Found It

Helena as a young mother. (de Kay Gilder)  I've been looking for this for a few years now. I knew it existed, but didn't know where. Eaton was one of the founding members of the Society of American Artists that she and some others organized when they got fed up with the Academy in NYC. Recently, I've been trading emails with a guy that's digging up graves back there. (Not literally.) He's found her father's and her brother's. And knows about the Oyster Bay house where she and her mother and siblings lived with Helena's uncle before they went off to Dresden. Another guy found my Helena site and said he grew up near Great Barrington (where one of the bears is hanging out these days) and thought her descendants were fascinating people.

 

Helena's mother from about the same time. Neither picture is up on the Helena site, maybe its time for an update. 

Chapman University Choir

We went down for their autumn all choir thing. Good stuff, rousing and lively. I can hear the little bear's voice through it all. From the back of the program, that's Efrain Solis, whose singing will be famous some day.

He calls my wife Mama. I met him at the same time Allie did, at lunch, at Freshman orientation. They've become good friends.

Places to Walk at Night

Bourbon Street - 1973 - The black kids with their shoeshine kits "Mister, betcha a dollar I can tell you where you got those shoes." ("On the pavement right here.") The hotdog vendors and the guys in the blue suits soliciting money for their cult religion. Finding a kid that dropped out of our circle because my friends made fun of him working as a hawker for a drag show. Friztel's was where I hung out or Molly Malone's. There were 3:00 am jams at Molly's. Found a guy I had worked with in Bloomington down on the street here on vacation. He said he wondered what had become of me. Being propositioned by in the closet guys here on a business trip. Holding myself upright by the buildings trying to get back to my little place on Dalphine street before I passed out. Being surrounded by crowds and not talking to a soul for hours.

Polk Street - San Francisco 1978 - Some nights it was quiet and empty, other nights there were rallies and street festivals. This was before AIDS became a nightmare and there were a lot of guys out here and over on Castro. There was an all night Tibetan Buddhist Temple down off the end of the street in North Beach near City Lights Books. The priest was four feet tall and slightly round like Buddha. There was a guy as tall as me out in a wonderful ball gown with a beard down to his waist walking all by himself at 4:00 in the morning. The was an all used bookstore over by City Lights too. I never got propositioned here. But I didn't hang out in bars very much.

Bloomington Court House Square- 1970 - On my nights of from work, I'd start at the Gables Restaurant across the street from the IU Law School. (Where I worked.) I'd sit in there and write poetry and drink coffee until they would close and then I'd walk over to the Waffle House up north of here and sit there for a couple more hours and drink more coffee and then there was a all night truck stop over in the sleezy part of town that I'd retreat to for the few hours before the sun would come up. It was a real greasy spoon and the help all talked and acted like inbred hill people. Seems they were all missing a tooth here and there. The sun would come up and I would slosh (after about a gallon of coffee) back over to campus to sit outside under the trees and try to finish whatever it was that I was trying to write. Then I'd go home to my room in the boarding house and go to sleep.

Sometimes Its Great

About half way through "Sailor Song" by Mr. Kesey. Not really sure what it's about but it sprawls out like the author himself. The characters are all real, the prose is wonderful and it rolls on. Can't seem to leave him alone. Read "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" and "Sometimes A Great Notion" as a kid. Still think "Sometimes A Great Notion" is a masterpiece. One should read Tom Wolfe's book about Kesey & the Pranksters & the bus. While you are at it, you might as well read "The First Third" by Neil Cassady- who drove the bus and made love to Jack and Allen.

 

Caretakers Deluxe

We had one that came right after the twins were born. We realized that the money we would spend for day care for two equaled what we would pay for a nanny that could come to the house. Much better deal. There was a lady that lived by that called about the ad. My wife recognized her voice. We were aware of her because she screamed at the top of her lungs at her own daughter when she walked by out house. She lived nearby in a house that the kids came to know as "the yelling family"- this wasn't good. Blanca showed up and I knew she was the right one. That didn't stop me from appearing at the house at odd times to say I forgot some papers that I needed for work (just to check up on her). She was with us for 8- 9 years. My wife and I were afraid to take the twins out for a walk by ourselves because we figured they would wander in separate directions. We came home early one day to find her strolling calmly about the block with both in tow. If Blanca could do it, we could. Eventually, we trusted her to take them all over the city on buses and we'd pick them up in odd places. We helped her get her papers. She came to the new house with us. And it was painful to let her go when I decided to stay home with the kids I was barely seeing. The littlest bear cried at me one day saying she didn't want me, she wanted Blanca back. Blanca let her cheat at cards.
She has two of her own now and we see her occasionally. She says she doesn't know how we did it as parents. She's worn out. We thought she was better at it than us, but then she got to go home at the end of the day.

Sunday Afternoon

Ole Wayne and I went to a party jam in a guy's garage down in Long Beach yesterday. Played for 5 or 6 hours and most of 'em were great musicians who could just hear something and start playing. I need chords written down. Anyway, it was great fun. Ended the night singing one of my original songs to them and they didn't laugh too loudly. (They didn't laugh at all.) Woke up this morning wondering why I couldn't do this for a living. The average age, we figured out on the drive home, was about sixty. The two single women that played were hits of the party. We were also wondering why we have to drive to Long Beach? But I've not been able to find anything in West LA of a similar bent.
They didn't know this one:

The Dragon

In my living room. We had to sedate it. One of the bears was trying to move a Fabergé Egg out of harm's way and the dragon thought it was hers. It was heavy and difficult to squeeze out the front door. It was my anger. I knew I couldn't manifest my dragon at work, so I had to dispose of it in my dream. This is really what my anger feels like to me. One has to understand oneself. I painted a sleeping dragon with a smile on its face in the mural on my children's bedroom wall when they were first born. Later, we had to tape a piece of paper over it because one of the twins was scared of it. Interesting context now huh?
If you haven't, at some point you need to read psychology- not that textbook stuff they teach you in college, the real stuff: Freud, Jung, Otto Rank, Adler, Fritz Perls, Havelock Ellis, then Confucius & Plato & Socrates and Watts on Zen, throw in Nietzsche and Aristotle, a few poets maybe -Gary Snyder & Ezra Pound AND then hang out for a few years with the idiots that want to analysis every minute particle of being in a framework of one of those guys I just mentioned. Then you're ready to delve into Barthes and Langer and Empson. Avoid economic theory- that has nothing to do with anything. Words in particular are fun house mirrors. The symbolism of "The" is endless. If you then have the guts, you can begin to write. And maybe someday, you might understand yourself.