Happy Birthday F Scott Fitzgerald!
For his birthday a bit of an event at the library…Fitzgerald in St Paul and about eighty people there. Notice the guy in the white tee shirt in some shots to the right of the speaker… a stand in for Dustin Hoffman in Rainman, There were slips of paper from the Friends of the Library on each seat. He picked his up…one side was in Spanish and he said (to all) “Excuse me, this is in Spanish.” I showed him that the other side was English and he looked at it, dropped the paper and picked it up…”It’s turned into Spanish again.” Did that a few times and told me “This is a big big problem.” But then the event began..as each speaker spoke about Fitzgerald he would mutter this and that …the short story “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” was mentioned he started muttering short story titles one after the other…
Just before the cake and lemonade the main speaker announced he would lead a Fitzgerald walking tour of the Summit Avenue area and would be at the cathedral parking lot at 4. I decided I would go and walked back to my car and drove up the hill. One guy was there already…a kid with a pompadour (meaning he was about thirty) so I talked to him and he expalined (as he gave me his card) that he was available to translate Mandarin Chinese, was a tutor and an investigative journalist who was just now living with his mother. We were joined by six others..older ladies, one other guy…they all knew the area and we stated with the carriage houses. Twenty minutes later we were on Laurel avenue where Fitz was born and Rainman suddenly appeared running down the street! He had run all the way from downtown up Ramsey Hill! He stayed with us..a few times when we passed a street he would (as far as I can tell) mutter a complete list of all Summit cross streets from there to the river. A few times the guide would describe an event in a story ans he would give the rest of the plot and the year it was published…always interrupting himself. It was a great tour. No one commented about him. When our guide failed to remember a name (of a boyhood friend of Scott’s or who owned what house) one of the older ladies would reassure him…”It’s alright…How could you be expected to remember everything…?”. It was a great tour. The guy with the parrot? Just a guy with a parrot!
They dance the Culotta. They sing “That’s Amore,”…a gondola floats down the Mississippi. It was great…and then I went to F Scott Fitzgerald’s birthday party.
Bell Book and Candle
I always liked Kim Novak
In “Bell Book and Candle”
Curled up on that couch
Which you would describe as
Immensely red but you are wrong
For the colors that show best by candlelight
Are (she tells you) white, carnation and
And a kind of sea water green
And Pyewacket that lucky cat
Curled up next to you green eyes
And a sardonic glance
And you reach for the silver cigarette lighter
Man, you are as shaky as Jimmy Stewart
And it is Christmas! Christmas!
And you know she is a witch and
You want to ask her
Why she well.. has a tree…Let the room
Abound in light especially
Colored and varied
Or something like that. Witch? Christmas?
And she gets up and is on
Tiptoes placing the ornament just so
(“oes and spangs as they are of no great cost”)
On the tree and she knows what you are
Looking at. She knows.
Christmas? But if you ask she’ll say
Something like “The best art is general”
Which, really, you haven’t heard before
And she turns and the doors to the balcony
Open and snow swirls you out and you
Are both on the balcony. Manhattan!
And you know that Gene Kelly is
There somewhere feeling just a bit blue
But will anyway dance his way into
Someone’s heart tonight and snow is
Steepling on the Chrysler Building and
There is giant impossible yellow moon
And she is there and you
Know this poem ain’t going to end the way
You want it to.
