First of May

In an interview, Sarah Brightman, Britain's warm and angelic soprano, once said, "I just make it up as I go along." And so one day she found this old lost Bee Gees song, First of May, and turned it into an evocative masterpiece, appearing on several of her albums and often sung on her concert tours. It's one of those universal love songs, meaningful in multiple ways to listeners, ways which may shift from time to time. Indeed, it even fits Sarah's own life.

And I love it. I can and do play it often directly from my iTunes program or from my (birthday) iPod (which I also love). It's actually a simple poem which hits you only when it becomes music. Fee and free versions by Sarah (and others) are available via Yahoo's new Audio Search. I've taken one of those few remaining free copies and hidden it (for a while) on my website. You can hear it by clicking here. It's in the widely used wma format.

Sometimes I associate specific songs or pieces of music with certain people. For me, Swan Lake is also a person, and so is First of May, even as these persons leave, or take a break, from my life.

One of the Bee Gees, Barry Gibb, pressed for an interpretation of the lyrics, claimed the first of May in the title was the birthday of his beloved dog Barnaby, and the song was written in his honor. Barnaby died, but the song lived on. Well, maybe it's so, maybe not.

What's the meaning behind the lyrics? To quote one of its few interpreters, "The song is about lost opportunity. The turning point ('moment of them all') is when a small gesture of affection ('I kissed your cheek') rather than commitment and opportunity for love was lost ('and you were gone')." It's sad, yet also affirmative. Things happen, but life goes on.

I leave you with the lyrics to follow and think about as Sarah sings them.

When I was small, and Christmas trees were tall,
we used to love while others used to play.
Don't ask me why, but time has passed us by,
someone else moved in from far away.

Now we are tall, and Christmas trees are small,
and you don't ask the time of day.
But you and I, our love will never die,
but guess who'll cry come first of May.

The apple tree that grew for you and me,
I watched the apples falling one by one.
And as I recall the moment of them all,
the day I kissed your cheek and you were gone.

Now we are tall, and Christmas trees are small,
and you don't ask the time of day.
But you and I, our love will never die,
but guess who'll cry come first of May.

When I was small, and Christmas trees were tall,
do do do do do do do do do ...
Don't ask me why, but time has passed us by,
someone else moved in from far away.

Where Am I?

How to find me, how to get here? Pretty simple. You become a virtual investigator.

Best to begin by gathering some basic info you'll need at some point along the way -- email address, phone number, and street address. How? Google? Fine. Dogpile? Also can do. Type: "johnmacdougall" indonesia . Not because I'm in Indonesia at the moment. This just brings you to a lot of neat, on-target, raw info pages, including this one. Aw, shucks, I just gave it all away.

Anyway, you're not here yet, right? But you have my address? How about an aerial view of the humble abode?

The most recent one is on Google Earth. Yeah, you got to download a little Windows program to see the place from the skies. Start the program. Highlight 'Directions' in the top left corner. Then under 'Start,' type where you're at. Under 'End,' type my street address which you just discovered. Hit 'Search' and Google Earth 'flies' you here. Double click on the little auto icon showing my address and you see the roof pretty close up. Keep on double clicking and you even see the trees. And you get driving instructions as a bonus. Awesome. Better than fireworks.

(Too much trouble -- or a Mac user? Maybe MSN Virtual Earth -- yuk -- or Yahoo! Maps is for you. Landmark not on any of these -- the 60-foot high dwarf myrtle with purple flowers in front of the house. This wonder was planted between two fir trees and survived by zooming straight up -- fast.)

Now, there's no helipad. This is not the White House. You can try landing in the street, but please don't sever the phone lines. Or the power lines. Or the cable lines. You'll upset me, the neighbors, and the feral cats. And if it's summer, you may shake all the sickle pears off the tree in the back yard. If you must use small aircraft or helicopter, I'm just a mile from College Park Airport. Pretty neat location, eh.

Now, of course, almost nobody really flies or drives directly here. You don't want to lurch accidentally into 'restricted airspace' and get intercepted by a bunch of jets, or get mauled or marooned on the Capital Beltway.

If you're living or visiting the area, you'd do best by finding your way to College Park Metro Station. That's where you use the public phone to call me to pick you up. Free ride. In the car, not Metro, which swallows your money once you figure out its farecard machines. All this after emailing me, of course, to arrange it all. Otherwise, I might be away in Topeka, Kansas.

OK, seeya sometime.

The Disappeared

This poem was written way back then for someone who vanished in the awful turbulence of the late 1960s.

I am slipping though the hour that never ends
waiting for bells to ring,
for bird song.
Why does love not only end
but also suffer cruel death?
Bells, bells, bells,
birds, birds, birds,
Where do you ring,
where do you sing?
I must be brave,
strong to fathom the narrowed heart
which denied its own happiness.
But why is goodbye so hard and harsh,
why did we go so fast and so sure,
and stop so uncertainly and hopelessly?
Who shall I sing for now,
and why should I sing,
and how?

Multiple Personalities

It all began in 1975, the second year of my chairing the Sociology Department at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). Our Dean in his usual droll manner informed me that a second John MacDougall had joined the faculty -- in the Political Science Department. Most unlikely, I thought. But I rushed to his supposed office. And there he was in the flesh, a very outgoing friendly fellow a few years older than myself -- with the same specialization as mine, Southeast Asian studies. Focused on Indonesia, too. We became good friends.

And for a while, the 'cloning' of John MacDougall made for a lot of fun. At one regional meeting of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) where we appeared on the same panel, we arrived early in the meeting room and began, in rapid succession, shaking hands with all there, then introducing ourselves in identical language, "Hi, I'm John MacDougall." A lot of laughs when people got over the initial shock.

On another occasion shortly after John's appointment, my wife, who happened to be at home, received a telephone call there. The caller asked, "Could I speak with John MacDougall?" Said she, innocently, "Are you sure you called the right number? There are two of them now, you know." Then the riposte from the caller, "Right, I'm the other one." Endless chuckles at both ends of the line.

But after I left UAH two years later for a research job in a federal agency in Washington, DC, the first hints of cosmic disorder began to appear. John had also worked for the government previously. And people who knew only one of us -- that would be most people at the time -- began to think we were each other. Thus began our new practice of, we thought, definitive differentiation. He would use his middle initial J. more regularly, and I would similarly use my middle initial A. most all the time. A few people finally caught on, and we became known in casual conversations as "John J" and "John A" (minus the MacDougall).

Alas, there were some casualties as my seven years in government passed and I became very active in national level meetings of the AAS. I was nominated in committee for its Southeast Asia Council. But the Ann Arbor staff, whom John J. knew from his dissertation-writing days at the University of Michigan, put his name on the ballot instead. I phoned John about the error, and he graciously offered to withdraw. But I demurred and asked him not to take this step. The bureaucratic mixup was already too far advanced. Thus began my utter dissillusionment with the AAS staff in Ann Arbor.

After I resigned my government job to start Indonesia Publications, and thereby became more well-known, for several years the confusion ebbed. In 1990 I started an online news outreach effort to Indonesians abroad in which my e-mail userid happened to be 'apakabar,' a usage which I continued through several changes of Internet service providers. When the Internet finally exploded rapidly in Indonesia in the late 1990s and the project grew into a large list and then a website very heavily trafficked in absolute terms with contributions almost wholly from Indonesians and myself, I became widely known in Indonesia simply as 'apakabar,' and, in personal correspondence, Pak (an honorific) John. Pity John J. During a Fulbright year in Jakarta, and travels elsewhere in the country, he was repeatedly asked, "Are you Apakabar?" and he could only ruefully say no, to questioners' obvious disappointment.

This is not the end of the story. John J. had a talented son also named John, middle initial M. John M. became a Princeton-trained anthropologist specializing in Indonesia, married a Balinese girl, and for some years now has lived in Indonesia. As talented as his father (now retired), John M. and myself now discovered that many people -- Indonesian and foreign -- were confusing the latest John MacDougall duo. So the explaining goes on, here and there, as I continued my online work by starting on Yahoo! an indonesian-studies e-group, with the majority of its members now Indonesians.

There's also yet another John MacDougall who specialized in India and arrived at Harvard in the class following mine. Little confusion in this case except for the time Harvard's job placement office sent me his full file of references (duly returned, of course). And there's a still younger John MacDougall who focuses on war-and-peace issues. As yet, almost no (known) confusion. But as one U.S. government philosopher remarked a few years ago, besides knowns there are the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns. So today I wait to see if there will be further chapters in this saga. Everything clear? :-)

Cold War Poems

I haven't written a poem for over forty years. Perhaps later, but not this moment. What I will offer here now and then are some from my strongly pacifist high school and undergraduate days. Cold War times -- when there were two superpowers, when the doctrine of mutual assured destruction reigned. This trio won Honorable Mention in the Poems for Peace contest sponsored by The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, Newton-Wellesley Branch.


One morning the birds awoke,
Stunned to see that the querulous humans
Had piled up their rifles for a bonfire.
"What liquor could they have consumed?"
Exclaimed the blue jay, aghast.,
While rocking on a radiant bayonet.
"Perhaps the sun crazed them,"
Blurted the cuckoo,
Poking his head about the impossible artillery.
In this manner all the birds chattered on the heap
And tried fearsomely to divine the ways of men.
Only the bleary-eyed old owl,
Squinting from his lonely treetop,
Spied the snickering man with kerosene
Who lit the fire to incinerate them.


All the gremlins came dancing,
Came leaping, came shrieking,
Dropped swiftly, dropped shrilly,
Dropped in for a party,
On Sunday, on Mom's Day,
On missiles like thistles.
So surely and safely
We mailed them a chill bill,
A droll toll, a pall scrawl,
And that is why, kiddies,
Matches are dangerous.


A battered maid stumbled from the forest,
Her garments torn and body ruined.
Two passing wardens discerned her quiddity
And hastened to catch her as she fell.
"Ah," rued one, "what an unfortunate lass
To be trespassing on public land."
"Yes," admitted the other, "but how fortunate
For us to apprehend her so easily."
Night approaching, the first looked into her eyes.
"It grows dark," he said, "and I do not remember her."
The maid, recovering dimly her senses for a moment,
Thought she saw bewilderment and gasped,
"I am Peace," and expired.

Homage

Personal blogs are where readers go to find out about others. Right? Not quite. They are more often carefully crafted vehicles for self-expression and presentation of self. This I learned from my blogmaster mentor. You read only what is given to you. True, you can offer a comment on each post -- even ask questions. And the blogmaster may or may not reply in another comment or post. But this is very incomplete communication. Even personal blogs lasting years yield only skeletons of lives. Time horizons especially are typically circumscribed, limited to the recent past and, in best cases, the near present. Personal futures -- better not to waste time looking. Getting to know someone well from his or her personal blog is nearly impossible. For that, you need many more open exchanges, via emails, lists, IMing, Skyping, videoconferencing, and especially personal meetings. So if I invite you into my life by writing here, do not expect to know me. Nor me to know you. For that, we must dare to embark on a long and arduous journey.

Getting Started, Slowly ...

Well, what's here, or will be, is really more like catching up. Personal stuff, but not really private. Of interest to some, but not many. Who knows where it will lead.