Mystery of the Spheres

In the span of my decades, I’ve lived through the ripening of our sphere as if a round fruit which now, hour by hour, is rotting. Planet Earth reduced to a melon.

Cut open the orb at its peak and you release the sun and the moon, the music of the spheres. Can it be, what seemed like progression was, in fact, cyclic? The straight line, actually bent. The Allies and Axis of 1941, flipped five years later and now the enemy is ourselves. The crystal ball bounces and rolls.

Melons fiercely hold their mystery. I’ve seen buyers at the market knocking on their skin and listening as if they could overhear a conversation among the pits. I’ve grown accustomed to the unknowing. It reminds me of something close at hand.

I’ve been watching it for the past six days. I pick it up and feel for? For what, I don’t know. This morning, I spoke to it. Are you ripe and ready? I think I heard a high pitch beep but that may have been a garbage truck backing up. What the hell, I bought it last Thursday. If I wait another day I may have missed the propitious moment. Everything in its time.

There are no signifiers. No bag of waters breaking. No contractions at short intervals. Every birth is Cesarean. So now I am making my incision straight down the mid-sagittal line to eventually create perfect quadrants….as if the judge from Uzbekistan is scrutinizing my grip for Olympian gold.

One nation indivisible, we pledged and we were when I spoke those words during WW II. Today we are a divisible zig-zag, as is this fractious globe, subject to a thousand cuts.

I would grant this honeydew an 8.7. I think it was a day away from sublimity. I wonder if melons rate us on a scale ranging from feckless to reckless. He who hesitates gets mush. He who rushes gets a sort of potato.

With a little bit of luck, our lifespan peaks when the world is ripening. By that schedule I should have checked out ten years ago or maybe hang around for another ten.

In honeydew talk I would hope for the pulpy flesh, lunar-luscious, in its prime as it reaches its upward slope when it sings, no zings, as if summoning Orpheus with his lute in the lost language of melon.

 

Unforgetting

I promised myself I wouldn’t do this. But I cannot let the anniversary of the last days of Peggy’s life go unnoted. I celebrated her birthday on May 2^nd and now I find myself commemorating the way she lived her dying four years ago. She lived 100 years plus 100 days.

Over our forty years together, Peggy and I created a soil in which our love watered and sunned a garden. I find myself imbued with that love as I embrace my remaining years. When she died, grief felt to me like self-pity. Instead, I celebrate the gift she bequeathed. When I go, she said of my future, go for it. I have.

While under hospice care she continued to write poetry until a week before the end on August t5, 2021. She faced the east window and communed with a hummingbird while singing along with the Irish folk group, Celtic Thunder. Below are excerpts of poems she wrote leading up to her death. All are taken from her chap book, Two Is A Sacred Number.*

I’ve taken some liberties with the lines I chose. I have conflated the overwhelming love she radiated with her embrace of the ultimate unknown. Both love and dying, I believe, are aspects of letting go, a mysterious transport.

 

A love that springs from nothingness, with opulence expanding,

To welcome each day in the flourish of this enormity,

our constant wedding.

Love has its own arithmetic,

Knows only how to increase.

 

From this window, larger than these years

you bring me vessels for the insistence of green.

Through your eyes I see rivers to remind us

what keeps moving, fluid as bodies.

You have traveled me here, out of a thirsty night

through advancing dark, into a moist

and sudden incandescence.

Love flares from its invisible yes.

 

Flesh answers more than desire

I/you forget to be old.

A Mozart rondo filling me with now.

 

Through the crack in the bedroom wall,

Green mystery makes its way.

When you enter among monarch butterflies

what I see comes to this:

The tree-lit park, touch of silk

The taste of tangerines.

 

Where we have traveled has carried me home.

I find my way to the orange sunrise

Even at the ebb of my long life.

* Peggy wrote under her maiden name, Peggy Aylsworth. Her poetry books are available from Amazon.

The Revolutionary Macaroni

Some words travel well and tell a slice of history in their migration. Take macaroni, for instance.

Yankee Doodle went to town / riding on a pony / stuck a feather in his cap / and called it macaroni.

We sing this song signifying patriotism. Yet I doubt many Americans have the slightest idea what they are singing about. Hint: it has nothing to do with pasta.

In the early 1700s, a macaroni was a word the Brits used to describe a well-traveled, sophisticated man. It then morphed into an effeminate male, foppish in his fashion.

By the time of the French & Indian war, circa 1760, the macaroni flipped again. It suddenly became a term of ridicule designating a country bumpkin trying too hard to look like a gentleman, thus meant to mock the American colonist.

In fact, it was sung in derision for the lowly rebel who thought he could stick a feather in his cap and call himself a dandy, a macaroni. Note that he rode a pony, not a horse. A doodle is a simpleton. And what, I hear you ask, is a Yankee?

The original Dutch settlers were the subjects of derision again by those nasty invaders from England. The Englishmen (John Bull) called those from the Netherlands, (Jan Kees), hence Yankees. Seems like everybody had names for the other. So much for the nonsense of national identity.

By the time of the Revolutionary War, the entire song was stood on its head. The tune of King George’s bad guys was adapted by us, the good guys, and suddenly it became a symbol of patriotism. When the Red Coats surrendered at Yorktown, Washington had his army band strike up a rendition of Yankee Doodle.

It was as if the entire war was fought over who owned Yankee Doodle. Or, as I’d like to think, it was a triumph of the common man. My other takeaway is how gusts of new consciousness move language and carry the seeds for revolutionary change. Keep your eyes on the MAGA macaroni.

  

Public Square

They have tables and they have chairs. We sit under our favorite ash tree and chew on big and small ideas over lunch. On weekdays my friends and I often gather in this public courtyard and order a choice of salad, pasta or pizza to-go for $9.00. The venue is Il Forno Restaurant on Ocean Park Blvd and 29^th St. It’s the best kept secret in Santa Monica.

I suggest that Zelensky and Putin meet here and end the carnage in Ukraine. BYOB, bring your own borscht. Let them first have a food fight if they must and then settle in and save their people from further bloodshed and displacement. Nothing ever happens on an empty stomach, so go ahead, Vladamir and Volodymyr, keep eating. Share your salad and pasta. Nobody's looking. 

On another table Bibi, Trump and the Ayatollah could spring for falafel and then get real. After hostages are freed, Gaza can be declared a demilitarized free city with open access and reconstruction. Let them admit their shame as pasta slides off their forks. Then the three of them can start writing their Nobel Peace Prize joint acceptance speech.  

The tables are round, great for conversation. We huddle and think great thoughts. Basil expounds on pre-history and intergalactic speculations. Dean offers his views on Erasmus’s advocacy for humanism as opposed to Martin Luther. I sit in awe of my learned friends, busy contemplating the arrangement of broccoli and peppers on my vegetarian pizza.

There is much to be said for a public square. It wouldn't hurt if speakers on phones were banned as a courtesy. It is hard to find such a space without going to the park and dealing with picnics and flying frisbees. 

But for civil discourse on the meaning of life in a godless universe and other light subjects, nothing beats my courtyard on Ocean Park Blvd. where revolutionary plots can be hatched at the drop of Caesar salad, and you can't beat the price.

Off to the side, I spotted a rather stout man giggling under a bodhi tree. But that may have been an apparition.

 

Dick, Hank and Donald

The reign of Donald the 1^st has me thinking how he will be regarded by future writers and even those in our midst, when normalcy is restored.

This led me back to Richard the 3^rd, and how he was maligned by Shakespeare, writing in the service of Elizabeth, the reigning Tudor of the day. Dick was deposed by Hank, the 7^th, father of the next Henry whose depravity we can’t seem to get enough of.

This is the way it goes with a monarch. Fawning sycophants blowing sweet nothings into his ear until they stumble and lose their heads. It then takes someone like the Bard to set in stone the deviltry of his patron’s predecessor.

While Hank-8 is buried at Windsor Castle, Dick-3 rotted in Potter’s Field for five centuries and then got paved over as a parking lot. His skeletal remains were exhumed a few years ago and revealed a counter narrative to the one Will Shakespeare spun.

No twisted, withered arm, his back less hunched or humped into a mountain as Shakespeare had it, and no unequal, limping legs. More importantly, Richard III allowed for petitions of the poor and set up legal aid for them in a Court of Requests, later abolished by his successor, Henry VII. He protected merchants by prohibiting the importation of goods from abroad, exempting books which he encouraged for the people. Laws, henceforth, would be written in the common tongue.

Conversely, one wonders how the mountain of retrogressive acts by Donald will be remembered. Will Trump, the man-child,  become a dynasty like the Tudors? Yahweh forbid. 

16th and 17th century media in the hands of great pens could move minds just as Fox News and social media does today. Even in the 19th century Charles Dickens' Tale of Two Cities became the accepted version of the French revolution. 

I probably won't be around to have my question answered. My guess is it will take a generation or more to repair the damage done to the fabric of this once great nation. Even worse, Donald's push for fossil fuels and callous indifference toward the degradation of our environment may doom the planet irreparably. 

I expect there will be dozens of poets, essayists, playwrights and novelists eager to unravel Donald's gibberish and translate his jejune vocabulary to adult language. The challenge is to grasp the full extent of his appeal, where it came from, what sustains it and how a country embraced spectacle over substance, nescience over research, and how indecency, malice and incoherence became a virtue.  

I seem to have written myself to a summer / winter of my discontent. I allow this to happen on Tuesdays and Thursday. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday I convince myself that sane voices will prevail and on weekends I let the miracle of life wash over me and plan my afterlife. As Jimmy Durante used to say, Let me hear dat trumpet. Dat's no trumpet. Dat's no trumpet. Dat's a trumpet. 

 

Friends

As our country grows more unrecognizable each day, friends are poring over maps considering spots to relocate, at least till we collectively come to our senses. I expect to stay put and ponder about leaving this world for the next one. Do you mean there is no next one? In that case I’ll check out Emily’s List for an ice floe and be done with it. 

This brought to mind phone calls from a couple of my dear-departed but wacko friends a while back. She left a message on my answering machine: Sorry I missed you but maybe you’re not back yet from Mexico. Hope you are having a good time in San Miguel Allende. I thought to myself: Did I forget to go to Mexico the way some folks forget to have children? Maybe I should hop a flight and look for the expat community. 

When she reached me, she apologized saying she was thinking of somebody else who went to Hawaii. This is the way it works with octo and nonagenarians. I told her I couldn’t make it to Mexico but I’d been drinking margaritas to make up for it. I was glad not to have gone to Hawaii since I have a profound dislike for all things coconut. 

She said she was sorry to hear about my allergy to peanuts. I was also sorry to hear about it since I’d just had some peanut sauce with Chinese food. Was my body beginning to itch all over or was that a reaction from the coconuts I didn’t eat by not going to Hawaii? At least I didn’t have jet lag. 

I thanked her for saving me a visit to the dermatologist as well as an intestinal disorder from suspicious lettuce where I might have perished from dehydration in an emergency room, an unclaimed body with a tag on my toe. 

We need friends like this in our twilight years to check up on us as our diminishing memory turns into galloping senility and other childhood diseases. The phone is ringing again. This time from a friend who started telling me about the time he set fire to the shower curtains while his mother was taking a bath. He was seven and apparently a very curious boy. I didn’t ask when he was weaned from the breast. It was 1934 and times were tough. I’m sure this is not why he called but I forgave him his trespasses. How we segued to this defining moment neither of us could recall. That’s how life works. The chronology turns to mush. 

How I ever got to my ninety-third year when just yesterday I was eleven can only be explained by missing a plane to Mexico because of the skin rash I didn’t get from not eating Chinese food in the bathtub with burned coconuts or was it caramelized walnuts?

Even as the specter of a dictatorship looms large, I plan on living out my shelf-life blabbering in blissful incoherence. Flights of imagination will be my letters of transit out of this world.

  

In Search For Beginnings

Nostalgia has a bad name; always has. Longing for the imagined past can be a delusional exercise or at least a sentimental journey. In the 17^th century it was regarded as a sickness, a form of melancholia suffered by seaman who couldn’t wait to return home. Try getting your HMO to cover that.

Yet, raise your hand if you replay those glory years. That home run I hit in the schoolyard is still orbiting a distant galaxy. The older I get, the better I used to be.   

I like a beer now and then but can’t tell the difference between Schlitz, Pabst, Miller or Modello. Yet, I also can’t forget one of their old commercials…which shows what sort of programs I watched. We only go around once in life and should therefore (spend our remaining days drinking Schlitz beer) or as he put it… live it with all the gusto you can.

What about harps and wings sprouting from my shoulders? Sounds like heresy to me and I’ll drink to that.

One man’s gusto is another’s big yawn. At the moment my attention is turned back to how I got from there to here; the breadcrumbs of my madeleine. I have always associated the recovery of time past as a personal detective story and a comedy. I think of Peter Falk as Colombo - Columbus in his crumpled overcoat discovering the new world called Truth or beginnings. There’s just one more thing…

Maybe this comes from seeing too many movies as a kid. The intrepid sleuth snooping, the black sedan trailing him, the goon holding up the lamppost across the street, getting bopped in the alley, everyone a suspect and all of them assembled in the last scene. The detective deduces and detects. He unravels the essential mystery at the core as if now I know why my brother died early, why my father could barely read, and my mother trusted no one or... how I was gifted with three loving daughters having stumbled and bumbled my way along and then got so lucky.

It's not fair that we’re allotted only one childhood, and we are too busy living it to have taken notes. Maybe that’s what old age is for. To rewrite everything I should have said and the dumb things I shouldn’t have, those years of zits and scars.

Julian Barnes wrote, A child wants to see. He was able to walk and could reach up to a door handle. He did this with nothing in mind that could be called a purpose, merely the instinctive tourism of infancy. A door was there to be pushed; he walked in, stopped, and looked.

In my infantile tourism I am at a window about three flights up looking down. A car is on fire, and I hear sirens coming. Across the street there is a derrick moving dirt and bricks are being laid. Another apartment house is going up.

I’m not so sure anymore about the car fire because I may be confusing it with my Little Red Fire Engine book. The dirt-mover is certain. It is on Talbot Street. in Kew Gardens, and I am between 3 and 4. Why that image while thousands of other sights have been shredded? It was unusual enough to be retained and when I see bricks mortared today it comes back to me. How does this figure in the detective story?

Guilt. Something went wrong. I wonder what I did or didn’t. I was a poor eater. I violated the clean plate policy. Serious stuff. People were starving in China… because of me. I wasn’t listening. Didn’t wear galoshes. That third sweater. Went out unprotected. No wonder I got measles, mumps, whooping cough, even scarlet fever. What about polio? Don’t go swimming. And head lice? Don’t lean back on the movie chair. Don’t. Don’t. How will I ever remember all these don’ts?

The don’ts get embedded. I fight for every Do. The derrick moves the dirt. I climb the hill, gradually find my gusto. Case closed………but not so fast. I wouldn’t do that if I were you.