by CKR
We’ve been getting lots of hits from searches for Rupert Pole (posts here and here). I suspect that they are prompted by the obituary in the New York Times’s year-end magazine. None of the photos I linked to, however, are anywhere near as charming as the one the Times acquired.
Lots of deaths this yearend in particular. James Brown, Gerald Ford, Saddam Hussein most newsworthily, and of course the continuing deaths of not-so-famous Iraqis and Americans in Iraq.
A few loom large in my universe. Gerald Ford’s decency replaced the guile of Richard Nixon. By that time, the men close to me no longer had to fear the draft, and even Nixon was starting to understand that the war had to be ended. Betty Friedan awakened us to “the problem with no name,” and Coretta Scott King and Jeane Kirkpatrick showed me that my efforts need not be in vain. Glenn Ford and June Allyson were already old hat: ideals that our parents had looked up to, no longer our stars. Marshal Igor Sergeyev moved the nuclear missiles and their warheads safely back to Russia from Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine when the Soviet Union dissolved.
They’re gone now. Ford’s pardon of Nixon will continue to be discussed, but both of them have said all they will say about it. We’ll hear no more from Betty Friedan on how feminism is changing. Marshal Sergeyev will not be able to tell us the details of his operations.
I will recall my best friend’s mother braiding my hair when my mother went to the hospital to give birth to my brother and sister, but I won’t be able to hug her any more.
We’ll have to continue with others and on our own strength. Our memories of them will fade. History argues, and the public people become historical figures. Conversations are locked in their dead minds, nuances of intonation flattened on transcript pages. Reinterpretations and revisionism follow.
Rupert Pole seems unambiguous, a devoted lover and almost-husband. There were things about him that Anaïs Nin didn’t write down. We can think him into an ideal lover and hope there are more. And what woman would turn down one of those?