Welcome

23 April, 2014
Houston


Sitting alone one cold night in a bleak, candlelit atélier apartment in Paris in December, 1973, I was playing with the dial of my AM radio. As I turned the tuner, one-by-one, broadcasts in dozens of languages met my ears.  I listened for a brief second to each, figured out what it was, and then moved on. Weary beyond sleep, I continued to listen to a vast world of radio transmissions, punctuated throughout by static and superheterodyne whines,  until the soft strummings of a guitar came into tune.

It was a live folk programme on the BBC! Since I love folk music, I listened, and set my cassette tape recorder to RECORD. What I heard next was melancholy and struck a chord within me, sitting as I was, contemplating my own sadness.

The singer, whose name unfortunately I did not get, played a John Conolly song* called "Punch and Judy Man." As the airwaves crackled from a distant storm and the signal faded in and out, I listened to a song that would forever become a part of me. It described in vivid detail childhood memories of a puppeteer and his Punch and Judy dolls. 

It ends with: "Punchinello, Punchinello, where have you and Judy gone? 

Gone to join the swelling ranks of things that we look back upon

Memories can conjure you from dreams of summer days

But the Punch and Judy man is gone forever."

Every so often, when there is a chill in the air, and I am in a special mood, I'll find that old cassette and play that recording - crackles and all - as if in its very imperfections a perfect feeling can once again be conjured up. When the singer gets to the line: "Winter's planting icicles along the barren shore..." the song shimmers, as if it is itself shivering in Paris' bitingly cold winter's night.  

As I look back on a long and a happy life, there are many, many things which I recall. Then I myself am once again recalled to the present, from whence even more memories come. They are made, then quickly sink beneath the waters of the present to, as the song so aptly put it,  "join the swelling ranks of things that we look back upon." This is why I chose this as the title - with apologies to John Conolly.

一圖勝萬言

A proverb, said to be of Chinese origin, says one picture is worth ten thousand words. Then perhaps with ten thousand words, it might be possible to make one picture. This is what I hope to do here; only this, and nothing more.

If somehow what I write here pleases someone, it will amply repay the pains taken by the author.

Kenneth E. Hall


* ENJOY!