I don’t keep much. Yes, stuff clutters my life but not from way back.

Family things went into diaspora after my father died. My mother wisely refused to become the widow Degelman in our little New England town. She sold the house and left for New York University to begin a new life.

My personal stuff fell prey to gypsy days and a metaphoric compulsion to shed my skin by giving stuff away or throwing it out.

I kept a few things. Chinese pewter candlesticks my grandparents brought back from China before WWII. An oak table, crafted by my father’s Japanese friend, built before I was born. He crafted the table out of tight-grained oak, hand-planed and perfectly proportioned. It has no fasteners, only joinery — the crossed legs mortised into each other, the supporting struts tenoned and pegged.

The table sits in my office, bearing the scratches, scars, ink stains and water rings of a lifetime. I remember crawling over those struts beneath the table, convinced I was invisible to the world.

I kept three guitars: a Martin D-28 dreadnought, now battered by use, eroded from flatpicking, but lovingly cared for. A Dobro steel guitar, enameled a screaming cobalt blue with a chrome soundpan. I played both guitars on the streets in the 1970s.

My third guitar was  built in LA’s Boyle Heights by the Delgado Brothers’ fourth generation of guitar makers.

I was ushered into the Delgados’ fragrant, dusty shop by my friend Hirth, LA’s own Doctor John. A remarkable songwriter and stellar guitarist, Hirth was born in Boyle Heights to a Chicano father, a labor organizer, and a Jewish mother, back when the neighborhood was half Jewish, half Chicano.

In back room of the Delgado Brothers’ shop, Hirth and I played guitars at each other to hear the full-frontal voice of each instrument. Hirth died last year but he visits me in the guitar. He says he enjoys the vibrations of my sofa-bound noodling and tells me jokes while I play.

I’ve also kept my resistance. I’m not a fighter but I’ve resisted forever. As a kid, I avoided playground fisticuffs and barroom punchouts. As a resistor, I cast my share of stones but I didn’t get off on street fighting with cops. They’re big, they’re scared, they can be mean. Besides, they got the guns and you don’t.

Resistance can be more terrifying than exhilarating, but I resisted anyway. I loved resistance and a feared it, but when new and revolting developments threatened my resistance, I held it all the more dearly to my heart.

For example, once upon a time, a revolutionary group called Weatherman splintered off from its parent organization, Students for a Democratic Society. The Weather People declared war against the government of the United States and learned to build bombs. Everyone involved stood at a crossroads.

I understood Weatherman’s motivations, we had all been driven mad by the injustice of racism and the war. But did their hasty declaration of war represent a viable resistance strategy? Or did it signal the birth of an incubator baby in a premature revolution? What was to be done? We discussed the differences arduously but had to choose our crossroads alone.

Weatherman became the Weather Underground under pressure from women in the movement. I was impressed by the Weather Underground’s ability to destroy malevolent federal property (draft board offices, draft induction centers, FBI and COINTELPRO facilities) but the Weather people never became a revolutionary army. How were we to declare war? We didn’t have a Ho Chi Minh, we had no popular sea to swim in, we didn’t know how to shoot, and we didn’t have guns (thank goodness).

The ‘we’ became ‘they.’ They made mistakes. They blew up three of their own while building a bomb in a West Greenwich Village townhouse.

Those were dark days but I kept my resistance. Resistance is resilient, not born or smothered. The System will beat, distort, and trivialize any power that threatens it, but for the lucky few who “dare to struggle, dare to win,” resistance can be full of hope as well as darkness.

We recruited our sense of humor, all our intelligence and guile to keep resistance for the future. Rather than selling out, we adjusted our expectations, changed our strategies, and kept resistance alive. It was difficult not to; resistance carries its own momentum.

We developed alternatives to capital consumerism — land-based utopias and food co-ops, free presses and clinics. A broader view of the world began to emerge. Instead of fighting for the here and now, environmentalism and the health of Mother Earth became the focus. The political turned personal as feminism gathered strength. Ethnic studies programs came to fruition on campuses. We hadn’t lost and we hadn’t stopped. We kept our resistance.

The Reagan era was rough. Many of us had come up against The Gipper as California’s governor and could not believe that such a man could be elected President. Then he began busting the unions. Many of us became union organizers to counter the destruction.

Daddy Bush came and went. Those who knew remembered his role in the violent ouster of the socialist President of Chile, Pinochet and the slaughter of his supporters. We kept track of Bush’s Gulf war, later to be amazed that his collusion to protect Saudi oil in Kuwait would be reduced to trivial in comparison to Cheney’s sociopathic Iraq aggression after 9/11. Keeping track of the hubris and raging against the machine seemed the only way to remain sane.

Occupy Wall Street seemed a promising response to the collapse of the real estate bubble and the banks but, after the good old boys of government dusted off the good old boys in corporate, we knew, with or without the emergence of leadership, this brave resistance movement could not last. No matter, the fight was admirable and has its own OWS survivors.

Now we have a same old new world. Sometimes I think I know too much to entertain any more notions of fundamental change. I know who the presidential candidates are — and aren’t. I know that we do not live in a pre-revolutionary climate, not yet. I know the limits of the Presidency; it does not offer a pulpit for broad social change. We knew this from before. We paid no attention to the elections until Richard Nixon stumbled into the apocalypse. No worry, decades later, the weather, not the Weather Underground will bring fundamental change.

I keep my art. I keep my resistance. My resistance and my art keep each other. I’ve also kept the pewter candlesticks, the oak table, the three guitars and — with luck and meditation — I’ll manage to keep my friend Hirth.

 #  #  #

P.S. Perhaps the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht describes the fate of resistance best in this poem, “To Those Born Later.” I hope this poem will augment my hasty efforts at describing such a complex and contradictory history.

Find more of my stuff at www.charlesdegelman.org and @CDegelman.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I keep memories. The photo is me in 1972 wearing a cherished dress brought from Russia by my maternal grandmother in 1906. It was part of her trousseau, four years earlier. My mother and I were the only women in the family small enough to fit into it. When it became too fragile to wear, I took it to the Lowell Textile Museum (Lowell, MA was a textile hub in the 19th century) and spent a lot of money to have it restored and packed away in acid-free tissue paper. It now resides in its special box above my wedding gown, similarly packaged. I have the neglige my mother wore on her wedding night and the one I wore on mine.

Those who have read my other essays know that I keep old photos. I have loads of photos albums, with the photos in chronological order and annotated. I have old home movies. My brother got custody when our parents divorced and converted them to Beta format…then VHS, which he gave to me. I converted them recently to DVD, but with each transfer, they lost quality. They pre-date my birth.

I have programs from every show I saw or participated in during college and beyond…even earlier. I saw the Royal Ballet, the Stuttgart, and Leningrad-Kirov companies as a child and still have those programs. I save important magazines and now I will reveal my true obsessions. I have three: British royalty, the Kennedys and Daniel Day-Lewis. I have the Life magazine from Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. Since I was 6 months old at the time, I have to believe that this particular interest was passed down from my mother. Nevertheless, I have scrapbooks and clippings and hardcover biographies of various members of the royal family. My favorite is Elizabeth I and the Tudor period.

I have the Life magazine from JFK’s inauguration. I fell in love when I saw the movie “PT 109”, and the assassination came at a particularly difficult moment in my life. We had just moved from Detroit to the suburbs, my mother had had a nervous breakdown and was in bed (for weeks!), my father turned 50 the next day and we had a very sad birthday/house warming party. My mother was too depressed to let me watch any of the TV coverage, so a real obsession was born. I clipped EVERYTHING from the newspapers for years, bought magazines and books, thrilled when I moved to MA and could vote for Teddy. Was astonished one day, pushing my infant son in a stroller, stopped to play with a dog, looked up and saw that Christopher Lawford was at the other end of the leash.

The Daniel Day-Lewis collection began after seeing “The Last of the Mohicans”. I collected every magazine article I could find, went to the library and pulled up old interviews, copying those. I bought the collection of his father’s poetry (Cecil Day Lewis was poet laureate of England at the end of his life). I wrote to his mother, the late actress, Jill Balcon and received a curt reply. I own  a copy of every movie he has made. Though the obsession has faded, I still have more primary research on him than most would be willing to admit. I have seen him in person twice, speaking to him once.

Yes, I do have two children, and no serious collector of memories wouldn’t have loads of photos of their kids, a box each for every note I received when each was born. In each one’s baby book, I have special things from each, like a copy of each’s first paycheck, their medical histories, other important memorabilia. I have a file in my study marked “special stuff” for each child. One is 30, the other 27. They are no longer children, but I will always cherish memories with them and making new ones.

 

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My parents were very different. We were never quite sure why they married in the first place, or how they stayed together as long as they did. Dad was a home-spun philosopher, having come from a difficult family situation. His mother was bipolar, started in and out of mental institutions when my dad was 8 and was permanently institutionalized when he was 12. He was the youngest of 8 siblings (Grandma had the last two to “cure her”; evidently she was more stable with pregnancy hormones onboard, but no one understood that at the turn of the 20th century). My dad tried to keep a positive outlook his whole life, read Norman Vincent Peale and practiced “PMA”: positive mental attitude. I think it got him through a lot of tough times.

My dad used to say, “To have a friend, be a friend”. I repeat that often.

He wrote this to me on my first day of college:

“Fears result from loneliness.

Boredom and fatigue follow.

Let your smile open the door to friendship.

Excel in something – so that you have something to give.

Give generously and receive graciously.

To be happy – have a friend – be a friend.

Friendship is man’s greatest treasure.”

He was quite a guy…I miss him dearly. He’s been gone 26 years.

My mother was something else entirely; hard to please, stingy with compliments, full of self-loathing and bigotry. She was smart, very cultured and I got that from her, but steered clear of the rest. She referred to gospel singing as “coon shouting”. She already had dementia and was in a nursing home at the time of the 2008 election. A life-long Democrat, I tried to get the nurses to not allow her to vote, as she really wasn’t capable of making an informed decision. I had her at an eye doctor appointment when I discovered she had already voted absentee for McCain – unthinkable for her in her right mind! I asked if she knew any of his positions? She finally admitted that she wouldn’t vote for the schwarz (Yiddish for black…Obama).  Yes…a very different point of view from my father’s. One parent wrote encouraging words, the other ranted nasty stuff. I chose to take after the former.

 

 

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