That Old Divide

Here we are living through the epilogue of the Civil War. The simmering embers of that conflict were never doused, never confronted and never resolved. Slavery was replaced by a virulent racism, lynchings, segregation and a persistent sickness in the soul of America. Even antebellum misogyny is having a revival.

Now, that inhumanity has been rekindled. The hoods of the Klan have been replaced by the masks of ICE agents. A mindless nativism is sweeping the country against people of color.

The degradation of human bondage which served to divide the underclass in 1860 continues today with misdirection of the aggrieved masses to vent their loathing against asylum-seekers. The malice of the administration toward immigrants serves the MAGA constituency not one bit.

There have been 16,000 books written about Lincoln and that war between the states. I’m currently reading two of them. Michael Shaara’s 1975 book, The Killer Angels is considered a classic as it profiles some of the officer combatants and brings them to life on the page. Particularly fascinating are their blunders, their arrogance and in one instance how the southern general, James Longstreet, saw the light in the aftermath and espoused the northern cause.

The other book I started I am unlikely to finish, since it is 725 pages. I was startled to learn that Jefferson Davis's wife, Verina, was opposed to slavery and regarded by some in the Confederacy, as being mulatto or creole. When Davis was jailed for two years after the Union victory, Varina moved to NYC where she worked as a columnist for Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper, The New York World. It was Pulitzer who got Davis out of prison.

This book is called Lincoln vs Davis by Nigel Hamilton. Much is made about these two men and their wives. If Davis’s wife had abolitionist sympathies, Mary Todd Lincoln had siblings fighting for the Confederate cause.

We may have forgotten how families were ripped apart not unlike today. However, since the MAGA control of the federal government. the matter of state’s rights is now reversed. Instead of importing human labor in chains, we are exporting millions of laborers in shackles. Working people of the old Confederate states are once more being misled by the old fallen angels well-practiced in moral vacuity.

 

Two Kinds of Fathers

In the early 1970s I attended a Jim Jones rally in San Francisco. The followers addressed him as Father or Dad which is what he demanded. That People’s Temple cult took the lives of the two teenage children of my friends. A tragic ending for a couple who sought an alternative life. Amazing to me how some people willingly abdicate their autonomy, their selfhood, their decision-making to an authoritarian leader as if being an informed and discerning adult is too much for them.

I would suggest that this transfer of self is a form of regression. Daddy, the reigning patriarch, will decide what is right and what is true. Dying begins when doubt is forbidden. Take me, Father, Mr. President, Supreme Leader, Fuhrer. Tell me when to shout, what to wear, how to hate, whom to fear and to whom I am to swear fealty with unconditional obedience.

__________________

All the above describes who my father was not. He never raised his voice. If he got angry it showed in his eyes. He modeled a certain equanimity, a presence who listened and offered full reception. He seemed imperturbable and yet had strong principles. When the FBI came to the door, in the McCarthy era, asking for names he turned them away. His silence was his spine.

As a pharmacist, my father was accorded a position of authority. In those days the man who presided on a raised platform between globes of colored water was held in high esteem. He earned it by his deliberative temperament, his knowledge and the special assurance he generated to his clients.

Thankfully, I was the beneficiary of his fathering, his unconditional love. I hope to have continued further, father.

Celebrating The Succulent Round

Yes, of course, coins, and wheels and the lunatic moon but discs are risky, tires go flat, the moon is pocked and the three ring circus that rolls and roils us to despair are no match for the roly-poly, squishy peach or cherry berry and behold the apricot, the color of dawn and then there are plums to plumb before they turn to prunes and melons like volleyballs, or open the cantaloupe and watch the sun spill out and honey dew like dew that’s been honeyed as big as basketballs but don’t try dribbling, go ahead and open the watermelon and part that red sea, pits and all these ahead of summer’s lease, a ring-around-the rosy time, so take a bite of the plump and fuzzy peach, let it slurp, juice yourself Prufrock, let it drip and then you’ll hear the mermaids sing above the din of marines in our streets and if there is blood let it drip from those Satsuma plums; it’s all we have in this land of sticks and stones, parched of our precepts, going from grape to raisin.

 

The Fact Of the Matter

I’m a sucker for trivia. In fact, Ken Jennings, the host of the quiz show Jeopardy wrote a fine piece in the N.Y. Times reminding us that the word trivia used to mean the three basic courses taught 600 years ago, grammar, rhetoric and logic. The word itself has been trivialized.

Facts have taken a big hit from the MAGA mind ever since so-called alternative truths were introduced in 2016. And that’s a fact. They have made deceit a virtue.

Here are some tidbits I’ve recently come across which have found their way into my memory bank. Now I have to casually work them into a conversation.

I tried that the other day with the startling fact that three of our last five POTUS were born within six weeks of each other, Clinton, Bush and Trump, in the summer of 1946. Could it be that Mercury was in retrograde, or maybe nuclear fallout radiated the air?

How can I ever move a conversation to lead into the stat that only 17% of roads in this country were paved by 1935. The other 83% were gravelly or dirt. And that includes Easy Street and the Road to Riches.

The other day I learned there’s no such bird as a seagull. They are just gulls. Just as sardines don’t really exist but can be herring or many other short fish under six inches. I don’t know what to do with this info.

It is also true that the violin was saved from extinction by Catherine de Medici, Queen of France in the 16^th century. The instrument was first deemed by the Church to be licentious, too screechy and for scandalous dancing. Maybe they felt its sound resembled the seagull which doesn’t exist.

Here’s another scrap of knowledge to drop at a dinner party: ten million trees are felled annually just to manufacture toilet paper even though 70% of the world population does not use it. On second thought, better save this for another occasion and try the violin material for the party if you want to get re-invited.

Blame the Internet for all this. Folks before the millennium didn’t have the cargo we have to sort out. Has it elasticized our brain or must we forget something to make room for each new fact? I wonder what Google has to say about that.

Now, of course, we don’t need to spell, multiply or memorize anything. It’s all there waiting to feel the call of the click. I’m beginning to feel bad for my remembering brain. It may become vestigial and slough off. All that’s left for us is to never forget our Social Security number, pin and passwords and even those essentials are already well-known to hackers and to DOGE.

Why do we remember what we do? I knew the answer to this but I forgot. If I could only un-remember our current presidency I might live happily ever after. I’d even gladly delete all I just learned about gulls, sardines and violins and focus on the meaning of life. I swear I was on the verge of unlocking that mystery but it just slipped away.

 

The Autobiography of My Name

There we are fresh from that embryonic sea with no say in the matter and they name us.

Am I my name?  Yes, I must own it. No, I also disown it.

Norman contains No and Nor which I accept as a card-carrying contrarian. Sometimes I don’t disagree so much as I want more, of which I can claim 3 letters. Other times I don't even agree with myself.

I shiver and shun when I hear Normal. In my college days the word normal caused a brief panic. The term was often used in chemistry to describe a certain molecular state of solutions or a string of carbon atoms. I always thought I was being called upon with that first syllable.

There is also a yes/no in the common usage of the word normal. Early on, I probably wanted to be normal even though I knew I was dropped to earth by a spaceship. The word seemed elusive, and I doubt I was ever admitted, thankfully, into the normalcy club. Somewhere along the way abnormalcy seemed a better fit. 

Whether I am or not is relative. Too bourgeois for punk rock, too much otherness for any prescribed behavior. Being odd is being individuated. On the spectrum between Norman Rockwell and Norman Mailer? Maybe but I only know I am who I am and I ain't who I ain't. *

And then there’s the heritage of my name. I owe it to those warriors from Denmark and Norway who settled in Northern France and then saw no reason not to invade England in 1066. William the Conqueror crossed the channel with ten thousand of his closest friends. Hence the Norman Conquest which joined the romance language with the Saxon.

Though my nominal ancestors were Norsemen, fierce, bellicose, plunderers. (everyone needs a hobby), those traits are missing from my double helix. The last thing I plundered was my piggybank 85 years ago and my most recent conquest was a poke salad with some fresh tuna.

My guess is that my name was chosen by my parents as a way of disidentifying with the so-called Old World of Eastern Europe driven by the urge toward assimilation. It was to be nothing biblical. No matter what I may think of Norman, it's better than Nebuchadnezzar.

I’ve come to embrace my name as I’ve grown fond of myself, even as I stumble and bumble along. I just noticed that my name is embedded in the word enormous. It must be from the milk of kindness which flows, by the quart, in every vein. **

* John Prine

** Alan Jay Lerner 

 

Midnight Riffs In The Long Night City (From the Archives)

The high-rise office building with random lights for the cleaning crew looks like a computer board from a distance. And here's an all-night laundromat. Great place for co-conspirators to meet during the spin cycle with plans for a revolution. If you came to launder money, your limo made a wrong turn. Lester Young on sax.

This may be where John Le Carre did his best writing. Insomniacs congregate and bore each to sleep or watch single socks slither out the door…and then show up in a yard sale next month.  Thelonius Monk. 

Those round windows remind me of early television screens by Philco or Zenith. Who does their laundry in these wee hours? Maybe folks on their way to early Mass or nurses coming home on the graveyard shift. John Coltrane. 

Dog-walkers on the verge of finding the meaning of life and dogs answering the moon. Shut-ins thinking great thoughts. Who is that painter outside the Nighthawk Cafe? ...and is that you Vincent releasing stars onto your canvas? Miles Davis.

Some guy just spilled ketchup on himself eating at a 24 hour diner. I don’t see any diners anymore with the We Never Close sign but they must be out there at truck stops. Eighty-six on the egg salad. I can smell the java perc-ing and hear Sinatra singing, Strangers In the Night. his phrases making stanzas of the nocturnal air.

CVS pharmacies with their lights on in this city that wishes it could sleep for shoppers who hate crowds or suddenly wake up in a panic because they ran out of Q-Tips. There's the pharmacist on the night shift left all the routine paperwork by the crew working days. Frederic Chopin.

I was a night-prowler once or twice cramming for final exams in college. With two friends I rode the subway through the wee hours to stay awake, tunneling under the boroughs with structural formulas in my head or botanical origins for a course called Materia Medica. Our brains stuffed with a glossary of Latin names, from rhizomes and roots to the inner rind of fruits. Facts as dead as those stars in the firmament with not the slightest relevance to my life as a pharmacist. Just an exercise in rote learning to prepare us to drop a name at some cocktail party that never happened. Gilbert and Sullivan.

At the midnight hour, white sheets from the laundromat float over to the pharmacy like ghosts of alchemical ancestors over a smoky cauldron to do their sorcery in the dark shadows of a CVS inner sanctum. This is the hour of miracle healings and spontaneous remissions. Igor Stravinsky.

Around 3 A.M. millions of fellow seniors bumbling our way into bathrooms lit by night lights to empty our bladders. It's getting easier to not think. Now let’s see if we can inch our way back to bed, perchance to dream. Handel's Water Music.

Unstill

A distant desert sirocco wind

reaches me as a breath barely felt

yet something in me stirs.

What seems at rest is movement unrecorded.

My heart pumps like a hummingbird

hard at work to stay still, while

kidneys filter, pancreas secretes,

skin sloughs, organs conspire, some wither

yet stay juiced in this grand commotion.

 

Maps, too, look settled with colors fixed

yet a mistral has shifted tectonic plates

under the halls in Washington.

There is a stench from the wreckage

and carnage trembles the body politic,

fertilizes a seismic rage

from the debris of bogus vows

and hollow slogans that do not buy eggs,

cure measles, or open factories.

Sores fester and simmer

under the dome and the oval.

The quake may not yet register on the Richter

but tremors can be felt in my bones.