1955 Revisited / As COVID Spring 2021 approaches

1955 was the year we received our polio shots.

Ours wasn't a musical household.  There was no record player or musical instruments.  We didn't sing.  My father listened to baseball games on his radio.  I don't recall hearing music on the radio. We did have a television, which is where I would have heard some of these songs from 1955:

From the list of the top 30, I remember hearing these songs that year when I was 5 years old going on 6.

2 Rock Around the Clock - Bill Haley & His Comets 3 The Yellow Rose of Texas - Mitch Miller 13 Sixteen Tons - Tennessee Ernie Ford 18 Mr. Sandman - The Chordettes 22 The Ballad of Davy Crockett - Fess Parker 27 The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane - The Ames Brothers

*

August 28, 1955: Emmett Till a 14-year-old from Chicago is brutally murdered in Mississippi for allegedly flirting with a white woman. His murderers are acquitted, and the case bring international attention to the civil rights movement after Jet magazine publishes a photo of Till’s beaten body at his open-casket funeral.

December 1, 1955: Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. Her defiant stance prompts a year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott.

* 

Except for on television, I had never seen anyone who wasn't the same race that I was.  I remember hearing the name "Stalin."  I had heard about Nazis and feared them.  I sat alone in our living room and watched a documentary about farm workers and felt empathy.  One day I was absorbed in playing quietly while the television was on and heard Mahalia Jackson singing in a way that moved me as I had never been moved before.  I remember being taken with a group of children to visit war veterans who were being cared for in a place called "The Fort" in our small San Joaquin Valley town in south central California.  I remember standing next to a bed of someone who appeared to me to be an old man, meaning that he was older than my father who was nearly 40 years old.  I remember feeling confused, seeing how sad and tired he looked.  I was so terrified of the wicked witch of the north, upon having seen "The Wizard of Oz" for the first time, that I ran out of the living room and hid behind a door, shaking with fear.  I had nightmares about witches and bulls who took the top of their heads off to reveal that there was nothing inside them.  There were sexual predators in our small community of families with fathers who worked for Standard Oil in various capacities.  The neighborhood kids and I all watched Mickey Mouse Club on TV and wanted to go to Disneyland.  We roamed through the neighborhood freely with no parents supervising us. We even walked outside our neighborhood once to a farm where there were horses, donkeys and turkeys.  We were told never to do that again. 

We went to "The Fort" to get our polio vaccines.

*

No COVID vaccine for me yet.  I keep checking the webpage for the clinic where I get my medical care.  Several of my friends have already received their vaccines through their health care providers.  We are almost to COVID Spring 2021.  

The bird song that I can hear, even with the windows closed, becomes more lively each day.  I look forward to hearing the song of a robin.

This is not easy

When I listen to Deborah Parker speak from her heart, I think of Sabine, and her raw pain and the something else she and Deborah Parker and so many of us have that can be there with the pain that is so real and present and unequivocal.

We are not alone.  We can turn to the power of good memories and the power of beauty and the power of community during times of raw pain. Deborah Parker's words remind me of what I know of  you, Sabine.  It is not easy.  It is not easy.

Someday Soon 1970 / Day Lilies / Someday Soon 2016

Yesterday I looked out on my porch and saw a brilliant golden daylily. Last fall, I dug up the bulbs because they had grown so crowded that there were very few blooms in June 2015.  I replanted only three of the bulbs, thinking I would have plenty of blooms this summer.  Although there are usually blooms in early June, they waited until August 3 this year.  There is no bloom today for me to photograph, but there will be more blooms this week.  Their appearance this year in the early days of August brings emotional healing to me.

This morning while looking for something else, I came across these photos that I took of myself in 1970, just after I had turned 21.  That was the year I waited for the man I loved to return from the war in Vietnam.  He had turned 21 on the day after I did.  The photos were taken with the Minolta camera that he bought while he was in Vietnam and gave to me during those months of waiting during which I attended peace marches in San Francisco.

This afternoon a friend who is dear to my heart and who went to live in Canada during the Vietnam War said that we would be taking a walk again someday soon.  He paused and then said, "Like the song."  I said, "It's always about music, isn't it?"  He laughed and said, "Yes."

We are 67 years young and old this year.  Today is his birthday.  Mine is in October.

Father's Day 2014

A good memory of my Dad from many years ago. That might be the beach at Anchor Bay, California, near where my parents lived from 1974 to 1994 -- the year my mother died.

My father died in 2003.

Thank you, Dad, for everything.

Memory from July of 1969 / Ocean Beach January 2013

 I remember going to the Family Dog on the Coast Highway (San Francisco, California -- Ocean Beach) in July of 1969 to hear "It's A Beautiful Day" in concert.  I was 19 years old.  This could be the poster for that evening concert.  

Good to see Ocean Beach this morning via the magic of the internet.

(It takes about 15 seconds for the live webcam image to appear)

MEMORY

I believe that my old friend and I spent a night on the beach shown in this woodblock print soon after he returned from Vietnam on December 8, 1970. We had driven from the small cottage we rented for $110 a month in the hills of Redwood City. Late in the day, near sunset, after parking the car on a turnout on the coast highway, we walked across the headlands and made our way down to the beach. Of course, this was illegal. We were on private land, but it was getting dark, and we decided to sleep at the bottom of the cliffs, in a safe place above the tide line. My old friend and I gathered driftwood, and he built a fire in the sand in a sheltered niche. As the smoke rose, we heard a shriek. When we looked up, there was an owl in the sky. It didn't seem like an auspicious sign. I felt as if we were in a Robinson Jeffers' poem. The night was cold and windy. We didn't sleep well. In the morning, we walked back up to the road where a highway patrolman was waiting for us. He asked us what we were doing on the headlands. He pointed out that we had been walking on private property but didn't cite us for trespassing.

No artist comes closer to my experience and vision of California than Tom Killion, whose woodblock print is shown above.

Many thanks to wood s lot for his link to POETS ON THE PEAKS: SNYDER, MUIR, KEROUAC, WHALEN

Calendar Series: 69th Month / Early Winter Painted from Memory (1991)

Yesterday, the following was part of an e-newsletter which I receive and which is called "Robert Genn Twice Weekly."

-- In a now-famous research project, Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980) found that toddlers from all cultures,
when encouraged, do the following:

1. Draw from memory, not direct observation
2. Emphasize obvious features, omitting others
3. Sometimes add local characteristics or happenings
4. Omit proportion, perspective, and other devices of pictorial illusion --

I am intrigued to find that many of my paintings have most of the qualities of a toddler's art. Picasso said, "It takes a long time to become young."

Calendar Series: 51st Month / Beloved Ocean with Fearless Room in True Colors (1989)

Last night I dreamed that a small plane fell from the sky and crashed, nose down, into the bed of daisies my father had planted on the north side of the house where my family lived. A calm and unhurt letter carrier from the U.S. Post Office, holding his mail bag, stepped out of the plane and handed us our mail as we stood at the sliding glass door which opened onto our covered porch. We then helped him drag the undamaged airplane onto our porch and invited him into our house. I went outside on the porch to look at the plane. I realized that it was a handmade plane, built from plywood and painted a flat grey. I thought to myself, "Hey, I could build a plane like that."

Considering that I have felt discouraged recently about being out of work, the dream was oddly comforting.

Looking back at my art work has been unsettling lately, especially because I can see in these paintings a shift which led to my conclusion in 1994 that all my paintings were about "looking back," and that I didn't want to do that anymore, after which point I did less and less painting. I wasn't having positive new experiences, just feeling the weight of old experiences and increasingly distressing new experiences. The elation and creative energy that had begun building in 1980 with my return to college, and to drawing and writing, peaked in 1990 with the onset of the Gulf War in August of that year, along with some upsetting circumstances in my personal life and the lives of those I loved, and I began to experience symptoms of delayed post-traumatic stress disorder. I had thought that painting would help me and others transcend our difficulties, but I began to feel overwhelmed by the losses that life brings.

About today's painting:

I still love the ocean. It's been too long since I've been to the ocean. After seeing the film footage of the Christmas tsunami of 2004 and Katrina in 2005, though, I will never look at the ocean in the same way I once did. In this painting, I was recalling a sense of fearlessness that I no longer have. Still, I remember what Georgia O'Keeffe said:

"“I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life -- and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”

Now that's something to keep in mind.

Calendar Series: 19th Month / EADGBE (1987)

The 18th Month was not photographed. Its title was "PQRST." Where could it be?