Horse and Train

c 2022 Bruce L. Greene

                                                            Horse and Train

The image is powerful.  In its simplicity is an astonishing complexity.  It held me much as Pecola Breedlove from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye was frozen looking at a black cat with blue eyes.  But this was no animal.  It was a painting. In fact a fairly famous painting entitled Horse and Train.  The work of Canadian artist Alex Colville, Horse and Train has rightfully earned it’s reputation as “the Mona Lisa of Hamilton, Ontario where it resides. 

 

I was not in an art gallery, much less in Canada.  I first saw the painting in the small box of a cubicle in the counselor’s office of El Cerrito High School.  Apparently, I’d missed the painting when it appeared in the film The Shining hanging in the doctor’s office.   “I see you can’t take your eyes off that painting,” said George, the counselor in whose office I waited.  We’d done many parent-student, counselor, and teacher conferences over the years and grown to be good friends.  Visits with George were always worthwhile.  Aside from his stellar sense of humor, George possessed keen observation skills and an abundance of empathy.  Students validated his importance to our school culture daily.  Within minutes, the conference attendees were all in place and not another word that day was spoken about that painting that had so enthralled me.  

I don’t think we ever spoke about that painting again.  That’s because there was always something else to share with George while waiting for folks to show up.  Typical topics included the music of Hank Williams,  good red wines under 20 dollars, or the latest book, film, or restaurant that impressed each other.  But Horse and Train remained a strong influence in my life.  Acting like a Zen koan. I found myself returning to the painting time and again because it touched something deep within.  

I liked the tension.  A beautiful horse in full flight on railroad tracks with an ominous locomotive rounding a bend and bearing down from the opposite direction.  The symbolism was obvious, but a quick look at what inspired the artist reveals even more. Alex Colville used a couplet from a poem by South African poet Roy Campbell as his chief inspiration:  

                             Against a regiment, I oppose a brain

                             and a dark horse against an armored train. 

I’ve often wondered what George’s intention was in hanging a print of the painting above his desk in the Counselor’s office.  How many students in a 35-year career might have pondered this disquieting image?  Was this part of George’s master plan in aiding students to make difficult decisions in their lives? 
We never had that conversation, because we didn’t need to.  Whenever I mentioned the painting to my colleagues, they assumed my attraction to it was linked to the fact that both horses and trains have played major roles in my life.  Throughout my long teaching career, I’d dabbled in other interests.  Out of love for these topics, I’d produced a couple of radio programs,  oral histories, one on hobos and rail riders, the other on the sub-culture of horse racing.  I loved studying the history, doing the interviews, and then editing them and mixing them with traditional music about similar themes.  But, no, that painting was much more than that simple explanation.   Horses were a standard of beauty for me.  Armored trains represented all those immoveable forces that I’d come up against in this lifetime.  To those who told me that they were disturbed by the notion of a horse heading toward certain death by colliding with a train,I can only offer that in my view, no horse would do that.  Even in full flight, they can and would swerve away.  Of that  I  am certain.

People I Remember

 The Beatles sang of "places I'll remember all my lifetime..." and that holds true for most of us.  What about people?  People you remember, though you did not know them well.  People who have been living in the back roads of your brain that somehow hung around for decades.  

In a way, we all collect people.  Some are friends.  Some were friends, however briefly.  The other day, I read on a Facebook page for members who attended the high school I went to that a woman from my graduation year had passed on.  The name stuck in my mind blinking as familiar.  Within seconds a picture appeared of a teenager with braces on her teeth.  Where had this been for the last 5 decades?  

In thinking about my last two years of college I recalled a half dozen people I called friends but I never saw again since I once roamed the UCLA campus in the late 1960s. 

There was Susie, a rather youthful Raggedy Annie, with curly auburn hair and a smattering of freckles.  We never "dated" per see, but rather hung out and had some other friends in common.  Like some of my college friends, she lived in an affluent part of West LA.  I commuted from a working-class section of the Valley.  Susie once asked me to pay her a visit while she was house-sitting for some friends of her family.  Once locating the mansion-like home I hung out for a couple of hours.  All I remember is going into a bathroom with gold mirrors and carpet on the floor.  I had never seen a bathroom with carpeting and kept wondering why would anyone do that?  Because they can is all I could figure out. I'd love to see Sue again, but I barely remember her name. Those auburn curls must be white by now.

I played harmonica in the sculpture garden with a cat named Erik.  His father was a big movie director and he too came from money.  Erik was active in the school's drug culture, always had plenty of money, and played a good blues harp.  That was our bond. Erik was impish in every way, from his elfin appearance to the bib overalls he wore every day.  I searched his name once and found a gray-bearded environmentalist, stout and wealthy and that could be him.  No sign of blues music anywhere.

And then there was Marv.  By now he could be Marvin.  A true brother because we both filed for our CO status at the same time.  Marv was a gentle soul.  Well-read, he and I had difficult conversations about dealing with the draft during the Vietnam war days.  We never kept in touch and the years just piled up before I made any attempt to track him down.  

There were two guys in my ethnic studies classes that were most memorable.  David was going to be a Baptist minister after his undergraduate work.  An African-American with Southern roots he attended the first Black history classes at the university with me.  His friend Gerald was often with him and so I befriended him too.  Gerald was a Latino grad student.  We extended class discussions to our lunch breaks, and slowly became close friends. I remember when Gerald told me that his chances of marrying a Latina were slim.  Why? I innocently asked.  Because there are very few college-educated Latina women in my world and I'm probably going to have a career in academia.  I was silently shocked, but in retrospect, I think I finally got what he was saying.  

Steve was a guitar player that greeted me with a 10 bar blues progression on occasion.  We'd sit under a tree in the sculpture garden and play some blues.  I learned about playing "cross harp" with him and always made sure to have a C, G, A, and F harp with me.  Steve, like me, was on a tight budget.  He was a working-class kid who got into the university on his grades.  Originally from the midwest, he wore a wrinkled white tee-shirt and faded jeans every day.   He lived on bologna sandwiches on Wonder Bread.

There were a few more who will no doubt visit me the next time I find a quiet moment of reflection.  I have no expectations here.  If I ever located one of these folks, I wouldn't be surprised if they had no memory of our time together.  That happens more often than not.

Paper Bag

 Ask someone who was the first person inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  See if they don't tell you it was Elvis Presley. Not a bad guess, but it's not correct.  But then you knew it was Chuck Berry, right?

Chuck Berry was an American original who had his pulse squarely on the postwar teen culture developing in the mid-1950s.  His ability to write lyrics that those kids could relate to combined with his blues guitar background and guitar creativity was just the ticket.  Berry became an overnight sensation, whose music would remain internationally popular for decades.  In fact, it may well be popular in interstellar cultures because it was sent into outer space on the Voyager mission to Jupiter, Saturn, and beyond.  As an artifact of the diverse cultures on planet Earth, a gold copy of "Johnny B Goode" was included in the items blasted into space.

But Berry's life in music was filled with interactions and experiences with some of the music industry's most greedy promoters.  Because he was often underpaid and not allowed royalties for some of his most well-known sings, Berry was super cautious.  That's why he developed the reputation for being hard to work with and often untrustworthy.  Throughout his career and hundreds of gigs,  he demanded to be paid in cash, delivered in a paper bag.  Sometimes he demanded half the fee before the performance, and the remaining half afterward.  

Chuck Berry also drove his Cadillac to all gigs and demanded to park close up so he could make a quick getaway.  

In the mid-1970s, I saw Chuck Berry perform at a most unlikely setting.  It was in front of the grandstand at Golden Gate Fields racetrack.  Since all of the thoroughbred horse racing in the state was at the county fairs in the summer, this August night featured the Berry concert after a modest program of harness races under the lights.  It was fairly well attended, but not what you'd expect for a rock and roll legend.  

Chuck  Berry did a medley of his familiar hits, backed up by a local group of musicians as was his style.  He always used a local group of young musicians because they came cheap and everybody knew his music.  If they didn't, they were dismissed on the spot.  By the end of the 60 min. performance Berry went into a version of "Rockin" and a Reelin" that would never have passed the censors back then.  But he went on, verse after verse filled with double entendre, much to the delight of the crowd who were well filled with beer on this warm evening by the Bay.  

I had attended with a colleague and his three kids and as we descended the stairway from the clubhouse level to the ground floor, we noticed a small crowd gathered around a car parked under the grandstand.  I walked up to the edge of the crowd and there was Chuck opening the trunk of his Cadillac.  He was putting his guitar in the trunk and getting ready to split.  I never saw any paper bag, but I assure you it was there somewhere.