Dan Riley's Blog, page 16

Patricia

By the random luck of alphabetical order, I ended up sitting across from Pat Rodowik in freshman homeroom at Enfield High School…check that…in the old Enfield High School…the old, old Enfield High School. But, of course, this was way back in 1960 and schools come and go…as do friendships too often. Up to that point, I had reveled in a long series of what was preciously called back then puppy loves. My attraction to Pat was neither puppyish nor love-ish, although each of my evenings in those days consisted of homework in Ancient History, Latin, and English plus an added assignment for me to craft a clever note to charm my way into Patricia's heart. On occasionally bold Fridays I would work up the courage to ask her on a “date”, which amounted to me riding my bike far across town to her house to visit under the watchful eye of her mother. Because Pat and I were both serious Catholic kids we always seemed more intent on sustaining our respective purity than exploring the opposite sex. So whenever we were together high morals, good manners, and propriety prevailed…hormones and teen desire be damned…or darned, as we both most likely would've put it.   By sophomore year, a new homeroom arrangement and my confusion about how to continue navigating a pristine relationship with Pat sent us both on our separate ways. Sometime thereafter the Beatles arrived, and for years I mangled this line from Everybody’s Trying to be My Lover:"Went out last night, didn't stay late
Before home I had nineteen dates"To my ears it was always:
"Went out last night, didn't stay late
Brought her home, we had a nice clean date"And it seemed the perfect epitaph for my relationship with Pat Rodowik. After high school graduation, we didn’t see each other again until our class 10th reunion in 1974. I was with Lorna, my wife of six years then, and Pat was alone. The three of us talked at great length, and what was so striking about it was that even though Pat recounted some difficulties she had experienced since graduation, it was the most relaxed and open conversation we ever had. Nonetheless, our contact after that dried up again. Until more than a decade later and out of the blue I received a birthday card from Pat with a very thoughtful, engaging letter. So engaging it would commence an enduring, remarkable long-distance relationship that prevailed over time and distance. Due to scheduling conflicts, we missed reconnecting a number of times at various visits to the hometown. The 3,000 miles between my home in California and hers in New Jersey kept us physically apart as our once devout Catholicism had done. Yet the letters we exchanged forged a relationship unlike any other, built as it was solely on the written word. When my homeschooling book was published in 1994, Pat brought it into her book club. We wrote back and forth about our families and frailties, religion, literature…the past and the future. It was all pretty heady stuff for two people whose paper-thin relationship had begun because their last names began with the letter R.About 7 years ago, we became “friends” on Facebook, where Pat would occasionally chide me for my failure to fully appreciate Frank Sinatra or my wild wandering from our Catholic roots. But even with Facebook available and its persistent birthday reminders, Pat still sent me birthday greetings the old fashioned way…in a stamped envelope. About three years ago she included a small package with the card. It was all those notes I’d written to her back in homeroom more than 50 years ago. They were mostly filled with teenage banalities…sophomoric put-downs of our batty Latin teacher, couched compliments about Pat’s hair or clothes or looks, etc.…not a hint of the lofty exchanges they would eventually give rise to. But the emotional impact of her having saved them all that time elevated them for me to Shakespearean sonnet level.This past February ominously marked my first birthday during all this time that I did not hear from Pat…not in a card, not on Facebook. As is too often the case in such instances, my first impulse was to think that I had said something that offended her. This, of course, is the nature of Facebook where offenses grow like weeds and can smother the flower of even the most seasoned and affectionate of relationships. Then, yesterday, Mother’s Day, I learned on Facebook that Pat had lost a battle with illness and died on Friday, May 12. In one of her letters to me, she made this reference to a book by one of her favorite authors, Pat Conroy:

In Beach Music a priest says, "Our souls take comfort in each other." Writing to you and hearing from you does that for me.  

I hadn't spent a moment in Pat's physical presence since 1974, but upon hearing of her death I felt the presence of her soul as if it had appeared right before my skeptical eyes.

I was able to make this video commemorating Pat's passing by unauthorized raiding of her loving husband Tom Heller's Facebook photos (my apologies, Tom). I also made the radical choice of Perez Prado's Patricia for the soundtrack. I suspect Pat was not much into mambo and would've preferred music from Leonard Cohen, one of her favorites. But Patricia had been a big hit in 1958, and during the time I was mad about Patricia Rodowik my mother would frequently break into the song whenever she knew I was calling Pat or seeing her. So the song provides a quirky Latin link between two of the important women in my life who've died within the past 10 months. 

Pictures at an Exhibition

As a writer I take some exception to the notion that a picture is worth a thousand words. In the current atmosphere, words have been further devalued not just for any alleged inadequacy in conveying drama, tragedy, truth or beauty but also for being the main conveyance for lies. Even in a time when Photoshop allows the rankest amateur to drop himself into the middle of history with a snip and a click...
pictures still carry more credibility than words. In the end all the legal testimony, investigative reports, and paper trails in the world probably won’t have the impact on Donald Trump as a photo of Stormy Daniels spanking his bare bottom with a magazine might have or the actual video of him in that Russian hotel room ogling two hookers pee on each other. Blame it on our brains. We’re simply wired to be more impressed with pictures than words.Yet pictures can be very tricky things themselves, and it often takes at least a thousand words to put them in proper context. I was reminded of this recently when visiting teenaged grandchildren Benjamin and Avery, who labor under some parental scrutiny over their social device usage. Traversing my own social media with stealth during the visit, I came upon the picture at the top which I thought nicely addressed the concerns of Benjamin and Avery's parents, so I shared it. During the conversation that ensued, it was revealed that the picture was not the indictment of kids and their iPhones that one--especially an adult—might immediately assume.  As it turns out the kids in the photo are actually using an app supplied by the Rijksmuseum to enhance their study of such great art as the Rembrandt piece they’ve been wrongly accused of ignoring. The person who took the picture was merely a tourist who thought he had captured an image indicative of our times, and posted it on Facebook. This was back in 2014, but the photo still circulates under the original misconception. The photographer was under no journalistic obligation to get the story behind the photo…and as irony would have it the real story behind the photo is how easily and persistently since 2014 it has served as shorthand for what’s wrong with kids today and their devices.Here’s another photo that’s gone viral recently:
The White House released it to commemorate its celebration of military spouses. As many were quick to point out, however, how can that assembled group be at all representative of military families when 40% of our military is non-white. That question begged the inevitable comeback: Why does everything have to be about race? Which, in turn, begged the also inevitable question: How come every time the White House releases official photos they overwhelmingly feature white faces? In either case, it would be interesting to know how military families were chosen for this honor. By lottery? Party affiliation? Payments to Michael Cohen’s (ho-ho) Essential Consultants? Although in these days when it's safe to say that things don't always appear as they are, sometimes they do. 
Asking probing questions about photos with deep emotional meaning and intent is always problematical. When people are moved by a photo, they really don’t want to apply critical thinking to it…and are often offended by those who do. Two of the most powerful photos of all time, both Pulitzer Prize winners, became objects of controversy after their immediate emotional impact wore off.  It’s taken far more than a thousand words (and a couple of movies) to deal with all the controversies surrounding Joe Rosenthal’s shot of the flag raising on Iwo Jima.
And Kevin Carter’s chilling heartbreaker of a shot—a vulture standing wait over a starving Sudanese child--brought him considerable condemnation for seemingly putting his professionalism above his humanity. He was made to answer not just for himself but all photojournalists when asked what he did other than aim his camera at this unfolding horror.  While I’m on the subject of pictures, this is a good time to resolve some confusion I raised in a much earlier post, where I wrote:

Maureen O’ Sullivan as Jane in Tarzan the Ape Man...I still find myself freeze-framing their first swim together to see if she’s wearing anything.

Thanks to my renewed dependency on Turner Classic Movies, I caught its Tarzan marathon this week and got myself straightened out on two scores. The first is that the movie in question is Tarzan and His Mate…not Tarzan the Ape Man, where Tarzan and Jane first meet and their swim together is appropriately demure. Tarzan and His Mate, however, is considerably more racy, especially for 1934…so much so that it was condemned by the watchdogs of my childhood innocence, the Catholic Legion of Decency. Thanks to TCM I learned that although Maureen O’Sullivan herself did not appear nude in the film, Josephine McKim, her body double, did. The four-minute underwater sequence was filmed in three versions…Jane fully clothed, Jane topless, Jane naked. All three versions have been shown in various venues at various times. In other words, if you argued with someone that she was naked, you'd win or lose the argument based on what version was produced as evidence. As for me, I no longer have to drive myself crazy freeze-framing the scene because the photographic evidence is now clearly evident to my naked loving eye. 

Am-I-a-Cult-Member Self-Assessment

Let’s face it, there’s no good way to take the word “cult.”  You can take gangand put a cute bunch of kids in a movie and call it Spanky and Our Gang, or a baseball team and call it The Gashouse Gang, but you can’t do the same with cult…no Spanky and Our Cult no cults in baseball. You can take the word moband build a comedy around it, as in I Married the Mob…but I Married the Cult will never be a funny idea. And if you’re a celebrity, you can openly show up at awards shows with your “posse”, but never with your cult…unless you’re Tom Cruise and everyone’s already creeped out by you. Cult has no positive connotations. It means blind followers led into doing stupid and/or awful things…the Manson Family was a cult. Jonestown was a cult. Heaven’s Gate was a cult. Boko Haram is a cult. Normal healthy-minded people don’t really want to belong to cults, but the problem is joining is not always a conscious decision. Most people often just get drawn into cults and are full-fledged members before they know it. They start following the cult often under benign and/or banal circumstances, but slowly are subsumed by it and lose their identity to it. Before they know it, they’ve lost their bearings and are like wanderers in an Arctic whiteout being guided by a raving lunatic.This post is a special Nobby Works service for those who may be so lost. They might not know for sure they’re in a cult, but there’s this uneasy feeling that seeps in whenever unsettling realities break through the cult filter and their confidence in things they believe begins to erode. This simple self-exam can help them determine whether they have in fact fallen in with a cult. Am I a Cult Member Exam Questions If you woke up to this mind boggling story today and your reaction was to say, "I don't want to hear about this negative stuff anymore. Why isn't anyone talking about the stock market, Korea, and National Prayer Day?" you are a practicing cult member. If you see documented evidence that Donald Trump has lied on the record more than 3000 times, and your response is, “But Obama said ‘If you like your health care you can keep it’”--then, yes, you are a cult member.If you hear Donald Trump maniacally repeat over and over again, “No collusion…No collusion…but you’ve never stepped in front of a mirror and asked yourself, “How would I feel if Hillary Clinton babbled on about, ‘No security breach…no security breach!” well, then you are a cult member.  If you hear Donald Trump claim there’s been no obstruction of justice and you remain unconcerned about him firing or trying to fire everyone legally and professionally responsible for finding out if there was, then you are a cult member.If you accept Trump’s attacks on the FBI and Department of Justice, but get very protective of law enforcement when black folks protest against excessive police shootings of unarmed black men, then you are a cult member.If you can read one article detailing the Trump Administration’s wide-scale corruption and wholesale rip-off of the American taxpayer without vomiting, you are a cult member.If you believe Jesus gives Trump a “mulligan” for his Stormy Daniels’ affair because you believe Jesus gives everyone a mulligan, but you dismiss the claims of the other 19 women who’ve come forward with stories of his sexual aggression and his own boast that he can grab women by their pussies because he’s a celebrity, you are not only a member of a cult, but you’re perverting Jesus.If you still take Trump at his word that because he’s so rich he doesn’t need your taxpayer dollars to get by, you’re a member of a cult…possessed of a disturbing childlike innocence.If you still believe that Trump filled his administration with "only the best people", you're clearly a cult member, but you're also adorable.If you believe Trump tells it like it is, but you avoid his insulting and inane Twitter feed in order to keep that fiction alive in your own mind, then you are a member of a cult.If you ignore the conflict between Trump’s autocratic demands for loyalty and basic principles of democratic rule, then you are a member of a cult.If you believe Trump is above the law, the Constitution, the courts, and independent investigation, then you are a member of a cult.If you believe Trump when he says he’s the only one who can solve our problems, you are most definitely a member of a cult. If upon hearing Trump say he could shoot someone on 5thAve and his followers would still stay loyal to him and you did not die right then and there of utter shame, you are an elite member of a cult.

The Great Beauty

Last week some folks on Twitter put their torches down long enough to respond to a benign question: Name the movie that best defines you. Usually I’d jump right on something like that, but this was not about pictures that I love or admire or that have influenced or provoked me or that are on my top ten list of favorites. Although all such films may define my taste in films, I wouldn’t go so far as to say they define me per se as a person. It seemed that to locate that movie in my voluminous movie-watching past I’d have to reflect rather deeply on thousands of films…and who has time for that on Twitter?
As happens, a few days after passing on the opportunity to tweet my answer into the wind that is Twitter, I sat down to re-watch Paolo Sorrentino’s glorious, Oscar winner, The Great Beauty. And there it was. There was the film I could confidently say expresses who I am without actually being a film of my life.
First, there were the superficial similarities. It’s Italian, of course, and regular readers of the blog know well my affinity for all things Italian (excepting the fascist strain and religious kitsch). More pointedly, Jep, the main character, is a writer in the latter stage of life reflecting on his earlier stages…the choices made, the losses, the options remaining. Such a personal accounting pretty much occupies most of my time these days, with The Nobby Works serving as a running documentation of that endeavor.  
In the wild, sybaritic birthday party for Jep that introduces us to him, he is at first a wry observer of the scene and his guests. He is with them, but not really of them. And then, almost with an air of noblesse oblige, he gets down with them…joins the dancing and lets loose for a generous moment, not only a generous show of comradeship with the revelers, but a generous show of indulgence for himself. I don’t think I’ve ever watched a movie party scene that better captures my own party attitude if not exact behavior better. Then Jep walks out of the dance, away from the crowd, and right up to the camera to reflect on a question he and his childhood friends used to ask themselves: What do you really like most in life?
The shock of recognition was truly electric at that point. Lorna has been obsessed with the approximate question for much of the past year and asks it of most everyone she encounters. Jep tells us that what set him apart from his friends is that they always answered that what they liked most was “pussy.” What he liked most was the smell of old peoples’ houses, and it was that sensitivity that led him to a career as writer. It is that sensitivity that sets him apart from the hedonists gathered around him of course…living for and in the moment. And it is that sensitivity that leads him on his quest through the rest of the film to find the answer anew.
There are so many other, somewhat surprising, insights into what defines me that the film reveals. Catholicism being one...it played such a major role in my formative years and remains an undeniable part of my make-up no matter how little I regard it now. Jep is also aloof from the Church, although it infuses his Roman lifestyle like incense. The film made me realize how much I owe to Catholicism for introducing an element of the exotic into my upbringing that could have easily been crushed under the press of American white bread homogeneity without it. I don’t think I could ever fully appreciate the magical realism that unfolds in the scene below without my Catholic immersion. More importantly, the scene made me reconsider the answer I had given to Lorna when she asked me her version of Jep’s question. I had originally answered independence; I now realize the answer is roots:  
In that crucial scene above Jep admits to putting his life on hold while he waited in vain for “the great beauty.” This is probably an instance where the film defines me in the negative. Unlike Jep, I’ve never spent much time looking for the great beauty. I’ve always been happy to enjoy whatever beauties come my way. Jep, for instance, has a terrace that overlooks the Colosseum in what surely must be one of the most remarkable views in Rome if not all Italy. Yet he never acknowledges it…never seems aware that it’s there. On the other hand hardly a day goes by, living where I live, that I don’t stop and gaze in wonder at the beauty before me…whether it be the landscape, the sunsets, or Lorna’s face. 
But Jep is not a lost soul in this regard. In fact his quest, his character arc, his renewed search for the answer to the question What do you really like most in life? provides the ultimate meaning of The Great Beauty. In the end, he arrives at a place for himself that also totally defines me. I couldn’t have written a better scene that sums up my own view of life better than this:

Manliness Unbound

Blessed as I am to live in a world technologically advanced to produce the miracle of DVR, I can fast forward through all the commercials on TV. So I rarely get to see commercials anymore except on  Super Bowl Sunday...and even then I only get to see the ones good enough to stop the intermittent socializing going on and really command attention. But yet another unpleasant by-product of the Trump Era is that so much looniness is happening in real time in rapid order that one is compelled to watch more as it unfolds rather than record and save for later when whatever was news at noon has been totally eclipsed by whatever is news at 1 or 2. As a consequence I find myself being exposed to more commercials lately, like the two in the clip below:


I must confess, at first I found those ads so freaking weird that I do believe that if they were run on Super Sunday they would stop any conversation dead. Whether they would start an immediate stampede to buy catheters and turd tenderizers I can't really say. But I'd make a Las Vegas bet that if you took them out of the weekday afternoon cable news ghetto and stuck them sometime between the first and second quarters of a Super Bowl game they would give Go-Daddy girls and Budweiser clydesdales a real run for their attention-seeking money. A crusty cowboy selling catheters and a bruising biker guy selling poop pellets would absolutely dominate the post-game analysis of in-game advertising. And maybe that focus would lead to a wider, deeper conversation about the state of masculinity in America.

Surely manhood seems to be in a state of acute crisis. How else to explain the overt, omnipresent declarations of toughness? Just today an SUV barreled by me on the road with a bumper sticker that read Make Hockey Violent Again. It was immediately followed by a pick-up bearing the ubiquitous warning: Don't Tread on Me . Sixty-two million Americans voted to make a con artist their leader largely because he played a tough guy on TV, famous for telling people "You're fired!". All indications are that we are suffering through the zeitgeist of the Macho Man. 

But what if there is nothing really unique about this seeming epidemic of unhinged masculinity? What if it is nothing more than a retelling of an ancient myth as old as humankind? By now most readers must know how much The Nob loves mythology. To further explain, here is one of the great authorities on mythology, Bronislaw Malinowski, on why myth is so essential to understanding ourselves:

Myth is...an indispensable ingredient of all culture. It is constantly regenerated; every historical change creates its mythology, which is, however, but indirectly related to historical fact. 

What if this rampant display of machismo in our present day is only indirectly related to red states and blue states, racism, misogyny and the rise of #MeToo? What if it follows a direct line back to a more primal fear of physical decline? Malinowski conducted most of his groundbreaking study of primitive mythology for Magic, Science and Religion among the Trobriand islanders off New Guinea. He writes of them:

...Human beings, one and all, had to submit to the process of decay and debility brought on by old age. This, however, did not involve the full incidence of the inexorable fate which is present in the lot of man; for old age, bodily decay, and debility do not spell death to the natives. In order to understand the full cycle of their beliefs it is necessary to understand the factors of illness, decay, and death. The native of the Trobriands is definitely an optimist in his attitude to health and illness. Strength, vigor, and bodily perfection are to him a natural status which can only be affected by an accident or by a supernatural cause.

So in the broader scheme of things, these excessive, over-the-top self proclamations of manhood and toughness can be seen as less poetic expressions of Dylan Thomas's famous poem, Do Not go Gentle into the that Good Night: "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." The current, near hysterical outbreak of ostentatious manliness arises out of an innate fear that Macho Man is on his death bed. In the narrower sense of the two ads cited above for catheters and stool softeners, dressing the two pitchmen up respectively as a cowboy and a biker is nothing less than an attempt to keep the myth alive of "strength, vigor, and bodily perfection". 

Now does that mean that the ad makers consciously went about creating these ads to "regenerate" an ancient myth? Not at all. That's what makes myth so magical and mysterious. It worms its way into a culture and manifests itself in ways often just comprehensible at a subconscious level. And we go along our merry way believing we are so far above such primitive voodoo-hoodoo. Yet we make real, consequential choices in our public and private lives according to such mythology every day...like what medical remedy to buy and what candidate to lead us.  

Half Sister

Donna, fragmented no more.
If you knew how much I counted on my mom bringing home a sister each time she went off to deliver a baby after giving birth to me, you’d have some idea of how far my eyes popped out of my head when I recently opened my 23 & Me report and found this startling bit of news:
Donna Harrison, nee Donna Lamagna, was long known to me as my 1st cousin, daughter of my mom’s older sister Rose and her husband Sam. So, half-sister!!!  Send in the holy freaking cows! And whaaa ..my father? My mother’s sister? Needless to say, 23 & Me had my attention.Donna was only four months younger than I, so of all my 30-odd cousins growing up I always felt closer to her. We remained close until after our grandfather Luigi Reale’s death in 1972. As often happens, the loss of the patriarch loosened the family bonds, plus with jobs to pursue and our own families to raise we drifted apart. My separation from Donna seemed particularly acute and prolonged in later years, and my periodic attempts to reconnect with her went nowhere. Then one day I posted an old family photo on Facebook and asked my other cousins on FB if they could identify one particularly unfamiliar face. Out of nowhere, a Donna Harrison appeared in the comments under the photo with a guess. That’s how Donna and I reconnected after decades.Subsequently I learned of Donna’s nearly lifelong search for her birth father. It was not just for obvious emotional reasons, but a practical need to provide her doctors with as much family medical history as possible. The focus of her search had been on a man her mom was briefly married to in the early 1940s. I tried helping her as much as Googling would allow. Then I suggested she try 23 & Me after hearing how my friend Dave McNamara had found a first cousin he didn’t even know existed through it. Donna immediately submitted her DNA sample, but was disappointed in the results. There the matter rested until December 2017 when my daughters gave me 23 & Me for Christmas. Daughter Meagan had gotten her report a few years ago, and although I was fascinated by her findings, I didn’t think it would be worth submitting my own sample believing my ancestry results wouldn’t much differ from hers. That was only the start of the genealogy learning curve for me. Before I even got half way around the curve I would have to confront a barrage of words, phrases and concepts that were all new to me, such as Autosomal, SNPs, IBD, FIRs and HIRs, and centiMorgans. I’d love to share all I’ve learned but I’d probably scare my readers off and lose myself in the process. So I’m going to limit the science involved to the essentials for conveying this story (with useful links like this one for those who think DNA is all about crime scenes and has nothing to do with who you are and where you came from).I cannot gloss over centiMorgans (cM), however, because it is really the most critical and yet maddeningly variable factor in determining whether Donna is my half sister. The colored segments below show all the areas on my chromosomes where Donna and I match. 
The matching alone would simply confirm that we are related, and no surprise there since our mothers were sisters and passed the Reale family DNA on to both of us. The combined lengths of all those colored segments, however, is what determines the closeness of that relationship. In our case we share 1313 cM, which according to various DNA experts places us at the very high end of first cousins, which we’ve always assumed we were, or the very low end of being half siblings, which would totally shake up our world*. And this is where the real detective work comes in. The first step was to compare Meagan’s cM to Donna’s, which turned out to be 605 cM. This also landed on the high end of the first-cousin-once-removed range or the low end of the first-cousin range. 23 & Me designated their relationship as first cousins, upending family assumptions. But because the magic number still fell in to a no man’s land, we needed to do further detective work. As happens, two other family members descended from another of my mother’s sisters and in Meagan’s generation also did 23 & Me. Their respective cMs with Donna were half of what Meagan’s was, and the lab reported them both out as Donna’s second cousins, as one would expect.   I’m no scientist (though I sometimes play one on The Nob), but I know that the first rule of good scientific detective work is to keep digging. So then I dug into the list of 57 relatives 23 & Me reported that Donna and I had in common. I eliminated those with obvious Italian backgrounds and those who had opted not to share their info. In the end I was left with three cousins (5th-distant) I shared with Donna, all with Irish/British heritage. Finally I compared my ancestry timeline with Donna’s: Dan and Donna timelines...not exactly in sync, but that is the variable nature of  this science.
However, Donna's heretofore unrealized Irish roots are evident.Clearly Donna was not the product of a purely Southern European line. We shared a common Irish lineage. But was it directly through my father? That very hot question still remained. Donna and I both agreed that pursuing this question with all the principals involved now deceased was much easier emotionally than it would’ve been had any of them been alive. Under current circumstances we could approach this mostly as a fascinating mystery without it ending in a potentially painful conversation with a parent. Still, regardless of what the science was indicating, it was not easy getting our heads around the enormously consequential personal choices necessary to put my aunt and my father together like that. My parents were married in April of 1945; Donna was conceived in September that year. As much as I may mock attempts to sanitize the sex lives of parents (and I do), it was still difficult to imagine that kind of 1970s level debauchery going on in that small, very Catholic town at that time.Not only that, but my skepticism was still hung up on the fact that those cM numbers were at the low end of the possible ranges. So I ran the entire case by Dave McNamara, who had not only inadvertently sent us down the 23 & Me road to begin with but was much more conversant with statistics than I was. It was Dave who raised the possibility that Donna’s father was not my father, but one of my father’s brothers. Of my father’s two brothers, Johnny and Pete, I immediately landed on Johnny as the most likely candidate. He was well regarded as a major heartthrob, and Rose was renowned as a stunning beauty. So it was easy to imagine them being attracted to one another. Pete, on the other hand, doted on me as my godfather. I never saw him in the presence of any woman until he found the woman he would marry in the mid 1950s. Pete and Alice would spend a happy but childless lifetime together. So frankly I always viewed Pete as a rather virginal figure. I could not conceive of him as a player in this drama...until! Until my youngest brother Rob reported that he’d learned from our mother that Pete and Rose had one time been a couple. According to my mother’s telling, it was Pete and Rose who introduced their younger siblings--my father and my mother--to one another. Is it possible that my mother, like me, viewed Pete as such a virginal figure that it never occurred to her to mention him to Donna in the many talks they had about Donna’s search for her father? Knowing my mother as I did, yes it’s quite possible. Indeed, without the 23 & Me lab report to lay the foundation and point the way, any suggestion ever that Pete was Donna’s father would have been dismissed as preposterous and relegated to idle family gossip.As for me, I’m happy to report that my lifelong wish for a sister did not end up being one of those be-careful-what-you-wish-for wishes. I'm also happy to report that the experts say that genetically speaking double first cousins, which is now what we are, is the same as half-siblings. So with that and on behalf of my three brothers--Tim, Cliff and Rob--welcome to the Riley family, Sis.
*  A chart showing cM ranges and degree of reaction predicted on cM

It’s All in the Game

It’s All in the Game*…Tommy Edwards…1958. Here’s the thing about that song: I was 12-years old when it became the #1 hit in the nation and my ear was glued to my transistor radio. As such, All in the Game was one of the first songs I remember that introduced me to the romantic quotient in boy-girl relations…beyond other such hits as Hey Little Girl in the High School Sweater and Chantilly Lace which merely celebrated boy-girl. And in looking back on my relationship with Lorna, which I’m doing a lot of in this the 50thyear of our marriage, I’m struck by the influence the song had on me in seeing love as a game…and I mean game in the best way, as in playful. Again to my man Johan Huizinga:

Play casts a spell over us; it is 'enchanting,' 'captivating.' It is invested with the noblest qualities we are capable of perceiving in things: rhythm and harmony.

I’m not what you’d call a laugh-a-minute guy, but I have endeavored to invest my relation with Lorna with as much playfulness as my sense of dignity will allow: here, here, and here for instance. The “game” we’re playing in this our “Golden Jubliee” year is Tour du Jour. We’ve put the names of 12 nearby locations (maximum 2 hours away) in a little treasure chest and draw one each month and then visit it, not as a nearby location, but as if we were tourists there. Three months into the year and it’s already yielding enchanting, captivating results. 

The first was an electric bike excursion through La Jolla. The second was a visit to Carlsbad, which actually got me to walk into the Museum of Making Music for the first time ever even though I walked by it every day for 15 years while working right across the street. Our most recent tour was to Anza Borrego, which is the site of some of the most astonishing fossil finds in North America. It is also the outdoor gallery for Ricardo Breceda, whose artwork graces our home property, but for fullest appreciation must be viewed in its natural desert environment. 
On this visit we also learned about Ghost Mountain, which in the early 20thcentury was the homestead of Marshall South, his wife Tanya and their three children. They were immigrants to America…he from Australia; she from Russia…they were both people of letters, but threw themselves into the backbreaking work of building a home at the top of a mountain in a forbidding environment. It’s an extraordinary tale of independence and isolation that speaks directly to the heart of anyone who longs to escape the insanity of modern American society. But it’s a sobering message, too, about how the most remote and seemingly self-reliant paradise can be vulnerable to world events and domestic discord. The Navy moved the family off their land when it became enveloped in a World War II practice target range…and divorce ended the marriage. Again, it’s all in the game. The game of course does make its winners and losers. Fifty years in, however, and Lorna and I are still riding a quite wonderful winning streak.


*   *   ** As amazing as it is to realize that camels, zebras, wooly mammoths, and saber-tooth tigers once roamed less than two hours from our door, it's almost as amazing to realize this about It's All in the Game:

The song is based on a 1911 classical violin and orchestra piece called "Melody in A Major" that was composed by Charles G. Dawes a banker who later became Vice President under Calvin Coolidge in 1925. Years later, in 1951, songwriter Carl Sigman penned lyrics to the melody and changed the song's name to "It's All in the Game". 

Also amazing that Ed Sullivan hurried Tommy Edwards off the stage like this!

Mother! for Your Easter Basket

Ladies and gentlemen, I think we now have a Darren Aronofsky trilogy in the books. This post will mark the third time The Nob has been dedicated to discussing a movie by one of America’s most daring and distinctive filmmakers, Darren Aronofsky. I was a big fan of two of his earliest films, Pi and Requiem for a Dream before he became a brand name. But his cinematic forays into religion, myth, and metaphor have coincided with the life and times of The Nobby Works, where religion, myth, and metaphor are always grist for the mill. It was just over 10 years ago in fact in one of the very first Nobby posts that I wrote about his film Black Swan and this week actually marks the fourth anniversary since my last post on one of his bold takes on the Bible, Noah.
With Mother!, his newest effort, his reach and vision are breathtaking as he attempts to jam two of the main stories from the Old and New Testaments into a modern blood and gore horror story. Before going further, I should address the issue of “spoiler alerts” that has become such a bane to contemporary film critique. This post is going to require one big spoiler alert, because I can’t possibly say what I want to say about Mother! without giving away key plot points. If it helps mitigate this transgression, I’ll say that if you have an even superficial knowledge of the Bible you already know the plot points anyway. So begging for spoiler alerts on a film based on the Bible is only slightly crazier than demanding spoiler alerts for films based on other books that saturate the culture, like, say, Love Story (the girl dies), The Godfather(the Corleone’s win) or Eat, Pray, Love (inner peace and love found in Indonesia).
So here are those basic plot points:God, the Creator, makes a Paradise/Home out of ashesAs Mother/Nature, God’s muse, comes close to finishing a grand, but painstaking renovation of their Paradise/Home, God decides to invite Man in…and then He pulls a rib out of Man and Woman appearsThe Woman leads Man into breaking the one rule of the House and they're thrown outThen the Sons of Man and Woman appear, embroiled in a fight over who their father loves more and one son ends up killing the otherThe blood spilled from the killing stains the HouseThese Original Sins (disobedience and murder) cause the House to be filled with greedy, reckless humansA Flood ends their destructive, orgiastic reign of excessIn a New Testament, Mother becomes pregnant with a child who restores God’s creative will and fulfills Mother’s longing  for a nurturing role in His creationThe celebration of God’s New Testament quickly devolves into over-zealous worship, religious war between battling “true believers,” and a violent dismantling of all Mother’s hard workThe Savior Child is born and immediately sacrificed (note: the most gruesome scene in the film involves the eating of the child's body and blood, something as a Catholic boy I was introduced to in second grade)  “The fire next time”—the House is burned to the groundThere you have it. And then you have the reviews, with an especially pitched battle between the pros and amateur reviewers over at the Internet Movie Data Base (IMBD) website, where over a thousand reviews average a middling 6.1 rating, indicative of the fierce struggle between those who found it to be brilliant (10) and those who found it to be the worst film they ever saw (1). Much of that hostile divergence of opinion can be traced to simple science and the fact that some people have right brain development that allows them to grasp and appreciate such abstractions as metaphor and allegory. Some people are more left brain oriented, which may give them strength in some areas but renders them impatient with, say, art.
     Nonetheless, the negative reviews--of which I’ve read many more than I should have—fall into three categories: those who did not see the movie they hoped to see (another Rosemary’s Baby)those who just flat out hated Mother!those who hated it, but direct their hatred at the director and those who like the film whom they accuse of being pretentious and intellectualI’ll simply ignore the first two categories, but address the third since it applies somewhat to me, and it opens the discussion to the broader issue of anti-intellectualism. Suspicion and derision of intelligence has been a recurring theme in American culture, which again may have more to do with right brain under-development than sheer ignorance. It has taken on particular resonance in recent years with the political ascendancy of anti-intellectualism. We see evidence of it in the widespread attack on scienceand cavalier dismissal of both expert opinion and skill. Art that aspires to do anything more than entertain has also been denigrated and denounced. Dumbing down has in fact become such a part of the new American mythos that one can imagine a hundred years hence the central message of the story of Genesis will not be that Adam and Eve disobeyed God, but that they showed too much curiosity…that they wanted a taste of the Tree of Knowledge.
Paradoxically, Aronofksy’s film advances that particularly dismal interpretation while boldly re-conceptionalizing the Garden of Eden story. In Mother! disobedience earns punishment rather than curiosity being rewarded. If I had Aronofky’s gifts, I’d stress the opposite message, but I admire his film for breathing new life into the dilemma…in making it fresh and accessible for an audience that has either grown tired or distanced from the Bible story. Great art makes us see old things through new eyes. That’s exactly what Aronofsky has done with this trilogy of films, Black Swan, Noah, and Mother!  He’s taken some of the most ancient myths in Western culture and breathed new life into them. He’s ripped them off the yellowed parchment of the past and put them up on the modern screen in brilliant color for us to reconsider.
There are those who would argue that it’s all old, dead religious nonsense and doesn’t even deserve the forced, false rebirth of old wine poured into new bottles. But this Easter weekend I would invite Nobby readers who are not challenged intellectually to step into the great allegory that is Mother! and see if you don’t agree with me that it reinvigorates story we keep living over and over again…as currently as tonight’s 5 o’ clock news.   

Stormy Weather

Don't know why
There's no gag upon her mouth Stormy weather
Since that gal and I ain't together
My fortunes have gone south


I was bare
Rolls of fat everywhere
Stormy weatherCouldn't fit in all that leatherI was sweaty all the damn time
So sweaty all the time

When she went away, I made her sign an NDA
If she stayed away, she’d get a big ass payday
All I do is pray my lawyer scum will get her
And I’ll screw her once more



















Can't go onAll my life is gone wrongStormy weatherSince my gal and I ain't togetherShe's leakin' all the timeShe's leakin' all the time






















I walk around, heavy-bellied and mad
Night comes around, I'm still feelin' bad
News pourin' down, blindin' every hope I had
This tweetin', lyin', leakin' and spinin' drives them mad
Lie, fire, sue, pee
This misery is from too much of me


Can't go on
Everything MAGA is gone
Stormy weather
Since my id and I been together
Keep failin' all the time
Keep failin' all the timeWith profound apologies to the awesome Miss Lena Horne.
Speaking of awesome Misses, Stormy Daniels seems rather so in her own right. Here was her twitter response to a Trump troll who tweeted her saying he hopes Trump sues her pants off. Gives good head and good tweet...no wonder Trump thought she was worth  $130,000.

Gillian at 40

Gillian was born on St. Patrick’s Day in 1978, making Lorna and I parents for the first time since the birth of Daughter Meagan in 1971. That was no mere scratching of a 7-year itch. As I’ve written before it was planned parenthoodto the enth degree.
Anyone who has had more than one child can attest to how wildly different two beings emerging from the same womb can be. And so it was with Meagan and Gillian. As I wrote in The Dan Riley School for a Girl:

…I told Meagan that loving her was like breathing; like the air … her love is clean and sweet, filling me up and sustaining me. But Gillian’s love, I told Meagan, was a workout. She doesn’t fill me up so much as she makes me sweat it out--the fats, the flab, the toxins. She makes me dig down deep inside myself to see how much love I’ve got and how much I’m willing to give. There’s no such thing as being lazy in love with Gillian…In trying to put things in perspective for Meagan, I’d put things in perspective for myself. I realized what Gillian does for me. She keeps me fit for loving.

I have long felt that the sequel to The Dan Riley School for a Girl was Gillian’s book to write. I think her perspective on how homeschooling impacted the rest of her life could make a compelling bookend to my chronicle, which is mostly about how it impacted mine. It could also help provide a fuller of understanding of homeschooling for those who have pigeonholed it as a practice exclusive to religious zealots and survivalists. Nonetheless, on the occasion of her 40th birthday, I feel inspired to reflect upon our home schooling together and provide a few notes of epilog for those who followed the original story in whole or in part.
Although the book itself only covers one year of our homeschooling, we actually did three years of it. The last two years came about as much of a shock to me as the first year came to Gillian. After that 8th grade year, we closed down The Dan Riley School for a Girl and Gillian went off, first to a Catholic girls’ school for 9th grade and then back to public school for 10th. But before her junior year she asked if we could start up the home school again. With her customary clear-eyed self-assessment Gillian argued that she was falling back into the same bad habits as before the home schooling and felt that if we didn’t return to it she wasn’t sure she would end up in a good place. Even with that willingness and motivation, the last two years were not smooth sailing. We still had to face the same roiling issue that had tossed and churned the first year: how to navigate the rough waters between teacher/student and parent/child.
After that came the very practical and daunting challenge of Gillian getting accepted at a college with little more than her father’s word for how worthy she was. Ersatz religious colleges that padded their bottom line by providing a quasi-academic haven for home schoolers were not an option. And most secular schools at the time were quite ambivalent about home school products. But we did find Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin, a small, independent school, which was trying to make a name for itself as an environmental studies college. It turned out that Northland needed Gillian to take a chance on it as much as she needed it to take a chance on her. Sometimes that’s all you need for a perfect match. As perfect as it was, however, every week of her first year at Northland I expected a phone call from her announcing that college was not for her and telling me to come and get her. Fortunately, that anxiety steadily diminished over the next three years as her circle of college friends and her enthusiasm about her studies grew. Recalling her graduation day from Northland causes me watery eyes right now even as I write about it.
From that point forward, Gillian has pretty much been soaring under her own power. She spent two-and-a-half years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand (and upon returning home dazzled her mom and I by carrying on a conversation in Thai with a waiter in a Thai restaurant). Then she went on to earn her master’s degree and put it to work helping teachers in the Savannah, Georgia, school system apply technology to their teaching.  And then she was instrumental in establishing a charter school in Savannah. Multiple times a week she posts articles and videos on advances in schooling on social media for her wide circle of friends in education and parenting (as well as prodding her father to check out scintillating podcasts from NPR). Not bad for someone whose dad once wrote this about her:

To put it as succinctly as possible, Gillian's 7th grade experience was a disaster. She failed math; she failed science; she did poor work in English; her highest achievement came in her social studies where she achieved a C-. In addition, there was an abundance of negative commentary from her teachers about the way she conducted herself—failing to get to class on time, failing to do homework, failing to pay attention, and worst of all failing to take failure seriously. She had made me one with the fire chief who learns his kid is an arsonist...the butcher who's raised a vegetarian. For most of my life I had been consumed by the pursuit of education only to father a daughter who seemed to disdain it.

With all her other successes, Gillian is now the mother of two…Nico, 2 years plus, and Remy just barely a month. Watching her parenting is a wonder to my eyes. She’s filled her kids' world with books, reads aloud to them, and tends constantly to their developing minds. She exhibits boundless patience when answering their emotional needs. And seems--without ever having to sweat anything out—like a parent always perfectly fit for love.   
Another excerpt from The Dan Riley School for a Girl:

My most important goal, attaining a better relationship with her, might be the hardest goal of all to measure. Without benefit of a parallel universe, we would never know if we were making our relationship better or worse by doing what we were doing. A father-daughter relationship is a life-long thing, and like most such relationships it’s subject to peaks and valleys. Maybe we’d hit an inevitable low-point in that seventh grade year and were, unbeknownst to ourselves, poised for a natural rebound? Maybe the home school would fail to such a degree that it would do permanent damage to our relationship? Speculating on the road not taken is one of the most tormenting games people can play, and with the home school in place I had equipped myself with all the pieces necessary for playing the deluxe version of the game for a very long time.      

Well, that game is over. Whether the home school was responsible or it was always just a matter of DNA and natural maturity really doesn’t matter any more. Gillian has clearly and definitively developed into a marvelous person I would not—could not—have dreamed she would become in the riotous tumult of her teenage years. It is an important (albeit unoriginal) lesson I think for parents…for teachers…for citizens as well. Things are never as awful as they seem at the moment…in fact the awfulness can sometimes be nothing more than a prelude to something quite glorious.

Tomorrow is Gillian’s 40th birthday, and I must say, for me, there is nothing more glorious than that.