For quite a few years now, the joke has gone something like this: If you remember the Sixties you weren’t there.
Fair enough in some ways, we suppose.
But then there’s the music. No doubt like the music of every generation, the soundtrack of our lives was largely shaped in our early years and continues today to evoke memories and transport us back to the unforgettable moments of our youth.
Or, as the title poem in WHAT BUT THE MUSIC puts it:
“What but the music might have orchestratedforgotten revolutions and unforgettable kisses?What but the music underscored every presumedtriumph and defeat, drew us into church basementsand into cheap apartments in bad neighborhoods,ripped down walls, egged us on, played us out?”
In WHAT BUT THE MUSIC: Baby Boomers Write About the Soundtrack of Their Lives scores of talented writers explore that soundtrack, artist by artist, and song by song. And, through the magic of YouTube and other similar sites, each poem and personal essay includes a suggested link (we call it “The Jukebox”) to the music itself, the perfect accompaniment to the writing.
You can try it out here.
Category Archives: Books
Baby Boomers Write About the Soundtrack of Their Lives
From the Eric Hoffer Book Awards:
“What Remains: The Many Ways We Say Goodbye An Anthology, Sandi Gelles-Cole and Kenneth Salzmann (editors), Gelles-Cole Literary Enterprises – Who knew that as many ways as humans are unique so are the ways they say goodbye to those they loved. This anthology of accomplished writers from all over the world shares how people mark that final passage. What compels a person to be buried in a mushroom suit to help with decomposing the body as a green solution? How does a creatively carved casket become ones last gift? These stories of final farewell will resonate.”https://www.amazon.com/…/173358…/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0…
A perfect gift for Grandparents Day 9/13
We thought when it first came out that CHILD OF MY CHILD would make a great gift for discerning grandparents, and past decade has borne out that assumption. After ten years, it remains a fresh and timely anthology for the grandpparents you want to celebrate!
And here’s some background on the holiday.
Filed under Books, essays, grandfather, grandmother, grandparents, Poetry
A great gift for grandparents
Grandparents on your holiday gift list?
CHILD OF MY CHILD: POEMS AND STORIES FOR GRANDPARENTS makes a great gift!
Talking poetry . . .
Recently, I was reminded of an interview I did a couple of years ago for Sketchbook, an international journal. The interview was conducted by Sketchbook Contributing Editor Helen Bar-Lev (a wonderful poet as well).
With Spring Training under way and another baseball season within sight for those of us who are weary of winter, it seems like a good time to share a baseball-themed excerpt from my regional history book, ALBANY SCRAPBOOK. Hall-of-Famer Johnny Evers is just one of the standouts a baseball-mad area produced or cheered for over the years . . .
In baseball, nothing is sacred. No achievement ever goes unchallenged when two fans meet over a like number of beers, no player walks into history without finding an army of disputatious detractors in hot pursuit. So it really isn’t surprising that there is at least one modern baseball writer who thinks that Johnny Evers and his Chicago teammates Joe Tinker and Frank Chance were probably overrated, an early product of what we now think of as hype or spin.
Evers was a gangly kid from Troy who was plucked from a minor league field in that city by a desperate Chicago scout, rushed down to Philadelphia to join the visiting Cubs as a last-minute replacement for a bum-legged shortstop and rather loosely outfitted (the 19-year-old Evers weighed only 115 pounds) for his first big league action—a doubleheader—that same day, Labor Day, 1902.
If his new teammates laughed at the sight of the scrawny little Irish kid in his man-sized uniform—they did laugh and the beleaguered scout protested, “It was the best I could do on short notice”—they wouldn’t be laughing for long. Evers (pronounced with the first “e” long) was as determined a player as baseball had ever seen. The scrappy but unlikely athlete who came up on Collar City sandlots gritted his teeth and scrapped his way into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
That first day, the story goes, his fellow Cubs were so sure that he wouldn’t make it in the majors that they wouldn’t let him ride on the team bus for the return trip to the hotel. (He climbed on top of the bus and rode there.) In short order, however, the double play combination of Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance, following Evers’s move to second base, became possibly the most formidable and certainly the most famous two-away combo in the history of baseball.
Glenn Dickey, author of The History of National League Baseball Since 1876, thought that the trio’s fame owes more to hype than hustle, though. In 1910, the famed sports writer Franklin Pierce Adams tagged his column in the New York Mail one day with eight lines of doggerel, before rushing out to the Polo Grounds to root for his native town’s Cubs in a contest with the—for Adams—loathsome New York Giants.
Adams’s bad verse became an instant and enduring classic in the literature of baseball; his poem is still remembered, quoted and disputed a century after he dashed it off. What the distinguished and proudly partisan sportswriter wrote is this:
These are the saddest of possible words—
“Tinker to Evers to Chance”
Trio of Bear Cubs and fleeter than birds—
“Tinker to Evers to Chance”
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double,
Words that are weighty with nothing but trouble
“Tinker to Evers to Chance”That poem, or so Mr. Dickey was later to claim, did more to secure the fame of the three Chicago infielders than did any of their own accomplishments on the diamond. “They should have,” Dickey suggested, “taken Franklin P. Adams into the Hall of Fame with them.”

Evers would also go on to play in that classic a fourth time, as a member of the 1914 Boston Braves, in a season in which he batted .341 and captured the equivalent of the Most Valuable Player Award. While he had only one other .300 season—1908 when he hit that number squarely on the head—he often was near the top of the list in statistical categories such as walks, stolen bases, runs scored and on-base percentage, seldom striking out along the way. As a fielder, Evers played in 1,776 games, recording 3,806 putouts and 5,215 assists and taking part in 692 double plays, the stuff of his legend, while committing 447 errors.
Overall, Evers chalked up eighteen mostly glorious seasons in the majors, first as a player and then a manager, mostly with the team that had once laughed him off the bus.□
It’s not your grandparents’ grandparenting book!
Thanks to all of you who have made CHILD OF MY CHILD: POEMS AND STORIES FOR GRANDPARENTS an Amazon bestseller again this season!
Books Heal Hearts
“Writing is a struggle against silence.” —Carlos Fuentes
Books heal hearts.
That’s the name of a special fund set up by Cyrenius H. Booth Library, the public library in Newtown, Connecticut, where officials know a community will long be perusing the stacks in search of some grain of wisdom or solace.
To meet that need, library officials are directing donations from across the country and beyond into ” a special fund for healing that will make materials available for use in our library, our schools, and throughout our community, wherever there is a need and whatever that need may be. This will be an ongoing effort by the library to meet the immediate and future needs of our community.”
You can donate online right here.
Or you can contribute by check to:
Cyrenius H. Booth Library
25 Main Street
Newtown, CT 06470
All donations are tax-deductible. But, more important than that, this is one charitable donation that you can be sure will serve a wounded community in profound ways for years to come.
Because books do, in fact, heal.
The proof of that can be found in the wake of any loss, whether one as grotesquely public as the Sandy Hook School tragedy or the private, personal losses each of us knows too well.
That’s when we turn to the written word for a measure of understanding of all that is beyond understanding.
I have seen that in my own life in–among other occasions–a series of readings I did from Beloved on the Earth, a remarkable poetry anthology I am privileged to have work in, along with scores of acclaimed writers, from Mary Oliver to Rumi to Lucille Clifton, Ted Kooser, and many more. At those events, the traditional audience-performer barrier never held, as each person in the room became a storyteller compelled to share their own experience of “grief and gratitude,” as the subtitle of the book has it.