New Year's Day 1968: A Quiet but Invincible Optimism

1 January 1968

I suppose I am risking snow blindness in looking out our glass doors onto the snow covered hill behind our house, but I am in a mood which I like to think of as a reverie, and so I stare out. What I see is not much besides the blinding whiteness: the deep blue of a noontime sky; shadowy geometries cast on the snow by the children's "swing set"; the observation platform, ladder, and fringed canopy that are a part of the swing set itself. A static scene, except for the movement of two thin icicles swinging from the canopy, reminding me of the tinsel "rain" on the Christmas tree. A moment ago, a dried oak leaf glided erratically over the snow crest looking like a frail piece of abstract sculpture foraging for a meaning, then it passed beyond sight.

Except for the cold and wind, I should enjoy planting the Christmas tree today. The sun and sky seem to have touched me with a quiet but invincible optimism: despite having been uprooted a week before Christmas and kept until a week after Christmas in a warm house, somehow it will survive the shock of having been replanted (in a new location) this 15-degree day. And I know that, despite the cold, I will get the tree planted today. This is what I mean by invincible optimism. In other years I should have left the tree in the garage for a day or so -- letting the tree get accustomed to the cold, I would tell the world -- before planting it. Today I don't feel the need for any such evasion: I shall go out there within the hour, not joyfully, perhaps, but but at least without hesitation. A third tree shall commemorate a "live tree" Christmas at this house. Some day, I suppose, our custom must come to a stop; we shall run out of space. But today is a day to dwell only on infinite possibilities.

The snow on the back hill is as new and unmarked as the year. It is a part of this optimism I feel that the year, like the hill, will be marked most conspicuously by footsteps taken in pursuit of the pleasures of human society. Half a day old, at the moment, the year is like a blank slate -- or rather, like an untracked hillside. Each will eventually be erased -- the one by time, the other by time's vicar the sun, and each will have been touched and marked by signs of quest, play, duty, or futility. But surely those ventures of compassionate and hungry human associations will leave marks upon the snows of the year that even the most intensive cross-trackings can never quite efface. Events of the past year have shown this to be a sound expectation.

Faith, Hope, and Charity

Her name was Hope. Fortunately, no one at that time saw the irony of her name. No one, that is, except her mother. The elder woman had a saying she used often: "Where there's strife, there's Hope -- right in the middle of it!" She'd begin with a despairing here-we-go-again note, but end with a motherly smile so that everybody got the joke. Her daughter, after all, was twenty-four, and it was too late now to do much about her proneness for catastrophic involvement. (Once again, Hope had become entangled in someone else's personal problems. This time it was Halcyon Somerset, a somewhat fluttery friend of twenty-two, whose stormy engagement to Buster Bragdon was nearing the breaking point.) In fact, it was likely to be atomized at any moment. The Gaines family was sweating out another of Hope's vicarious crises.

If Hope had a talent -- a theory no one seemed eager to defend -- it was her apparent knack of innocently precipitating a disaster while in the act of averting another, or of simply making a fouled-up situation worse by maladroitly rendering the assistance she was asked for. On occasions of relatively minor cheerlessness, Hope might be simply the bearer of dire report -- someone's house burglarized, auto stolen, or pet animal killed. But when trouble's gravitational pull was stronger, and if the fates were working in diabolical connivance with misfortune, Hope might find herself directly caught up in the event as a sort of secondary victim. How soon, and to what extent, Halcyon Somerset's troubles would become Hope Gaines's troubles, no one could at the moment predict.

Site Update: 2008-09-01

From the site owner:

I've been unable to make any progress on posting "Something Twenty-One Mamaroneck Avenue", due to a busy personal life and due to the fact that the manuscript is currently tucked away in my storage locker at the facility on Mission Street and 11th.

I made a very hurried visit to that locker this morning and blindly grabbed a few handfuls of papers from the box where I've got the family memorabilia stashed. That mission didn't net "Mamaroneck" but did produce a stack of manila folders with some other manuscripts (and typescripts) of Dad's. The haul also included photographs and documents from both sides of the family, and a 397-page typescript not of my father's authorship that mysteriously appeared among his effects after my parents' death.

The last is a story called "Viscount and Discount" authored by one Ada Rudd Mallory. I am presently unable to learn anything about the identity of the author or her relationship with our family; perhaps she was a friend, colleague, student, or teacher of my father's, but that's only a guess. The subject of "V&D" is Lord Palmerston, formally known as Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1859 to 1865. I am assuming the story is a work of fiction based on his life; it is written in the form of a "now-it-can-be-told" memoir. Some of the 19 chapters are titled: "Father and Son" (Chapter 1); "Together" (Chapter 9); "The Orphanage" (Chapter 14); "Nebraska" (Chapter 18).

Among the works authored by my father is a 45-page story titled "Faith, Hope, and Charity", which I will begin posting immediately.

[Update: See above. Also newly posted is a reflection from New Year's Day 1968.]

- Asher Abrams

Site Update: 2008-04-29

Welcome to my tribute site in honor of my father, Ken McLintock (1920-2000). It's been almost a year since I last posted here, but this site in honor of my father's memory is never too far from my mind, and neither, of course, is Dad.

The last year has been insanely busy for me personally - all in good ways. I've relocated from Portland to San Francisco and adjusted my education and career goals. Most importantly, I re-connected with an old friend of my sister's from our high school days, we started dating, and fell madly in love. I am moving in with her this weekend.

Thanks to all who have visited so far. A special greeting to the regular readers in Jamaica, New York and Tempe, Arizona. I hope to resume posting by the first week of May. There are still many pages of his memoirs that I look forward to sharing on the internet.

Again, thanks for visitng, and please feel free to drop me a line through the e-mail address at my Blogger profile (which still lists my hometown as Portland, Oregon).

Site Update

Welcome to Urban Renewal, where I'm collecting and publishing the written work of my father, Ken McLintock (1920-2000). Currently in progress is a memoir of his childhood, "Something Twenty-One Mamaroneck Avenue". This was recently discovered and kindly forwarded to me by a friend of my sister's. Later in the narrative we'll meet some of young Ken's neighbors and friends - both visible and invisible - and his mother, who is more fully recollected in "Tales My Mother Told Me". He also mentions a family named Block - who were, as far as I know, no relation to the Stella Block who would become part of his life years later.

In addition to the writing at this site, my father's memoir of World War II can be found at Pacific Memories. The fifteen chapters appearing there are all he wrote of that work, which ends abruptly just before the New Georgia campaign.

Family history is collected at The Town Down the River, which includes anecdotes, genealogies, and a few photographs, including my father's maternal grandfather John Henry Cavanaugh, whom he greatly admired. Newly posted material has more on the family's Irish roots.

My sister Stephanie left a rich body of writing. Her poetry is collected at Wilderness Vision and her prose writing at Iridescence. More recently, some of Stephanie's friends have helped in creating the site Stephanie Online, which includes writing, anecdotes, artwork, photographs, and links.

Thanks for visiting.

- Asher Abrams

Something Twenty-One Mamaroneck Avenue

The house I was "born in" was on Mamaroneck Avenue. I don't recall precisely its number; I seem to remember hearing it as something ending in "twenty-one". Perhaps it was 421. There is no easy way to tell now: the house itself is gone and snapshots of it don't show the number.

And whether I was really born in it or in a hospital, I don't know either. At some point in her life, my mother became a Christian Scientist. Was that before or after I was born? I don't know. Did becoming a Christian Scientist lead her to take a stand against going to hospitals at all, even for having a baby? I don't know. I do know that when I was in elementary school, I was amazed at how many of my classmates - by their own accounts - had been born in either Stamford Hospital or Greenwich Hospital. What a lot of kids must have had something wrong with them to be born! I was sure then that it had not happened to me, for if it had, I would have heard about it. (I'm not so sure now. My mother was extraordinarily reticent about such matters.) I used to hear my mother speak of Dr. Marsland (the family doctor) and Miss Edmunton (the public health nurse); but whether I was OB'd in a hosptal or midwived at home I have no idea.

I was five years old when we moved away from Mamaroneck and came to Connecticut, leaving New York State for good. I remember nothing of the preparations for leaving or of why we were going to connecticut. I do remember my brother Tom's talking about the new high school he would be attending, and we joked about its name - Greenwich. He must have been told it was pronounced "Grin-itch", for I laughed when he first said the name, and I said (and kept repeating for our amusement) the word it immediately suggested: "spinach". In later years, after I had acquired a wider vocabulary through reading and listening, I realized how funny the name of Tom's former high school [was], suggesting as it did a dislocation of the cervical vertebrae. Mamaroneck did not have its own high school then, and the Mamaroneck students attended one in the neighboring town of Rye - more specifically, in the section known as Rye Neck. I have wondered whether anyone saw the humor in the name Rye (wry) Neck High School after a season of dislocating football injuries.

The Keeper

He blends, at first, with the corrupted landscape;
and then you see him: a gross blue figure
panoplied in overalls and contempt, moving,
perhaps, a step or two to survey
impassively, wiht porcine eyes,
each citizen come to cast
non-goods on more non-goods in this
anti-matter kingdom.

From ranched,
split-leveled, and garrisoned lives
they turn this Sunday morning, briefly,
as every Sunday morning, to leave
their leavings. Each car or truck in turn
receives his house-detective scrutiny,
for he sees that the simple protocol
is followed: drive up, dump, drive off.
Hands thrust importantly in pockets,
he nods them through the course -- salesman,
buider, teacher, clerk, who for a brief
half-hour play at being
the necessary pariah.

He
does not play. The dump is his,
and all that therein is.

One,
uninitiated -- or rash, found a chair he no doubt thought
could be upholstered back to life.
He got it halfway to his station-
wagon, then, crimson-faced, returned it
to its resting place after
the thou-shalt-not's had thundered.

Our follies, set down in black and white,
that we so fatuously consign
to the waste paper basket first,
and then the garbage barrel,
were better burned, or flushed down toilets.
For at the dump our scribblings
don't die at first; they lie nakedly
or get blown about. And who is strong
not to yield to their temptations?
The man in blue overalls sees that only
the man in blue overalls sees.

There's
power in the world to him who wants it.

Qualifications Examined

The job that I must do some day --
Fill an excavation or fule a flame --
I hope will not be asked of me too soon.
Were it tonight, or, say, tomorrow noon,
The fire would sputter, to my shame,
Or else the hole that's dug would be
So unexpectedly full of space
They'd think they'd buried in that place
Someone already more than half a ghost.

It's not the job that I mind most.
What daunts me is the sense that I
Won't have enough of me to make it worth
The trouble everyone will go to
To get me properly combusted up the flue
Or bedded tidily in the earth.
What's worse, it's certain that they'll know
How ill I fit the job, and so infer
A life spent on the perimeter
Of Life, where growth takes longer. I'm not the right size yet. I need more time.

Until that job opening comes through,
It's living I must do and do.

A Solstice Incantation

The sun has hurled itself far far away;
it will not draw near us soon.

They say the universe is expanding.
Is this then what we are to look out on,
feel sucking at the heat left on our skins
till we are caught up in the dispersal,
struggle against lest hearts be ripped
from us by that receding magnet?

Then I renounce that universe
that zero raised to the power of infinity.
And I would make of my heart a lodestone
not to annul the sun's flight
nor to be sooner torn asunder
but to pull, and feel the pul from, other hearts.

Outward and outward the sun goes.
At night, on a clear clear night
the very singleness of each star
makes the star seem more remote
and I can believe those who say
the universe is expanding.
And a chill steals into me as I wonder:
Will those stars disappear one by one
over the horizon of the galaxy
as if the earth and all its fellow planets
were things to be avoided, things to be left alone?

Alone I stand at the edge of a wood
on the side of a hill on a cold bright day.
I look up at the gray skeletons overhead
and see, here and there, a brown leaf
moving convulsively and hear it cry
in the wind. The wind is cold.
I say a prayer for the leaf;
for where would I go if the wind
dislodged me? Would I become part
of the great dispersal
adrift in an ever-enlarging sea of space?
The far sun shines
but it is a far far sun, a withholding sun.

Is it because of the cold
that I can not feel?
The ground is somewhere beneath my feet.
The snow on the ground is beneath my feet
somewhere. And out there at my finger's tip
is a tree, is a rock, is air, somewhere.
And somewhere
just a little outside my heart
and my bones and my flesh is my skin
somewhere.
And somewhere out there
beyond the tree and the rock and the air
at my finger's tip
is a finger tip I can't quite touch
but it's there.
Is the distance too far
for the message to leap from tip to tip,
the message that travels along the skin
through the bones and the flesh
from the heart to a heart out there
somewhere?

I should make of my heart a lodestone then,
let the flying sun go
(it will be back some day)
and pull my universe together.

I will say this to the somewhere: Let us now
as the sun rides on
down the hill of night
touch one another.
Let our tears flow in one stream,
our songs blend.
Let us speak frank words,
exchange naked hearts,
converse in our close universe,
and looking into one another's faces
smile and say It's you, It's me
after the most ancient and honorable
human way
before there was a Them or a They.
Let us seek as our ancestors sought
some honorable cave wherein to wait
(as if there were still some waiting cave)
the long long winter out
as if we were all the life there is
and all the love.

Uncontested Passage

The row of houses sitting face to face
Watch to see which house is first to move.
Between the rows extends a whitened space
Wherein of sidewalks there's but token trace
And all there is of street is a feathered groove.

But I am certain that the homes will stay in line;
They look cemented in by the solid snow --
By nature's deed first, now by man's design.
Not soon will shovel-zealots undermine
Snug indolence: there is no place to go.

For snow has stopped the town's activity.
So in the street I boldly walk along,
A peer of moter cars, and feel in me
The kind of joy in rebel liberty
We feel in venturing where we don't belong.