Say Goodnight Dick

Sometimes, I need to write, but I hate to. This afternoon, I learned that yesterday, Dick Blount passed from this world to the next. It’s hitting me pretty hard. Sometimes, I have sort of a time-delayed fuze when things build up so they can hit me full force.

Dick, an Opthomologist, sometimes practiced with my cousin Ben. He performed surgery on my grandmother and my aunt. The idea that you could sew tiny little stitches on somebody’s eyeball gave me the heebie-jeebies, but I figure it’s close to a superpower. Dick went to Millsaps. So did my cousin Ben, so did Jeanette Pullen, Weir Conner, and a bunch of other people in this story. That’s part of the point.

When I was in rehab, maintaining a daily routine meant I was getting better. My day involved spending time with John Corlew, then Jeanette Pullen, then Weir Conner, then Dick Blount, then Mr and Mrs. Frank Quiriconi, and then if I was lucky, I’d see Sister Simmons at lunch. Intellectually, I knew they were in their fifth act, but as far as I knew, I was too. We have the time we’re given. I’ve always tried to keep sight of that.

What they had in common was they were all part of the Mississippi Camelot years, and they each had a hand in creating it. Jeanette Pullen was a pediatric oncologist. Putting those words together should be terrifying if you know what they mean. Among other things, Sister Simmons is the reason why APAC exists as part of Jackson public schools. These were princes and queens in an era that doesn’t exist anymore.

As long as David Blount has a seat at the New Capitol Building, I feel like there’s still a candle burning for Mississippi Camelot, but I don’t kid myself that it’s more than a candle. He doesn’t know it, but I’m resting most of my hopes on Delbert Hoseman. There are actual barbarians with big ears coming for his head. He’s pretty strong, though.

I’ve always found it easy to befriend people who were twenty, thirty, forty, even fifty or sixty years older than I was. From what I can see, they’re the most interesting people. For some reason, it didn’t work with Eudora Welty. She always scared the peanuts out of me. I think it’s because she was actually the only thing I ever wanted to be, but she was also the one tenuous connection between working writers and people my family approved of.

Normally, I get along with writers pretty well. When I finally got to meet Larry Brown and Barry Hannah, we drank together like we’d always done it. I think the issue might have been that we were drinking. People always tried to get me not to like Willie Morris because he drank. One night, I was having dinner and waiting for the band at Hal & Mals, and my friend tried to make me pity Morris as he held court with Michael Rubenstein at the end of the bar.

“Look how drunk he is! I feel so sorry for his wife.”

“You and me have been drinking for two hours, clem. We do it four days a week. I’m not gonna judge Willie Morris until I can do what he does.”

As a child, I became obsessed with Ray, Ray, and ForRay. My childhood idols Ray Harryhausen, Ray Bradbury, and Forrest Ackerman helped shape the imaginations of young people around the world for generations. Godzilla exists because of them, or rather because a studio in Tokyo wanted to copy what Harryhausen and Bradbury had created.

Fearless and dauntless, I wrote to these god-like creatures, and they wrote back. What makes them a part of this story is not what they created, although it was remarkable, but how they reached back to the people whose minds they helped create.

Knowing them as middle-aged men, they were dauntless. I don’t recall ever seeing Ray Bradbury when he wasn’t dressed to play tennis. I heard he was pretty good, but it could easily have just been an act. The coke-bottle glasses and the short pants became part of his visage. Ray Harryhausen made a movie once where Herecles did battle with Talos and lost. That’s how powerful he was.

They were all the same age, and they were a little older than my father. My father died before I could see him decline. I consider that a mercy. I got to see Ray, Ray, and ForRay decline. I didn’t care for it.

The last time I saw them together, I was in the audience too far away for them to know I was there. They were each in transfer wheelchairs. Self-motivating wheelchairs have big wheels, and the patient can move himself about and take charge of his own life. Transfer wheelchairs have small wheels, and someone has to push you, dress you, change you, and feed you.

I had met Ray Harryhausen’s daughter. Seeing her wheel him about like that was difficult. Even though he was a huge nerd, he was a powerful and active young man. That day, he was part ghost, in his fifth act, saying goodbye to us fans and to his two closest friends. It was a beautiful but extraordinarily painful moment.

As his play drew to a close, Dick Blount was losing motor control, and his hearing was really very bad, but his mind was still there. He always had a remarkable mind. His wife was his ambassador to the world. My heart is with her tonight.

Remember now the Lord in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them;

While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain:

In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened,

And the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and all the daughters of music shall be brought low;

Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets:

Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.

Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.

Vanity of vanities — all is vanity.