September 26, 2005

Memories of James Dean

James Dean, a friend worth remembering.
By Melinda Pillsbury-Foster

The street where we lived in Mar Vista was populated with many families who had a parent working at UCLA; the No. 8 bus rolled past us on National Boulevard and some fathers took the bus so that their wives could have some mobility; most drove. This meant that Moms were often home all day, mine was. The visit of the Helms Man was a major event that brought delectable baked goods into the house. It was a different world than kids experience today. It was homey and friendly. People dropped in to visit and to eat lunch.

It was in Mar Vista, at our home on Colby Avenue between National and what would later be Mar Vista Park where I met James Dean over Beanie sandwiches. He came by to renew the acquaintance between our mothers, before his died and he returned to live in Indiana.

I knew right away Jimmy was not like other adults. He showed me how to augment my Beanie sandwich by crunching in my potato chips. He filled his with things like onions and pickles that Mom let him have from the refrigerator. Both sandwiches caused Mom to roll her eyes, but they tasted great. Jimmy let me try his. Jimmy helped clean up afterwards. He was the only one who could do everything just like Mom liked.

Jimmy came back to visit and eat sandwiches again and again, until he stopped coming back in late 1955. During those visits he taught me a lot about how to look at the world. Those are lessons I never forgot.

Jimmy and I shared a hobby. We both liked to talk about ideas; we both understood being lonely around people who didn't. He said once he had started to live 'an internal life' when he was my age.

After lunch that first day Mom took him outside to look at the roses. But I knew what Jimmy would really like to see, so I grabbed his hand and hauled him to the back of the yard.

I had been watching a tortoise dissolve back into dust, so to speak. I had discovered the tortoise already very dead behind a bush. I was fascinated by the process of its dissolution as ants carried it away and it shrank into itself. I had not told anyone else because I knew how they would react. The tortoise would evoke shrieks and Mom would remove it.

Jimmy was delighted. He proceeded to tell me about observing the same process with a cow on a farm back home. Then, squatting down for a closer look, he told me that the essence of the tortoise, the thing that had make it move and live, was gone. The same happened to all that lived, he told me.

Every visit came with new revelations. It was James Dean who explained to me the process of photosynthesis by telling me that, "Trees breathe; life exists on earth because the green growing things breathe in the light of the sun and produce the oxygen that we, and all life, need to survive.” An amazing way to make that process real and viscerally available to a child.

James Dean loved thinking about the processes of life. He loved books and the ideas that roil in the mind when that mind weaves the possibilities of what is now with what could be. He pounced on new facts with delight.

The James Dean you see projected by Hollywood, a place that was not far from us in distance, is not the person I got to know. My Jimmy was intelligent, focused, insightful, and patient. The Jimmy that Hollywood knew and remembers was an angst ridden teenager, unprepared for life. The two images could not be more different.

Places are one form of separation; the ideas with which we fill our minds can bring us together or they can divide us.

I wish Hollywood had known Jimmy. Then they would understand why he is worth remembering.

Article by Melinda Pillsbury-Foster, President of the Arthur C. Pillsbury Foundation.
http://www.acpillsburyfoundation.com



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