I scarcely had time to post this program last night before bed. My neighbor from upstairs was trying to print some pictures, which ended up taking the evening. This ends the Season, by the way. Fibber and Molly will return in September.

 

Guildersleeve will famously move away. What on earth did he do with his wife? That’s a question a lot of listeners asked at the time. In FM&M Throckmorton P. Guildersleeve, president and owner of Guildersleeve’s Girdles, had a nameless wife we never met but was often alluded to. But in the spin-off program, “The Great Guildersleeves,” the same character is a bachelor who takes on the care of his young niece and younger nephew, whilst courting the widowed neighbor lady. OK – it’s a continuity problem. Or it’s a fiendishly clever murder. Pick the explanation you prefer.

 

So, Fibber and Molly will be on hiatus at the White Lodge until September. I will try to find Jim and Marion Jordan’s guest appearances on the Lux program and on Suspense! in the meanwhile. I may also post some 1930’s FM&M programs. I have a few. Maybe I’ll also post some Jack Benny to satisfy our appetites for OTR.

 

Well, it seems like yesterday that I was bemoaning the absence of the color green in my world. I bought this camera in January and began taking numerous pictures, as you may recall. Many of them might as well have been black and white. They were all color pictures, though. It was the world that lacked color.

 

Elizabeth and I were on our way to a job in the West Hills when I decided to try to get this beaver pond in somewhat inadequate light. The West Hills are full of such swampy places. I know a place where I can get a better one, but it’s on a blind turn on a rather busy road nearby. Perhaps I’ll try it this morning while the sun is in the east and post it later.

 

Little roads with treacherous turns are abundant hereabouts. The natives tend to drive much too fast. I suppose if they grew up here and have lived here all their lives they don’t really see the world they inhabit. Behind the wheel they sometimes behave like drivers on Long Island where there is nothing worth looking at. I am often pulling over to the side to yield to speed racers. If I’m in a bad mood – (bad mood, moi?) – I’ll say, “Oh yes, you’ve got to get on with your pathetic little life. You’ll miss the first five minutes of Nude Runway Model Funniest Videos.” I mean, where on earth do they think they are going? I am so grateful that I am unimportant; that I don’t have any crucial meetings with heads of state to race to, nor women giving birth in the back seat…

 

Don’t get me started.

 

Well, as far as they’re concerned I must be a perennial Sunday driver. I try to see it from their point-of-view. Why? That’s a good question.

 

 

 

I know this fellow. His name is Paul Bley. He lives nearby. I just ordered one of his discs and I’m waiting on the mail. In the meantime…

 

We sat and had coffee once or twice. It was Paul who told me to put The Lord God Drops in on Rhubarb Valley on DVD. “A live performance is like smoke,” he said, “When it’s over it disappears.”

 

I didn’t talk about music with him. I just let him do the talking. If he wanted to tell a story about… oh I dunno – Jaco Pastorius going through customs with his amplifier, whatever – that’s fine.

 

“And what is this?” asked the officer.

 

“That’s my sound,” he answered.

 

If you like Jazz you can look him up. I don’t feel like doing biography this morning. He played with Charlie Parker, Mingus, lots of talent. His ex-wife Carla Bley is also someone you can google.

 

Say – as much as I enjoy the month of March I think it’s high time that it should end. It’s 40 bloody degrees this morning. I haven’t ordered my flower boxes yet for fear of frost.

 

I clocked the mileage to that house last night: 16 miles door to door along the back roads. I’ll have to check it out on the state road. I prefer the back roads. (You knew I would.) At some point before the Apocalypse my Dad’s going to arrive. I’ll take him down to look at it. He’s a good judge of house flesh.

 

One interesting thing: adjacent to the property is a train graveyard. The tracks bisect the land in back of the house. It’s been many years since a train ran regularly on that particular branch. I shall have to take some pictures next time I am down there. But it is some little distance from where my customers live. If I do buy it I shall have to raise my rates again to pay for gas.

 

That may be the case no matter where I land. I am living in an absurdly over-priced area. If I were to purchase property this village offers nothing of good value – well, nothing you might call a bargain anyway. People keep doing it, though. It’s extraordinary. More money than brains, as an old co-worker of mine used to say. Then they complain about the taxes. Well, buddy…

 

It’s a taxpayer’s right to complain. It’s a soldier’s right to complain. It’s my right to complain… about the weather.

 

Anyhooo, I haven’t told you about my garage sale finds this year. I got an RCA radio from – oh, I’d say – mid 60’s. It’s an early Solid State unit but it still has the big transformer tube, so it continues to play for a moment when you turn it off and it takes a minute to warm up when you turn it on. A nice sound, too. What else did I get? A few Morris chairs, another upholstered side chair ($3.00!), some fireplace tools. I got a Dremel sander/polisher/body massager still in its box. I can’t imagine using it for a relaxing massage. When you turn it on it makes a sound like a buzz bomb. I feel like I’m in the blitz – not very relaxing.

 

Fibber and Molly tonight.

 

  

What the heckiedoodles is happening to Project Playlist? Heckiedoodles? How old am I?

My songs are working and then not working. I had some cool Mahavishnu Orchestra going for a while there, but three out of four selections stopped working. Then I replaced it with Sonny Rollins and Shirley Bassey, and something else. Of course, now it’s gone completely because Suspense! is on.

 

I received an invitation to a “Baptism Bash.” Those are two words it would never have occurred to me to put together. It’s in Connecticut. Should I go?

 

Suspense!, introduced again by the narrator, “The Man in Black,” stars Peter Lorre. This 1943 episode is called “The Devil’s Saint.” I have to post this picture again. I’m so sorry. Oh, here he is – Uncle Stefan. What a magnificent voice!

 

 

It’s really too bad they’ve edited out the commercials. In ’43 the sponsor would have been Roma Wines. Who remembers Roma Wines? It was god-awful stuff. Suspense! will become a venue for Hollywood stars more and more. The War had a lot to do with that, but it was also a smart move because it boosted the program’s popularity.

 

This episode is particularly spooky-ooky.

 

Heckiedoodles.

 

Didn’t I say I was going to write something about downward mobility? Yes, I believe I did. I haven’t yet. I got side-tracked by houses and scenery. I’ll get to it – eventually.

 

I took a drive through the mountains yesterday and saw some things that made me weep with joy. It’s been a long time coming – a break from the sameness.

 

Looking at Black Lodge hill I understand why people worship mountains. There it is – every day, in every season, changing but also remaining the same. I begin to wonder: as I look at the hill is the hill looking back at me?

 

When I got back I looked at it, and I realized that I had just been somewhere beyond it, and that there were many other hills. Other people live within view of those other hills, and perhaps to them – to their way of thinking – the hill they are looking at is just like this hill I am looking at. But, to me, this is home. This is the center of the universe. Every other place is reached by stretching a long, elastic tether. The purpose of the day decides how long and how elastic. I decide.

 

Yes, it is possible to break away. I have done it. I came here from someplace else. And there it wasn’t a hill that watched me, it was the sea.

 

But when I get up in the morning I try to imagine that I am only visiting, and that this is someone else’s hill. I have a cup of black coffee in the morning dew, and listen to the new birds, and smell the new smells. We live in a context of time and space which we weave about us like a web made out of perception.

 

I suppose I need a vacation. What does it mean to vacate? It means “to leave.” It’s all about changing one’s perception, if only temporarily, leaving the limits of the web on that long, elastic tether. The whole idea is to make the sameness seem not so much the same.

 

Understanding the historical context in which we live is difficult. It requires imagination so it is rather rare to find somebody who understands exactly where he is. Most people seem to believe that history began the day they were born. Not surprisingly, such people really are pagans – or, in many cases. They really do worship mountains, nature, “mother earth,” or whatever nearby landmark, just as some of our primitive ancestors did.

 

Some, but not all.

 

There have always been people with imagination and people without any, or with a limited imagination, one that allows them to personify and even deify mountains but doesn’t give them the resources to see beyond the mountain.

 

Belief in a purely spiritual God is just as difficult for most people today as it was back in Abraham’s time when he was the oddball madman visionary who smashed the idols in his father’s temple and fled into the desert. Wherever could he go? In what place does he fit in? “No place,” comes the answer, or “Any Place” – in the desert, in permanent exile from the material world; “in the world, but not of the world,” as Sister Mary Tabernacle Door used to say. It is much easier to worship mountains – that much hasn’t changed.

 

But in his case, we are told, God had a plan to establish an entire race of people with imagination so that out of that race He could become a man. I was always taught that Genesis is as much about Jesus as the gospels are; it’s all the same story from beginning to end. It requires some imagination to understand that, and it’s interesting to me that many people think that what happens in imagination is somehow not “reality” when the truth is we have been given imaginations in large part to be able to perceive reality. It isn’t something that can be seen by the eyeballs alone. It’s not our eyes that do the seeing, it’s our minds.

 

“It’s a small world after all?” No, it’s really larger than we can imagine. The word we like to use is infinite. It defines a theoretical quantity that isn’t really a quantity at all because it can’t be measured. It is unbelievably large or unbelievably small. If you jump off a tall building and during your journey to the pavement you somehow manage to become infinite – either large or small – the molecules of the pavement will not collide with the molecules of your body and neither will be harmed. I wouldn’t suggest trying it, though. Taking a vacation is more sensible.

 

There was this one place in particular. I couldn’t take a picture of it because it was too closely connected to a residence and I have manners. The truth is I was afraid to knock on the door and ask for permission, although I’m sure they would not have been surprised. The trees which lined the road were much older than any tree that grows hereabouts. There was a structure of what appeared to be terracotta, as a structure in the desert might be. It looked strange and out of place in the Catskills. It was a ruin. The chimney is mostly all that remained. The top of it – or, the section that still had one - was covered in a tarp held down by tires and large rocks. It had a view of a field. Cairns of flat fieldstones were everywhere, and fences, and pasture. Beyond it there was a gigantic gorge. The road went into it, an entrance to another world, a gate to infinity.

 

If there is a place I belong perhaps that was it. And I drove right through it. I was there only briefly. We are anywhere only briefly.

 

People in the mountains wave to you as you go by. In the mountains you’re always impossibly far away from anywhere else.  

While I helped my friends move into their new house my answering machine received calls from both the realtor and the seller of that property I had been interested in. This morning I am asking myself if I am still interested in it, and awakening from a nightmare of whiteness which upset my stomach a bit.

 

Yes, the house is white. And, to make matters worse, the front elevation and one gable wall are covered in dingy plastic – that is, vinyl siding – in defiance of all that is wholesome and innocent, and good. I am trying to focus on its interior with all of its possibilities, the land around it, the lilacs and roses, that interesting sleeping porch, but I keep coming back to that horrific whiteness. I feel I am being enveloped by it.

 

I know, I know, there’s this stuff called paint which is available in many places – probably even someplace close by. I try to imagine gold, brown, red. I would like to alternate between two different hues of some reddish brownish color. It would be warmer I think. I would freeze to death in a house the color of dirty snow.

 

Kitchens must be a deep reddish yellow. I picture a tin ceiling layered in rich, shiny enamel the color of the dryers down at the local launderette, sort of orange. I would tear one from the wall and bring it to the paint store, and say, “Make this color. It doesn’t exist anywhere else in the universe.”

 

White ceilings make my skin crawl. Everywhere I go I see white ceilings. I avoid looking up.

 

Wallpaper is appearing before my mind’s eye, wallpaper and wood. I like wood. Wood is good.

 

I am comforting myself with the thought of several naked angels with skin the color of lovely dark potting soil embracing me, and stroking my hair, and saying, “There there.” Another time they might say “Fear not!” but this morning they are saying “There there.”

 

We are at the foot of the Cross. Christ is there. I look up at Him and I say, “Does it really matter?” The sky is red and black, and purple, and the color of thunderstorms in a sunset over the sea. Through a hole in the hungry clouds some stars appear, then lightning shocks the vision away. It is like being hit on the back of the head with a blunt object, and everything is white. Hell is white.

 

What does it all mean? Should I take it, should I paint it? What shall I say to the voices on my answering machine?

 

I spent Thursday evening in the emergency room with a little boy with a broken wrist, and yesterday I spent in a fog, lack of sleep. I drove home from Rhubarb Valley. I took a picture of cows in a field. I stood barefoot on the dusty road. I thought of escaping. I thought of never coming back. I thought of ignoring all the obligations I had taken on in my insanity, now that I am restored to my right mind, and the road ahead is endless, clear, and beautiful with sunshine and lack of destination.

 

I stopped to chat with an older couple outside the Rhubarb Valley Museum. I bought a book that had a picture of the Darkly house and the amazing Four Towers House. I flirted with a skinny girl with very long brown hair across the sales counter of the convenience store. She wore braces in her mouth and her chin was an amazing thing.

 

 

Coming back through Hinder Hollow I saw a house which was unpainted and weathered gray, gigantic Italianate, on top of a hill. That’s the color. That’s the place. Not down in some dark valley, but up in the hills, with its own cemetery. That girl will magically come to live with me, and we’ll be happy. I suppose I would learn her name at some point. It’s really not important. What’s important is to forget that horrible whiteness and get it out of my head.

 

 

 

Today I work. This afternoon when I return I must have something to say to these people. What will it be?