HungryBlues

Sixty Years Ago Today

[This is from my friend Marsha Joyner, who produced the TV series. I carried something else by her yesterday. --BG]

“All life on Earth has been touched by the event, which took place here."
The official Trinity Site proclaims

For we are all Downwind

Atomic Bomb Series on ‘Olelo Channel 53 (Hawaii)

Sixty years ago on July 16, 1945, the final step of the WWII Manhattan Project took place at Trinity Site, Alamogordo, New Mexico where the first atomic bomb was tested at 5:29:45 a.m. Mountain War Time. The project marked the beginning of an era of nuclear weapons, scientific discoveries, unfathomable injuries and unimaginable sorrows.

The 19-kiloton explosion ushered the world into the atomic age. The second bomb, known as "Little Boy", was detonated over the city of Hiroshima, August 6, 1945. The third bomb, known as "Fat Man", was detonated over the city of Nagasaki, August 9, 1945. The fourth bomb known as “Able” was detonated in Bikini and began 30 years of horrific atomic/Hydrogen bomb tests throughout the Pacific Ocean.

The atomic/nuclear age has wrought worldwide havoc beyond belief. It has had such an impact on our lives, that we should not ignore the history but study it and learn from it.

From 1945 through 1962, the United States conducted atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons. Hundreds of thousands of military personnel and civilians participated in the conduct of those tests, and many of the participants were exposed to ionizing radiation.

July 15, 2005 Channel 53 – 10:00 p.m. “Atomic Bomb part II”
July 16, 2005 Channel 53 – 9:30 p.m. “Half Life”
July 17, 2005 Channel 53 – 9:00 p.m. “Cry At The End”

The entire series will be repeated
July 23, 2005 Channel 53
7:30 am “Black Hole”
8:30 am “Atomic Bomb part I"
9:30 am “Atomic Bomb part II"
11:00 am Half Life"
12:30 am "Cry at The End"

August 6, 1965 should be commemorated as the day of deliverance

By Marsha Rose Joyner

Aloha,

On August 6th we will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the signing by Lyndon B. Johnson of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And of course, our own, the late Congresswoman Patsy T. Mink was instrumental in is formation and passage.

Almost one hundred years after the 15th amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting voting rights to everyone, non-whites in America had not enjoyed the full measure of freedom. The cost of Freedom was exceptionally high.

We, The Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Coalition- Hawaii are requesting that you join with us in a VOTER REGISTRATION DRIVE. We feel that it is the best way to commemorate this event as well as celebrating the lives of all of the people who sacrificed so that we may enjoy the right to vote.

Many people from Hawaii made huge sacrifices and involved themselves in the voter registration campaign in the southern states. Southern Blacks who tried to register to vote--and people of other races who supported them--were typically harassed, beaten or killed.

For years, hundreds of thousands of people had worked and died to secure human rights for everyone in the U.S. July 2, 1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson signed The Civil Rights Act into law. Yet some of the southern states still resisted granting voting rights to everyone. The physical abuse was unimaginable and the economic manipulation deplorable for those who tried to register to vote.

The Selma-to-Montgomery March for voting rights ended three weeks--and three events--that represented the political and emotional peak of the modern civil rights movement. On "Bloody Sunday," March 7, 1965, some 600 civil rights marchers headed east out of Selma on U.S. Route 80. They got only as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge six blocks away, where state and local lawmen attacked them with “billy-clubs” and tear gas and drove them back into Selma. Two days later on March 9, Martin Luther King, Jr., led a "symbolic" march to the bridge. On Sunday, March 21, about 3,200 marchers set out for Montgomery, walking 12 miles a day and sleeping in fields. By the time they reached the capitol on Thursday, March 25, they were 25,000-strong.

“At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama (March 7, 1965). “There is no Negro problem. There is no southern problem. There is no northern problem. There is only an American problem,” President Johnson said in his message to Congress three weeks after the televisions images of Bloody Sunday were shown to the world.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which required equal access to public places and outlawed discrimination in employment, was a major victory of the black freedom struggle, but the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was its crowning achievement. The Act had an immediate impact. Within months of its passage on August 6, 1965, one quarter of a million new black voters had been registered. Winning the right to vote changed the political landscape of the United States. When Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, barely 100 African Americans held elective office in the U.S.; today there were more than 10,000.

The biggest impediment to voting is not the KKK or the white citizens council or economic sanctions; it is apathy. Today, far too many people do not appreciate or do not know of the struggles that women, African-Americans, Asians, Pacific Islanders and other minorities have gone thru for the right to vote.

The Voting Rights Act was costly—100 years, thousands were arrested and served time in jails across America, while others gave their lives for the right to vote. People stand today on the ground won by people yesterday, it is a debt we owe.

I've Been Blogged (Once and then again...)

I forgot to mention that Susan Klopfer caught me in action at the Longdale Community Center site in Mississippi.

More recently, Jeff blogged about taking me and Scott B Smith out to lunch last Wednesday, when I was in Montgomery, AL. Jeff has his own blog and is also one of the cool people over at Preemptive Karma. Jeff turned up an old list-serve post by ScottB, which is a good introduction to his involvement in the Lowndes County Freedom Organization and the story behind the black cat (later the Black Panther) symbol in African American political organizations.

Definitely check out Jeff's post to read the passage by ScottB. But I also want to make sure you catch the last part, where Jeff announces his project on Tallassee:

I'd been thinking for a long time that the history of Tallassee needed updating. A History of Tallassee was published by the about-to-close Mt. Vernon Mills in 1949, but I'm not aware of any similar historical attempts at archiving since.

I'd been thinking for a long time that the Writers' Bloc site needed doing, for longer things than blog entries.

There's so much to cover since the 1940s, and so many stories that aren't what the Chamber of Commerce would appreciate, but they need to be told; like this one Ben and I have talked about a lot. So it's on. In a serious way. I'm expecting it'll be a forum or portal-style website, collecting and telling the oral history, and that I'll be organizing it in anticipation of a printed version.

Yet another reason being a blogger has been so worthwhile: I keep meeting people and learning things I'd never have had access to otherwise.

Thanks for lunch, Jeff.

Oooo, my good friend Kaspit has started a blog . . .

My brilliant and zany friend now has a blog called Kaspit! Kaspit isn't my friend's real name, of course. Kaspit (by my friend's coinage?) is the Hebrew word for Quicksilver. Kaspit's blog is about Jewish law, comic books and public policy, among other things. You may have seen other blogs on classical rabbinic literature, but I doubt you've seen anything quite like this . . .

Here's a little from Kaspit's inaugural Daf yomi commendiary:

Let us try a Daf Yomi commendiary.1 A running commentary on the daf yomi. Daf yomi is the "daily page" of the Babylonian Talmud read by many Jews in synch with a 7+ year cycle. This reading is a "spiritual exercise" and, for some of us, the reading may veer off-schedule and out-of-synch. In this commendiary, let's bring the textual into the material.

Why Quicksilver? Quicksilver is a living marvel, a mythic protagonist but also an antagonist, a pollutant when "out of place". (M. Douglas) Has it healing properties? Good as gold, or at least as silver. But quicksilver may be more susceptible to impurities like any liquid. It is hydrargyrum, silver water, silverfish. D/b/a mercury, Mercurial, toxic speech, poison. Do not incinerate: flesh and organs are vulnerable to trace amounts of quicksilver, Hg. So always again we ought to divine and interpret the traces, as when quicksilver slips through our flesh and texts, and we have to chase after both the Mercury and the Hermes.

Reading Talmud between the Greek and the Roman, the philosophical and the material, between their Hermes and Mercurius. Yes, it’s an endless hermeneutical Job to fall into both the textual and the toxical depths. A hermercurial critique.

Hermes, a wing-footed, mad-hatted herald, a cunning and clever sort, who also happens to be the god of Commerce and of Science. Yes, and he’s leading us all the way down to Hades. Thus the Greeks.

Mercury, god of merchandising. The sages do know Mercurius, the Roman God of wayfarers, merchants2 , commerce, mercantilism, free trade zones and Capitalism. The sages “apparently considered [Mercurius] almost synonymous with idolatry.” (Per I.G. of EJ) When the sages fulminate about Mercury, might their texts3 be tackling bigger targets?

(Read the whole thing.)

This one is going to be fun . . .

Jonathan On Passover (From The Comments)

[Jonathan's comments frequently deserve more air than they get in the comment fields of my posts. --BG]

Passover makes me think of the black slave experience in contemporary Sudan. Thursday evening I met a terrific man named Simon Deng who works for a group called iAbolish [www.iabolish.com] (I actually introduced Mr. Deng before he spoke to the Amnesty International club here on campus). Mr. Deng (a former enslaved child in Sudan) spoke to me about Arab slavers who are still killing and enslaving black Africans today. This is form of genocide in the lush jungles of Southern Sudan is equally as disgusting as the problems of mass murder in the desert of Darfur. Mr. Deng was taken as a boy from his village of Tonga in Southern Sudan and brutally enslaved and scarred on all levels before he escaped with the aid of an international buy-back force of anti-slavers.

I have often thought of what it means to be a independent American voter who rejects all parties (and therefore often cannot vote in primaries and other such twisted affairs) and a socialist (for lack of a better word) but the more I learn about the virulent permutations of capitalism, the more I strengthen my intellectual and sociopolitical resolve.

THAT is why your posts on the election fraud are so important to me because that willful debacle equals $-fiending. Many of the guns used to gather slaves in Southern Sudan are German-made and this equals $-fiending. The UN fails to intervene in Sudanese slavery because of pressure by the Arab oil magnets and this equals $-fiending. Condi Rice is pet of power who goes inside the big house, unleashed, when she is called and that is an example of $-fiending too. But I digress, forgive me.

Passover made me think of this world problem.

I am with you in recognition of this crucial, crucial time of Jewish observance.

Jonathan on St. Petersburg: White Fear of Black Rage (From The Comments)

In response to Jonathan, I was bemoaning the paucity of analysis in the blogosphere concerning the story in St. Petersburg covered in my two previous posts, when Jonathan posted a second comment which reads the whole story as a display of white American culture's fear of Black rage.

You know, Benjamin, it seems to me that this story is also about a knee-jerk, centuries-old fear of BLACK RAGE or the presumption of BLACK RAGE (emphasis added).

I'm currently teaching a course in INTRODUCTION TO AFRICANA STUDIES and the white students (the class is mostly white) will accept nothing less than cool, detached rhetoric. We are now moving into a unit on racism, slavery and political economy. I produce commentaries that explain elements of my pedagogy. This shows them the design behind my performative pedagogy. I want them to get a radical, bird's eye view of a teaching practice in motion.

However, these commentaries also give me a chance to formally address matters that arise in lecture/discussions and video screenings.

Here's what my latest commentary on the role of BLACK RAGE said (and I often think of the role of beligerence and biting nastiness in our developmental process when we are not being listened as children or as adults) . . . (emphasis added)

The rest of Jonathan's comment continues at a tangent to the story in St. Petersburg, but is nevertheless a valuable opening into the historical and symbolic dimensions of how African Americans and white Americans experience and express racism. It is also a window into Jonathan's sophisticated approach to teaching. His students are truly fortunate.

Last Week Was An Interesting Week

Two Fridays ago (4/8), my mother called to tell me she had just talked with a retired journalist, named Jeff Prugh. Apparently Jeff had come across my posts on the Roosevelt Tatum story, and he wanted to talk with me. Between my father's name and the mentions of Delmar, NY in the Tatum series (I called it "From Delmar to Bombingham"), Jeff figured out how to reach my mother.

Jeff called because he had researched this same story, starting three decades ago, interviewing many of the principle figures who were involved, including the likes of Macon Weaver, the US Attorney who drummed up the case against Tatum in the first place. If you haven't followed the links, or read the posts before, Roosevelt Tatum claimed to have witnessed two Birmingham Police officers planting the bombs that destroyed AD and Naomi King's home on the night of May 11, 1963. The Kings and their five children were in the house when the bombs went off and escaped alive only by good luck. After Tatum made his allegations and made several official statements to this effect, he abruptly retracted his testimony and was then prosecuted for false testimony. Tatum was convicted swiftly and sentenced to a year and a day in prison.

Both Jeff and I—as well as Diane McWhorter—have concluded that Tatum was bullied out of his original testimony through a rigged polygraph test, administered by the FBI in Birmingham. Jeff was astonished to find my work in part because until he read this post, he'd made the same mistake that Macon Weaver had in assuming that the Greenberg mentioned in FBI documents was the famous Civil Rights Movement attorney, Jack Greenberg.

When my mother called two Fridays ago, I was lying in bed, trying to recover from a bad cold in time for a job interview on Monday the 11th. I was still under the weather all weekend, and I wanted to use my spare time to prepare for the interview, so I didn't end up calling Jeff back until Tuesday night (4/12).

It was exciting to compare notes with Jeff because we'd reached so many of the same conclusions from our separate research and because we had each learned things that the other hadn't. While Jeff had spoken to many of the people involved—a number of whom are now dead—I had succeeded in getting additional FBI documents on the case declassified. His research led him more deeply into corruption in Alabama regarding Tatum's case; mine had revealed new details about what happened while Tatum was in Washington, DC with my father and AD King (the next part in the Delmar to Bombingham series, still in the works).

Jeff has done some very interesting work on Dan Moore, a federal marshall who tried to expose the rigging of the grand jury that convicted Tatum. In 1999 Jeff published his research in the Marin Independent Journal , the last paper he worked at before he retired (before that Jeff was a LA Times reporter for twenty-one years, including six as Atlanta Bureau Chief). In 2004, he published an expanded version as part of the King family memoir by Alveda King, AD and Naomi's oldest daughter, who was twelve at the time of the bombing. Here's an excerpt from the version in Marin Indpendent Journal:

In June [1963] while Rooselvelt Tatum is being questioned in Washington, Moore becomes incensed when [sic] learns that his boss, U.S. Marshal Peyton Norville, and Judge Allgood participate in selecting the federal grand jury that would indict Tatum.

In sworn testimony, Moore would say that he told a Washington-based official of the U.S. Marshals Service that his boss had bragged to him about putting his son-in-law on the grand jury.

A Justice Department examiner's report in 1964 would say that "...the jury box was one name short. The then Marshal, Mr. Norville, knowing his son-in-law to be a qualified voter, wrote his name on a piece of paper and put into the box. When the Marshal returned to his office he passed this information to the Chief [Moore] in an informal conversation . . . ."

In 1964, Moore would be subpoenaed by an attorney who represented eight white supremacists and who had been tipped about Moore's allegations that U.S. Marshal Norville had told him he had placed his son-in-law on the grand jury. The eight members of the militant National States Rights Party had been indicted by the Tatum grand jury for disrupting efforts to desegregate some of Birmingham's schools.

After the attorney takes Moore's deposition alleging that the grand jury had been improperly impaneled, Moore is called to Judge Allgood's chambers, and, according to Moore, the judge tells him: "You've got me backed against the wall now. What the hell am I supposed to do?

Moore to Judge Allgood: "Throw 'em all out! Dismiss all the indictments [including Tatum's]!

Amid allegations that the grand jury was tainted, the judge drops charges against the whites—publicly citing "fundamental deficiencies" in the indictment—but the judge doesn't let Moore's testimony impugning the grand jury get in the way of the case the feds had built against Roosevelt Tatum.

Dan Moore continues to press for propriety in the federal courthouse in Birmingham. However, he becomes persona non grata. He refuses an offer of a lifetime pension of $3,971 a year ($331 monthly) if he would retire on the spot, after nearly 20 years with the U.S. Marshals Service, and claim what he says would be a bogus disability. He would describe the offer as "a crooked scheme designed to steal public money and to cover up what I knew about obstruction of justice in the Tatum grand jury."

            ***         ***         ***
Earlier the same Tuesday evening that I spoke with Jeff Prugh (4/12), I found a voicemail on my cell phone after I got out of yoga class. The call was from Bob Adamenko, an old friend of my dad's. Back in October, Bob stumbled on Hungry Blues posts from July about Ray Charles and the 1963 concert he played in Birmingham, organized by my father, as a benefit to send Birmingham residents to the March on Washington. In the comments to one post, Bob wrote:

ben, I was a friend of your wondeful father. your mom would rebember me and my wife elaine. please call me at home. after your dad moved up to albany with the family we stayed in touch and eventually lost contact. I was on line doing some research on the liberal party and i came upon hungry blues. please call me any time. I would love to talk to you. Bob Adamenko-[phone # deleted for commentor's privacy] ps. I have the negatives of that show in birminham (emphasis added)

I called Bob immediately, of course, and we had a great, wide ranging conversation—Birmingham, Ray Charles, Nina Simone, Liberal Party, CORE, James Farmer, the Lower East Side . . .

Bob had been in charge of security for the concert and had taken pictures. Bob was emphatic that I should have the negatives. "If anyone should have them, you should. They belong to you . . ."

Until last week, that was the last I'd heard from Bob. But then there he was on my voicemail, saying he'd been in the hospital again but he is doing better now and he needs my address so he can send my the pictures. I called Bob as soon as I got home from class. I couldn't catch everything he told me about the negatives because my son Aaron (who is now two, by the way) was resisting bed time, and exuberantly showing off his command of two word phrases and multi-syllabic words as he climbed into his high chair to join me and Ruth in our ritual, post-yoga class take out.
            ***         ***         ***
Last Friday (4/15), I received some interesting mail: 1 oversized, padded envelope, from Jeff Prugh; 1 9 x 12 manilla envelop, from Bob Adamenko; 1 flat, cardboard mailer, 6 x 8 1/2, from Jonathan David Jackson.

Jeff sent me a copy of Alveda King's book and a photocopy of the Marin Independent Journal article (not archived on the paper's website). Bob sent me several contact sheets from the Birmingham negatives, a contact sheet of negatives of scenes from Washington, DC in 1963, the day before the March on Washington, two large prints, and a letter of recommendation that my dad wrote for him in 1976, while Dad was Secretary to the New York State Tax Commission. Jonathan sent me his new chapbook of poems (also see this post).

I spoke with Bob on Saturday, to tell him his envelope arrived. He told me he's sending the negatives next.

One of the prints from Bob was a press photo (at right) from John Lindsay's first appearance after he won the New York City Mayor's race in 1965. Lindsay was a Liberal Republican, with a capital "L" and a capital "R." That is, he ran in 1965 on a joint Liberal/GOP ticket. In 1965, my father was Assistant to Executive Director and Legislative Representative for the Liberal Party of New York, and he was one of the driving forces behind Lindsay's mayoral campaign. In this victory photo, you can see the Liberal Party banner overhead. In front, from left to right, it's Robert Adamenko, Paul Greenberg, and John Lindsay.

I'm not at all certain, but I think that might be my mother, very partially visible behind Bob's left shoulder, standing next to Dad.

Update 7/9/05: Jonathan David Jackson's website is down; links to it removed for now.

New Poetry Chapbook: We All Sell The Shadow, by Jonathan David Jackson

My dear and talented friend Jonathan has just published a chapbook of his poems.

Jonathan has a website where you find an announcement of the chapbook, two sample poems, and other related items.

[Update 7/9/05: Jonathan David Jackson's website is down; links to it removed for now.]

Jonathan and I attended the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars together eleven years ago. If he were still the same writer he was then, I could be nothing less than effusive about a chapbook of his work. But the two poems on his website suggest a marvelous expansion in his range, with all the meanings that can imply: range of reference, range of voice, range of mind . . . Now a big range could mean expansiveness with no center. But the two poems on Jonathan's site are to my way of thinking entirely within the range of the voices and minds of deeply realized and starkly individual dramatis personae. With Jonathan's permission, I leave you with one of the poems right here:

Directions to Burn



A child, especially
should not think of death or anything South
of chins and collarbones—only books and music, the kind
with strings. Questions should be answered. Fantasies unchecked.
You’re like a child. What do you know? Why would you possibly want
to go to a place that everyone condemns? But everyone wants everything—
even rich children are gigantic, blazing yet unburned. It’s the 80s.
How can you walk uncrushed among giants? You must go

where no one thinks to look. You have learned
how to do this at the free public library early in the evening,
raising your small voice to the gray attendant, Can you show me
the picture books about pharaohs? …the kings you have only seen
airbrushed in Ebony Magazines. Strange that the curled
old woman at the desk should not part her hair
to answer. So on your own you pull out
drawers brimming with yellowing
cards and squiggles. Everything
under Civilization

is on the second floor; then hot up the elevator,
where the biggest book smells sharp of glue and flipping
through you see him, the mummy prince doubled up to fit
in his shining sarcophagus, knees to chin, hands crossed over breasts,
robes swallowing him with snake-trellis and ivory clips. Directions
were never a problem in old Egypt. Priests planted anemone
by a sick woman’s house; kept whole petrified clans
in tombs of white origanum; cleaned everything
with scarabs; drew crisscrossing translucent
chalcedony, right to left, left to right, up, down,
inside, outside…soon you are asleep, wet
forehead between glossy pages

then the closing buzzer sounds. Face creased,
fingers numb, you hit the streets…You are not dreaming.
This is the nation’s capitol. Stuffed in corners around the library’s entrance
stand winter coats and rusty shopping carts—people so small you only see them
in the evening when the suits have left downtown.
It is at least a one-minute stroll to the bus stop through
the girlie shops, signs teasing, and on quarter
reel movie row, twelve glimmering
palaces say, girls girls girls—

Right now bulldozers clear
the area like there’s been a plague.
But years ago if you had to handle business
you took yourself there. The first time I went on a dare—100 bucks
in three hours. 15 years old. Boom box says, more, more, more—
you’ll remember all the songs when no one sings them anymore.
Boss men wait in Buicks in alleys for their girls. It’s the 80s.
It’s capital. Even shemale free agents, make 30, 40—
hell, I can pull 60 in two hours. Watch out
for the politicians on the late dinner hour.
I can turn a congressman
in his Town Car in five
and be back on
the block

in time to meet
a creep who has the nerve to say, Come on & go with me
‘round the corner. You know the way.

Like that, m’ blade’s out, shining this close
to his pink eye. Let me introduce myself, I tell him,
nails along his arms.

I know what it takes—5 foot 6
but I’ll bring your head to your knees.
Now burn these directions.
You got what
you need.

In The Mood of Elegy

the spin of the earth impaled a silhouette of the sun on the steeple
and I gotta hear the same sermon all of the time now from you people
why are staring into outer space crying
(Elliott Smith)

My friend Lisa died in her late 30s the day before yesterday, suddenly, of a brain aneurism. My friend Larry's mother died this morning of cancer, in old age. Lisa was ill with rheumatoid arthritis since her 20s, but no one expected this.

I was practicing yoga tonight. My practice has been very steady for a couple of years now, usually without more than a couple of days off in any given week. Because of travel and other circumstances, tonight's practice was the first time in seven days.

In a simple kneeling pose (adomukha virasana) I curled my toes under to push up and raise my tailbone vertically and settle back into downward facing dog (adomukha svanasana). Before there was any verticle movement at all, just in the simple act of bringing the pads of my feet into contact with the floor, I felt a wave of emotion, as if this somewhat more precise than usual repetition of a ritualized physical action was affirming something vast and elemental.

When people we love die, we need to affirm the good we mean to strive for. We feel guilty for getting diverted, for losing sight of our right intentions.

In 1995 my father had surgery to remove his bladder. Recovery from a resulting infection laid him low. He became depressed and didn't want to eat much of anything. He was extremely withdrawn. It was hard for anyone to reach him. I needed some way to make him know I understood him. One morning, I came into his sick room and read from Walt Whitman:

It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw its patches down upon me also,
The best I had done seem'd to me blank and suspicious,
My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?
Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil,
I am he who knew what it was to be evil,
I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,
Blabb'd, blush'd, resented, lied, stole, grudg'd,
Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,
Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant,
The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me.
The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,

Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting,
Was one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest,
Was call'd by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me approaching or passing,
Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh against me as I sat,
Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet never told them a word,
Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping,
Play'd the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,
The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,
Or as small as we like, or both great and small.

The lines, if you don't already know, are from Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, a poem about the passage from life to death. When I finished reading these lines I told my father that after I drive back to Boston I am going to call him every day at 8:00 a.m. You need to have things that you anticipate, that you expect to happen at a certain time. I took his lack of refusal to mean that he agreed.

The transience of the people and water and animals and industry that Walt Whitman sees signal his own death and assure him that beyond death he will know us and we will know him:

I too many and many a time cross'd the river of old,
Watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls, saw them high in the air
      floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,
Saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies and left
      the rest in strong shadow,
Saw the slow-wheeling circles and the gradual edging toward the south,
Saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water,
Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,
Look'd at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of my head in the sunlit water,
Look'd on the haze on the hills southward and south-westward,
Look'd on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged with violet,
Look'd toward the lower bay to notice the vessels arriving,
Saw their approach, saw aboard those that were near me,
Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops, saw the ships at anchor,
The sailors at work in the rigging or out astride the spars,
The round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, the slender serpentine pennants,
The large and small steamers in motion, the pilots in their pilothouses,
The white wake left by the passage, the quick tremulous whirl of the wheels,
The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sunset,
The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the frolic-some crests and glistening,
The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray walls of the granite storehouses by the docks,
On the river the shadowy group, the big steam-tug closely flank'd
      on each side by the barges, the hay-boat, the belated
      lighter,
On the neighboring shore the fires from the foundry chimneys
      burning high and glaringly into the night,
Casting their flicker of black contrasted with wild red and yellow
      light over the tops of houses, and down into the clefts of
      streets.

My father's depression broke. He started to eat more. Or rather, his doctor prescribed Ensure, he regained some strength, and his depression broke. He lived about two more years. I wish I could say he was graceful and dignified, but he wasn't really. He did the best that he knew how.

My friend Lisa and my friend Larry's mother, each with different challenges, were marvelously graceful. They knew what they were holding onto and wouldn't let it elude them. My father seized hold of it, rode it fiercely until it shook him free. He watched it drift away.

I finished my yoga practice, as always, with savasana, the corpse pose, letting go of effort, relaxation after exertion, the body's memory of itself. Lying still, feeling the pressure of my body against the floor, another wave of emotion:

Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!
Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg'd waves!
Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splendor me, or the
      men and women generations after me!
Cross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers!
Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta! stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn!
Throb, baffled and curious brain! throw out questions and answers!
Suspend here and everywhere, eternal float of solution!
Gaze, loving and thirsting eyes, in the house or street or public assembly!
Sound out, voices of young men! loudly and musically call me by my nighest name!
Live, old life! play the part that looks back on the actor or actress!
Play the old role, the role that is great or small according as one makes it!
Consider, you who peruse me, whether I may not in unknown ways be looking upon you;
Be firm, rail over the river, to support those who lean idly, yet haste with the hasting current;
Fly on, sea-birds! fly sideways, or wheel in large circles high in the air;
Receive the summer sky, you water, and faithfully hold it till all
      downcast eyes have time to take it from you!
Diverge, fine spokes of light, from the shape of my head, or any one's head, in the sunlit water!
Come on, ships from the lower bay! pass up or down, white-sail'd schooners, sloops, lighters!
Flaunt away, flags of all nations! be duly lower'd at sunset!
Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys! cast black shadows at
      nightfall! cast red and yellow light over the tops of the houses!

Appearances, now or henceforth, indicate what you are,
You necessary film, continue to envelop the soul,
About my body for me, and your body for you, be hung our divinest aromas,
Thrive, cities-bring your freight, bring your shows, ample and sufficient rivers,
Expand, being than which none else is perhaps more spiritual,
Keep your places, objects than which none else is more lasting.

You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers,
We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward,
Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us,
We use you, and do not cast you aside-we plant you permanently within us,
We fathom you not- we love you- there is perfection in you also,
You furnish your parts toward eternity,
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.