The Close of The Closer & Dreams

Oh Brenda Leigh Johnson, how I'm going to miss you. As you would say, "Thank you, thank you. Thank you so very much." Kyra Sedgwick became Brenda Leigh, and I don't see how she can ever go into another role as someone else. But then, I didn't think Ray Romano could either, and he made the transition. Major Crimes can't possibly live up to the standard set by Kyra Sedgwick and The Closer. So, goodbye, Brenda Leigh. I'm really going to miss you.

My dreams are getting weirder and weirder. And so many are only half-awake, half-asleep dreams. Last night I dreamed about Miniver Cheevy. I think I was prompted by my thinking about my old buddy Bill Pilgrim, who, in a letter to me, called me Miniver. At the time I didn't know why he called me that. And then, in my teaching career, I taught the poem "Miniver Cheevy" to my Am lit classes, even had it memorized because I'd taught it so many times. All right, so, in my dream, I thought about Miniver Cheevy, couldn't remember who wrote it, could only remember the first verse. "Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn, grew lean while he assailed the seasons. He wept that he was ever born, and he had reasons." But I kept going over it and over it in my half-dream, half-awake state. At first I thought it was from Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology (an idea which came to me in the dream). That led me to "Richard Cory," which I'd also taught enough to have memorized it, thought it too was from Spoon River. That reminded me of the old Beatles' song "Richard Cory." I remembered the first stanza and the final two lines but not the middle sections. "Whenever Richard Cory went down town, we people on the pavement looked at him. He was a genleman from sole to crown, clean favored and imperially slim." And then the last two lines, "And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, went home and put a bullet through his head." Over and over and over again and I just couldn't come up with any other lines from either poem. Weird dream. This morning I looked up both poems, "Miniver" (1910) and "Richard" (1897) by Edwin Arlington Robinson, the bleakness, the blackness of both poems the result of hard, depressed times following the panic of 1893. And the closing stanza of "Miniver Cheevy"? "Miniver Cheevy, born too late, scratched his head and kept on thinking. Miniver coughed and called it fate, and kept on drinking." So, I guess my buddy Bill was suggesting I was too much a romantic to be happy living in a starkly realistic world.