will always be,
There where I can hear the song of the sabiá.
I'll go back, I know now that I'll go back.

I will lie in the shadow of a palm
That's no longer there.
And pick a flower that doesn't grow,
And may be some one's love will speed the night,
The lonely unwanted night
That may bring me to the new day.

I'll go back, I know now that I'll go back.
They won't in vain,
All the plans I made to deceive myself,
All the roads I made just to lose myself,
All the love I made to forget myself,
Those mistakes I made just to find myself.

I'll go back, I know now that I'll go back,
That my place is there and there it will always be,
There where I can hear the song of the sabiá
Of the sabiá.

Is the writer of the song talking about an actual place or is he talking about the past - a past self? What both writers were tacitly pointing out is that their goals are equally unattainable. Secrecy is as elusive as the past.


Both of these pieces, secret messages to myself, express a great longing - the first, to lose myself, the second, to find something that was lost. Having to be "present and accounted for" in the Navy for eight years, mostly in places and among people I didn't like, made me want to lose myself somewhere, it didn't matter where, I couldn't be found. My returning to active duty for three years in the Army couldn't have turned out worse. I did it to save my marriage and found myself, when I got out, in a failed marriage that was more like a crypt for two. Shortly after joining the Army, I realized my mistake and wanted to go back, back to the very beginning.

I accomplished both when I came to live in the Philippines ten years ago: while going back to a place from my past, I somehow found myself about as thoroughly lost as it's possible to be. I live on a small island, one of the archipelago of more than 7,000 islands in the Philippines. Looking at a map of the country, it looks sort of like the skeletal remains of a hominid. There is the skull, represented by the northern island is Luzon, the elongated arms are the islands of Palawan and Negros-Cebu. Mindanao is the pelvis, and the islands of Samar and Leyte are its spine. I live somewhere along the hominid's lower ribcage.

But I've gone too far. Finding my way back may take too long, but I have to try. It was Heraclitus who wrote that one cannot step into the same river twice, and Thomas Wolfe who wrote "You can't go home again." Everything is in flux, change is inescapable, nothing remains as it was.

But it isn't as simple as this. Physics can't explain why we can't maneuver in time as freely as we travel through space. They argue that, just as Anchorage, Alaska continues to exist a decade after I left it, and I can return to it (if only I had the wherewithal), so, too, the past continues to exist and awaits our return. The life of Anchorage has continued without me. Much will have changed since I left. For one big reason - my sister is no longer living there. She died in October 2016. Without her there, I have no real reason to return.

But the past remains as it was - perhaps not exactly as we remember it because memory is selective. It remains as we first experienced it, alive and dynamic. Will we one day prove Heraclitus wrong and step into the same old river that we once crossed?

Cat Man

Kichie

When it comes to pets, a lot of us are dog people. The majority of my friends are among them. They post photos of their dogs on social media. I like to kid them now and then, especially when they tell me that their dogs have human traits, that they have souls and deep thoughts. Ok. So let's pretend that your dog is actually a human being. Naked, covered in hair, he can't understand a language and can only make rudimentary noises. He isn't toilet trained and has to be taken for walks on a leash. He's likes to pee all around your yard - on trees, on walls, on your car's tires. He also sniffs everything, including your friends' crotches when they come over to your house. Imagine your friends' reaction to this naked, hairy human being in your house. They would be terrified. "He's just being friendly" you reassure them when he humps someone's leg.

Some of us, though, are cat people. My mother was a cat person, so I grew up around a few cats. We went through rather a lot of them, I'm afraid. We lost them to accidents, usually involving a car. We lost them in long, cross-country moves. They disappeared mysteriously, because of an evil-minded neighbor or because my father took them on a "one-way ride." My father - you guessed right - was not a cat person.

One memory stands out from all the rest. It happened before I was in school. My folks were getting ready to move. Since my father was in the Army, we moved rather a lot. When all the boxes were packed and the movers had arrived, we couldn't find the cat. We called her and looked everywhere. One of the movers found her inside my mother's empty wardrobe - with a litter of newborn kittens. We had to leave and there was no way we could take the cat and her litter with us. So my father took them, all five of them, into the bathroom, locked the door behind him and drowned them in the tub, despite my screams outside the door. I resented what he did for years.

My latest cat arrived in my life in June 2014. My girlfriend called me from outside and I went out the front door to the terrace where she held out to me two tiny kittens that our neighbor's cat had given birth to a week before and told me to choose one. One was a gray tabby and other was red. I chose the red one. He was male. We had to wait awhile until the mother weaned him before my girlfriend brought him home.

Since I wanted him to be a house cat, we had to improvise a litter box. I live on a remote provincial island in the Philippines, so pet supplies weren't available anywhere. My girlfriend had never owned a cat before. Over the years, I had owned several. I preferred them to dogs because they were smaller, cleaner, and easily house-trained. But also because they were smarter and more independent. I had learned that you never earned a cat's devotion easily. You had to work at it. Ultimately, I found them to be inscrutable, which was, I think, a large part of their fascination for me.

My girlfriend and I had trouble getting him to eat. He went days without eating and, having tried our best, I resigned myself to his imminent death. Then, hearing a fishmonger outside our house one day, my girlfriend bought some small fish and offered them to the kitten. He gobbled them up so quickly that he threw up. But at least we found something he would eat. Our neighbors, some of whom couldn't afford to feed fish to their own children, were amazed that we were feeding fish to our cat. They were also surprised that my girlfriend spoke to him and how, eventually, he would reply. She named him "Kichie" and when she called his name, he would reply "Ma! Ma!"

We tried to keep him in our house but it became impossible. As soon as he was strong enough to jump from the floor to the top of our refrigerator, and from the refrigerator to the top of the wall beneath the eaves of our house, he was routinely outdoors. It was our intention to have him spayed, but when my girlfriend reminded her relative, who was supposed to perform the operation, he reneged. This turned out to have serious consequences for the cat and for us.

When he was 16 months old, we moved a short distance down the road to another house and brought Kichie with us. Within a few months he established himself as the alpha male, with his own territory and a harem of females to defend. He would come home with fearsome injuries, some of which were obviously inflicted by a dog. There were several dogs in the area around my house. As I have pointed out elsewhere, these dogs don't belong to anyone. They are "adopted" by people in the same way the ,dogs "adopt" their fleas. They stake out a selection of houses from which they eat discarded scraps of food and the people utilize them as watch dogs. Unrestrained, the dogs are a nuisance, causing accidents on the road, scattering garbage everywhere, and engaging in loud and bloody territorial. fights with other dogs. When a female is on heat, male dogs from all directions arrive to have a go at her. It is a terrible sight when the dogs, sometimes more than ten at a time, swirl around through yards, with the female at the center, savaging one another for their turn.

These dogs are also a menace to cats, and when I discovered the wounds that they had inflicted on Kichie, I planned to poison them with engine coolant. I never went through with it. Kichie recovered and returned to his place as the alpha male.

My girlfriend learned to love Kichie deeply, just how deeply I discovered when she came to me and thanked me for persuading her to adopt a cat. Kichie was like her child, she said. Unfortunately, two years after we moved, we had to move again. Like the first move, it was only a short distance down the road to our new apartment. After we were finished moving, my girlfriend brought the cat to our new apartment in a rice sack. Unlike our old house, there were no spaces between the walls and the roof to escape through. We expected it would take some time for Kichie to adjust to his new territory, but we were surprised when he got out the door and, after a brief inspection of the area, disappeared. He didn't come back, and the following day my girlfriend returned to our old house and called his name. "Ma!" he cried as he emerged from behind the house. My girlfriend then brought him back a second time, and then a third time, to our new apartment before we realized that we would never be able to keep him there. His hard-won territory was back at our old house. He had made his choice.

Now, three months after we moved, my girlfriend sometimes returns to the old house, which has been transformed by renovation. Kichie always answers my girlfriend's call. He gives her a sad look. He has grown thin, despite the promises of the house's new residents to save their leftovers for him. He is 3½ now. My last photograph of him shows him poised in a living room chair, glancing nervously at our open door. That was September 15, the last time he was with us. We have spoken of getting another kitten, but my girlfriend is no longer interested. She hasn't learned what I learned so long ago - that pets can never be replaced, that they somehow cross the distance between the animal and human worlds to become our familiars, companions, to occupy that special middle ground, less than human but more than animal. But the love we had for one can sometimes be bestowed on another, however grudgingly, until they, too, are, as Rilke put it so beautifully, helped "up into a soul for which there is no heaven."*


*Letter to N.N., February 8, 1912.

Baby, It's Cold Outside

It began in 2014, I believe, when The Huffington Post ran an article that, for sheer purblind stupidity, would be hard to beat. "A Line-by-Line Take Down of ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’"(1) by the eponymous Em & Lo, accuses the 73-year-old Frank Loesser song, which he wrote for himself and his wife, of being "creepy" because its language suggests nothing less than date rape. Whether the legions of admiring listeners across the decades were aware of it or not, "Baby, It's Cold Outside" is "a song that basically sanctions date rape — roofies and all."(2)

In disbelief, defenders of the song insisted that the key to the song's charm is its context of a loving couple (Loesser and his wife) kidding around on a cold night. Rich Lowry of The National Review wrote last Christmas, 'A cottage industry has sprung up denouncing the song as “creepy” and even as a “rape anthem.” Two singer-songwriters recently reworked the song so it could pass muster, say, at the holiday party of the Oberlin College gender-studies department. The result is predictably leaden and humorless.'(3) Even the greatest songs are subject to interpretation, the interpretation of the singer who has to find its true meaning and present it to the listener. Simply reading the printed lyrics is like reading the text of a play: it often provides nothing but indications, clues for an actor to "flesh out." 

Unconvinced, the critics of the song continue, every holiday season, to stand on their own necks, proudly displaying their ignorance of double entendre and denying the possibility of the tongue-in-cheek. The corrected (unsexed) alternate version of the song accomplished nothing but make the original seem far better than it is.

Which raises the ultimate point: it's only a song - an old song at that, written for a generation that is long gone. The fact that it has stuck around for so long is all the testimonial its qualities need. It will probably outlive the current fidgeting with the past. I mean, why should men and women from the 1940s, like my father and mother, be held to our enlightened standards of behavior? Times have changed and, we can only hope, so have people.

Nobody seems to have seen the MGM film in which the song debuted - and which won an Oscar for Best Original Song.(4) Neptune's Daughter was a star vehicle for former Olympic swimmer Esther Williams. The scene in which the song is performed features two couples in separate locales - Williams & Ricardo Montalban and Betty Garrett & Red Skelton. Montalban and Williams perform the song straight, i.e., "romantic," as it was written. But Betty Garrett and Red Skelton perform the song with the roles reversed, presumably for laughs, with Garrett playing the aggressor and Skelton playing the victim. I hate to break this to the enemies of "Baby, It's Cold Outside" but the Garrett-Skelton duet stands their date-rape argument on its head, unless they mean to suggest that Garrett has plied Skelton with roofies and is planning to rape him? 

One of the most entertaining recent renditions of the song by She & Him is contained in a very clever animated short that can be found here. The woman very aggressively tries to convince the man to stay in her cabin. She even stoops to disabling his car. Finally, all her efforts wasted, she sits, exhausted and alone. But then the man comes back to knock on her door, and, smiling, holds up a mistletoe. I wonder how many people will lose their jobs this Christmas season by hanging mistletoe around the office?


(1) Huffpost, The Blog, Dec 19, 2014.
(2) In the same article, Em & Lo take a swipe at the Richard Curtis film Love, Actually, which is "mind-bogglingly offensive in its depiction of women as nothing more than the embodiments of men’s romantic and/or sexual fantasies." Such sexism isn't the exclusive domain of men. One of the most cogent criticisms of Jane Austen's novels is that they are exclusively about young women seeking to land good husbands. I wouldn't dream of equating Love, Actually with Sense and Sensibility, but isn't Austen guilty of depicting men as nothing more than the embodiments of women's romantic and sexual (and monetary) fantasies?
(3) The National Review, December 24, 2016.
(4) A different Frank Loesser song was going to be used in the film called "(I Want to Get You on a) Slow Boat to China" which - ironically - the infamous Hays Office warned was too risqué. So Loesser sold MGM "Baby, It's Cold Outside" - over the objections of his wife.

The Long Ball

"Baseball fans are pedants, there is no other kind."(1)
(Wilfrid Sheed)


Speaking now as a former fan about baseball, I want to address Joe Morgan's recent letter to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Morgan says just about everything I expected he or any other player from the analog days of baseball would say about the continuing refusal to induct some former players who are eligible for induction into the Hall. The reason is by now no longer what it was when these players were active: a secret (although it was the subject of widespread rumors). The problem with Morgan's letter is that the issue isn't nearly as black and white as it seems. Morgan wrote:

"The Hall of Fame has always had its share of colorful characters, some of whom broke or bent society's rules in their era. By todays's standards, some might not have gotten in. Times change and society improves. What once was accepted no longer is . . .  But steroid users don't belong here. What they did shouldn't be accepted. Times shouldn't change for the worse."

(I am heartened by Morgan's faith in society's improvement through the years.)

I learned to love baseball through the eyes of my father. Born in Lagrange, Georgia, his team was the Atlanta Braves. He was a devoted fan, which you had to be if the Braves was your team. "Cellar Dwellers" is the old term for sports teams that commonly occupied last place in their divisions, and in the late 1960s and early '70s the Braves lived up - or down - to it year after year. The only ray of sunshine during those years for a Braves fan was one player - Hank Aaron. I remember when Willie Mays and Aaron were neck-and-neck in the race to break Babe Ruth's record for career homeruns. Week after week, I would check the Sunday newspapers for the lists of the top homerun hitters of all time. There was Ruth's name at the top with 714 homeruns, with Mays' and Aaron's names beneath. Mays, who was older, gradually faded away. He retired with 660 homeruns. But Aaron kept going. When he finally broke Ruth's record, in May 1974, I was in hospital recovering from an appendectomy. I also celebrated my 16th birthday there, which is why it's easy for me to remember the date of Aaron's feat.

When I look at the current list of Major League Baseball's Top 300 career homerun hitters, it feels like I'm being wrapped in a warm blanket on a December night. The names that stand out for me are Willie McCovey (521), Boog Powell (339), Dave Kingman (442), Willie Stargell (475), Harmon Killebrew (573), Reggie Jackson (563), and Frank Robinson (586). Mea culpa - I remember their names because they were sluggers, "long ball" hitters. For a kid, there is nothing in sports more impressive than a homerun.

There have always been great baseball players who didn't hit homeruns. Pitchers, for instance, were expected to be poor hitters, which is why they were almost invariably the ninth batter in the lineup. Barry Bonds was a gifted hitter and had a dependably high batting average. But, too often, he found his accomplishments ignored because he hit comparatively few homeruns. "Cleanup" batters, at number four in the lineup in game after game, were always the long ball hitters. They couldn't match Bonds in average, on base percentage, in runs scored. But it didn't matter as long as they could knock the ball out of the park thirty, forty, or even fifty times a season. That's why Bonds decided to become a slugger, and why he, and some other sluggers - Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and Alex Rodriguez - changed baseball by cheating. They took their natural talent for hitting the ball and enhanced it to the extent that they broke - shattered - existing records for single season and career homeruns. Both McGwire, Sosa and Rodriguez later admitted to "doping," but Bonds has always denied it. Their long ball stats are impressive: Rodriguez 696 homeruns, Sosa 609 homeruns, McGwire 583 homeruns. And Barry Bonds sits atop the list at 762 homeruns. So why aren't they in the Hall of Fame?

It seemed like it happened all of a sudden. In 1998, it became obvious that Roger Maris's record for most homeruns in a single season - 61 - was going to be beaten. By whom wasn't exactly clear, since there were two contenders. Mark McGwire had forearms so enlarged that he reminded me of Popeye. He and Sammy Sosa made the breaking of Roger Maris's record into an appalling circus. McGwire finished the season with 70 homeruns, while Sosa had a mere 66. One would think that, getting close to the record, these hypertrophied antiheroes would've perhaps slowed down so it didn't look so obvious that they were doping. But, no, they approached the record in haste, it seemed, broke it, and then kept on going into stratospheric heights of absurdity. Not to be outdone, Barry Bonds nullified McGwire's record in 2001 by hitting 73 homeruns.

Joe Morgan was a great member of a great baseball team - the Cincinatti Reds - that also included a cheater - Pete Rose. Morgan is a member of the Hall of Fame. Rose is not, and may never be. Rose never doped, but he participated in gambling while an active player and was proven to have, on occasion, bet against his own team. 

Americans invented baseball, basketball, and their own kind of football, but the principles behind these games and the rules that bound its players were all invented in 19th century England. Wilfrid Sheed could write with some authority on the subject because he was an Anglo-American whose dreams of playing any sport were forever extinguished by a brief bout of polio at the age of 13. As Sheed wrote in his essay, "Why Sports Matter," "But perhaps the greatest benefit of all, to judge from the fuss that would be made about it, was that sports not only outlawed cheating but drilled its devotees to detect and despise it in each other and by extension in themselves."(2)

When I think of great baseball players of the past, like Joe Dimaggio and Mickey Mantle, both of whom played with sometimes crippling injuries, I think of what they accomplished and what they might have accomplished if they hadn't had to contend with injuries. But then I think about the fate of the record-setting balls. According to Wikipedia, "[Barry Bonds's 756th homerun ball] was consigned to an auction house on August 21 [2007]. Bidding began on August 28 and closed with a winning bid of US$752,467 on September 15 after a three phase online auction. The high bidder, fashion designer Marc Ecko, created a website to let fans decide its fate. Subsequently, Ben Padnos, who submitted the (US) $186,750 winning bid on Bonds's record-tying 755th home run ball also set up a website to let fans decide its fate. 10 million voters helped Ecko decide to brand the ball with an asterisk and send it to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. Padnos sold 5-year ads on a website, www.endthedebate.com, where people voted by a two-to-one margin to smash the ball."

Now that the entire Russian Winter Olympic team has been banned from competition in South Korea early next year because of substantial evidence of systemic and institutionalized doping, the issue of performance enhancing drugs is once again in the spotlight. While sports organizations have all decided that it is bad for every sport, I wonder if a majority of fans really care. I mentioned above that I am a "former" baseball fan. Contemporary professional sports is exasperating to me because it doesn't seem to even want to make up its mind. Like everything else, professional sports has been tainted by money. I don't watch baseball much any more, but if players like Bonds, Rodriguez, McGwire, and Sosa are voted into the Hall of Fame, which is probably nothing but a matter of time, I will never watch another baseball game, not in my home, not at a friend's house, if I am in a bar and a baseball game is on the TV, I will get up and leave. Before lights were installed in stadiums, baseball games used to be called on account of darkness. For baseball, it's getting darker by the hour.


(1) "Why Can't the Movies Play Ball?," The New York Times, May 14, 1989.
(2) "Why Sports Matter," Wilson Quarterly, Winter 1995.