Rod McKuen - Flight Plan


INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW		Rod, One question I’ve always wanted to ask you, will you marry me? Bethanne. Will you marry me? I have great qualifications. To quote you, "I’m strong but I like roses." Jerry Dear Bethanne & Jerry, Yes. Dear Rod, I’m nine. When I grow up will you marry me? Donna Dear Donna, Yes, providing I can get rid of Jerry & Bethanne by then & you’ve managed the skill of pushing a wheel chair around. LISTEN TO THE WARM How can anyone; even you ROD, Listen---------- to the warm? Peter Dear Peter, What, you don’t hear it? Dear Rod, I have been an avid fan for years. I am a former DJ now news director and hopefully soon to be mayor in Logansport, In. Have most of your old albums and some CD projects. Would you ever consider transferring "Listen to the Warm" and the project "The Earth, The Sea, and The Sky" to disc? I believe those two projects would sell like hotcakes. Dick Hettinger Dear Dick, How did the election go? Hope you won. If you read back over the last couple of Ask Rod’s (check out the archive section) there is quite a bit of correspondence about the Elements trilogy & why it isn’t on CD yet. Trust me, it will be as soon as Anita & I can iron out the kinks. Meanwhile CD’s of Listen To The Warm, The Sea and La Mer [The delightful French version of The Sea] and . . .the just issued 40^th Anniversary edition of Beatsville which includes a pretty outrageous original Daddy-O Beatsville Font that can be downloaded to Macs & PC’s, are all available from Stanyan Mail Order. There are ten different items that can be purchased including my New Carols For Christmas album, The Benedictine Monks of St Michael’s Noel at the Monastery and a 3 CD Box set on instrumental music entitled Beautiful Music To Love By. Yesterday in the basement Edward and Dwight discovered 200 copies of the Japanese import CD of the 25^th Anniversary edition of the soundtrack to Joanna. It contains 29 tracks (15 never before issued) and that’s being made available for sale too, as are pocket hardcover editions of the books Stanyan Street & Other Sorrows & Listen To The Warm. All are currently available at Stanyan, Box 2783, Hollywood Ca. [see yesterday’s Flight Plan for more info.] This is a trial program & we hope they sell more like CD’s that hotcakes. If the trial results in a hung jury, it's back to the drawing board. Thanks for the interest, Dick. THE BARN Hi Rod, Were You serious about that barn? I know of a beautiful 200-year-old place tucked quietly here in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. House is huge 6 bedrooms, 6 or 7 fireplaces. Two big ponds and the barn were just refurbished. It's called Queechy Farm in Canaan, NY (Just 2 miles from the Mass. border) I grew up there and it's really paradise. Eric Dear Eric, You bet I’m still interested in the barn. Could you check out the different costs of sending it to me by FedEx, US Mail and UPS? I mean you don’t really think anything could induce me to move to the East Coast where they only have two seasons, Hot & Cold. Here in California we have four seasons, warm spring, warm summer. warm autumn & warm winter. Seriously, Eric, it does sound like a wonderful place. I still have high dreams of building my barn here in my own back yard, but first I have to become gainfully employed. I’m working on that. On This Day Today in the USA we celebrate Veterans Day and for our Canadian neighbors to the north it’s Remembrance Day. In both cases we honor those who have fallen on various battlefields in defense of their countries and those veterans still with us who fought bravely and were fortunate enough to come home. In this time of relative peace in the world it’s sobering to think about the men and women everywhere who care enough about their nations to defend them in wartime. Today’s poem is from a 1980 book of mine entitled "The Power Bright and Shinning". I like to think it’s a different slant on military service. If I wrote it today, I would probably make it a block of prose, for it is a short story. And a true one. Here in Los Angeles one of the most moving sights every November 11^th is the Veterans’ Memorial Cemetery with its thousands upon thousands of military graves, each bedecked with a single American flag. It stretches for acres and it’s hard not to pass by it without becoming teary-eyed. - RM 11/9/1998



		Mose Allison o Ernest Ansermet o LaVerne Baker o Maria Basilides o Leonardo DiCaprio o Fyodor Dostoyevsky o Narvel Felts o Calista Flockhart o Elena Gerhardt o Vernon Handley o Stubby Kaye o Susan Kohner o Demi Moore o Pat O’Brion o William Proxmire o Robert Ryan o Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. o Jonathan Winters o Jesse Colin Young

		War is a telescope whose other end is always fixed on darkness. Most wars are the wreckage of diplomacy. No peace is ever perfect and no war is ever won. The historian say, "It was thus"; the veteran, "I was there."

IT WAS ALWAYS WINTER IN KOREA		It was always winter in Korea – no matter what the time of year, the seasons ran unto each other in one long thread without a gateway. Snow melted into snow. Ice iced over ice. And sparrows like the soldiers of both sides didn’t seem to notice the absence of spring. or the neglect of summer on the landscape. Some days were colder than others, that’s all but even looking back through army snapshots I came across no comrades, no buddies posing or going about their business with their shirts off. Only black and whites or slides, but even they look faded- black and white like winter. One shot of me and a friend – whose name I can’t remember – shows us squatted, bent over at a table In T-shirts, eating kimchee, and that’s the closest photographic memory I own depicting a single summer soldier. I wasn’t quite eighteen I had a year and some months yet to go till I would be called up so I volunteered for the draft. The government used to let you do that – that way a man or boy-man got his service over early and headed home a certified reserve civilian- a veteran, a hero, experience hardened, a big shot till his severance pay and unemployment check ran out The first combat I saw was at Fort Ord, down the coast from San Francisco. During sixteen weeks of basic training thirty-six men in my division were killed or killed themselves. An instructor, "funning it" threw a live grenade at one recruit; it blew off half his arm. He was reprimanded, given four days’ leave with pay and then came back to work. One night, jogging through the darkness on a hike, A non-com coming in off pass plowed into the tail end of our squadron in his nineteen fifty Cadillac killing five men instantly, wounding seven more. Few soldiers oversees could make that boast. No board of inquiry was convened and no Inspector General came That never happened in The Flying Sixty-Third, but he was told by the Commandant himself that drinks and driving just don’t mix a popular slogan of the day. We’ll never know how many lives it saved. Six weeks into basic, long after the infiltration course would take another nine men’s lives, Corporal Garner, I think that was his name, got up from bed while the barracks slept and hanged himself from the rafter just above his bunk. His deed did not disturb the quiet. Only each man soloing His individualistic snore sliced the silence. Stumbling out of bed, but half awake on my way to take piss I bumped against his body and set it twirling in mid-air. I did not cry out or cry. I only sat down on the footlocker opposite this slowly-slower still-turning man and staring straight-ahead said shit. I might have tried to wake the others, but that emotion, the reaction would come later. The noose around the deepening purple neck, the head bent over, eyes bulging ready to drop out like aggies. The shape of him that morning still circles in my mind. He had been the mailman, the quartermaster passing out reality in envelopes of every color, twice a day. Pink envelopes from pink-cheek girls some of us had left behind blue envelopes from mothers and envelopes with stamps embossed on them from practical, utilitarian fathers. It took the company commander one full week to appoint another mailman and then I think he only did it to alleviate the bags of mail that started stacking. All of us wrote home about it but of course the letters never left the post. So much was going on, being pushed and crammed into our heads that most of us forgot to rewrite the incident in letters sent again that finally reached their destinations. Three men died of poisoning over a long weekend. Another seven had their stomachs pumped. We were never told and never knew where the poison came from or any other circumstance related to this latest inconvenience. We did not know we were pieces of meat expendable to be delivered to the battle ground after we’d been made ready for the sport. And after these new deaths whole sackfuls of Hersheys and Baby Ruths were carried to the class or field each day. Mess hall attendance dropped and packages of food from home were usually half eaten by the newest mailman before he made delivery War is hell. Especially in training camps. I should have started realizing that the first morning we fell into the street to stand formation. The barracks sergeant gave a little speech just before the role-call You men, he said, there are two things we don’t allow and we don’t stand for in this man’s army… Eagerly I listened on I didn’t want to break no rules. …racial and religious prejudice, he continued and gum in the urinals. I suppose those are pretty useful truths in army life or just in life. The first we take self-evident. Ah, but the second is much more practical if you’ve ever had to clean a row of barracks’ urinals. Finally on a boat that headed toward Japan one day out of harbor you could see the snow cone of Mt. Fuji, then boxed inside a flying boxcar for the ride from Tokyo to Pusan someone said aloud, I hear it’s cold there. Memories of boot camp, not yet completely gone would soon be taken over by that cold. I never talked to anyone about it much or heard somebody else express it but I knew it to be fact and far away from fiction, it was always winter in Korea. I wonder if the climate’s that way still? Surely snow is not the normal covering for ground where farmers work the earth every day of every year. Maybe it was only one long winter made up by both sides for the war. I’ve heard that steam rose up and covered everything like fog in the Asian jungles of Cambodia and the squatting forests of North and South Vietnam and that no matter what the time of year it always seemed like summer there. Someone else will have to write of that. I only know for sure that it was always winter in Korea. - from "The Power Bright & Shinning"

Birthday research by Wade Alexander

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