Thursday Thoughts

It's been a few days since I wrote my thoughts of the day or night.

The World Cup has been tremendously exciting and am just thrilled that the U.S. has advanced to the next round. On the other hand, I am very disappointed that Italy chose to put together a team that was not a team. Like the French, their coach was on his last legs and their best player was in Italy and not even assigned to the team.

In 1996, the Italians were pelted with rotten fruit when they arrived home. I wonder what delights await them this time.

Back to the excitement, however. It is great to see nations like Paraguay, Mexico, South Korea, Ghana and Japan advance. It, now, truly is a World Cup.

In between the games, I am reading my stacks of books that have been waiting for me.

When I was employed in my heinous job, I didn't have the chance to even peruse their tables of content let alone read them. I would come home so exhausted that I didn't want to do anything except put on the television and fall asleep to the babblings of the infotainers.

Just finished Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. It's a teen book and I would recommend it to all English teachers for their classes. Doesn't sugar coat anything and certainly not life on the reservation or the poverty or the alcoholism but like all great writers, you get to love the characters.

First discovered Sherman Alexie with a fantastic book called Indian Killer. Then, my husband and I had the luck to meet him at the Chicago and New York Book Expos. Great writer and a great guy and I predict a future winner of the Nobel Prize.

Now, I guess, still in honor of Father's Day, I'm tackling the 640 page biography (tackling is the right word) biography of Eugene O'Neill entitled Life With Monte Cristo.

Arthur and Barbara Gelb had previously written about O'Neill but years later they were able to interview more people and to uncover more sources and writings. They determined to rewrite their former biography. That's a task and a half.

The last thing O'Neill asked of his fourth wife, Carlotta, was to release "Long Day's Journey Into Night" 25 years after his death. The other proviso was that it never be staged.

Thank God that she had a mind and will of her own. Although, O'Neill is the only American Playwright to win the Nobel Prize, by the time of his death, his plays were no longer being produced. Twenty five years would have placed him in oblivion.

It took that magic and sublime combination of Carlotta, Jose Quintero and Jason Robards, Jr. to return the words of a genius to a time that was so in need of them.

So, returning to the theme of Father's Day, it was my father, again, who introduced me to Eugene O'Neill.

We had a restaurant for one year and we failed because we were ahead of our time and the location sucked.

Of course, there was a bar. In the bar, there was the ever present television, black and white, of course and for one week (when I was 13, that magical 13) they were advertising an upcoming play to be televised for the first time.

My father was born in Italy and always trying to learn about American and English Culture. When I was 8, and came home from school crying because my fellow schoolmates, made fun of my father's accent, he plopped me in front of the television one night.

He was on his way to work but the ever present Million Dollar Movie was showing Laurence Olivier's "Hamlet" for the entire week. As he was running out the door, he said to me, "I may not be able to speak English, but he can - so listen to him and learn".

I did.

And, now, there was another moment for learning.

I went upstairs to our small black and white TV and left the drunks at the bar. I traded in our drunks for O'Neill's drunks.

The play was "The Iceman Cometh" and my first introduction to both O'Neill and Jason Robards, Jr.

Although, I can honestly say that I watched the entire play and was mesmerized, I don't think I could tell you what it was completely about. However, it was my first introduction to denial and I can still recall the sound of the young man who kills himself and the sight of Larry, the philosopher, at the corner table who still denies that the young man is his son. And all the other characters of Harry Hope's saloon who just wallow in their own fantasies.

Years later, Jason Robards, Jr. reprised the role of Hickey, the salesman and Mom and I went to see the new production. To be in the theatre, on this occasion, wasn't just part of being an audience member. Each of us was a denizen of Harry Hope's Saloon and as we left, shaken yet exhilarated, I wondered how many of us were still clinging to our delusions.

When I was a child, I always held on to the delusion that through my prayers or some divine intervention, my brother would be cured of his brain damage. Or short of prayers, the Blue Fairy would come and make him a real boy. My brother, my twin, died when we were 28. No prayers and no Blue Fairy ever released him from pain. Death released him.

I was grateful to Death. My mother, however, never saw my brother for what he was. For her, he was fine and, perhaps, the only person in her life who gave her unconditional love. She never ceased to grieve for him. Perhaps, we all carry a bit of Harry Hope's Saloon in us.

The greatest American works of art deal with "Family"; certainly, the plays do. From O'Neill through Arthur Miller to Tennessee Williams to Edward Albee, the concept of family has been grabbed, like some giant tree, by both hands and shaken to its last leaf.

As Carlotta O'Neill once said, "The Past is the Present" and as O'Neill said through Mary Tyrone, (his mother in Long Day's Journey) "None of us can help the things that life has done to us".

I think we can. We can never forget them but I think we can accept them. Then, we have to move on.

They are always with us, always lurking behind us, in the shadows. The trick is to just keep on walking and not to look back.

Good night and on to the next games.