Grassy Knoll Covid Morning

In nearly four months now, I reckon that I have met in person, at a suitably safe social distance and almost always wearing a mask, about a dozen people total, four being family members. Few of these get-togethers have lasted for more than an hour. I meet with two people individually about scholarly collaboration and research fairly regularly for an hour or two. For all I know, my sense of aloneness may be a bustling social life compared to others who are not so well off and do not have uninterrupted continuing employment and a loving family and good friends around them.

Ironically, my last major pre-COVID outings were to a small community south of Austin for the funeral of a veteran friend who had been a standout member—in a wheelchair while battling cancer—of the Warrior Chorus ATX Program, and with my one and only brother from Lamy, NM to a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio for the funeral of a dear cousin who was like a sister to me for over sixty years. So for me, the COVID shutdown began with deeply felt personal loss. My sense of disconnection from people who matter to me, like my dear brother, has continued like a persistent low-grade fever. My loving wife Lisa is my life boat.

One way of facing a problem is head-on. As Americans we are taught—we might even say programmed or indoctrinated—to look past our problems, minimize them, imagine that someone else will solve them, or that we can take care of ourselves and our own when the time comes. But again, the virus has other ideas.

Not being able to swim regularly, as I am supposed to do on doctor’s orders, I have taken up running on a simple cinder track behind Baty Elementary school in the East Riverside and Montopolis area in southeast Austin. The area is traditionally Hispanic and lower-income. As of May 24 it consistently had the most residents test positive for COVID-19 in Austin.

Baty Elementary is a small, nondescript bicolored stone school building with a few long rectangular temporary buildings out back. 97% of its 487 students are economically disadvantaged; 40% have limited English proficiency. Their buildings sit in perpetual isolation at the end of a short, undeveloped dead-end street down past a fire station and a first-stage transitional center for homeless veterans called Safe Haven, where our Warrior Chorus ATX group performed three years ago.

On Thursday night, March 26, Bob Dylan released on-line what not only I think is an epic masterpiece. The song is called “Murder Most Foul.” For close to seventeen minutes Dylan, with piano, cello and light percussion accompaniment, hypnotically meditates upon the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He takes us through the events of those late November days in 1963 when “the soul of a nation has been torn away” and “the age of the anti-Christ has just only begun.” The subdued meditative mood of the song matches the gray mood of these COVID times.

I listen to “Murder Most Foul” three, four, five times each time I run on the cinder track set down on the flat-topped grassy knoll that rises about twenty-five feet high behind the Baty school building. Scraggly woodlands surround the track on three sides, although huge building cranes menace the trees a short way to the north. A few other regulars appear. Two couples who run their dogs. One couple who run while their dog patiently watches the three of us jog or walk round and round the oval track. We have never said a word to one another in a dozen weeks or so.

Dylan’s song is Nobel Prize-worthy. I would say he makes us relive the miserable killings, the grief of the Kennedy family, the quick changing of the political guard and what it all meant for us and our country, but in truth “Murder Most Foul” makes us take these things deep into our minds and souls and really live them for the first time.

I lived through the assassination of JFK. I was twelve years old and sitting on the front steps of my neighbor friend Robbie’s house in the early afternoon on Sunday November 24, 1963, when his divorced mother came out the front door looking shaken and distracted. Because there were no adults around for her to talk to, she said, not really to us, “They just shot President Kennedy’s —.” I forget what she called Lee Harvey Oswald. Neither my friend Robbie nor I felt very much. We did not talk about the president or his presumed killer being shot. We were more interested in the Cleveland Browns football game that afternoon. By weird fate the Browns were playing against the Dallas Cowboys. I saw my Catholic parents grieving during this period, my mother crying during iconic televised and photographed moments like John John’s final salute to his father.

Dylan in his sung words and sea-like musical accompaniment takes us “Deep in a Dream,” into the kind of reverie where “junk” or heroin takes the jazz musicians he calls out. He re-creates what it was like for Kennedy himself to realize that he was being “led into some kind of a trap” and “gunned down like a dog in broad daylight” while “ridin’ in the back seat next to my wife / heading straight on into the afterlife.” Dylan conveys the meaning of this “vile, cruel and mean” act to Americans then and to us now, as it was captured forever on the famous Zapruder film.

Dylan never uses the clinical and emotion-obliterating word ‘assassination’.  He makes us feel the horrific moment as a murder most foul (a phrase from Shakespeare’s Hamlet that he uses to conclude all four main stanzas, and to end the song itself), a killing “with hatred, without any respect.” And we do feel what it was like when “they killed him once and they killed him twice / killed him like a human sacrifice.” Dylan takes us away into our distracted American lives filled with Beatles music, Hollywood movies, Woodstock, Altamont, Patsy Cline, Etta James, Don Henley, Sonny Boy Williamson, Hoagey Carmichael, Shakespeare, the Who, Wolfman Jack and “the great Bud Powell.” He jars us out of our American dreams by alluding to other brutal murders of innocents and not-so-innocents in our country’s history: Sherman’s march to the sea (1864), the Tulsa race massacre (1921), the sordid hanging for murder of Civil War veteran Tom Dula (1868), the violent killings of notorious gangsters Charles Floyd (1934) and Benjamin Siegel (1947).

In the early morning of June 17, we had gone through a brief dry spell in Austin. As I walked to Baty Elementary to jog, the sky was gray and overcast. I noticed as I walked up the slope of the knoll that its compacted clayish earth was dry and cracking. The grass was parched. The springtime wildflowers had all died off. At the top of the slope, a single lonesome yellow flower, defying all odds, asserted its lively color and its reason for being. As I stopped to take it in half-consciously through the reverie of Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul” playing through my ear buds, my shadow engulfed the flower.

I lifted my iPhone, almost without conscious will, to photograph the flower in my shadow. I half-remembered, I think, a beautifully creative photograph in the Chicago Art Institute (taken coincidentally also in 1963) by Kenneth Josephson. In it, the shadow of his adult parental body surrounds and protects the swaddled body of his innocent infant son Matthew.

The photo was used as the cover for a translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus.

I also remembered an interview I had read with Josephson when he was much older. When asked which of all his many photographs was his favorite, he replied quietly and with almost tangible sadness: Matthew, a photo from 1965 of his boy, then a toddler, playing with an upside-down photograph of himself, with his hands on the photo set as if to snap a shot with a camera just like daddy does. Matthew would die about ten years later in an auto accident.

When I took my photo, I had 1963 Matthew and his father’s forever broken and still loving heart not so much in my mind, but in my heart. The flower in my shadow is where my human heart would be.

My photo image of a ‘grassy knoll’ is specifically so described to resonate with the now famous or infamous ‘grassy knoll’ near where, as Dylan sings, “a nightmare on Elm Street” took place at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas.

Josephson’s photo obviously speaks to us of the potential of the infant in swaddling clothes to grow up out of the shadow of the father and assume a full life of his own. The lone flower in my photo where the human heart would be in the shadow outline of my body speaks to the potential we all have as individual human beings to feel deeply enough—to take things deeply enough to heart—to step forward and help us all overcome adversity.  But we first have to recognize that the shadow is there and real. We have to step into it, explore it, figure out why it is there and what it is doing to us.

Sorrow is a funny thing. As Americans, we try to avoid sorrow at all costs. Yet as the ancient Greeks knew and conveyed in their poetic songs, stories and histories and as the Old Testament stories remind us again and again, it is suffering and sadness that make our hearts big and enable us to feel along with others and as if we were others (sympathy and empathy). Without suffering and sadness, we would not be wise enough to stop and look at a lonesome flower. The flower is lovely despite the fact, as my great-hearted wife Lisa pointed out to me, that it is a weed.

My figure poem reminds us, too, that during these times in the heart of darkness of COVID-19 and ongoing racial injustice we may recall MLK’s grand insight in his last speech (‘I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,’ Memphis, April 3, 1968): “Only when it is dark can we see the stars.”

To pull ourselves through now, individually and all together, we each and every one of us have to be brave and see our ways through the gray times. In fact, so much grayness helps us to appreciate what gives our lives the colors that sustain us. I hope this simple poem and photograph help us to remember how strong we are and can be if we forget about our separate colors and merge them into a rainbow.

A grassy knoll can be connected, as Dylan sings, with the place “where Faith, Hope and Charity died.” But it can also be a place of awakening in gray and threatening times.

July 12, 2020