NOT that it's of earthshaking importance in these parlous days, but . . . wait. All days are parlous. All days - by which is meant all eras - are rough and tumble, and they are also fancy free. We think a little economic uncertainty is nightmarish, compared to what? World War? Cold War? The world immediately before this one, that 99.99percent of human history without lights, plentiful food, warmth, that cellphone savant with all human knowledge sitting in your pocket?
So what I was going to say was that the naming by a city of its poet laureate is not a matter of life and death - except you will recall what William Carlos Williams said: "It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." Williams was a revered physician in Paterson, N.J., the kind who made housecalls in the middle of the night, that most practical man, a man of life and death. And yet what is he remembered for? Writing great poems. If you haven't read them, turn from this now and do so. They might save your life.
As I was saying: When I heard last week that Eloise Klein Healy was named the first poet laureate of the city of Los Angeles, I breathed two sighs of relief.
The first was that a poet was named poet laureate. When city muckamucks announced that they would search for one, all kinds of non-poets came out of the Encino woods and announced that they should be the laureate of the City of Angels, even if they weren't,well, exactly poets themselves. But they were the bard of something-or-another, or they write really swell prose, or they spin a fine ghost story, or they make excellent movies or video games.
That they weren't actually poets was small beer so far as they were concerned.
This is the kind of thing that happens to poets all the time, and I am mystified as to why. No one who is, I don't know, a newspaper columnist would, when the time comes to name that year's Nobel Prize in physics, claim that it is he instead of those fellows writing the equations who should be feted by the king at the banquet in Stockholm. So why should poetry - which I assure you is precisely as complex an art as physics - be considered a craft in which every Jasper with a mildly creative streak is a candidate for the post the same as those who have actually written, and published, poems?
Second sigh of relief: Eloise is a wonderful choice. Man alive, is she a real poet. You can look her up - she is an ardent practitioner of the craft, which is a life's work. The non-poet could no more write her poems than I could paint a Picasso. But here's a fun one, a stanza from "Entries: LA Log": I never owned a map / to the stars' homes / but I sent to JPL / for 8x10 glossies of Mars / to stick up around my mirror.
Of course there's a Pasadena connection. There always is. While Healy lives in Sherman Oaks, her publisher is Kate Gale and Mark Cull's Red Hen Press, headquartered right here in town, the biggest small press on the West Coast. Red Hen has published a number of her books; she even runs a special imprint of poetry books by others through the press; and it will publish her next, which is not only a volume, but comes with what poetry started out as, sound. "A Wild Surmise: New & Selected Poems & Recordings" will be released in March.
So congratulations to Eloise, and to Los Angeles, for picking a real poet as its laureate. Every town should have one - Altadena does, for instance, and she is dynamite: Linda Dove, who we at LitFest Pasadena got to hear reading at that finest versifying location, the Altadena Ale House. What's more, every town should pay its laureate, as Los Angeles will: $10,000 a year. There will not be any money from the municipal treasury better spent next year than the bucks engaged in spreading the good word.
The person responsible for Harry Delmolino’s ghost bike is reportedly a close friend who protects his identity. Those who work nearby often see the man bringing fresh flowers.
Susan Delmolino, Harry’s mother, has seen the ghost bike but finds it too painful to return there.
“It gives me some comfort,” she said. “It’s so respectful and, in some ways, so tender.”
John Delmolino, Harry’s father, says he is pleasantly surprised the city has allowed the memorial to remain in place so long.
Susan Delmolino, 60, and John Delmolino, 64, live in Hadley, close to the Sunderland town line. The location of their home made it a long ride for Harry to go anywhere on his bike. Still, it was his transportation of choice, and he bicycled back and forth to his information technology job at Smith College and his day job at an Amherst bike shop called Laughing Dog and often rode the bike paths of Northampton and Easthampton just for the fun of it.
“He’d do 40 miles a day as a lark,” his mother recalled recently.
Harry and his sister, Grace, were home-schooled from an early age and were in and out of college by the time their peers were graduating from high school, but their parents are reluctant to talk about this. The Delmolinos haven't viewed their kids as prodigies but as their children, as people, breathtakingly normal, though endlessly fascinating and burdened by the usual growing pains which young people have.
Susan Delmolino worked as a child-abuse investigator for the state, but left that job years ago to be home with her children. Because Harry and Grace were so self-directed, her biggest task as their mother, she said, was to get out of their way. It was time she would otherwise not have spent with them, and she treasures it.
Harry Delmolino started taking classes at Greenfield Community College when he was just 13. Grace, now 20, is working on a doctorate in medieval Italian literature at Columbia University. That might sound impressive, but being precocious is not the highest priority in the Delmolino household.
“It’s not how smart you are,” said Susan Delmolino. “It’s what you do.”
John Delmolino, a retired state trooper who is in his second career as an interior house painter, has a more concise way of putting it.
“The jails are full of smart people,” he said.
Fortunately, the Delmolinos didn’t have to worry about their kids on that count.
Harry Delmolino joined the Boy Scouts and worked his way up to Eagle Scout. He went on an 11-day hiking trip to New Mexico with Boy Scout Troop 504 of Amherst. He climbed Mount Monadnock in the snow. He had a girlfriend. He fell in love with bicycling.
John Delmolino says he was taken aback by his son’s need to take things apart and amazed by his ability to put them back together.
Harry’s bike, for instance, his father explained, was in a hundred pieces soon after he bought it. Then, like magic, it was a bike again. He disassembled many household appliances. At 12 he asked for a welder for Christmas. He had barely learned to walk when he threw a hissy-fit over some kind of digging contraption he wanted. His parents gave in. Harry spent hours with it in the dirt pile.
As he got older, Harry Delmolino was drawn more and more to computer science. He won a temporary job at Smith by essentially convincing the college he could fix anything, his parents said. He was planning to take classes at the University of Massachusetts to get a degree in computer science.
The young man bought a $1,000 bike, took it apart, put it together and then got a job at Laughing Dog where he worked on repairing other people’s bikes.
Parker Ramspott, who owns the Amherst bike shop, said it was not uncommon for Harry Delmolino to work on $6,000 bicycles. “He loved bikes,” Ramspott said. “It got him real fit.”
On the morning of his accident, Harry and his mother made a couple of trips to the house next door with Harry’s belongings. The family had bought the house as a place for him to spend the summer before he went to UMass.
For the Delmolinos, it was the best of both worlds. Harry would be close by, but he would have the privacy a young man craves.
“You’re spreading your wings,” said Susan Delmolino. “You want to have the freedom.”
Then, Harry rode off to work at Laughing Dog and later biked to Northampton.
The office of Northwestern district attorney David Sullivan announced this week that its investigation found no basis upon to bring criminal charges against the driver of the car that struck Harry Delmolino, Cesar Avelar. The investigation determined the incident was an accident. Delmolino was not wearing a helmet.
The city of Northampton will use some of the state funds it receives for road and bridge repair to study the intersection of Main and Pleasant streets with an eye towards installing a dedicated left-turn signal for motorists entering from the east along Main from Hadley and Amherst, as Avelar was. It is the only one of the four entry points to the major downtown intersection where Route 9 meets Route 5 that lacks such a signal.
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