Let Them Come To Junior Gorg.

Six years ago ...


Truman


OPENING ACT I


I don't know whether you fellows ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.


END OF ACT I                                 atomic explosion


Ben, I haven't stopped writing poetry, thanks for asking!


ACT I (April 13 - August 6, 1945)


We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.


Carl Sagan, Cosmos, "The Backbone of Night" chapter VII


And up to today ...


The selection you just read is from one of two journals and one blog I was keeping from April through September 2011. For my local readers, you may recognize this was the year Minot got flooded and some of my writing does reflect that. (I really ought to talk to anyone collecting an anthology of local things produced at that time, I think it would be interesting.) I think I know which Ben asked me that day if I was still writing poetry, and the Truman reference comes from a planned series of plays I'd like to write based on the lives and accomplishments and the world at large, for good and bad, of the Presidents of the United States the second half of the twentieth century along the line of William Shakespeare's history plays. Paralleling his own series of ten (but I will likely not have the Presidents or anyone else speak in iambic pentameter; it always seemed surreal to me, like most musical do with people suddenly breaking out in song) plays you're looking at this lineup from Shakespeare

King John, Richard II, Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; Henry V,
Henry VI, Part 1; Henry VI, Part 2; Henry VI, Part 3; Richard III, Henry VIII


and this lineup from me.


Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon,
Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton


I get to be ambitious too. Right now I'm ambitious to find a better place and employment than I have right now. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't like where I work now, but it DOES close at the end of the month and naturally I'd like to take a step up (or several steps up) to be somewhere that makes for more opportunities. With a small business like I currently work for, there just aren't that many. And at this point some well-meaning people and some not will interject that "hey, you ought to start and/or own your own business and take that on full time"! That's great, and I am taking steps, small steps, in that direction. In the meantime, I still have to eat and provide for my family with an income I can count on. And unless no one ever gets sick again and everyone heals of all outstanding medical conditions and people stop dying (the older you get the peskier that possibility is), one of the five or six jobs I've applied for with Trinity Health should be something I can hold for a while.


One of those I applied for just this morning, at my previous interviewers' suggestion.


Maybe I'm someone who moves around as much they suggested. I just think it's rude to shake someone's hand when you are seated! But I digress. This summer at Minot Public Library they're holding Summer Reading Book Bingo where you check off squares as you do the various activities within them. Three books I've read each count for a separate block -- don't worry, it's not all reading, so doing this should broaden my horizons too. Saturday I read TIME 1949: The Year In Review outside which is a reprint of many of TIME Magazine's articles from that year, with the profile of Winston Churchill's TIME's "Man of the Half-Century" on the front cover. It and other books I've read and am reading suggest a few details I'm missing in the rough outline I've now got for the President Plays.


Berlin will likely be a significant setting in several of them.


My non-fiction book, American Greats edited by Robert A. Wilson and Stanley Marcus (ISBN 9781891620485) give twenty-seven contributors at the turn of the century room to stretch and write about one of the things they personally find great about the country they live in. Some you'll recognize like Common Sense ("These are the times that try men's souls,") and M*A*S*H and maybe the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889 (from the movie Far and Away: "They've got so much land they're giving it away!") and Sesame Street (really? maybe?), and others like Keeneland, a racing track where all the famous horses practice before they make Triple Crown efforts, and Mohawk Steel Workers who built many of those high-rise buildings in the first half of the twentieth century ...

... well, you will learn a lot from this coffee table book. I know I did.


And this morning I read aloud Danny Abelson's If I Were King of the Universe (ISBN 0030710871). Illustrated by Lawrence DiFori, this is the fantasy of Junior Gorg, one of the three giant Gorgs -- well, giant compared to a Fraggle from the Muppet series Fraggle Rock, they might be human-sized for all I know! -- who fantasizes that he would love to be king instead of Pa Gorg his dad! And as he thinks it through he realizes as most of us fantasizing ultimately do that once you have everything you ever wanted there's nothing else to really strive for. So maybe not having all the works I want to do done before taking leave of one occupation for another is a good thing.


Wait. There's more.


David