Remembering my old Scoutmaster

Mr. Palazzo (center) at a cabin in which we camped at Camp Bullowa, at which it snowed. Best campout ever.

NOTE: I do not know when this originally ran, and I don't know if this is the way it appeared in print, exactly.

My old digital archives are so out of date I can't open a clean version of my old work.

From the file creation date info, it might have been around July of 2003 when I wrote this. The time fits, because I was in the waning days of my time at The People-Sentinel.

I saw a post from the daughter of my old Scoutmaster today on Facebook. So I thought I would dig this up.

(I thought I had all my latter work saved as a pdf, but nope.)

Anyway, on to Mr. Palazzo.

Originally published in The People-Sentinel around July 31, 2003.)

I don't know why, but I thought the unhappiest thing a wedding invitation might garner was a "Sorry, I am unable to attend" check.

I didn't expect him to come, but I sent the invitation on anyway, just in case. If he couldn't, it would let him know that after so many years, I still remembered him. But the answer for Nick Palazzo came instead in a letter to my father.

I shouldn't call him by his first name. He was my Scoutmaster when I was growing up. I always called him Mr. Palazzo. It's an Italian name, and only one person, a priest at St. Helen's parish in New York, pronounced it correctly when we were growing up – Pah-lots-so.

He was the Scoutmaster of Troop 56, St. Raymond's. He's the guy who watched us. He didn't try to teach us "leadership" like they do in some troops these days. He saw who the natural leaders were and he tried to develop them.

He worked in the city planning office of New York City.

When the terrorists attacks happened on Sept. 11, I thought of Mr. Palazzo, because he had given us, when we moved to South Carolina, something to remember New York City with. They were five books, the city planning documents for all five boroughs of New York. They were so big, square pages bigger than a phonograph record. I mostly looked back on those pages to the book on the Bronx, about Parkchester, where I grew up. But the Manhattan section had a detail plan for something called the World Trade Center, which wasn't complete.

It weighed about 20 pounds, at least.

It was a great gift to give someone leaving the greatest city in the world, in my case under protest. It kept us connected.

He was an usher at the church. He was a father.

When I signed up, even though the Scouts met in the basement of St. Raymond's Elementary School, I never knew how heavily tied into religion the Scouts were. But as a Cub Scout, he got us to get our religious medal, the Parvuli Dei. And he was my instructor when I went through the Boy Scout-level Catholic Scout award – the Ad Altare Dei.

That's Latin, and it means Approaching the altar of God.

It was a big deal, and I still have the cross badge and red white blue and yellow ribbon that I earned by listening, in part, to what Mr. Palazzo taught us.

I must have been 12 when I went for it, and I am 37 now. A quarter of a century has passed, yet I can still remember one night, walking home from an Ad Altare Dei class, at which Mr. Palazzo tried to teach us about Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, which we Catholics call the Beatitudes. It was an odd situation for me, that class. Mr. Palazzo was a "civilian" yet he was teaching us religion. He wasn't a priest or a nun or a school teacher.

But he made the most salient point I've ever been taught.

"Blessed are those who show mercy, for mercy shall be theirs," Jesus said. What did that mean, Mr. Palazzo asked. I was a kid, and of course I didn't know. I thought maybe it meant there was a scorecard up in heaven, and you got points later on, in the afterlife. He knew it wasn't so silly.

So he taught me.

"When you do something for someone else, don't you feel good inside?" he asked. I thought I did.

"Isn't that a mercy?" he asked. Indeed it is. I can hear his voice, I can see him standing next to me, me on the other side of my father and my brother as we walked home.

He was just a good man, a man who told me that sometimes my ability to make people laugh was also a mercy for those people, a mercy that should return to me.

I am on the verge of tears as I write this.

I just wanted the invitation to perhaps thank him for always teaching me, and he never saw it.

He was a large man, though. Late in life, he developed diabetes. He got a sore on his foot that wouldn't heal. He was put in the hospital, and some toes were amputated, then his leg, at the knee. The second amputation caused a blood clot.

On Thursday, I found out all that. His wife Phyllis wrote a letter to my father because she had gotten the wedding invitation.

I found out Thursday Nick Palazzo died. He died back in January, and I just found out Thursday.

I need some mercy, Lord; mercy for Mr. Palazzo, a good, good man who I never thanked.

It doesn't have to come back to me, but right now, I could use some myself.

Edit to add: I think an online obituary I found is his. Lists "Nicholas A Palazzo was born on February 20, 1926. He died on January 24, 2003 at age 76." 

Dad (center) and Mr. Palazzo (right) at the cabin we camped in at Camp Bullowa where it snowed, we had an epic snowball fight and we went out after Bigfoot at night.

Thoughts on The Last Jedi soundtrack

DO I HAVE TO SAY SPOILERS?

I have always been a fan of the great John Williams, and I have pored over every recording of his Star Wars soundtracks. A lot of time, I have found it's the music, not the performances that tell us what we are supposed to feel in movies,and very most particularly with a John Williams score.
Just as a prefatory note, I was thrilled to finally be able to get the soundtrack to The West Wing by the great W.G. "Snuffy" Walden. And I almost, almost wish I hadn't.
It is a fantastic soundtrack, but it is not separately as listenable. Walden's soundtrack sets the scenes so well. But just to kick back and listen, it's not great in that separate way.
Anyway, when I went into the theater the first time, I thought I recognized most of the themes that Williams was basing his music on. And I wasn't sure, but I was thinking that they were just the themes that Williams had created, many of them years ago, without what I consdered the tailoring Williams did for each theme when it is actually used on screen.
For example, Williams wrote a theme, Luke and Leia, for the scenes in the Return of the Jedi where Luke tells Leia she is his sister and he has to face their father.
But on the Special Edition soundtrack, they include first the performance cue that was actually used in the movie, which they named "Brother and Sister" on the album (for lack of a better word these days).
But it sounded like they were using "Luke and Leia" almost straight up in the scenes in which Luke and Leia have a tender but brief reunion. And just now listening to both, I think I am pretty much on target about that.
Also, Williams wrote "Yoda's Theme" for The Empire Strikes Back, but he tailored for the couple of cues where he raises the X-wing out of the swamp and shows Luke what the Force is really about. And he also made it an "action" cue, as Williams described it, for when Luke is attacked briefly by Boba Fett on Cloud City.
But when Yoda's Force ghost shows up in The Last Jedi, the music playing is a very close rendition of just Yoda's Theme.
Also, a piece of music that has never been played on screen before, straight up, but used to inform other cues is Princess Leia's Theme. It appears in The Last Jedi, straight up, when Leia uses the Force for the first time on screen.
It might read like I am saying John Williams was phoning this soundtrack in, but I am just pointing out the very specific choice I think he made. I think he saw the movie bringing those characters back, and he brought back their themes to give the fans who wish nothing to change to have exactly what they wanted.
Because Leia using the Force is a very different Leia than the one Williams wrote that theme for, but the theme absolutely works.
In The Force Awakens, Williams revisited the romantic cues he came up with for Han and Leia's flirtation where they fall in love. And it's obvious the characters are still in love, but that love is different. And Williams used the theme in that movie to inform themes without it being straight up the same.
I don't know what Williams was thinking when he chose to go this route with those themes for those characters. But he came up with some new stuff for this movie, so he quite specifically was not phoning it in.
The Luke and Leia theme blends into the theme you hear in a lot of the commercials, don don don donnon. The music on Canto Bight is thrilling. Williams uses steel drums, like he used so famously in the Cantina Band music, but this is completely different.
On screen, much is made of what appears to be a ship landing in a steaming bay, but it turns out to be a futuristic iron pressing some Imperial uniform. The scene is said to be reminiscent of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil."
John Williams gets in on the "Brazil" act as well. Part of the Canto Bight music is about 20 seconds or so of a theme used in that movie a lot.
I find it interesting that the name of the track for Luke's battle with Kylo Ren is called by Williams, "The Last Jedi."
But there's one theme that Williams changes.
In the liner notes to the original Star Wars soundtrack album from back in 1978, Williams said that he used the "Force theme" for the twin sunset scene, to show Luke's hopes and dreams for the future.
The theme has been played in just about every Star Wars film ever since. Sometimes exactly the same as it was in Star Wars, like at the end of Revenge of the Sith, where it is used in the same setting -- Luke's aunt and uncle watching a twin sunset.
The Force Theme is present a couple of times in the Last Jedi.
At one point, it weaves so sweetly and turns into Rey's Theme that you might think it was the plan from 1977.
But it's played, and played slower and sadder, at the end, when Luke looks at what appears to be a twin sunset, and he dies, fading away into the Force like Yoda did in Return of the Jedi and maybe Ben did in Star Wars. I am pretty sure it's the track called "Peace and Purpose" on the soundtrack.
The soundtrack, I think, begs the question of who The Last Jedi is. It tells us, by title, that from Luke's battle with Kylo Ren, that it's Luke. The movie mostly says it is Rey, but suggests "Broom Boy" from the final scene might be, since he displays Force abilities.
I think the Soundtrack answers the question definitively. The music that plays over the Broom Boy, as he gazes into the stars they way Luke gazed at that twin sunset on Tatooine, is the Force Theme, very similar to the Force Theme from Star Wars. (Maybe it's a little closer to how it was used at the end of Revenge of the Sith, but still. It hearkens back to staring off and dreaming of something better.
That is as pure a Star Wars moment as any.)
There's a lot going on in this soundtrack, but if you've never bought a Star Wars soundtrack, this one just about has it all.