Something Unusual in a Past Ritual

 "Wear the old coat and buy the new book."

Austin Phelps

Rituals.

Everyone of a certain age and comportment remembers The Book of the Month Club. Not the watered down 2025 version. The coupons and deals BOTMC. Four books for a dollar (you mailed in a card with actual stickers you pasted on) with the agreement that you'd buy four more over the next year...or something.

That deal was sometimes problematic, as any working-class parent would know. So a new book was a treasure, a moment to savor. This was especially true when it was a long-awaited offering from a beloved author.

The book arrived in the BOTMC box. It would sit for a day, sometimes more. Then, the kids in bed, the dogs settled... Pour a glass of wine, struggle with the box and open the cover.

The book binding crackled. New hard covers had a certain fragrance, of glue and paper. The tactile sensation and unblemished perfection of turning pristine pages was prelude to the ideas impressed in black letters on each page. Reading was not just an intellectual journey but a sensory bouquet.

So I buy an actual book from time to time, as I did recently. Social media puts one in touch with individuals who share interests (in history, here) and exchange opinions about books they have read. One person said he'd finished a particularly gripping account of a WWII bomber pilot, Those Who Fall, and recommended it.

It was available, used, on Amazon. There were no sticker perforations with which to struggle, no waiting "4-6 weeks." An envelope arrived within ten days.

The rituals today are simpler. Our kids are grown, the dogs have their niches. I'm retired and so the only question left to answer is...tea, or a restorative? I take a seat in the recliner, extend the porch for my reading and writing buddy and open the package.

The book has felt other hands. It is, in fact, a former library book that retained not just the dust cover but the due date card that showed it was checked out in 1999, 2003 and 2012. Stamped on the title page was the identity of the previous owner:

Post library, Dugway Proving Ground, Dugway, Utah. Property US Army

 What a long, strange trip this book has taken into my home. One wonders - is it possible that the personal observations of a B-17 bomber pilot have fallen so out of favor that it was read three times in 13 years on an Army post? Still... The author does not write in the modern manner - "Write the first chapters until you get to the action. Then, delete everything except the action scenes." He begins calmly, almost laconically. Tent living, eating military meals, flying out of bases that are rudimentary airports, even for the times.

Years after the war, this man sat down and memorialized a time that, he writes, "Something unusual happened to me."

Please, sir. Tell me more. 

Softly

 "I heard he sang a good song. I heard he had a style."

Killing Me Softly With His Song

Noting the passing of singer Roberta Flack.

It was impossible to walk down the hallway of a college dormitory in the early 70s and not hear Roberta Flack's clean, sinuous voice. She'd released a number of singles, each wonderful in its own right. Then came the song that made her ubiquitous.

It's not just a great song, with an involved and very music-business back story. It captures a world that escaped many at the time, and continues to be lost in the 60s/70s continuum many people think they know. Somehow, this woman from North Carolina grasped the deeper meaning of this elegant tune, married it to a lush arrangement and brought it to life.

The song was about singer/songwriter Don McClean, of "American Pie" (and so much more) fame. A young woman named Lori went to see McLean at a concert and left spellbound, having written her thoughts on a napkin. She reported all of this to her music collaborators, with whom she wrote a song.

When Roberta Flack recorded it... What a beautiful, expressive way she had with the words, with the melody, with the meaning. She sings with a vibrant vulnerability, at once lamenting and at the same time marveling at the genius of her subject.

He sang as if he knew me, in all my dark despair. And then he looked right through me as if I wasn't there.

 During an era when men were going off to war, when America was still wrestling with questions the 60s did not answer, Roberta Flack took a song about another artist, and made it hers. She took an idea, that there is beauty in the simple act of singing about how a musician can touch someone so deeply, and made it ours.

She had a long and successful career, charting popular songs into the 90's. She was still performing into the Twenty-teens. She passed this week at eighty-eight, another of those timeless icons who cannot be as old as the numbers seem to suggest.

There was a time - it doesn't really seem that long ago - when a young woman sang a simple song in such a compelling way that it never ages. That's the gift of music. That was the gift of Roberta.

 

 

A Beach Chair, A Restorative and A Puzzlement

 "We are tied to the ocean. And, when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch - we are going back from whence we came." John F. Kennedy.

A real book.

Mostly now, I read a Kindle. Part of that reason is mercenary - all of my books are available in that medium and I should support it. Part of it is practical, that a hundred books on a Kindle is...the Kindle. Then, there is the "I'm in the mood for" moment when one can shop anywhere wifi is available.

But on the beach, the tactile appeal of real pages to turn draws me to bring a book on vacation to a beach resort in Mexico. And, so it begins.

We'd stopped at a new/used shop by our house the day before we left. Have you ever... I feel like Andy Rooney. Have you ever gone to a bookstore on just a general purchase mission and started blankly at the rows and rows of volumes? Even genre can be daunting. I glanced across the tomes until one caught my eye.

Mark Bowden. If you don't know him, he writes a good book. His most recognizable is Blackhawk Down, the story of an American military operation gone awry in Somalia in October 1993. It was turned into an excellent (if not entirely accurate) movie of the same name. I've seen him in person, doing a presentation at the University of Denver for his book about a battle during the Vietnam War. Smart, well spoken. Easy to read. That's it.

Well, about a third of the way through I began to question my judgment. It wasn't that the book is awful - in fact, it's well-written and informative. Bowden writes with an easy grace, descriptive without taking a microscope to the world he is trying to describe. He doesn't generally tell you what to think, or who the bad guys are. It's that, well, drones.

The book is a bit dated, copyright 2016. Bowden discusses the early evolution of both recon drones and those weaponized as particularized killers. Along the way he explores the legal underpinnings of their use, both on the battlefield and in places that are not technically (or otherwise) combat zones. And, you are thinking, this is a beach read? 

Right? I closed the book and set it aside.

My mind goes first to A More Perfect Union, with its strong and marginally legal drone applications. Did I handle the dilemmas posed by Bowden artfully, or clumsily? Does Bowden's legal assessment comport with mine?

It moves on to Amy 3, a work in progress as yet untitled. Am I contemporary in my thinking, up to date in the technology and current on the law?

And what, exactly, is the definition of sovereign?

I look out over the horizon. The deeper water is a dark blue. Closer to shore the water is turquoise. Palm fronds rustle overhead in the gentle breeze. By and by the young man working the beach bar will bring me another Tequila Sunrise to go with the chips, quac and pico I scored at the snack buffet. My mind drifts - it is 80 degrees, sunny and I'm with the love of my life at one of the best beaches in Mexico.

This is the definition of sovereign.