Charles Degelman
  • Home
  • Blog
  • Writing
  • News/Reviews
  • About
  • Contact

Sputnik

1/23/2016

1 Comment

 
Picture
We lived at the edge of a forest in Massachusetts. The hay field across the road served as our own planetarium, surrounded by stone walls and maples. From there, the night sky unfolded for us: an unusual moon, the northern lights, an eclipse, but now. . . who could predict?

“Tonight!” My old man shouted. “Sputnik! It’s going to orbit right over our heads. We’ll be able to see it.”

“I thought it was the size of a basketball,” I mumbled. “How’re we gonna see it?”

“It’s a sphere,” my old man said. “It magnifies reflected light.”

“Come on,” I said.

“Look it up. Plug in the ratio of lumens as a function of sphere circumference and distance. . .”

“Distance?” I grumbled. “Distance to what?”

“In this particular situation, my boy. . .” My old man liked to imitate W.C. Fields, Groucho Marx, Jack Benny. That night he was W.C. Fields. “The distance from satellite to earth and sun to satellite, the circumference of the sphere. From our vantage point (nobody said POV back then), it should look like an orbiting Venus.”

“Won’t that be lovely,” my mother chimed in. “Venus. Like Botticelli, in that clamshell, for the whole world to see.” My mother was an exhibitionist.

My old man pushed away from the table. He lit the sticky-sweet, cherry-stink tobacco in his five-dollar, Huckleberry Finn, corncob pipe and gazed up at the darkening sky. “For the whole world to see.”

Most people looked upon the unblinking mini-moon as a threat. The Soviets had shot the damned thing up there with a super-powerful spaceship, proving they could send anything anywhere. The Ruskie satellite orbited the heads of humans worldwide, a lighthouse for the devil. “If the commies can do that,” our authorities told us, “they can do whatever they want.” They would then elaborate, giving specifics about whatever aspect of the communist threat was being featured that week.

My old man was beyond all that. “Paranoid bullshit,” he said. A backhand flick of the wrist dismissed the partisan fears. “Give it time. That little ball is going to unite the world.”

Now the family stood in the meadow gazing upwards into the sprawled bowl of stars. Would Sputnik drift? Would it float? Would it crawl so slow as to render its orbit imperceptible, the way the planets sidled across the night sky? Or would it fail, descend, and burn out like a meteor?

“There!” I shouted, my voice adolescent and shrill. A small orb, gleaming with mercurial clarity, broke over the treetops from the east and glided, slow, smooth, and silent across the cold New England sky.

“Jiminy!” my mother said.

“Just like a tiny Venus,” my sister said.

“That’ll make the Pentagon crap in its pants,” my old man said.

Amid Cold War infestation, my old man managed to impart a love for the patterns and structures and physics of astronomy in his son. Despite my resistance, my father’s spiritual, non-religious enthusiasm for the music of the celestial spheres had infected me with curiosity about the world, the planets, the solar system, the galaxy, and how the entire Universe might operate.

I thought sputnik was beautiful beyond belief.



1 Comment

Digger Bread — you had to give it away for free

1/19/2016

0 Comments

 
Picture
I graduated Harvard and never looked back. The previous year, I had auditioned for the San Francisco Mime Troupe (pronounced ‘meem,’ not ‘myme’ — a long story in itself) and had been invited to join this wild radical theater company that performed free shows in the parks of the city.

Caught up in San Francisco’s free-city anarchy and resistance, seduced by its poets and folksingers and revolutionaries, I had been eager to turn my back on the red-brick traditions of Harvard. To hell with the diploma; I was gonna make radical theater.

The Mime Troupe’s director, R.G. Davis, a theater visionary with a penchant for rebellious thinking, got wind of my intentions. He kicked me down the stairs of the Troupe’s second-story studio and told me not to come back until I graduated. I thought it odd that the radical R.G. was so adamant about a college degree. Wasn’t this the ‘hip’ thing to do? I argued. Turn on, tune in, and drop out?

My question enraged R.G. That’s media bullshit, he growled. Drop out and you disappear. Turning on is irrelevant. Grow your hair, shave your head, no matter. Get high, just don’t forget to bring the ammunition. We commit, he continued. We engage. We breathe the fresh air of the parks and give free shows to the people. Drop out and you won’t be good for anything but smoking dope and playing guitars. We got plenty of that. We need thinkers. So get the hell out of here and learn how to think.

Can I come back after I graduate? I asked from the bottom of the stairs.

Yeah, yeah, Harvard, Davis replied. Come on back… next year. If there is one. Things were feeling pretty apocalyptic in those days, with napalm news clips coming back from Vietnam and American cities burning with uprising.

I finished my final year at Harvard, glowing with the expectation of joining the Troupe when I returned. I gave no thought to grad school or the draft. There was a war to stop and they could put me in jail before I’d kill farmers in a third-world country. Hell no. I was headed back to that rag-tag group of actors and poets, anarchists and carpenters, communists and comics who had set out to change the world with theater. A tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it.

At the dawn of the over-publicized Summer of Love, I trucked back to San Francisco in a rattling red GMC pickup that consumed more oil than gas. I rejoined the Troupe and landed in a Digger household in Diamond Heights.


Picture
The Diggers featured a loose collection of wanderers, free spirits, and anarchists who took their name from a movement in Cromwellian England. The English Diggers had believed in economic justice, an egalitarian contract with the flora and fauna of the planet, and open sexuality. The English Diggers lived largely in rural, utopian communes and developed a self-sustaining livelihood.

In the 1700s, the landed aristocracy descended upon the Diggers when the utopians “liberated” English common land originally granted to the underclass for grazing and gardening. As Europe collapsed and Guy Fawkes rose to prominence, the aristocracy clamped down on the poor. The Diggers were attacked and executed for their liberating behavior. Three hundred years before the Summer of Love, the English Diggers had opened the door for my San Francisco brothers and sisters to liberate San Francisco.

So the Diggers re-birthed themselves in San Francisco, this time in urban communes, largely in the Haight Ashbury.  They had taken the name, spirit, and philosophy from their British forebears. The latter-day Diggers launched a contemporary assault on the bastions of private property, conventional thinking, and repressed libidos.  Armed with the slogan “one percent free” they set out to create alternatives to the rules, regulations, and expectations of a big American city at the pinnacle — or nadir, if you will — of post-war hegemony.

As the ranks of dreamy hippies descended on San Francisco, the kids found that life was not as Timothy Leary or the Beatles had described. They descended by the tens of thousands and found themselves at the mercy of city and a culture that was simultaneously amazed by and terrified of the roaming youngsters who were looking for the Yellow Submarine.

In resistance to the still-expanding consumer culture, Diggers maintained they could create an alternative society that would depend on neither profit nor war. They set up a Free Store to distribute contributed clothing, blankets, appliances, and abandoned furniture. Need a change of clothes after escaping Kansas City? Head for the Free Store. They set up a Free Clinic, a coterie of Free Presses, helped spawn the Mime Troupe’s free shows in the parks and…


Picture
… the Diggers launched a Free Bakery.

Ecstatic with my post-graduate work, studying mime and movement, building shows from scratch, stomping on the boards of a commedia stage before a lawn full of laughing freaks, I lived happily on Mime Troupe wages — twenty-five dollars a week, raised by passing the hat after the show. The Troupe worked nonstop at the gritty warehouse studio leaving no time for a job and no money for food or clothing. No matter, I dropped by the Free Store to exchange one blue-jeaned, plaid-shirted uniform for another. I fought off several bouts of social disease thanks to the ministrations of the Free Clinic, and broke my bread free of charge in the Golden Gate Panhandle, thanks to the Free Bakery.

The first Digger Free Bakery began in the basement of a church on Waller Street. To make Digger bread for free, you need to scavenge free but healthy ingredients and tools. Baking bread for free took ingenuity and the Diggers were long on ingenuity. The church lent its ovens to the endeavor and Digger bakers hustled free whole wheat flour from a Hunters Point wholesaler who gave them damaged sacks. Whole wheat Digger bread broke the mold [sic]: at that time, whole wheat flour and organic foods were largely a thing of the future.

The most ingenious characteristic of Digger Bread was its shape. With no money to buy large baking pans — bakery brothers and sisters collected one- and two-pound coffee cans. They’d grease the cans with vegetable oil and mix flour and salt in warm water to nurture the yeast. The yeast they kept in cultures so they wouldn’t have to buy more. They’d add sugar, honey, molasses, anything sweet, even dried fruit that they collected on their early- morning runs to the city’s sprawling produce market.

The produce marketeers looked forward to visits from the Digger scavengers. They began to applaud the Digger mission. After all, the wholesale workers shared common purpose with the colorful diplomats from the Haight-Ashbury — to feed the hungry. They set aside fruits, vegetables, and grains that quietly dropped off the market’s loading docks and found themselves joining bubbling soups and stews in the cauldrons that Digger cooks brewed, lading out a bowl to anybody hungry, daily in the parks.

In the beginning, you had to slice the first Digger bread by hitting it with a hammer. Some folks claimed that Digger Bread could also be used to build retaining walls and walkways. Nonetheless, it was free and for many that meant sustenance where none other was to be had.

Gradually, the Digger bakers improved their technique and Digger bakeries opened up, six or seven of them around Northern California. Anyone could become a Digger baker. The only stipulation? You had to give it away.

In the spirit of their ingenious determination to create a free society, Diggers brought food to the Americas, those who had been spit from the belly of the beast and those who chose to walk away from the American Dream. Digger bread was tough, nourishing, went down warm, smelled of molasses, and it was one hundred percent free.


0 Comments

    The author of this blog...

    Writes about the world — real, imagined, troubled, lied about, dreamt of, and celebrated.

    American Postcards: growing up absurd in the land of the free

    Style — The Lone Revisionist

    Style — Why Write?

    Lost in Translation

    Doctor Sunshine

    Covidream 2.1

    Outside Agitators

    The Crash

    Archives

    July 2022
    May 2022
    March 2021
    October 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    January 2016
    September 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014

    RSS Feed