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January 24, 2010

The Off Season: Going on a search for ‘Rosebud’

By Mike Lunsford The Tribune Star Sun Jan 24, 2010, 08:47 PM EST

The following story should come with a “spoiler alert,” one of those pulsating red neon scroll bars that allows the reader to know that the writer is about to give away some critical piece of information — a joke’s punch line, a novel’s resolution, a movie whodunnit’s killer…

If you have never seen the classic film, “Citizen Kane,” and you don’t want to get the lowdown on it, kindly move now to the lottery information on page 2. I had never heard of “Citizen Kane” until I took a course in mass media during my freshman year at Indiana State. My instructor, Gary Steinke, did for me, as my students would now say, a “solid,” by introducing me to that film, which was recently, once again, named the all-time greatest movie by the American Film Institute, if such rankings really matter.

I loved the movie from that first time I saw it, its incredible deep-focused black-and-white images flickering away from one reel to the next as I sat absorbed in my cramped oak student desk in a second-floor Dreiser Hall classroom. I’ll leave its merits for others to argue; what interested me most then, and still intrigues me now, is Kane’s sled, his now iconic “Rosebud.”

To make a long movie short, “Kane” is the story of Charles Foster Kane, a multi-millionaire publisher. The fictional character was supposedly based on the very real newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who forbade anyone in his presence to even mention it. As the film begins, Kane dies in the icy bedroom of his cavernous mansion, Xanadu. Before he expires, he drops the snow globe (it was his second wife’s) he has been holding and croaks the word, “Rosebud.”

Kane’s final whisper sets the film’s plot into motion as a reporter leaves no stone unturned in an attempt to discover what the dying man really meant. He never finds his answer, but in the movie’s final scene the viewer sees Rosebud consigned to the flames of Xanadu’s furnace, nothing but a piece of worthless trash amidst a sea of the old man’s endless collections. The sled was just a tiny bit of Kane’s life, yet, perhaps the only enduring happy memory of his childhood

“Kane” is, of course, considerably more complicated than the “Reader’s Digest Condensed” version I’ve just handed to you, but, to me, the most compelling storyline in the film is that such a powerful man, a man who had everything, and lost much of it, would have on his lips at his death the one thing that made him most happy. I’ve always wondered if we all have a “Rosebud” in our pasts.

There’s no way that I can know what my parents’ ideas of Rosebud were; they died before I thought to ask them, and my brother, sister and I have precious little from our folks’ childhoods to divide among the three of us. I know that when I think of my dad and what made him most happy, I would have to say that it was his old Willy’s Jeep. I remember the rattle of it — a 1946, I think — as we took Sunday afternoon drives up the County Line Road. My dad always had a smile on his face when he drove that thing, but, of course, that was long after his childhood was done. I guess I could call it a memory of his second childhood, perhaps.

I’d like to think that I have a photo of what my mom’s childhood keepsake was. The snapshot of her shows a long-legged girl of about 10 astride a huge bicycle in the yard of her 1940s West Terre Haute home. She has curlers in her hair, and in the basket of her bike sits a little two-toned terrier. On the back of the photo she had written “Louie and me.” I don’t know, but perhaps Louie was a memory she clung to for many years; I want to believe that anyway.

I have written about so many of my own memories that choosing something to be my Rosebud is next to impossible. I have told stories about the rock hammer my grandparents bought for me in the days I aspired to be a geologist, and the old oak tool box my dad saved from a landfill that still sits in our living room, filled with a collection of rocks and fossils. I hope my children and their children will someday want it. I have my first baseball glove, and I have a nearly perfect arrowhead that I kicked up in the sandy field next to my boyhood home; I must have been about 10 when I did that. I also have a very old copy of “Treasure Island,” too, and it was a book I came to love then, as I still do.

Sitting on my desk is a small piece of quartz that my Grandmother Blanche found in a stream in Virginia many years ago. I pick it up every once in a while and hold it to the light as I did when I was boy. My grandmother kept the quartz in her purse; it was always wrapped in a piece of tissue paper, and she would often show it to me as I sat in the front seat of a blue Chevrolet Biscayne between my grandparents on unbearably long road trips to Brazil on Sunday afternoons to visit even older, more wrinkled, relatives.

Despite her telling me that the quartz was just that, that she kept it because she knew I liked it, and that she had found it in a place where she used to sit and listen to falling water, I always believed that it was a diamond, that in time she’d sell it, and we’d all be rich. She was barely 60 when she died, and it is one of the few things I have from her. When I look at it, I think I can still see myself crammed into that old Chevy riding the waves of the Rio Grande Road to Clay County.

Early in “Citizen Kane,” a young Charlie can be seen through a kitchen window as he plays in the falling snow on his sled in a Colorado winter. He is truly happy despite his poverty. The sled is left behind in his mother’s boarding house, and later in the film, before he enters into a sordid affair that ends his first marriage and leads him into a disastrous second, he implies that he is on his way to a warehouse where Rosebud can put him in touch with his past.

If we are lucky in life, we’ll not only have people who love us to hold onto, but also we’ll have our memories, whether they be in the form of sleds or pet dogs or bits of stone. They might just comfort us in tough times and make our good days even better. If there’s anything that Kane teaches us, it’s that.

Mike Lunsford can be reached at hickory913@aol.com, or by regular mail c/o the Tribune-Star, P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47809. He will be signing his books at BookNation on Feb. 5. Visit Mike’s Web page is at www.mikelunsford.com.

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Mike Lunsford

• MIKE LUNSFORD: Books open our eyes to that which we will never see

  I got a letter last week from a friend, Sister Margaret Quinlan, who lives amidst the beauty of the St. Mary-of-the-Woods campus. Besides the email space and the time she invests in describing the flowers and trees and birds that she shares with her roomies out there, as well as her accounts of teaching and traveling, Margaret most often writes about books. She loves them, and she knows I do, too.

  February 6, 2012  

• MIKE LUNSFORD: Hoping to master the art of taking a nap

  I got away from work as early as I could one day last week. It was a cloudy day, filled with grayness and rain, and my head felt as if I had inhaled my pillow the night before. My throat suggested I’d swallowed a wood rasp, too, and my eyes felt as though I was looking through someone else’s glasses. Yet, I had work do, this column being on the list of chores.

  January 23, 2012  

• MIKE LUNSFORD: Windy companion finally gives him the cold shoulder

  The wind came to visit us this week. We live on the knob of a hill that overlooks a Raccoon Creek valley, and it is a breezy spot year-round, but this wind was the kind that ushers in a full-blown front from Canada, perhaps just to remind us that cold weather is going to be the boss around here for a while. No matter how surprising our mild winter has been so far, this kind of wind tells us not to expect many more warm days over the next few months.

  January 9, 2012  

• SIDELINES: Good for even a traditional Classic buff

  Lights down, tree out, another year gone at the Classic.

  January 4, 2012  

• THE OFF SEASON: The more things change, the more they keep changing

  I must have had at least a dozen people ask at my son’s wedding a few weeks ago whether I cried, or “how I was handling losing him.” I think they all knew just how tight I am with my two kids, and thought I must have come completely unglued when it finally hit me that he was on his own for good, that the rules had changed nearly as much in my life when he said ,“I do,” as they did for him.

  December 26, 2011  

• Lunsford signing new book at Brazil Coffee Grounds

  Parke County writer Mike Lunsford will be signing his latest book, “A Place Near Home” (Shade Tree Press; $15) from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday at Coffee Grounds, Bakery and Coffee Shop in Brazil.

  December 8, 2011  

• MIKE LUNSFORD: In the neighborhood with the ‘fantastic’ Mr. Fox

  As we drove home late one night last week, my wife and I, both a bit drowsy and anxious for a warm bed and a long nap, were surprised to see a red fox as it darted across the road. He made his appearance in a flash — just a bit of nose and fur and bushy tail — as he jumped out of a ditch in front of our car and was caught in the glare of our headlights on his way to the relative safety of an apple orchard.

  November 14, 2011 2 Photos  

• MIKE LUNSFORD: The lizard wore long johns, and other Halloween tales

  We stocked our house with a supply of Halloween candy last week; Joanie and I stopped into the new dollar store in town and filled a grocery cart with Butterfingers and Baby Ruths and Three Musketeers bars. Every aromatic bit of it has been calling to me from the orange-and-black baskets we keep on a living room trunk ever since.

  October 31, 2011 1 Photo  

• MIKE LUNSFORD: Here’s to the simple beauty of an untended garden…

  I can hear a combine eating its way across a nearby cornfield as I write this on a Saturday evening. It is a sound that signals the end of one season and the beginning of anot

  October 17, 2011 2 Photos  

• The Off Season: Listening to Mozart is a ‘purr-fect’ way to relax

  Regardless of what some people may believe, classical music fans are not snobs. They come from all walks of life, fall into all income brackets, and they’re not required to understand or analyze anything to which they’re listening; they just need to enjoy themselves.

  October 3, 2011  

• MIKE LUNSFORD: Fall’s arrival heralded in ever-present fencerows

  As much as I hate summer to leave us, I am happy that fall is just around the corner. It has been a bone-dry season, one in which I’ve watched my yard bake and crack like an old pie crust. My wife and I are still spending our evenings going about the business of watering flowers, standing with a dribbling hose in our hands, optimistically hoping that our drought will be broken because we’ve tempted the weather fates to do us one better and give us a good rain.

  September 19, 2011 1 Photo  

• MIKE LUNSFORD: The value of hard work goes well beyond a paycheck

  Years ago, I used to drive into Rosedale to get my workday started with a big cup of black coffee. Every morning, Monday through Friday, until the town grocery store’s business dried up and blew away, you could have found me slipping through a back door — left unlocked for the early birds — of the old Red and White, 15 minutes before it opened for official business.

  September 5, 2011 1 Photo  

• MIKE LUNSFORD: Life’s little conveniences actually can be quite annoying

  I am aware that much of the language I use is outdated, stodgy, old-fashioned; I apologize.

  August 22, 2011 1 Photo  

• The Off Season: Another sad passing: One-time trendsetter can’t keep up

  I wandered into the local mall bookstore the other day. My wife and I had come to town with a list of chores to do and things to buy, but whenever we venture anywhere near a place with book shelves and sales tables and racks of paperbacks, we’re attracted to the scent of ink and the sight of book covers like bees to clover .

  August 8, 2011  

• MIKE LUNSFORD: Overheated in Hobart and other vacation tales…

  My family climbed into our van and headed to Michigan a few weeks ago, just as we do every other year or so, to stay on the great lake there, for we have come to love its cool breezes and blue water and lighthouses.

  July 25, 2011 1 Photo  

• MIKE LUNSFORD: Silence is wonderful, as long as you don’t take it too far

  I have visited this topic — how it is often only through inconvenience that we come to appreciate the comforts we have in life — before.

  July 11, 2011 1 Photo  

• MIKE LUNSFORD: His tolerance for insects ends with sawyer beetles

  As I sloshed a can of water over a pot of red petunias a Sunday morning ago, I saw a pine sawyer beetle make its way slowly up the vinyl siding near my front door. I swatted it to the concrete, and smashed it with my shoe … with impunity, I might add.

  June 27, 2011 1 Photo  

• MIKE LUNSFORD: Storm damage makes you appreciate home

  My wife and I hadn’t been into town for a good while when we drove in from our place to visit her doctor and my favorite hardware store last week.

  June 13, 2011 1 Photo  

• Paying respect in more way than one way…

  It has become a habit of mine on Mother’s Day to go to Rosedale Cemetery and lay a few irises on my mom’s grave.

  May 30, 2011 3 Photos  

• The Off Season: On the trail with Max the Mushroom Cat

  The wet weather and a busy calendar have kept my wife and me from doing what we’ve really wanted to do for a while. Ever since the thermometer began to stay consistently above 40 and the grass started to green, we’ve wanted to get outside, get some sun on our arms, and get down to the wetlands to watch the geese make their landings with a flourish and a honk.

  May 2, 2011  

• THE OFF SEASON: So much to do; so little time…

  My wife’s aunt, Martha Jean McCarthy, passed away earlier this month; she was 85 years old. Martha Jean was kind and generous and busy her entire life.

  April 18, 2011 1 Photo  

• MIKE LUNSFORD: A lesson plan for public schools

  I am an advocate of public education; I pull no punches about that. I have taught in public schools for 32 years, and I think it is an inherently American institution.

  April 3, 2011  

• THE OFF SEASON: Craning to see elegance in flight

  Just before midnight last night, spring officially slipped quietly into our back yards, but I doubt that any of us noticed it much this morning as we slurped our coffee or downed our eggs over this newspaper.

  March 21, 2011 1 Photo  

• The office boy who became a poet

  I made up my mind when I moved my home office out of the house last summer that I’d organize some of my books, that I’d categorize and catalogue them in a way that would help me find the one I wanted when I wanted it. I can’t say it worked out as well as I had hoped. Already, I have the overflow stacked on the floor and shoved into the spaces where previous tenants once lived. Gradually, expediency is replacing order, so fiction and non-fiction, biographies and novels, are scandalously co-mingling on my shelves.

  March 7, 2011  

• THE OFF SEASON: The office boy who became a poet

  I made up my mind when I moved my home office out of the house last summer that I’d organize some of my books, that I’d categorize and catalogue them in a way that would help me find the one I wanted when I wanted it. I can’t say it worked out as well as I had hoped.

  March 7, 2011  

• THE OFF SEASON: It’s taken long time to say thanks…

  It was with a cup of coffee and a newspaper in my hands a few Mondays ago that I discovered that Mr. Hapenny had died.

  February 21, 2011 1 Photo  

• THE OFF SEASON: Lessons learned from the night the ice fell

  The picture window of my cabin is sealed in a perfect glaze of ice as I write this, last Thursday morning, and since it faces due north and sees little direct sunlight, I imagine I will be looking through this shower door glass of mine for a few more days. But since I sit and watch the woods much of the time, instead of writing, I suppose the ice is serving a rare good purpose in keeping me on task.

  February 7, 2011 1 Photo  

• The Off Season: Pass a ‘midnight dreary’ with The Big Read

  It was a pretty poor excuse for an evening one night last week as I lay beside our glowing fireplace, a pillow propped behind my head. I was spending some time with my current read, enjoying each page in the semi-darkness, smug in the knowledge that I’d not be heading to my classroom the next day.

  January 24, 2011  

• The Off Season: ‘Too old and too lazy’ to deal with coyotes

  Despite the cold and the ever-present winter breezes that blow across our hill these days, I often find myself, even in the blue evenings, standing on the walk near my cabin, looking at the stars or watching for the last red-tailed hawks of the day as they float by in the drafts.

  January 10, 2011  

• The Off Season: The passion of having a passion is a great thing

  It just occurred to me that I am fortunate to have a passion — a drive to do something that takes me away from the clutches of my job, of home repairs, of the mundane and the ho-hum.

  December 27, 2010  

• More Mike Lunsford Headlines

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