A cup of coffee

Today marks the inaugural installment of this new adventure, whatever it turns out to be. And right here, amid the news, good and bad, and the sports scores, amid who got married and who died, who wrote a letter to the editor, and what Dagwood and Blondie are up to, I hope you'll find a few minutes for it every week.

I like to think of this as our having a cup of coffee together to start our day, or one in the evening to finish it, dependent on when you read the paper. Back in Oakwood, the little East Texas burg where I was raised, having a cup of coffee with friends was a treasured event. The men would have theirs at Laurene's Café, while ladies met around each other's breakfast tables. Often the problems of the world were tackled. And I don't buy into the notion that it was a simpler world then, with simpler problems. As I recall, the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, and racial discrimination weren't exactly petty trifles. Every age has its own problems, I guess, sufficient to itself.

But mostly those conversations over cups of coffee dealt with less significant things. Recipes were shared. Sick friends were discussed and put on one another's prayer lists. Somebody got a new color television set, and it turned out that Ed Sullivan looked even worse than he did in black and white. Cattle prices were up, or down.

These assemblies transpired at any time during the day and sometimes several times daily. Whenever friends wanted to confer about anything, specific or general.

And that's just what I'd like for this to be.

There's no telling what our subject will be on any given Sunday. We'll be fancy free and will wander in whatever direction the wind and current events take us.

Let's steer clear, if you don't mind, of religion—I'll hold to my religion and you hold to yours—but we'll probably take up faith in general as our topic now and again. We'll leave politics to the syndicated pundits and angry letter writers, unless, that is, some politician does something either interesting or aggravating, the latter being the most likely case. Endorsements, implied or explicit, of anyone running for any office in any place will never be offered. Good, old-fashioned patriotism is allowed, but I'll keep it shy of soapbox bellowing.

I teach senior English and creative writing in high school, so I'll talk about teachers and students and education now and then. I might as well go on record right now as believing that good teachers are underpaid, bad teachers should find another career, students are smarter and have more potential than they are sometimes given credit for, and the giving over of a school's curriculum to the teaching of a single state test is both dangerous and wrong.

I'll talk about books occasionally, since I do dearly love reading good books and see it as an enterprise that society should take up more in earnest. I am in the business of writing books, but I'll refrain from pushing them at you, like a barker at a sideshow. And Oakwood, my little hometown, will make regular appearances, since you couldn't any more take that little town out of me than you could train a cat to roll over.

Speaking of cats. My wife Karen and I are empty nesters now, with the exception of four cats named Will and Grace, Earl Gray, and Missy. We're awfully attached to them and pretty much let them run the place. But I promise to not go on and on about them like some tiresome people do about pets and children.

In fact, you might never hear another word from me about those cats.

But, then again, you might.

On wizards

Many people—what pollsters would label a "significant demographic group"—find young readers' fascination with the Harry Potter novels to be dangerous, disturbing, and indicative of a societal slide into regions dark and dire. And most, if not all, of their conclusion rests solely on the fact that Harry, the baby-faced lad in the large eyeglasses, is, in fact, a wizard.

My first inclination here is to suggest that this group find something more important to worry about. But, after all, it isn't any of my business what people choose to worry about. Also, I'm well aware that their concerns are, in many cases, born of deeply held beliefs, religious and moral, and who am I to trample around in that field? I harbor pretty deep religious and moral beliefs myself, and I don't take kindly to any such trampling.

So what I would suggest is this: consider the fact that kids, millions of them, are spending time, when enjoying the Harry Potter adventures, reading big thick books. And that, I have to believe, just can't be all bad. After all, they could be up to no good on the Internet, or watching hours and hours of reality shows on television, or racking up body counts in video games, or yakking on the cell phones that seem, these days, to be surgically attached to their heads.

To my dying day, I will be an advocate of the importance of reading. Even about wizards.

Before Harry, wizardry didn't seem to have been viewed as such an evil enterprise. The Wizard of Oz, remember, wasn't a bad man (just a bad wizard, as he told Dorothy upon being found out). And many venerable ladies who find great fault in young Mr. Potter and other fantasy tales wouldn't, I suspect, at all mind being called a "wizard in the kitchen." One of the most famous science teachers of all time was television's Mr. Wizard, who stirred things up in test tubes and captured the attention of American children at a time when sparkling clean programs like Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best were the standards for home and hearth. Nobody, even in that Eisenhower utopia, objected to Mr. Wizard or to his title. (I must confess that I was not a Mr. Wizard devotee, being not at all bent toward science or math. I was much more of a Captain Kangaroo man, finding dancing bears and tennis ball-tossing rabbits more in tune with my world view).

Several years ago, a student in my high school creative writing class wrote a story in which the central character was an old wizard complete, I think I recall, with a pointed hat (perhaps with stars and slivers of moons on it; I can't remember), a dark robe, a wand, and scowling features. The old fellow's name was Ellezor. A name which, I thought at first reading flowed smoothly on the page and was an altogether fitting name for a wizard. I probably scribbled that in the margin, since I am a constant margin scribbler. When students started giggling during the silent reading of the piece, I asked what I had missed.

Ellezor, it turns out, is my last name spelled backwards.

It stuck. And I even began signing occasional memos to my independent studies writers as Ellezor. I never donned a robe or a pointed hat, but I'm sure that at least a few taxpayers would find something to carp about in my identifying myself in a public schoolroom as a wizard. If those folks gave their imaginations free rein, as naysayers often do, it wouldn't be long till they envisioned boiling kettles, dead cats, and crystal balls. None of which would fit in my classroom even if I wanted them to, since it is overflowing with books and manuscripts and computers.

So, to anyone who might be concerned, I will say this:

I am not a wizard, though I do sometimes play one in class. If I were one, I would use my powers for good and would turn the world into a better place, with no war, no murders, no prejudice, no starving children. I would wave my magic wand around enough times to make people tolerant of others' viewpoints and supportive of their children's interest in reading, as long as the reading material is not truly harmful. I would conjure up long, productive, happy lives for every student I teach and would make the Astros win the World Series.

But I am not a wizard. So be not afraid. And have a nice day.

—Ellezor (occasionally)

Another piece of the puzzle falls into place

Red Buttons died a couple of weeks ago. And I was sad when I read it in the paper.

It wasn't that Mr. Buttons—who many readers will be too young to know anything about, and others too forgetful to remember—had been one of my particular favorites among actors or comedians. But he kept popping up here and there along the way. The first time being when he hosted a weekly program that came on one of the three channels that we got on the big Zenith in the house I grew up in. If the weather was clear and the atmosphere conductive between our tall antenna and Dallas, then we could watch Red Buttons dance that silly dance of his. We watched Red Skelton do his silly dances on some other night, and I was probably a teenager before I realized that not all people named Red were clowns.

I recall that Buttons dressed flashy for that show, with a handsome bowtie not too unlike the one that my mother snapped onto me some Sunday mornings before we went to church. Mine was green, I think; Red's was any color I imagined it to be since it was a black and white television.

Later, I enjoyed him in movies. Like Hatari!, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Pete's Dragon, and the original Poseidon Adventure. If you want to watch one fine job of acting, rent Sayonara, the Marlon Brando flick with Buttons playing a G.I. who falls in love with a Japanese girl. In Japan. Right after World War II. That performance spoke volumes about racial prejudice in an age when almost everybody either avoided the issue or opened their mouths and made fools of themselves. It won Buttons a best supporting actor Oscar, and in all probability made a lasting impression on at least one little boy in deep East Texas about bigotry.

Years later, when I visited the beaches of Normandy on the fiftieth anniversary of the DDay landings, I looked up at the steeple of the old church in SainteMère Église, half expecting to see him still hanging there by his parachute. Such was the impact of his performance in The Longest Day that there actually was a parachute up there, with a mannequin dressed like the paratrooper that Buttons portrayed.

So, there he's always been, present and accounted for somewhere in the periphery of my consciousness, this small, lively man who used to dance for me when I was a child, and provided entertainment and a few laughs occasionally. I never saw him in person. Never wrote him a fan letter. Never thought much about him one way or another beyond the time I spent watching him perform.

And now he's dead. And I was a little sad when I learned of it.

Every time somebody whose name I've known my entire life slips away—like Red Buttons and, just a day or two before him, June Allyson—it's like a tiny piece of the big puzzle clicks irrevocably into place. It occurs to me that some of the old movies I watch on AMC are peopled entirely by performers who are no longer with us. That's a bit disconcerting, don't you think? And it lends itself to weighty musings regarding the meaning of life and its brevity.

And before you write in to explain these feelings I'm having to me, let me assure you that I'm pretty sure I understand what's going on. The world is changing. I'm getting older. It's best to just get on with it and roll with the flow.

On the day that I read about Red Buttons's death, I dug out my DVD of Hatari! and watched him chase animals around Africa with John Wayne (dead) and Bruce Cabot (also dead), all of them vibrantly alive for the length of that movie. All of them part of a past that, rightly or wrongly, seems golden in retrospect.

But, let's not forget what Robert Frost, that wise old New England poet (dead, of course) told us.

Nothing gold can stay.

Letters

Have you gotten a letter lately?

Not an e-mail. Or a text message. Not a note scribbled out by someone in a hurry. Or even a formal business letter, which was more than likely signed by a computer. I'm talking about a personal, handwritten letter with a salutation, a proper closing, and an actual signature.

Me, neither.

I used to get them all the time. I used to write them all the time. I've got, on a shelf in my closet, an old shoebox crammed full with letters that came to me during my army days at a little base in Germany, where I personally kept democracy secure.

Many of the residents of Oakwood—the little East Texas hamlet that, along with my parents, collectively raised me—wrote to me regularly. Some good-hearted souls even sent care packages. Miss Eudie Belle Cutler sent a nine-layer jam cake with a different homemade jam between each layer. But mostly it was just letters that arrived at Mail Call. And that was fine with me. Those letters eased the homesickness that was pretty strong in a young fellow who had never even ridden an airplane before Uncle Sam sent his greetings.

I have, in my bookcases, several fat volumes of famous people's collected letters. I enjoy reading what Ernest Hemingway wrote to his various wives. And Steinbeck's daily letters to his editor during the writing of East of Eden—all of them grouped into an amazing book called Journal of a Novel—were more beneficial to me as a novelist than any writer's manual could have been.

In the high school where I've taught for the last twenty-five years, building up that enormous state pension that I'm going to take them up on one of these days, there was, until recent renovations, an interesting display consisting of twenty or so copies of historical documents on laminated plaques in the main entryway.

One of them was a handwritten letter from President Franklin Roosevelt to Joseph Stalin, informing him that "the immediate appointment of General Eisenhower to command of Overlord operation has been decided upon." Beneath it was another short, scribbled note—from General Marshall to Eisenhower—which says "I thought you might like to have this for your mementos."

I'll just bet he did, don't you?

I've always found it both fascinating and fitting that the handing over of the biggest invasion force in the history of the world was transacted in a few handwritten lines.

I don't know when letter writing fell almost completely by the wayside as an important and common human enterprise. Probably it began its slide when e-mailing came into vogue, which lets us dash off truncated communications without any regard to spelling, capitalization, or grammar. Then the final death knell must have been with the advent of text messaging on cell phones. My goodness, when you can quickly tap out the bare bone essentials you need to impart, why would you pour a bit of your heart into a multi-page letter, address an envelope, and be out the cost of a stamp?

I can tell you why.

Occasionally, I take down that box of letters I got when I was in the army. All of them are fun to read again, but the real treasures are the ones from my parents and from my two sisters. When I hold a letter from my mother in my hands, rub the brittle pages between my fingers, and decipher her tiny, wandering henscratch handwriting, it's almost like she's back with me for a few minutes.

I don't have a box of old e-mails. Or text messages. Because not enough effort is put into them to last. And almost never is enough of the writer's soul infused into them to be worth keeping.

So, sit right down and write someone a letter. The recipient will feel better for it.

And so will you.

Good Daddies

Let me tell you about Mackenzie, my grandniece out in Southern California, who is lucky enough to have been granted a good Daddy. Maybe you share the same good fortune. I hope so.

It would be wonderful if all fathers were good Daddies. But spending any time at all reading the paper or watching the news on television provides conclusive evidence to the contrary. There are far too many men out there who just aren't up to the job. And that's a shame.

Mackenzie had an excellent Daddy, by all accounts. I never met Jim, since Southern California is pretty far out of my regular range, and since he and my niece Lisa decided to live apart not long after their only child was born. But Mackenzie, a beautiful and vibrant thirteen year old that laughs at my jokes (as reliable an indicator of intelligence and worth as I've come across), was the link that held the little family together anyway. Mackenzie cemented a strong, dependable friendship between Jim and Lisa who, having created something wonderful together, decided to see the project all the way through as a team.

A little over a week ago, while Mackenzie and her mother were in Hawaii for a holiday before the school year started, Jim was involved in a freak motorcycle accident. They barely made it home in time for Mackenzie to stand by her father's hospital bed to say goodbye before the life support machine was turned off.

Lisa was only six when her own father was killed in a car accident. Lisa is the oldest child of my oldest sister Diane, so I was only five when she was born, and I had a devil of a time figuring out just what our relationship was. At one point, I was pretty sure that I was her grandfather. I wasn't, apparently, the sharpest knife in the drawer as a child.