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There's a story behind almost anything. All you have to do is dig a little in order to find it. Here's a glimpse into the history of the Singer Sewing Machine factory in Elizabeth, New Jersey, which we passed on the container ship MV Monte Rosa our way to our berth.
SINGER PLANT CLOSING: A WAY OF LIFE ENDS
By WILLIAM E. GEIST, Special to the New York Times
Published: February 23, 1982
ELIZABETH, N.J., Feb. 19— The Singer Company is closing its mammoth plant here. Moving on to a marketing strategy of more costeffective foreign production and diversification in aerospace products, it is finished with this aging city now.
So intertwined have their lives become - this company and this city -during their 109 years together that many people here can only shake their heads and say, as Morris Finkel did, ''It just doesn't seem possible.''
In their heads echo the racket of the 10,000-worker assembly lines, the cheering on the tool department's softball teams, the big bands playing at dances in the company's hall on the shore of Newark Bay.
It has been more than a professional relationship, and the community now feels scorned. ''Working at the Singer plant,''''was a way of life,'' said Mr. Finkel, who was there for 44 years. ''It was the natural thing for a young man coming out of high school to do. Everyone in town seems to have worked there at some point.''
A machine operator and first-baseman, Mr. Finkel recalls that the company recruited top athletes during the 1930's, 40's and 50's from nearby high schools and other companies to work for it and play ball.
''Everyone in town went to those games,'' said Sophie Kobylinsky. Mrs. Kobylinsky also has fond recollections of company dances on Friday and Saturday nights during that period, to which women were not admitted without bringing cookies and cakes, with the company supplying soft drinks and beer.
''Singer's recreation hall was the center of social activity for the whole town,'' she said. ''My girlfriend and I didn't work at Singer, but we went to the dances. She met her future husband there.''
Harry James, Jimmy Dorsey and other top bands played at gala company affairs. Wedding receptions, bar mitzvah parties and other functions took place in the company hall.
Mayor Thomas Dunn recalls that thousands of people used to gather at the plant each year for a springtime demonstration by the company's fire department in which a house specially built for the occasion was burned to the ground.
The gargantuan red-brick plant was built here in 1873, during America's industrial revolution. The city of Elizabeth grew up around it, with neighborhoods representing the waves of immigrants who came to the plant from Ellis Island, a few miles away: German, Italian, Irish, Jewish, Polish, Lithuanian and others.
Mayor Dunn, whose father worked at the plant for 41 years, has childhood memories of earning nickels by ''rushing the growler,'' a job as common for a boy in Elizabeth as delivering newspapers was in other towns. He said German workers lowered covered beer pails, called ''growlers,'' out the windows of the factory on ropes to the boys, who would rush them over to Grampp's tavern to be filled.
Joseph DiBella recalls that the ''growlers'' he carried were heavily larded to hold down the head and allow room for more beer. Donald Wylie, who once edited a local newspaper, says a Catholic priest roamed the streets, knocking the pails from the children's hands.
People in the city have fond memories of the long relationship, but now they are bitter that the company is leaving them, particularly when Elizabeth is having unemployment and revenue problems.
''We're being done in,'' Mr. Wylie said, ''by outside influences - malls taking business and cheap labor in Japan and Taiwan taking jobs.''
Not that they are completely surprised; things had not been right between the city and the company since Singer began gradually moving its operations overseas 25 years ago. Closing Announced Feb. 11
The dances and the recreational activities came to a halt, and in the early 1970's the company deeded away the recreation hall to be used by local groups. The work force dwindled, then dropped off sharply in 1980 when the plant stopped making all but industrial sewing machines. Now, only about 950 people work at the plant. Still, the closing, announced Feb. 11, is traumatic.
Mr. DiBella, president of Local 461 of the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, said that the union would file a $15 million damage suit against Singer for not living up to its contractual agreement, made last year, to spend $2 million to make the plant more efficient so it could compete with the modern technology of the foreign producers, and also to seek defense contract work for the plant.
''They did neither,'' Mr. DiBella said. Representative Matthew J. Rinaldo has also charged that the company made no valid attempt to obtain defense contracts. 'Reduced Demand for Machines'
Singer officials contend that the company sought defense work but could find none. The company plans to spend the $2 million to modernize the plant before it is closed at the end of this year ''in order to live up to the contract,'' said a spokesman, Thomas Elliott.
He said that the plant was closing because of ''reduced demand for the industrial machines produced there,'' partly because of the recession.
''Singer officials told me that they'd never move their industrial sewing machine operation out of Elizabeth,'' Mayor Dunn said. ''Their word doesn't mean a thing. We reduced their taxes by $417,000 over four years when they gave us the impression that would keep them open, but they were just taking us for a ride.''
During the lunch hour at Shoban's, a shot-and-a-beer bar across First Street from the plant's main gate, a Singer supervisor wondered aloud whether the United States was not turning into a nation of two kinds of people: white-collar managers for multinational companies that produced their products overseas, and unemployed workers.
Later in the day, S. L. Jones summed up the prevailing mood of the rank-and-file workers, many of whom said they believed the company capitalized on cheap immigrant labor until the union negotiated the first contract in the 1940's, then began moving its operations overseas to capitalize on other ''oppressed'' workers.
''Now it seems like they just used us up,'' Mr. Jones said, ''and left us behind.''
www.nytimes.com/1982/02/23/nyregion/singer-plant-closing-...
Rowlf: “Hey, Fozzie. You know Thanksgiving is coming. Do you have anything to share with us?”
Fozzie: “For one thing, we dress up for Halloween, but turkeys dress up for Thanksgiving. And Thanksgiving and Halloween are both alike. They both have gobble-ins. And I see you’re holding what a turkey uses to drink his wine.”
Rowlf: “What’s that?”
Fozzie: “A goblet.”
Rowlf: “I wonder if the Swedish Chef is preparing any meals.”
Fozzie: “I heard a turkey finally told him the secret recipe for dressing. It was about thyme.”
Rowlf: “He’s planning on making bread the same way as the Pilgrims, too. He’s using May-flour.”
Fozzie: “Did you hear about the turkey that went into Information Technology? It was a technical fowl.”
Rowlf: “I know Animal is waiting for the turkey this Thanksgiving.”
Fozzie: “Why is that?”
Rowlf: “The turkey has the drumsticks.”
Fozzie: “How do you make a turkey float? You put it in a milkshake!”
Luke Skywalker: “Enjoy your Thanksgiving, Fozzie. May the forks be with you!”
Rowlf: “Do you know do you keep a turkey in suspense?”
Fozzie: “No. How do you keep a turkey in suspense?”
Rowlf: “I’ll tell you next week!”
For the anything will help show. I have a few more pieces of cardboard lying around this is what I have so far
Please feel free to comment with anything you like or dislike. Any and all criticism is more than welcome whether it be 'cool' or 'not good'
Now that each member has been shown off in their respective photos the final stage was to bring them together in a single image, and thus here is that image!
Now I'm expecting people to say 'what no Flash?No Green Lantern?' well the reality of the situation is I would probably add the flash if I had the minfigure but I'm not particularly fussed about getting the new bat-mobile set. I'm also extremely uninterested in forking out money just for a Green Lantern custom figure, nor do I have the pieces to do one myself as of this moment.
Who knows maybe Lego will do their own especially after having him appear in the Lego movie (please no spoilers seeing it soon).
Not to mention the fact that I sometimes find Superman's speed to almost remove the purpose of Flash, though I do like the character.
So here they are do feel free to leave comments and favourite it if you really want but honestly I'd rather get feedback. Good or bad, any feedback is welcome feedback.
To walk within the lines
Would make my life so boring
I want to know that I
Have been to the extreme
So knock me off my feet
Come on now give it to me
Anything to make me feel alive
Say Anything @ Warped Tour - July 19 2008
This image is copyright © 2008 Carrie Musgrave. All rights reserved. This photo may not be used under ANY circumstances without written consent. Please contact carrie@livebabylive.com for usage rights.
Funnily enough, as soon as the BP station at Goodman and Airways in Southaven decided to go all fancy and brick up their canopy support columns… the Shell across the street went and did the same! Here’s a photo of that work in action from Saturday afternoon (April 7th). In addition to the columns, you can see that this Shell has gotten a brick base for its roadside price sign, which has also been replaced (and now features the new Circle K logo). But the overall décor of the place remains unchanged, including the convenience store and canopy. We’ll see if any more changes come soon – to either station – but at this point, I’m pretty doubtful of anything happening on that front (that includes an Amoco rebrand). I’ve never been quite sure whether these two dueling Circle Ks are owned by different people or the same person… but either way, the stations always have struck me as competitive – normally in their pricing, but evidently also in their brickwork as well, haha!
Shell // 35 Goodman Road W, Southaven, MS 38671
Circle K // 35 Goodman Road W, Southaven, MS 38671
(c) 2018 Retail Retell
These places are public so these photos are too, but just as I tell where they came from, I'd appreciate if you'd say who :)
I couldnt find anything about the remains of this ship around there, or on the internet.
(See links). I wish we could have looked around this area more, but the town was about to have a parade on their only main road, & we were about to go over to a scheduled time at a nearby swamp tour.
Jean Lafitte, Louisiana is a small town in the heart of the Barataria Basin, one of the most prolific estuaries in America. The town was founded and named after the infamous pirate, Jean Lafitte. This coastal community is rich in history and tradition, it is about 30 minutes from the city of New Orleans. It hugs scenic Bayou Barataria and Highway 45, which leads deep into the Louisiana wetlands.
The Town of Jean Lafitte's hard-working residents are proud of their unique bayou culture that has endured for centuries.
Pirate’s Story Finds Home in Lafitte Museum
Jean Lafitte, LA. 021823.
Over the 2019 Easter weekend London Underground took a possession at Wimbledon in order to replace track and undertake drainage works in platform 4. This meant the up slow from Raynes Park to the London side of Wimbledon station also had to be placed under possession due to the proximity of the work site and as somewhere to stable engineers trains before entering the site. At the time I hadn't realised these engineers trains may involve London Underground battery locomotives due to their inability to operate on the national network under normal circumstances, but as this was part of a possession normal working didn't apply. Having seen some messages and pictures from Good Friday of multiple battery locos stabled on the mainline outside Wimbledon I realised I needed to head up there to see what was going on!
Making a remarkable (and rare) sight on the mainline, battery locos L22 and L27 are seen with a rake of underground general purpose wagons stabled at Wimbledon West Junction on the South Western Mainline as class 455s 5714 and 5851 head passed on the down slow with 2F25 11:10 London Waterloo to Guildford via Woking service on 21st April 2019. With thanks to Jason Cross.
*LpD* Optical dress <33333 =***
Hairs: Wasabi Pills
Tattoo: Lovely Mi <33
Hat: My Precious AgnesFinney <33
Shoos: Ladies Who Lunch
Socks: hmmm will put in later
Props: {What Next}
blogged: anchailinalainn.wordpress.com/
Look of the day lol i didnt do anything with the pics just shot them with windlight Nam's optimal skin and prim no filters just me lol.
Moon. Hair. // Fatal Horizon
CATWA HEAD Magy v4.5
CATWA EYES RIG Magy v3.2 Ghost Eyes pack by Madame Noir
CATWA HD Lips Magy v1.0
CATWA Tongue Piercing For Teeth B [Default]
EAR_ver-B(L) [MANDALA]STEKING_EARS_Season5
EAR_ver-A(R) [MANDALA]STEKING_EARS_Season5
RAWR! Bass Stud
RAWR! Treble Stud
RAWR! Heaven and Hell Face Chain (female fitting)
*PKC* Like A Boss Bento Face Set - Catwa Magy
BLAXIUM -Nera 2- Piercing MAGY
**RE** Spectre Necklace - Female
**RE** Queen of Hearts Rings - Legacy L
**RE** Queen of Hearts Rings - Legacy R
**RE** Elegance Couple Bracelet - Female
EarthStones Everlasting Love Bridal Set Bento - Platinum
EarthStones Dark Devotion Bridal Set - Black Diamond
**RE** LUX Ti Amo x2 Necklace RLV v3.0
[BODY] Legacy (f) (1.2.1)
[HANDS] Legacy (f) (1.1)
[+] Legacy (f) Fit Deformer (Feet) (1.1)
)O( CHARMED )O( VENUS NAILS - STILETTO - LEGACY
Phoebe nail applier from Charmed
CODE - 5 Real Spank Ass ( LEGACY ) V0.01
Blueberry - Stella - Flowy Tops - TMP Legacy
Blueberry - Stella - Flowy Skirt - TMP Legacy
{kokoia} :: Halle High :: Shoes :: for maitreya
Bom Layers
Izzie's - Armpit Hair black
Izzie's - Body Moles dark
Izzie's - Catwa - Veins (dark)
Izzie's - Catwa - Waterline Fix Lower white (tinted Black)
Izzie's - Catwa/LAQ/LOGO - Face Moles dark
Just Magnetized - Basic Hairbase - set 16 - tint 1
Shiny Stuffs Genus Cheeky Glow 1 75%
#ADORED - prizmo shadows - 02 [catwa/genus]
#ADORED - rowena shadow - 02 [catwa]
..:: INKer ::.. Cherokee Tattoo (Light)
[Mistica Thespian Artworks] Tattoo Daddy's Little Girl Shoulder
BOM .::WoW Skins::. Anna Toffee Legacy body
Als in the Picture
.:TT:. QUIANA PHOTO LADDER LI:5
RAE - Bellisseria Winchester Porch v1 (LOW LOD) 35 LI LI:35
[satus Inc] Pole Floor Lamp LI:1
evh Jamaica Swing LI:14
BALACLAVA!! Pelham Home Bar
35/52
Well, she's walkin through the clouds,
with a circus mind that's running wild.
Eh, this got sharpened, dammit.
Hey i couldnt think of anything i havnt been really worring about my contest lately my coputers so fuked up and i just didnt know what to do i am really sorry this sucks i hope joelle's not got
And the reason i wasnt worrying was Because.....
On thursday nigh i bielive my computer was hacked and had gotten so many viruses and i go on Safe Mode so it dosnt bother me cuz their not on here then i dont have Sound on my Cmomputer and Photoshop just completly wont work anymoe so i have to use Gimp now its alright but its confusing
"Anything for the culture".
I haven't noticed this kid for a while, thinking it as a statue and was shocked when i recognized that it was a boy, posing standstill in thrisur PULIKALI festival.
i made these for the little boy of a friend. fun and easy to make!
tinyhappy.typepad.com/tiny_happy/2015/05/anything-animals...
Sorry the pic is blurred but...phone camera & poor light. Was surprised yesterday by this amazing Ordinary Bicycle aka. Penny Farthing.making it's way along the Lower Peak Forest Canal.
It was a modern recreation and was lovely to look at up close. Originally the tiny rear wheel had a caliper brake that scratched the rear rim. The owner had replaced it with a 24 hole velomobile specific Sturmey Archer drum brake.
Is there anything more peaceful than sitting warm and dry inside a cafe with a cup of coffee and a book and a camera while watching the rain fall outside?
This was at Ralph's Pretty Good Cafe in Chatham.
We lost count of the concrete trucks after 12. This was the scene next door to us on Friday, our neighbours pouring the concrete for the slab of their new house.
A stark contrast to the peace of the mountain range in the distance.
117 pictures of 2017/117 finishing touches
SSC peace
Another long night of being strung out and alone.
Another night of hearing things then having messed up dreams.
Another day of rejection,
the people i love
seem to be giving up on me.
Apart from four Stilts and three Spoonbills, the only other species on the algae-infested Pauatahanui salt marsh were three or four Paradise Shelducks...
In the scene above, a female Shelduck trudges through the muck with her head down; she looked anything but happy with her surroundings, and who could blame her? The algae mat was thick and it was smelly...!
It's interesting to note that
** Paradise shelducks breed only in New Zealand;
** unusually for ducks, the female Paradise Shelduck is more eye-catching than the male; females have a pure white head and chestnut-coloured body, while males have a dark grey body and black head;
** moulting happens from December to February (which is what might be happening to the bird above);
** the average life expectancy is only 2.3 years (although some individuals live much longer, with the oldest recorded bird living 23 years!), and
** Australia has its own shelduck species, the Chestnut-breasted Shelduck.
** From - "https://www.doc.govt.nz/nature/native-animals/birds/birds-a-z/paradise-duck-putakitaki/"
Thanks so much for the very kind and encouraging comments beneath this photo...! Your support is always greatly appreciated...!
Northeastern Beach Bash
June 2, 2012
Northeastern University
Boston, MA
Like this photo? Support us and purchase a print here!
335/365
"I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish that He didn't trust me so much." - Mother Teresa
It seems that when I have one things finally under control another spins out of control.
Taken at the beginning of a rainstorm
Tremont
Great Smoky Mountains National Park
[147/365] Nothing and anything.
I thought I had nothing
Found out I had something
Something that could be anything
Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.
. . .
"You know that song 'If a body catch a body comin' through the rye'? I'd like -"
"It's 'If a body meet a body coming through the rye'!" old Phoebe said. "It's a poem. By Robert Burns."
"I know it's a poem by Robert Burns."...
Anyway, I keep picturing these little kids playing some game in this big field or rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean, except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."
—excerpts from J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye
✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯
"Somewhere along the line - in one damn incarnation or another, if you like - you not only had a hankering to be an actor or an actress but to be a good one. You're stuck with it now. You can't just walk out on the results of your own hankerings. Cause and effect, buddy, cause and effect. The only thing you can do now, the only religious thing you can do, is act. Act for God, if you want to - be God's actress, if you want to. What could be prettier? You can at least try to, if you want to - there's nothing wrong in trying." There was a slight pause. "You'd better get busy, though, buddy. The goddam sands run out on you every time you turn around."
—excerpt from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey
✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯
John Keats
John Keats
John
Please put your scarf on.
Do I go on about my brother's poetry too much? Am I being garrulous? Yes. Yes. I go on about my brother's poetry too much. I'm being garrulous. And I care. But my reasons against leaving off multiply like rabbits as I go along. Furthermore, though I am, as I've already conspicuously posted, a happy writer, I'll take my oath I'm not now and never have been a merry one; I've mercifully been allowed the usual professional quota of unmerry thoughts. For example, it hasn't just this moment struck me that once I get around to recounting what I know of Seymour himself, I can't expect to leave myself either the space or the required pulse rate or, in a broad but true sense, the inclination to mention his poetry again. At this very instant, alarmingly, while I clutch my own wrist and lecture myself on garrulousness, I may be losing the chance of a lifetime - my last chance, I think, really - to make one final, hoarse, objectionable, sweeping public pronouncement on my brother's rank as an American poet. I mustn't let it slip. Here it is: When I look back, listen back, over the half-dozen or slightly more original poets we've had in America, as well as the numerous talented eccentric poets and - in modern times, especially - the many gifted style deviates, I feel something close to a conviction that we have had only three or four very nearly nonexpendable poets, and I think Seymour will eventually stand with those few. Not overnight, verständlich. Zut, what would would you? It's my guess, my perhaps flagrantly over-considered guess, that the first few waves of reviewers will obliquely condemn his verses by calling them Interesting or Very Interesting, with a tacit or just plain badly articulated declaration, still more damning, that they are rather small, sub-acoustical things that have failed to arrive on the contemporary Western scene with their own built-in transatlantic podium, complete with lectern, drinking glass, and pitcher of iced sea water. Yet a real artist, I've noticed, will survive anything. (Even praise, I happily suspect.) And I'm reminded, too, that once when we were boys, Seymour waked me from a sound sleep, much excited, yellow pajamas flashing in the dark. He had what my brother Walt used to call his Eureka Look, and he wanted to tell me that he thought he finally knew why Christ said to call no man Fool. (It was a problem that had been baffling him all week, because it sounded to him like a piece of advice, I believe, more typical of Emily Post than of someone busily about his Father's Business.) Christ had said it, Seymour thought I'd want to know, because there are no fools. Dopes, yes - fools, no. It seemed to him well worth waking me up for, but if I admit that it was (and I do, without reservations), I'll have to concede that if you give even poetry critics enough time, they'll prove themselves unfoolish. To be truthful, it's a thought that comes hard to me, and I'm grateful to be able to push on to something else. I've reached, at long last, the real head of this compulsive and, I'm afraid, occasionally somewhat pustulous disquisition on my brother's poetry. I've seen it coming from the very beginning. I would to God the reader had something terrible to tell me first. (Oh, you out there - with your enviable golden silence.)
I have a recurrent, and, in 1959, almost chronic, premonition that when Seymour's poems have been widely and rather officially acknowledged as First Class (stacked up in college bookstores, assigned in Contemporary Poetry courses), matriculating young men and women will strike out, in singlets and twosomes, notebooks at the ready, for my somewhat creaking front door. (It's regrettable that this matter has to come up at all, but it's surely too late to pretend to an ingenuousness, to say nothing of a grace, I don't have, and I must reveal that my reputedly heartshaped prose has knighted me one of the best-loved sciolists in print since Ferris L. Monahan, and a good many young English Department people already know where I live, hole up; I have their tire tracks in my rose beds to prove it.) By and large, I'd say without a shred of hesitation, there are three kinds of students who have both the desire and the temerity to look as squarely as possible into any sort of literary horse's mouth. The first kind is the young man or woman who loves and respects to distraction any fairly responsible sort of literature and who, if he or she can't see Shelley plain, will make do with seeking out manufacturers of inferior but estimable products. I know these boys and girls well, or think I do. They're naive, they're alive, they're enthusiastic, they're usually less than right, and they're the hope always, I think, of blase or vested-interested literary society the world over. (By some good fortune I can't believe I've deserved, I've had one of these ebullient, cocksure, irritating, instructive, often charming girls or boys in every second or third class I've taught in the past twelve years.) The second kind of young person who actually rings doorbells in the pursuit of literary data suffers, somewhat proudly, from a case of academicitis, contracted from any one of half a dozen Modern English professors or graduate instructors to whom he's been exposed since his freshman year. Not seldom, if he himself is already teaching or is about to start teaching, the disease is so far along that one doubts whether it could be arrested, even if someone were fully equipped to try. Only last year, for example, a young man stopped by to see me about a piece I'd written, several years back, that had a good deal to do with Sherwood Anderson. He came at a time when I was cutting part of my winter's supply of firewood with a gasoline-operated chain saw - an instrument that after eight years of repeated use I'm still terrified of. It was the height of the spring thaw, a beautiful sunny day, and I was feeling, frankly, just a trifle Thoreauish (a real treat for me, because after thirteen years of country living I'm still a man who gauges bucolic distances by New York City blocks). In short, it looked like a promising, if literary, afternoon, and I recall that I had high hopes of getting the young man, a la Tom Sawyer and his bucket of whitewash, to have a go at my chain saw. He appeared healthy, not to say strapping. His deceiving looks, however, very nearly cost me my left foot, for between spurts and buzzes of my saw, just as I finished delivering a short and to me rather enjoyable eulogy on Sherwood Anderson's gentle and effective style, the young man asked me - after a thoughtful, a cruelly promising pause - if I thought there was an endemic American Zeitgeist. (Poor young man. Even if he takes exceptionally good care of himself, he can't at the outside have more than fifty years of successful campus activity ahead of him.) The third kind of person who will be a fairly constant visitor around here, I believe, once Seymour's poems have been quite thoroughly unpacked and tagged, requires a paragraph to himself or herself.
It would be absurd to say that most young people's attraction to poetry is far exceeded by their attraction to those few or many details of a poet's life that may be defined here, loosely, operationally, as lurid. It's the sort of absurd notion, though, that I wouldn't mind taking out for a good academic run someday. I surely think, at any rate, that if I were to ask the sixty odd girls (or, that is, the sixty-odd girls) in my two Writing for Publication courses - most of them seniors, all of them English majors - to quote a line, any line from "Ozymandias," or even just to tell me roughly what the poem is about, it is doubtful whether ten of them could do either, but I'd bet my unrisen tulips that some fifty of them could tell me that Shelley was all for free love, and had one wife who wrote "Frankenstein" and another who drowned herself.* I'm neither shocked nor outraged at the idea, please mind. I don't think I'm even complaining. For if nobody's a fool, then neither am I, and I'm entitled to a non-fool's Sunday awareness that, whoever we are, no matter how like a blast furnace the heat from the candles on our latest birthday cake, and however presumably lofty the intellectual, moral, and spiritual heights we've all reached, our gusto for the lurid or partly lurid (which, of course, includes both low and superior gossip) is probably the last of our fleshy appetites to be sated or effectively curbed. (But, my God, why do I rant on? Why am I not going straight to the poet for an illustration? One of Seymour's hundred and eighty-four poems - a shocker on the first impact only; on the second, as heartening a paean to the living as I've read - is about a distinguished old ascetic on his deathbed, surrounded by chanting priests and disciples, who lies straining to hear what the washerwoman in the courtyard is saying about his neighbor's laundry. The old gentleman, Seymour makes it clear, is faintly wishing the priests would keep their voices down a bit.) I can see, though, that I'm having a little of the usual trouble entailed in trying to make a very convenient generalization stay still and docile long enough to support a wild specific premise. I don't relish being sensible about it, but I suppose I must. It seems to me indisputably true that a good many people, the wide world over, of varying ages, cultures, natural endowments, respond with a special impetus, a zing, even, in some cases, to artists and poets who as well as having a reputation for producing great or fine art have something garishly Wrong with them as persons: a spectacular flaw in character or citizenship, a construably romantic affliction or addiction - extreme self-centeredness, marital infidelity, stone-deafness, stone-blindness, a terrible thirst, a mortally bad cough, a soft spot for prostitutes, a partiality for grand-scale adultery or incest, a certified or uncertified weakness for opium or sodomy, and so on, God have mercy on the lonely bastards. If suicide isn't at the top of the list of compelling infirmities for creative men, the suicide poet or artist, one can't help noticing, has always been given a very considerable amount of avid attention, not seldom on sentimental grounds almost exclusively, as if he were (to put it much more horribly than I really want to) the floppy-eared runt of the litter. It's a thought, anyway, finally said, that I've lost sleep over many times, and possibly will again.
(How can I record what I've just recorded and still be happy? But I am. Unjolly, unmerry, to the marrow, but my afflatus seems to be punctureproof. Recollective of only one other person I've known in my life.)
—poem and excerpt from J.D. Salinger's Seymour An Introduction
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I was staring, as I remember, directly in front of me, at the back of the driver's neck, which was a relief map of boil scars, when suddenly my jump-seat mate addressed me: "I didn't get a chance to ask you inside. How's that darling mother of yours? Aren't you Dickie Briganza?"
My tongue, at the time of the question, was curled back exploratively as far as the soft palate. I disentangled it, swallowed, and turned to her. She was fifty, or thereabouts, fashionably and tastefully dressed. She was wearing a very heavy pancake makeup. I answered no - that I wasn't.
She narrowed her eyes a trifle at me and said I looked exactly like Celia Briganza's boy. Around the mouth. I tried to show by my expression that it was a mistake anybody could make. Then I went on staring at the back of the driver's neck. The car was silent. I glanced out of the window, for a change of scene.
"How do you like the Army?" Mrs. Silsburn asked. Abruptly, conversationally.
I had a brief coughing spell at that particular instant. When it was over, I turned to her with all available alacrity and said I'd made a lot of buddies. It was a little difficult for me to swivel in her direction, what with the encasement of adhesive tape around my diaphragm.
She nodded. "I think you're all just wonderful," she said, somewhat ambiguously. "Are you a friend of the bride's or the groom's?" she then asked, delicately getting down to brass tacks.
"Well, actually, I'm not exactly a friend of--"
"You'd better not say you're a friend of the groom," the Matron of Honor interrupted me, from the back of the car. "I'd like to get my hands on him for about two minutes. Just two minutes, that's all."
Mrs. Silsburn turned briefly - but completely - around to smile at the speaker. Then she faced front again. We made the round trip, in fact, almost in unison. Considering that Mrs. Silsburn had turned around for only an instant, the smile she had bestowed on the Matron of Honor was a kind of jump-seat masterpiece. It was vivid enough to express unlimited partisanship with all young people, all over the world, but most particularly with this spirited, outspoken local representative, to whom, perhaps, she had been little more than perfunctorily introduced, if at all.
"Bloodthirsty wench," said a chuckling male voice. And Mrs. Silsburn and I turned around again. It was the Matron of Honor's husband who had spoken up. He was seated directly behind me, at his wife's left. He was seated directly behind me, at his wife's left. He and I briefly exchanged that blank,uncomradely look which, possibly, in the crapulous year of 1942, only an officer and a private could exchange. A first lieutenant in the Signal Corps, he was wearing a very interesting Air Corps pilot's cap - a visored hat with the metal frame removed from inside the crown, which usually conferred on the wearer a certain, presumably desired, intrepid look. In his case, however, the cap didn't begin to fill the bill. It seemed to serve no other purpose than to make my own outsize, regulation headpiece feel rather like a clown's hat that someone had nervously picked out of the incinerator. His face was sallow and, essentially, daunted-looking. He was perspiring with an almost incredible profusion - on his forehead, on his upper lip, and even at the end of his nose - to the point where a salt tablet might have been in order. "I'm married to the bloodthirstiest wench in six counties," he said, addressing Mrs. Silsburn and giving another soft, public chuckle. In automatic deference to his rank, I very nearly chuckled right along with him - a short, inane, stranger's and draftee's chuckle that would clearly signify that I was with him and everyone else in the car, against no one.
"I mean it," the Matron of Honor said. "Just two minutes - that's all, brother. Oh, if I could just get my two little hands -"
"All right, now, take it easy, take it easy," her husband said, still with apparently inexhaustible resources of connubial good humor. "Just take it easy. You'll last longer."
Mrs. Silsburn faced around toward the back of the car again, and favored the Matron of Honor with an all but canonized smile. "Did anyone see any of his people at the wedding?" she inquired softly, with just a little emphasis - no more than perfectly genteel - on the personal pronoun.
The Matron of Honor's answer came with toxic volume: "No. They're all out on the West Coast or someplace. I just wish I had."
Her husband's chuckle sounded again. "What wouldja done if you had, honey?" he asked - and winked indiscriminately at me.
"Well, I don't know, but I'd've done something," said the Matron of Honor. The chuckle at her left expanded in volume. "Well, I would have!" she insisted. "I'd've said something to them. I mean. My gosh." She spoke with increasing aplomb, as though perceiving that, cued by her husband, the rest of us within earshot were finding something attractively forthright - spunky - about her sense of justice, however youthful or impractical it might be. "I don't know what I'd have said to them. I probably would have just blabbered something idiotic. But my gosh. Honestly! I just can't stand to see somebody get away with absolute murder. It makes my blood boil." She suspended animation just long enough to be bolstered by a look of simulated empathy from Mrs. Silsburn. Mrs. Silsburn and I were now turned completely, supersociably, around in our jump seats. "I mean it," the Matron of Honor said. "You can't just barge through life hurting people's feelings whenever you feel like it."
"I'm afraid I know very little about the young man," Mrs. Silsburn said, softly. "As a matter of fact, I haven't even met him. The first I'd heard that Muriel was even engaged -"
"Nobody's met him," the Matron of Honor said, rather explosively. "I haven't even met him. We had two rehearsals, and both times Muriel's poor father had to take his place, just because his crazy plane couldn't take off. he was supposed to get a hop here last Tuesday night in some crazy Army plane, but it was snowing or something crazy in Colorado, or Arizona, or one of those crazy places, and he didn't get in till one o'clock in the morning, last night. Then - at that insane hour - he calls Muriel on the phone from way out in Long Island or someplace and asks her to meet him in the lobby of some horrible hotel so they can talk." The Matron of Honor shuddered eloquently. "And you know Muriel. She's just darling enought o let anybody and his brother push her around. That's what gripes me. It's always those kind of people that get hurt in the end ... Anyway, so she gets dressed and gets in a cab and sits in some horrible lobby talking with him till quarter to five in the morning." The Matron of Honor released her grip on her gardenia bouquet long enough to raise two clenched fists above her lap. "Ooo, it makes me so mad!" she said.
"What hotel?" I asked the Matron of Honor. "Do you know?" I tried to make my voice sound casual, as though, possibly, my father might be in the hotel business and I took a certain understandable filial interest in where people stopped in New York. In reality, my question meant almost nothing. I was just thinking aloud, more or less. I'd been interested in the fact that my brother had asked his fiancee to meet him in a hotel lobby, rather than at his empty, available apartment. The morality of the invitation was by no means out of character, but it interested me, mildly, nonetheless.
"I don't know which hotel," the Matron of Honor said irritably. "Just some hotel." She stared at me. "Why?" she demanded. "Are you a friend of his?"
There was something distinctly intimidating about her stare. It seemed to come from a one-woman mob, separated only by time and chance from her knitting bag and a splendid view of the guillotine. I've been terrified of mobs, of any kind, all my life. "We were boys together," I answered, all but unintelligibly.
"Well, lucky you!"
"Now, now," said her husband.
"Well, I'm sorry," the Matron of Honor said to him, but addressing all of us. "But you haven't been in a room watching that poor kid cry her eyes out for a solid hour. It's not funny - and don't you forget it. I've heard about grooms getting cold feet, and all that. But you don't do it at the last minute. I mean you don't do it so that you'll embarrass a lot of perfectly nice people half to death and almost break a kid's spirit and everything! If he'd changed his mind, why didn't he write to her and at least break it off like a gentleman, for goodness' sake? Before all the damage was done."
"All right, take it easy, just take it easy," her husband said. His chuckle was still there, but it was sounding a trifle strained.
"Well, I mean it! Why couldn't he write to her and just tell her, like a man, and prevent all this tragedy and everything?" She looked at me, abruptly. "Do you have any idea where he is, by any chance?" she demanded, with metal in her voice. "If you have boyhood friends, you should have some -"
"I just got into New York about two hours ago," I said nervously. Not only the Matron of Honor but her husband and Mrs. Silsburn as well were now staring at me. "So far, I haven't even had a chance to get to a phone." At that point, as I remember, I had a coughing spell. It was genuine enough, but I must say I did very little to suppress it or shorten its duration.
"You had that cough looked at, soldier?" the Lieutenant asked me when I'd come out of it.
At that instant, I had another coughing spell - a perfectly genuine one, oddly enough. I was still turned a sort of half or quarter right in my jump seat, with my body averted just enough toward the front of the car to be able to cough with all due hygienic propriety.
—excerpt from J.D. Salinger's Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters
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