Who Dad?!

Now What?

Writing by the firelight of burning mountains,

I watch the leading ring form a smoldering caldera

as if something immense erupted, something unholy birthed

into what was once a place where nightmares would end upon waking,

where one could close the book, turn off the set, walk away from the screen,

and return refreshed from a brief immersion into the unreal.

Now the distinctions are gone.

There may be rhyme, but there is no reason.

History merges with Fantasy. Science Fiction collides with Reality TV.

And the wheel spins faster, even as everything slows.

Will the arrow point to whatever we can agree upon?

Or, to the smoking crater of what only Hell, not Heaven, knows?

I went to sleep with images of the devastation on Maui in mind, but then in my dream it was as if I were there on the island, writing the above words. I've never woken up with a poem (or whatever it is) fully written before!

I was disoriented and my stomach felt queasy. Even though it was morning, I couldn't do any of my normal routines. Instead, needing a certain kind of comfort and grounding, I turned to Turner Classic Movies. Sometimes, I can surrender my own impatience with the lack of sophistication and lose myself in a time of black and white simplicity. That's what I needed to do today.

I stumbled upon The Egg and I. Not something I'd probably ever watch except for these circumstances. I wanted something from a less complicated era. I wanted to transport myself to a simpler time. It was made in 1947, starring Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert. To keep my mind fully engaged, I looked it up on my computer while watching it.

Turned out it was where the quirky characters of Ma and Pa Kettle began their long movie run. And, it was based on Betty MacDonald's accounts of living and working on a chicken farm from 1927-1931. Her book was a bestseller. The movie was a hit. There were songs written, lawsuits, a tv series in the early Fifties, and later, much criticism for the stereotypes portrayed. Yet, it even spawned a chain of restaurants with the same name that more recently became First Watch. Wow! I had no idea.

I kept reading and watching. Somehow, this charming simple tale led to so much more. Maybe that's part of the problem with us big-brained mammals: we keep multiplying complexity into every equation.

In 1950, there was a similarly themed Granby's Green Acres which was an eight episode radio show, which then inspired the television sitcom, Green Acres. Now, that story was meshing with my own childhood! I watched Green Acres as a kid. The basic premise of them all was the impulse to exit from the quickening urban pace and return to our rural roots. Therein was the irresistible nostalgic appeal. Whether one had ever lived on a farm or not, we imagined there something essential absent in city traffic and sterile offices.

Of course, the ineptitude of the former city dwellers first encountering the hardship reality of farm living was the foil for many humorous situations. However, it also revealed a deeper allure. This was movingly expressed in The Egg and I when a runaway fire from Pa Kettle's moonshine still burned everything but the main house of their new young neighbors, Betty and Bob.

(Egads! How did I find my way to this movie? I was trying to get the image of so many homes and historic places on Maui now dust and ash out of my mind.)