He Probably Paid Extra

Sampling the different luminaries of the “Talented Tenth” in this Harlem Renaissance Reader one writer who immediately appealed to me is Claude MacKay.  Born in Sunny Ville, Clarendon Parish, Jamaica in 1889, arriving, leaving and returning to Harlem from France, Spain, Morocco, Russia, his voice is necessarily more international than any of his other  Renaissance cohort.  There’s an essay in the compendium of that period I’m going through, from his 1937 “A Long Way From Home” that that demanded immediate attention.  In the first few paragraphs, he lionizes W. E. B Debois as a writer and then disposes of him as an individual when he finally gets to meet him.  We’re introduced to the Talented Tenth from his perspective, he’s befriended, use, promoted, disposed of.  I’ve piled half a dozen novels and non-fiction into my list of next-purchases.

I wonder if we’re in a micro-climate of some sort here in New Paltz, right below the Shawangunks.  The clouds drop down, blow over the ridge and shift left rand right and hesitation before rising up over the hill behind me.   We get a lot of rain.  I kinda love it.  If you’re growing things it seems like a blessing.  Surely one can have too much precipitation but of late it has been coming and unloading and moving aside for sun, which is something like the weather of the tropics, where afternoon rains are ferocious but temporal.  My mom over in Poughkeepsie, a scant fifteen-minute drive from here says it didn’t rain at all today. 

My stepdad is down in the hospital in Westchester, right near where I grew up.  My sister took my mom down this morning and I’ll go to pick her up.  My daughter’s join me today and we are told to go first to my mom’s house as my to pick up the gardening pornography my sister has purchased to help my step dad pass the time while he’s recovering.  Later, when I’m somewhere over the bridge she writes me to say there is no reason for me to come by and pick it up as it could just as easily be accomplished tomorrow.  It’s too late for all that.  I take what she’s got and rather than the quicker, steady ride down the New York Throughway on the western side of the Hudson we head out to the Taconic which is the same twisting road we’ll take back up. 

"Write your Grandma and tell her we’ll be there closer to six."  Passing Fahnestock State Park, you twist past a sign that Donald Trump paid for, which names a park in the area after our current president.  I’ve seen photos of this very sign colorfully defaced.  But for now, the sign is pristine.  Not long after there is a sign, I remember from my youth, for an FDR Park, and then, there is another Trump park sign.  It occurs to me that he probably paid extra to have his name appear before and after that for FDR.  You, however Don, are a name which will live in infamy.

Saturday, 6/27/20