Louis Roney: How's tricks?

• Do some in this country feel that our great nation is sinking into a mire of lower standards of self-satisfaction, and is on a journey to a point of no return? I can remember in my youth when our cry was, “onward and upward forever.” Our original great difference from once all-powerful England was the fact that we did things for ourselves, whereas they depended upon those in their colonies to do the hard work for them. The U.S. refused to be a subservient colony and went on to save England twice in World Wars.

• It occurs to me bizarrely that life is a long series of occasional indispositions, the last of which being one from which we do not manage to recover.

• “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.” I am very lucky indeed in having a good neighbor who frequently brings his workman to do necessary things at our place. Inasmuch as my sight is extremely impaired, my neighbor often sees things that need to be done at our place, and gets them taken care of, thus replacing my eyesight and critical faculties. This kind of good neighbor is more than one could ask for—or deserve!

• We’ve received the shocking news that the New York City Opera company is folding. Living in New York for many years, b.w. and I were regular fans of the company. The future of any performing organization is in the hands of the young people in the audience who grow up supporting it. Audiences for great music in this country are continuingly growing older and shrinking, and this makes me wonder if — God forbid — rock and roll is to take over as the wave of the musical future?

• When I came back with my b.w. to Winter Park, the place where I was raised, I suddenly realized that I had spent most of my life in cold climes. I have a big closet full of cold-wear gear that I haven’t used in the last 33 years—nor do I intend to.

• I have sung with and/or heard most of the great singers of my generation, and often have to answer the question, “Who was the greatest of them all?” and my answer is the miraculous Swedish tenor Jussi Björling — a nice guy too.

• Someone I know opines that it is OK to talk behind other peoples’ backs as long as what you say is true. I feel that it is better also to tell the others what you have said.

• Although the Titanic sank in 1912, all the kids who were in my Winter Park grammar school class knew the song, “The Great Ship Titanic” and we used to sing it in class. My father was an American Lieutenant in France in WWI. The seeds of WWII were buried in the Treaty of Versailles and a defeated Germany was waiting for a guy named Adolf Hitler. My father volunteered in the Navy in 1942 and so both men in our little family were Naval officers in that War.

• The Spaniards say, “There’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip.” Whether it’s Spanish or Icelandic, that saying is sure true in my life. These days it’s hard to get off the ground some grandiose things I am intending to write. Often I get up in the morning with a good idea in my head, then when I get to the keyboard after tooth brushing, coffee, and throwing on a few odds and ends of clothing, I can’t remember my “great idea”— or else my idea is not so “great” after all. I must then come up with a new and better idea, and the news of the day nowadays is not a happy source of inspiration.

• Sorry to read of the death at age 90 of Tennessean 1946 Miss America talent winner Marguerite McClelland, soprano, the beautiful Juliet to my Romeo in our 1947 coast-to-coast tour of Gounod’s opera “Romeo and Juliet.”