PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

This is not an elegy, as my poor words could never serve as an elegy proper and good enough for her.

I simply wish to describe a way, perhaps a strange way, that my life was touched by her great song, "Be My Baby."

On Saturday, February 18th, 1989, I was planning to attend the thrice annual degree work of the Ancent and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry for the Northern Jurisdiction of the United States of America.  I was particularly excited for this event, as it would be the first one I attended as a 32nd degree Mason, not as a candidate (as I had the previous November).  A 32nd degree Mason normally has not witnessed all of twenty-nine Scottish degrees (the first through third degrees are conferred in the Blue Lodges; and the third, or Master Mason degree, is the supreme degree of Freemasonry---the 29 Scottish degrees are expansons upon, or extensions of, the Master Mason degree).  In our local "valley" (the name of a Scottish Rite organization in any vicinity), the February convocation always performed the so-called George Washington degree, plus a couple of the rarer of the 29 degrees.

But my last dream of the morning, about 7am or so, had nothing at all to do with Freemasonry.  I dreamed that I was playing a piano duet with the great science fiction writer, Cordwainer Smith (whose picture I had not yet seen; but that did not seem to obstruct the dream), to accompany Ronnie Spector singing her signature song, "Be My Baby."  In the dream, I was performing the melody line in the upper treble, and Cordwainer Smith was playing the accompaniment in the deep bass.  I remember being amazed at the sound he was able to draw from the bass, and the unusual way he configured his chorts and octave stretches.

I woke only after the song subsided.  My then wife and I did not play a television or radio during our sleeptime, so no sound effects were available.  I was hearing my own dream's performance of the piano part of the song.  

The song continued to echo in my mind the entire day.  I cannot remember any details of the George Washington degree that I witnessed that afternoon, or what the other two rare degrees were.  (I was often amused by the title of one of them, I believe it was the 6th, wihich was then called, "The Intimate Secretary"---which was an old British designation for a---presumably male---clerk who helped look after one's confidential business affairs.  But I am sure the Intimate Secretary was not performed on that particular day.)

Over the next several weekdays, I visited a used bookstore to obtain as many of Cordwainer Smith's science fiction tales as I could find.  I began a long study of his work---a study that occupied all my free time until the middle of May of that year; until Friday, May 19th, 1989, the day I received a promotion to a job so stressful, so difficult (due to supervisory demands) that it severely affected my health and, in my first wife's opinion, caused our marriage to begin to collapse into the divorce that followed in 1993.  Of all the days of the year, I curse May 19th. Oddly enough, the supervisor who caused me such problems was a fellow Freemason, a 32nd degree (ostensibly) whose behavior was part of the cause for my eventual withdraw from the fraternity in January, 1993. 

To this day, for reasons I cannot explain, Ronnie Spector's song represents science fiction to me---not just Smith's. but Walter Miller, Jr.'s (with whom I actually spoke by telephone in 1987; and whose PTSD drove him to suicide in 1996); and John W. Campbell's (whose stories signed as Don A. Stuart, which was derived from his first wife's maiden name, changed the course of science fiction in the early thirties).

Like I said, not an elegy; simply a recollection.

J9thxciv