FUNNY HOW TIME SLIPS AWAY (SHIRLEY TEMPLE)

It's funny how time slips away.

  Reading this AP article (Link) makes me think there are others (besides Willie Nelson, of course, and me and thee) who feel this way.

  Shirley Temple's passing seems to mark the certain ending of something, the 20th century, perhaps.

  She was as much a part of its essential fabric as Charlie Chaplin and Winston Churchill, who were, of course, born in the 1800s.

  Margaret O'Brien's and June Lockhart's comments in the piece are touching and charming, but so, particularly, are the ones spoken by Shirley's fellow thespians George Clooney, Kevin Costner and Bob Balaban, and also those of Marc Grossman, Cesar Chavez's speechwriter.  These gentlemen are all vocal political liberals, but Democratic/Republican differences did not cause them to withhold their praise (and express as best they could their awe) of Shirley Temple and her talent, achievement and good character.  The actors' words are especially touching "pro"-to-"pro" (as Variety would say) send-offs.

  It's good that former president George H.W. Bush weighed in and Nancy Reagan also.

  Barack Obama, usually present and accounted for at showbiz celebrity death time, is notably absent.  That doesn't surprise me one bit.  I remember reading how this vain man thought that his speeches would soon wind up carved into stone pediments and pillars.  I doubt that will happen anytime soon.  In the meantime, there's this (Link).  Bowdown yourself.

But Shirley Temple's work will endure. It even survived (and triumphed over) colorization.


Willie Nelson: Funny How Time Slips Away (Link) 

[1]  I am inclined to suggest that the poet Ted Berrigan’s passing in 1983 also indicated the conclusion of the 20^th century, and the time when modernism, something I believe in and understand, transformed (or so they say) into post-modernism, something I "disbelieve in."  I was too busy, foggy and fearful in 1983 to take stock of this. Il faut être absolument moderne.

Crime Club (Weldon Kees)

No butler, no second maid, no blood upon the stair.
No eccentric aunt, no gardener, no family friend
Smiling among the bric-a-brac and murder.
Only a suburban house with the front door open
And a dog barking at a squirrel, and the cars
Passing.  The corpse quite dead.  The wife in Florida.

Consider the clues:  the potato masher in a vase,
The torn photograph of a Wesleyan basketball team,
Scattered with check stubs in the hall;
The unsent fan letter to Shirley Temple,
The Hoover button on the lapel of the deceased,
The note:  "To be killed this way is quite all right with me."

Small wonder that the case remains unsolved,
Or that the sleuth, Le Roux, is now incurably insane,
And sits alone in a white room in a white gown,
Screaming that all the world is mad, that clues
Lead nowhere, or to walls so high their tops cannot be seen;
Screaming all day of war, screaming that nothing can be
    solved. 

 

  
From:  The Fall of the Magicians (New York, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947).  Included in The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees (Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 1975)

The Cow (Robert Louis Stevenson)

The friendly cow all red and white,
I love with all my heart:
She gives me cream with all her might,
To eat with apple-tart.

She wanders lowing here and there,
And yet she cannot stray,
All in the pleasant open air,
The pleasant light of day;

And blown by all the winds that pass
And wet with all the showers,
She walks among the meadow grass
And eats the meadow flowers.

NOTES:


1. From A Child's Garden of Verses (1885)


2.  Most days I drive from Berwyn to Bryn Mawr along Darby-Paoli, turning left on Conestoga Road.  On either side spread two large cow pastures, which are home to a single herd of beautiful black cows.  The cows are either in one pasture or the other -- never in both simultaneously.  We have never been able to figure out how they cross the road and no one has ever been able to explain this phenomenon to us.  Either people are totally uninterested, they are all participating in a conspiracy against my family or, as I actually believe, these are magical cows.  


3.  Link: Shirley Temple recites The Cow in Dora's Dunking Donuts (1933)


4.  Paintings by Thomas Hewes Hinkley, 1869, Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.  


5.  Link: The Cow (Paul Bowles)