Nothing But BLue Skies Do I See

This column originally appeared on Sept. 26, 2010.

History tells us that heroes were initially demi-gods – part man, part deity – and that they gradually transformed downward from that into human characters who, under fire, show special courage and resourcefulness, mostly on the battlefield (think Achilles, Sir Galahad, Audie Murphy, etc.) where they end up slaughtering their foes like so many spring lambs.

Now, we’re pretty much left with sports figures like Roy Halladay as heroes, and despite what some might have wanted to see happen to the teenager who ran on the field at Citizens Bank Park last week in a red body suit, I don’t think the Phils’ ace pitcher would necessarily involve himself in a ritual disemboweling of that fellow simply to prove his mantle.

But I thought about my own hero recently while mingling with the cars parked on Level Seven of the Chester County Justice Center Parking Garage and Smoking Lounge. Allow me to explain.

Harold Wallace Ross (1892-1951) was the originator and first editor of The New Yorker magazine, and an editor whose vision, wit, and outrageous temper I have admired over the years, to the point of apotheosis. If there is a book about Ross, I’ve read it, more than once, and have used the descriptions of him as inspiration, in my own small way. He once gave a colleague of his on The Stars and Stripes, the U.S. Army newspaper during World War I, a page of commas as a Christmas present, and that predilection towards punctuation, one might point out, is something for which I have more than a fleeting affection.

James Thurber, another of my literary heroes, said in his book, “The Years With Ross,” that the editor had ways of looking at people and things that would stick in one’s head forever. He looked at a portrait of a banker and said, “That’s not a banker. That’s a butler,” and so the man became. Ross, according to Thurber, once complained of a blue sky, “There was never a sky like that. It’s delft, or Alice, or some goddam shade,” even though Thurber allowed that only blues Ross probably could have known were light, sky, and Navy.

So I thought about Ross and delft and Alice as I stood looking out over the West Chester landscape one day this month as the blue sky surrounded me overhead. We have had a string of days of blue skies in September here in Chester County that strikes me as remarkable, and each day it seems to me the shade changes, but by bit. It’s the sun and the clouds and the time of day, I tell myself, but it’s also nature having fun with color.

Here are the shades of blue that are possible in our world, a few of them at least.

Steel blue. Tiffany blue. Indigo. Dark blue. Sky blue. Deep sky blue. Han. Iceberg. Federal. Midnight. Cornflower, Alice (yes, it is there). Teal. Carolina (no Nittany). Palatinate blue.

There’s Bleu de France. Bondi Blue. Tufts Blue. UCLA Blue. Air Force Blue. Iris. Powder, Prussian. Ultramarine. Yale Blue. Duke Blue (still no Nittany).

I am not certain whether all those blues have been seen when looking upwards, but I love imaging what a Cobalt Blue sky would look like. I think that the shade that exists out the window of my garret here on West Miner Street could be construed as Majorelle Blue, but given time and a change in the position of the sun you might also be able to describe it as Maya Blue in polite company.

I considered myself lucky to examine the shades of blue we’ve seen overhead from one of the best vantage points in the county, the parking garage, which I have noted in previous musings. Open only a few short years, it allows panoramas that were not seen in the hundreds of years that West Chester has been populated – letting one see the expanse of the county from an entirely unique point, and check off the blips on the horizon as the pop up like heartbeats on a cardiac monitor – there the Historic Courthouse clock tower, there the steeple of West Chester United Methodist, there the West Chester University water tower.

I know that the sky will change it’s shade of blue tomorrow, and into the winter, where we will be more apt to describe what is clearly Glaucous or Ceil blue as Dull gray. And simply to know that everything changes, including the color of the sky, is comforting in a way, because we no longer have to revere as heroes only the men whose swords are bloodiest.

Enter, Laughing

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Sept. 12, 2010

I don’t know whether it was Lowell Ganz or Balaboo Mandel, or both together, who wrote the following, but it doesn’t matter. If either of them never writes another worthwhile paragraph again they will nonetheless have entered the world of American letters.

(I am paraphrasing here for propriety’s sake, but this is a dressing down that Manager Jimmy Dugan gives a poor-performing player on his Rockford Peaches squad in the film, “A League of Their Own.”)

“Are you crying? Are you crying? Are you crying? There's no crying! There’s no crying in baseball! Rogers Hornsby was my manager, and he called me a talking pile of pig slop. And that was when my parents drove all the way down from Michigan to see me play the game. And did I cry? No! And do you know why? Because there's no crying in baseball. THERE'S NO CRYING IN BASEBALL! No crying!”

There is, however, crying in the courtroom.

If you spend enough time visiting courtrooms when criminal cases are being heard, you will see a lot of crying people. There are crying defendants, crying victims, and crying parents and siblings of defendants and victims. They cry tears of grief, tears of fear, tears of rage, and tears designed simply to win a favorable outcome in their case. There is a reason that every courtroom in the Chester County Justice Center comes equipped with a tipstaff and a box of tissues. People will cry, and someone needs to hand them the Kleenex.

I once saw a woman, who was called to testify in a trial against the man who attacked her at her home on her birthday in her bedroom, walk into Courtroom 7 in the Historic Courthouse already in full sob. She cried taking the witness stand, cried taking the oath, cried during her direct testimony, cried during the cross-examination, and cried as she left the room. The only time I didn’t see her cry in the courtroom was when her attacker was sent to state prison for his crime. But she wasn’t smiling, either.

You never get used to the crying, because so much of it comes from the heart. But you come to expect it and accept it for what it is.

So yes, there is crying in the courtroom. What there is not a lot of, however, is laughter. I was reminded of that last week.

Generally speaking, being in court is not a laughing matter. People who stand before a judge with a criminal defense attorney on their right and a prosecutor on their left, more or less, aren’t having a picnic. You don’t normally come to court because you’ve completed high school with perfect attendance. Jocularity is pretty much never on the docket.

The absence of humor is even more profound if you are appearing at your probation violation hearing from, say, SCI Greensburg. Incarceration at a state prison is, on the whole, a fairly good indication that whatever you were supposed to be doing to show probation officials you were living up to your end of the bargain, something was missing in the total effort. So what happened on Wednesday as Judge William P. Mahon was wrapping up a video VOP hearing with a man whose name and crime escapes me but whose image will remain in my memory for days, was remarkable in its own way.

Mahon is the only judge who makes it a regular habit to come down off his bench and shake the hands of defendants who have lived up to their part of the bargain, so he’s more used to relating to those in front of him on a one-to-one basis than others. As such, he was being about as pleasant as he could be with the fellow in SCI Greensburg, even though he’d given the fellow a few extra months to consider the wages of sin and/or civility.

“Thanks judge,” the inmate said. “Thanks.” Not at all, the judge responded. Just remember to keep away from those knuckleheads in the cellblock with you. They’ll only get you in deeper. “I’ll try, judge,” the prisoner responded. “I just want to get back on the right track.” The hearing done, Mahon started to move on to the next case on his list. Until the microphone in the video link, still live, picked up something from SCI Greensburg.

“I think I just got railroaded,” the aforementioned inmate remarked to a fellow prisoner next to him. “Did you get a load of that?”

The courtroom, full of probation officers, attorneys, defendants, sheriff deputies, exploded with laughter. For once, they had heard a defendant speak honestly, not just truthfully. Mahon, his Irish eyes wrinkled in delight, kindly cautioned the inmate not to take it any farther, and the fellow’s defense attorney quickly turned off the connection. The chuckles lasted a few minutes afterwards, and then the next case was called.