One for Billy Joe Bianchi

Bill Bianchi 1/16/1950 - 9/4/2020

Thinking of you lots, these days, Billy Joe. Like the song, you’ve been on my mind. I was talking to Dennis de la Montanya the other day. A rarity as I hate talking on the phone. We used Messenger. Even worse, with video. No way to hide how we’ve all aged. I remember when we were young, during the 1960s, Pacific Bell set up mobile labs in the San Geronimo Valley Horseman’s Arena, and we rode down to see what the future might entail. Inside the trailers were telephones with video screens. Cumbersome things. I thought it would never come to pass. But here we are. Do you remember? Phone calls to the future, or to the dead. Dennis had sent a photo of the San Geronimo Valley baseball team. Suddenly I was remembering watching you playing baseball at Lagunitas School, running, top of the ninth, the bases were loaded, we were all yelling slide, slide, home run. How you loved baseball. You could’ve been a contender. Or at least a major league pitcher with that throwing arm. Do you remember that first kiss? Or the time you took the old truck into the lower field, with your sister Cottie and me trailing along behind, little pests that we were—how, as you spun us circles in the dirt in that old Ford, it was as exciting as any carnival ride. But the passenger door flew open with the centrifugal force, and you grabbed my arm as I hovered in space, my legs flying like little flags, the dirt spinning past me. It was the closest I ever got to solo flying. But you didn’t let go of my arm. You didn’t let go. Brave, you are. Blessings upon you, old friend. Blessings. May you walk the bridge in peace. You gave the Big C a heroic fight. Showed it what a home run really meant. Bring the team home, Billy Joe. Bring it home. It’s OK to let go. Walk on. 

William Bianchi obituary

Home Run

We were talking about baseball the other day. Old Lagunitas School friend Dennis de la Montanya was checking in, because of the evacuation. We reminisced about the past, I wanted to see a photo of his father Dean the Milkman, whom I was crazy about when I was a child. Was he is handsome as Dean Martin, the face I remembered? After Dean was killed, Irene married Joe Bianchi. Dennis sent me some photos, among them, a junior league photo of our San Geronimo Valley classmates. I posted it in our San Geronimo Facebook site. Names crawled out of the past: Marc and Wayne Peacock, Johnny Kaufman, the Fahey brothers, Jeff Sousa, and Dennis. No Billy Joe. I guess he had moved on. But in the intricate basket weave of memory, his presence was winnowed. He was our star player. We thought he’d go onto the big leagues. Someone, perhaps Liz Haas, complained that in those days, girls weren’t allowed to play baseball. And she was a good player. I remember one afternoon, everyone gathered at the baseball diamond at Lagunitas school, there were so few of us, that girls and boys played on the same team. It was late afternoon with long shadows, and Linda Gregg hit a home run, her ponytail was a golden stream of sunlight as she ran the bases. Billy Joe Bianchi slid into home. Slide, slide, slide. The bases are loaded, teammates on both sides cheered. Slide. Safe. And now Dennis says Billy Joe is going down for the final count. Bases are loaded, but Billy Joe gave the odd a run for their money.

Three generations of de la Montanyas, Dean, Sr., Dean, Jr., & Dennis 

Jazz Hands and Second Dinners

Me with my faithful pet skunk named Flower,

In the very early days, the school bus dropped us off at the bottom of Arroyo Road, and it was over a mile to my house. Pete's house was about a quarter of a mile up from he highway. I was tired of walking, so I'd follow him home...I was also nearly a year younger than most of my classmates, so I was really a baby walking that long walk home.

Pete's mom, Chuck Sutton would feed us peanut butter sandwiches, and she sometimes gave me a ride home in the green VW bus. Peter never ditched me, though he could've, having two brothers. Even when they made a blanket fort and wouldn't let me in because I was a girl. I'm sure I was a pest. I remember building Lincoln logs with him. I'd never seen Lincoln logs, I was fascinated.

I was devastated when the Suttons moved to Lagunitas. No more free lunch. No more playmates. Nobody ever had any money in those days, and feeding the neighborhood kids was the norm. I remember eating cereal at 5PM with Adair Lara Dalys mob in Lagunitas too. Tony the Tiger. Roarrrrr!

Apparently I had a voracious appetite. I went from house to house grazing with the other kids. Scott Waver's mom made the most outrageous sugar doughnuts. Billy Joe Bianchi's grandmother fed me spongecake and raviolis, saying, "Mangia, mangia." "Eat, eat." And so I did, but I was a skinny kid, so skinny, Jimmy Bohman used to sneer and call me "Skinny" in eighth grade.

Stephanie Stone's blended family was so big, they never even noticed another ravening mouth at the table. Micaela Wall Marsden's stepmom Betty Lang Wall had an open larder policy too. I practically lived hat her house when we were tweenies. Then, I'd go over to another neighbor's house, usually our next-door-neighbor Agnes Vincilione's house for Second Dinner. I must've had a tapeworm or something. Now I'd love to be able to eat like that and still be called Skinny.

Pete Sutton's famous dad once played a concert for us at Lagunitas School. Kevin McConnell reminded me. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven....so cool. The original Loony Tunes. What were we, 2nd graders? We all danced and made jazz hands, little starfish hands keeping rhythm to the tunes. And Steve Tristano playing his dad's (Lennie) famous boogige-woogie chords on the piano afterwards, I thought Mrs. Burges was going to have a stroke. No wonder we were so delightfully warped.

Pete posted a ditty that spurred this memory:

Over in the meadow where the grass grows so even, 
Lived an old mother frog and her Little froggies seven. 
"Spring," said the mother, "We spring," said the seven, 
and they sprung all day where the grass grows so even.

The silly ditty. Think of the soundtracks of those old cartoons from the 50s, that was Pete's dad at the keyboard playing stride piano. Of course, he played more famous jazz tunes too.So what rainsong would Ralph Sutton play, if he was still with us, this morning? Was a time you couldn't find anything on him on the internet. Didn't realize he lived in Aspen. He's been rediscovered. I found references to Ralph on the internet, but (no mention of "Chuck.")

Katelin asked, Wasn't it Tristani?

Lennie Tristano. Another name out of childhood. When I was a kid, I thought all good piano players had to be blind, like Lennie, and also Kent Weaver (Scott Weaver's bro), so when someone offered us a piano (and lessons), I didn't want it. NO siree! I liked my eyes.

Lennie played cool jazz bebop, using chord progression. The Wiki article says Steve only met him once after 1956, but I remember meeting him walking down the road (SFD Blvd) to the Lagunitas store—two blind piano players and their entourage cut quite a swath in the imagination of childhood.

INSOMNIA at 3AM, Imaginary letters to Wiley

Insomnia after the art opening at Sonoma State. We went to Christine's and I think my decaf mocha was indeed very caffeinated.

So odd the bidding started right away on my piece, a sculptor from Occidental finally bought the piece. I think it was a major shock to see how well people responded to my work. Last year's piece too. It seems that the whimsical quality of the pieces combined with the words is a major attraction.

I'm glad the writing is important because it's a challenge for me to place the words on an art piece. How do you use the words so that they don't dominate the piece? We are such illiterate society. That's what I need to work on as a series.

It's hard for me to just do a piece of art. It has to be for someone specific, the personal aspect. That's what I tell the kids in class: the personal becomes the universal.

I have the 3 AM jitters, rapid heartbeat, a breathless feeling, and a racing mind. The things that keep going around my head. I imagine that I'm writing a letter on adding machine tape inside my large fish box piece dedicated to William T. Wiley. I'm carrying on about this and that, my urge to thread the words together meld with my desire to ask him for a watercolor.

The imaginary letter goes something like this:

Dear Bill,

This is just to say, to borrow a line from the good Dr. William Carlos Williams, that I admire the work you've been doing lately as an antiwar protest. Our work's been in a few shows together. Your piece in Megabark with Jane Hirshfield's poem. Mine with Ann Faught.

Last year's valentine from the Sonoma State art show drew a lot of attention, and some of the crossover between painter and poet interest me because I was a painter and now I am a poet. A painter-poet.

I wanted to tell you for years I fantasized about writing to you, to ask you for a watercolor that you did of my grandmother's house. I'm sure you probably don't even remember it. It's a picture of a red house with a painted black crooked chimney surrounded by the hills above Baranca Road.

That painting of my grandmother's house is the family homestead. You may not know that she is the oldest settler in the Valley, she's 93. The former champion, the old Frenchman in San Geronimo, is dead.

I rode past your house a couple of weeks ago but no one's home. Probably the last time I rode past your house was when I was a child on donkeyback. No, it was on my horse.

I remember when the Raynes sold the house after she choked on a piece of steak and died. You moved in soon afterward and placed various bits of debris in the yard. I was coming from the fire trail from my usual ride. There's another house up there now, so I can no longer trespass—I didn't even remember where the road comes out anymore. But I remember the sweet sizzle of bugs. I used to think it was the grease brush singing in the heat of summer to the tortured rocks.

It was dusk, something new was visible in the crotch of the madrone. Something large and white like a ghost. I thought of Mrs. Raynes with her clipped English accent, how her horse turned up that road, sides heaving, flecks of foam on his chest, as he carried that fragile load of human flesh home.

I was terrified to go past the tree, forcing my horse closer. I thought perhaps it was a phosphor from the deadwood. So I sat outside your window on horseback and watched you in the kitchen preparing tea, until the fear subsided. I suppose I could've screamed but the horse was already nervous enough.

Once when I was coming home from second grade, we had afternoon session and I when got home around 5 PM, it at dark. The low winter light on the fallen tree trunks glowed as though ghosts were living in the limbs. I was afraid to walk home in the dark. No one believed me. And, worse, Billy Joe Bianchi laughed.

Years later he told me he went up there to see if it was true, but the trees didn't glow at night. The timing wasn't right.

As I came closer to the madrone, the apparition began to decode itself. I saw that you had placed the white Styrofoam torso of a woman in the blackened recess where the lip of the Cambrian layer eked out a dark smile.

That torso gleaming white in the winter dusk, transfixed me to the spot. I couldn't move, it follows me still. I see something white in the darkness out of the corner of my eye and when I look at it, I can see nothing.

This is why you have to look at the Andromeda Nebula or Orion's supernova shoulder, out of the corners of your eyes. The Pleiades are a blur when you view them had on. You can see more when you look indirectly. And that's also so with art too. Sublime.

And that torso trapped in the trunk of an old tree was like an escaped dream let loose in the dark woods at night. Signs of habitation, a new owner. The light from the kitchen window knocked against the darkness. From within the encircled garden below the kitchen, the clatter of deer antlers, as they lifted their heads to watch us pass.

2/7/86
added, rev. 9/17