Dana Gioia speaks for me, though he has another sort of reunion in mind:  “This is my past where no one knows me. These are my friends whom I can’t name— Here in a field where no one chose me, The faces older, the voices the same.”   Our fifty-fifth high-school reunion was held at the Cleveland Yachting Club, about as alien an environment as I can imagine. The guard at the front gate asked if I knew where to go. Had I been there before? “I didn’t come from a yachting family,” I explained. I entered a dining room full of strangers, “my friends whom I can’t name,” some of whom were classmates for thirteen years. Slowly I started recognizing a few people, or at least figured out who they were by reading name tags. Youth and old age are like foreign countries often suspending diplomatic relations.   The person I most hoped would attend walked in. I wrote about Lynn Kilbane four years ago after our previous reunion. She has retired after forty-five years as a registered nurse and lives in Cincinnati. We resumed that earlier conversation, and Lynn answered questions that had puzzled me for decades. A guy I had known since kindergarten, Norm Kuhar, died in 1974, just four years after we graduated. Vietnam, drugs, cancer? Lynn told me he committed suicide. Louise Koch died in 1972 of an undiagnosed blood disease. These are people whose images I carry in memory. I would recognize them, or at least their younger selves, if they walked in the room. From Lynn, after sixty-four years, I got a second kiss.   “Must I at last solve my confusion, Or is confusion all I can feel?”

Gammer Gurton loses her needle (solution to the mystery: distracted by her cat she forgets it in her servant Hodge’s pants).  A wandering stranger uses the hubbub to sow chaos for some reason, which gives the play a kind of plot, which for something like this is just a way to give the gags some order.  The stranger wants chaos but of course  so do we, the readers, the audience.  That is the point of comedy. Such is Gammer Gurton’s Needle.  I date it near but somewhat after Ralph Roister Doister, so mid-1550s.  It was possibly printed in 1563 and certainly printed in 1575.  There we go.  The authorship is a total hash.  The author is one or another Cambridge do, writing a holiday entertainment performed by and for an audience of teenage boys. They presumably found it hilarious. Tib.  See, Hidge, what’s this may it not be within it? Hodge. Break it, fool, with thy hand, and see an thou canst find it. Tib. Nay, break it you, Hodge, according to your word. Hodge.  Gog’s sides! Fie! It stinks; it is a cat’s turd!  (Act !, Scene v) As a character says later, “An thadst seen him, Diccon, it would have made thee beshit thee / For laughter” (IV.iii).  Gammer Gurton’s Needle is rather more earthy than the English comedies that would follow it.  The student of Shakespeare soon learns that anything that looks like a dirty joke probably is.  Such is true here, too. Gammer.  For these and ill luck together, as knoweth Cock, my boy, Have stuck away my dear neele, and robber me of my joy, My fair long straight neele, that was mine only treasure; The first day of my sorrow is, and last end of my pleasure!  (I.iv) The play has an outstanding cat, Gib, who sadly never appears on stage, such were the limits of mid-16th century theatrical special effects.  In Act III, scene iv, for example, Gib “stands me gasping behind the door, as though her wind hath faileth” – has she swallowed the lost needle!  The characters debate what to do – “Groper her, ich say, methinks ich feel it; does not prick your hand?” – but the cat stays behind the door the whole time. Whoever the author was, he knew how to have some fun with the language, which is again in rhyming couplets but with more North English rural dialect. My guts they yawl-crawl, and all my belly rumbleth; The puddings cannot lie still, each one over other tumbleth.  (II.i.) Or these two old ladies screaming at each other: Gammer.          Thou wert as good as kiss my tail! Thou slut, thou cut, thou rakes, thou jakes! Will not shame make thee hide thee? Chat.  Thou scald, thou bald, thou rotten, thou glutton!  I will no longer chide thee, But I will teach thee to keep home.  (III.iii) And the humor deepens when I remember that these are two teenage boys dressed as old women shouting these lines for an audience of teenage boys.  This is what we call classic humor. Next week I switch to tragedy, with Gorboduc (1561) by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, written and performed for young lawyers and full of important lessons and Classical learning and so on.  It will be a tonal shift.

It’s a comfort to know people who know you. Cleveland has become a semi-ghost town. My brother, parents, teachers, most friends and former co-workers are dead. My niece and nephew are here and so are two of my oldest friends, the artists Gary and Laura Dumm. Gary and I met in 1975 while working as clerks at the late, lamented Kay’s Books. He was then on the cusp of working with Harvey Pekar (1939-2010) on his autobiographical comic book American Splendor (“From Off the Streets of Cleveland”), later adapted as a movie. I thought of Housman: “And friends abroad must bear in mind / Friends at home they leave behind.” That’s what I was doing.  On Friday my nephew and I visited the Dumms at their home on the West Side of Cleveland. For five hours we talked without once uttering the president’s name – surely a triumph of maturity and good taste. No talk at all of politics or sports, the most common and tedious conversational fodder. Our talk mingled reminiscences, gossip and plain old storytelling. Conversation ceased only when Abe and I had to meet his girlfriend for dinner. Gary, Laura and I confirmed Dr. Johnson’s observation: “The friendship which is to be practised or expected by common mortals, must take its rise from mutual pleasure, and must end when the power ceases of delighting each other.” No end in sight.

Alpha and Omega, originally published in 1915, is the third title in Marginalian Editions. Below is my foreword to the new edition, as it appears in on its pages. “Have faith,” someone I loved said to me, holding my face in her hands — the face of a lifelong atheist. And suddenly, there in the lacuna between love and reason, in the warmth between her palms, I found myself reckoning with the meaning of faith — this ancient need for something to keep us from breaking the possible on the curb of the known, to keep the heart from breaking… read article

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