Hello Baltimore, I?ve missed you.I haven?t written regularly for a newspaper in seven years, not since leaving the paper of Mencken in January of 2001.
Now, after a few years on ships and a few more in Hollywood, I am at the paper of Twain. It feels right and it feels good. Like that special thing you think won?t ever happen again. But then it does and you smile: How lucky am I?
From this spot each Friday, I will speak to my favorite audience ? you. The conversation (a two-way street, please write) will orbit everything in the universe.
The quick and the dead.
The sacred and the profane.
And the entire Beltway, from Pikesville to Pylesville.
Every little thing.
In 1907, my predecessor at The Examiner, the aforementioned Mr. Clemens, said: “I like a good story well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself.”
If you know my stuff, you can anticipate (but hopefully not predict) what’s to come. A lot of Baltimore, a lot of family (mine and yours) and a lot of food. Books, baseball and the blues. Elvis on the day of his birth, the day of his death and most of the days in between.
I am partial to libraries of all kinds ? be it the Library of Congress or the labyrinths in Jorge Luis Borges? imagination. But I am especially devoted to public libraries, in particular the grand dame that is the Enoch Pratt Free Library.
People who collect things fascinate me but not as much as people who give things away. Sometimes I roll pennies for Darfur. Ridiculous, isn’t it? Like tears in the ocean.
The harvest is rich, baby, but the workers are few.
I like talking to old people, especially older Marylanders, because they are loose with life?s secrets the closer they get to the world to come.
The Examiner doesn?t have an obituary column. A pity, for there is no better historical record than the way someone met their spouse (“over a 15-cent glass of root beer,” is how one widow explained it to me), where they lived and how they toiled.
So from time to time, I will give the departed a special send off, be it an obscure writer who deserves better, a world figure like the heroic Benazir Bhutto or the guy at the garage who rotates your tires.
Speaking of tires, the guy I want to meet is Joe Tormarchio, known to everyone with a radio as “Mr. Tire.”
I bumped into Tormarchio?s daughter Bridgetta, an aspiring actress from Ellicott City, on the Writers Guild of America picket line in Los Angeles just before Thanksgiving. (I?ve been on strike with the WGA since Nov. 5 of last year. More on that and my other, somewhat alien life in Tinseltown, in weeks to come.)
Bridgetta and a co-worker were giving away promotional shorties of tequila packaged in provocative glass bottles to striking writers outside Sony Studios in Culver City.
She saw my Orioles T-shirt (the “cartoon” bird, always) and said, “Hey, I?m from Maryland.” I passed on the tequila but got excited when she claimed to be the daughter of “Mr. Tire.”
Not because my Toyota pickup needs a new set of radials, but because her old man’s radio ads ? “I?ll tell you who I really am!” ? are the best 60 seconds of entertainment in town.
There won’t be much politics in this space (not overtly), but you will find that many times in the past seven years I have been profoundly ashamed of things done in the name of you and me and the rest of this great country.
On the spiritual side ? all that is seen and unseen ? I am a practicing Catholic with the soul of a Jew and a hunch that the Buddhistsknow things the others don?t. The depth of those cultures informs much of what I believe, even when telling stories about the Muslims from Yemen I befriended while working cable ships after leaving Calvert Street.
In a pinch, I?ll write about anything, but more often than not it will be grounded in life as it has been lived along the banks of the Patapsco River from the time of the Piscataways.
That is the inheritance bequeathed to me at birth, a fine kettle of strange and beautiful fish. Show up here each and every Friday, and I?ll spear one for you.
Rafael Alvarez is an author and screenwriter based in Baltimore and Los Angeles. His books ? fiction, journalism and essays ? include “The Fountain of Highlandtown” and “Storyteller.” He can be reached at [email protected].
