Fire and Wind

“The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.”

― Larry McMurtry, "Lonesome Dove"

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Dear Kate,

The great American novelist Larry McMurtry passed away last month, and if not for Google spying on me I wouldn't have gotten the newsfeed about it.

Then I went on the biggest news networks to see if it was reported at all and literally needed to dig it up, for it was nowhere to be found in the headlines, not even in Entertainment news.  And do you know what I finally read on CNN?  A piece as disinterested and perfunctory as some high-school project to give a letter-size poster account of celebrity.

I said that because yesterday I was wandering around town, walked (hope not trespassed, something I often do, only half-knowingly, the good half I assure you) into a high-school ground, climbed up some fancy new playground equipment (safe even for octogenarians, nothing to knock out false teeth), and finally landed myself in front of a portable reading letter-size poster account of celebrities.  Black singer was the topic, apparently, most picked someone still alive and all with a reported "net worth."  Yet at the end, there she was, Nina Simone, and Mississippi Goddam I said.

It was a dull piece.  Ms Simone was wild as the wind; the piece a passing spring breeze.  I took it in nonetheless and found solace, good enough that she was there at all.  Who's responsible, I thought, to speak to the present about the past, to "educate" the next generations about what matters?

See the trailer above?  It's a commercial to sell VHS copies of one of the most beloved American television series, based on McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize Winner "Lonesome Dove." No home should be without that story, the voiceover said, spoken probably around the time I came to Canada.  Before I've grown old enough to stop climbing, the question has now become: Which home needs this story--at all?

Our current culture is thin, like a piece of pork, mostly translucent fat, an image from "Prison on Fire," a Hong Kong movie made around the same time as "Lonesome Dove."  I chose to venture into the "Western" world at a time when my heart was still very much shaped by where I came from.  I could hardly speak the language then but understood the people well enough when they talked on screen.  It was in their face, their longing.  It was my Montana too.

There was no "net worth" reported on the poster for Ms Simone, and, I suspect, that's not just for her being dead.

Yours, Alex