I posted a cartoon last Monday, inspired by news reports about proposed warning labels on alcohol, so I didn’t really have to post one this week, but I thought the day demanded it. Over the weekend I drew the earth shaking, an action that was hard to depict on paper (I put lines suggestion vibrations on the four sides of the globe). Afraid that no one would get it, I drew my version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
A story in yesterday’s New York Times told of how New Hope, PA – on the banks of the Delaware River – was becoming popular with Hollywood celebrities and wealthy New Yorkers. Living upriver in Phillipsburg, NJ, I knew the town as a kid and then, working as a feature writer at the Trenton Times, I drove through it a lot as a young man. In fact, I was house-sitting for a colleague in New Hope when Hania arrived for the first time from Poland. So I probably have the town to thank for helping to ignite our romance. (It was a more charming introduction to America than Trenton would have been.)
New Hope used to attract writers and theater people, thanks in part to its playhouse. S.J. Perelman bought a farm not far away where, he wrote, he raised turkeys, “some of which I exhibit on Broadway.” But the surrounding towns, especially on the New Jersey side, remained unchanged. Now, apparently, even they are being infused with spillover glitz. An article in the weekend Wall Street Journal was about a new mixologist in Stockton.
I understand while lamenting the region’s new popularity. I was never attracted to the Hudson River Valley because the Hudson, like the city it flows into, is too big and impersonal. The Delaware is stitched with narrow, erector set bridges – some of which I worked on in college – and in summer it’s dotted with innertubers. As I write in my memoir, the landscapes are not as dramatic as in many parts of the country, and the towns are not as picturesque as those in Europe, “but there’s a quiet, unportentous beauty to the place that suited my temperament, no doubt because it had helped shape it.”
The weepy John Lennon tune is pulled out for countless ceremonies, most recently Jimmy Carter’s funeral. Apparently, the former president requested the anti-religious anthem (“Imagine there’s no countries … And no religion too”), presumably because he liked the later image of “all the people/livin’ life in peace.” But it seemed an odd choice (“Imagine there’s no heaven,” it famously begins) for a man who taught Sunday school and who believed he was headed toward his celestial reward.
But it was not the most egregious use of the song. That came at last summer’s Olympic Games in Paris, when it was played following the boat parade of athletes enthusiastically waving their national flags.
For Christmas I received from our French neighbors a two-CD set of songs by Jeanne Moreau. I said that I didn’t know she was a singer and they assured me she was. And then I remembered one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite films, François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. Jim, the tall, lanky Frenchman, picks up his guitar and plays a catchy song about a femme fatale that Moreau sings. You immediately understand why he and Jules, who is sitting in a nearby chair, have both fallen in love with her.
The tune has stayed with me all these decades, as have some of the words – “Elle est retombee dans mes bras” – which I sometimes sing as I head off on my bike rides. (There is a memorable scene of Moreau riding a bicycle.) But I never knew the title. Scanning the list of songs on the back of the collection, I found nothing with the words “dans mes bras.”
The other day I opened the box and played the first CD. And immediately I recognized the tune, and then the words, of the first song, the title of which was Le Tourbillon (The Whirlwind). I had been gifted a memory from my youth.
On my New Year’s Day bike ride I saw a few people wearing tops with lettering on them: PINK. POLO. LIMITED. I miss the days when people wore the names of colleges and universities on their chests: DUKE. MARSHALL LAFAYETTE. Then you had an opportunity for conversation: “What year did you graduate?” “My niece went to Lafayette.” You don’t go up to people and say, “I have a shirt from Ralph Lauren.”
Happily, things change during the college bowl season, when fans travel proudly in their school colors. I’m looking forward, in the coming days, to seeing PENN STATE jerseys out on Las Olas. My uncle taught hospitality management there.
Everyone writes about the evils of social media, and yet this morning I read a post from a woman who wrote that every Christmas Eve morning her mother would light a bayberry candle on the kitchen table and let it burn all day until it extinguished itself. (This was supposed to bring good fortune in the coming year.) And I was reminded, for the first time in years, that my mother did the same thing.