Speak Tables, Speak

I think my earliest kitchen table was blue and it had a drawer holding utensils to slurp, stab and slice. The tools one needed to grow up. That table was the place for high-level policy decisions. My parents would settle world affairs as if on some summit. Of course, they pretty much agreed with themselves. When it came down to less lofty matters, like cursing Uncle Irving for God knows what or how to get Mr. Dalebrook to settle his outstanding bill after the drugstore went belly-up, what better place to plot strategies or reconcile differences.  

Oh yes, I suppose we ate there too.  I have fond memories of burnt liver and boiled chicken which I tried, in vain, to hide under the mashed potatoes. But then there was also my mother’s world class pot roast, and I shall leave with that whiff in my memory vault.

The Algonquin Round Table, or Vicious Circle, was comprised of NYC literati including Dorothy Parker who had a habit of committing suicide unsuccessfully, Robert Benchley, Jascha Heifetz (to my surprise), a loquacious Harpo Marx, the NY Times theater critic Alexander Woollcott, Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman to name-drop a few. It all started when a few members decided to surprise Woollcott by roasting him. It turned into a ten-year lunch. They were said to have viper-tongues and concealed stilettoes as they jabbed each other with taunts, barbs and gleefully mean wit. It was the post WWI roaring 20s, with a dozen speakeasies on every block in midtown Manhattan.  Gradually they drifted off to Hollywood or sobered up with the crash of 1929. The table outlasted them all. 

Speak tables, speak.

Going back in time to mid-18^th century England, Samuel Johnson sat with Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon and assorted luminaries around a table every week at Turk’s Head Tavern. James Boswell was there to record the pearls of wisdom dropping onto their plates and into their ale. The group was called The Club. One had to have a silver tongue to gain a seat at this table. I wonder if their waiters wondered if they’d put their money where their mouth was. In later years, Tennyson, Kipling, and Eliot made the cut but not Dickens, Trollope or Hardy.  Some tables don’t have a leg to stand on.

Johnson’s words were precise and mellifluous yet not ornamental. One could be happily reprimanded and save the insult under glass as Lord Chesterfield did. Perhaps the greatest export of imperialist England was language itself. It flowed around six continents leaving its mark of empire upon which the sun never set.

Then there would be the solitary figure sitting and ruminating on such petty matters as the meaning of life. That would be myself at a corner table in the Automat where I could introvert into my coffee and take communion with a Kaiser roll.

Now I sit with dear friends at a table commiserating over the thousand cuts into the entrails of our dear-departed country. A fly has found low-cost housing in my salad. The lettuce is undocumented. The music is a dirge, but we move the conversation from lamentation to exclamations of charged air and green remembered hills.

 

 

About Face

Is our face a map of where we’ve been? Does it register our journey from dread to radiance in the country of our eyes? My guess is that our wrinkles signify a continent of sorrow alongside a firmament of wonder. My creases are on-ramps and off-ramps where I've dared and where I haven't, like a hung jury carrying both innocence and guilt.

Mouths can sneer, foreheads can frown and eyes can laugh, even noses; I’m told mine flare when I’m telling a joke. I wouldn’t know. I seldom look at myself. I’m not even sure I’d recognize me if I ran into myself in a crowded elevator.           

The full spectrum is there but not always decipherable. Yet some people, apparently, can probe our past and intuit our future as they decipher the nuances of our facial terrain.

It got me thinking how my face at age five has grown over decades to this one I’m wearing now. Was the guy in the mirror always there in waiting or has my thrill-a-minute chronicle shaped it? If I had been born in squalor and fallen in with a band of mercenaries, would I have the same look? I would hope that my lucky life of passion and compassion has found a home in this landscape of a face.

Some of us like Redford or Newman keep the same face for a lifetime. Others like Pacino or Brando morph as if there was always another Al and Marlon waiting to emerge. A friend once remarked that she had married Roddy McDowell and ended up with James Gandolfini.

Our nose always lands in the middle of our face to make for magnificent symmetry, yet the possibilities seem infinite. Siblings and cousins come close but are not indistinguishable. Maybe there’s a guy in Bulgaria who is my double and we're each other's generic equivalent. That’s the sort of stuff of which trashy novels are written and even trashier blogs. 

Valentine's Day

February 14^th is a holy day. There’s nothing more sacred than love, being met, where we can discover our full selves. Who is to be more revered than the person who can received us and be received.

Love is the opposite of death. The way compassion is the antithesis of dispassion, callous indifference. Now more than ever, love is our stay against hatred and oppression. Even when we rage against the dying of the light we do so in the name of love. Love is what is missing in a room of nefarious schemers.

I can imagine that someone, early on, profoundly unloved Donald and his wound is now ours. Against all the avarice and loathing let loose in the scramble for power and domination let this Valentine’s Day be our filibuster against the madness of our country, our stay halting the moral violence in the common air. 

Love expressed is risky. The designated day has to overcome the ridicule of cynics along with the usual monetizing by merchants of roses and chocolates. Then there are the recycled verses of Hallmark cards all of which tend to degrade true affection.

But I say, let it be, all of it. The flowers and the candy, even the bad poetry. We live with a paucity of language for love. It is far easier to write a poem of vehemence and dread than one from the loving heart. Love eludes what is sayable.

Life is an astonishment and warrants an astonishing embrace and exclamation. Love is, of course, more about being than saying yet we get revitalized in trying to find the words. I can't carry a tune, but I sing anyway. Let it be celebrated today and renewed every day thereafter.

Life As A Movie

I thought it was my movie, this one I’m in, as the aw shucks / gulp, good guy who discovers the cure for all that ails us / negotiating a peace among tribes / the one where I’m improvising on tenor sax /dancing on walls / singing duets with my leading lady.... oops, wrong movie.

For now, I’m just a second banana, better than an extra, but still just a minor bit player bearing witness to the debacle, not the sheriff leading a posse but the guy who ducked in the barroom brawl while the card sharp and cattle rustler took over the town and headed out to the hanging tree.

But wait, we are all stars in our own movie. Here I am now in the Resistance, posing as a ninety-two-year-old retired pharmacist by day but an urban guerilla in the Underground by night sending coded messages in dusted frappuccinos or embedded in everything bagels. Who knows the moles in Musk’s closet? I’ll never tell.

The third act is being written on the fly. The lynch mob will be met by the heartland which finally gets the serious joke on them. Dissent breaks out. The first ones now are soon to be last. Joe the Plumber will get the word that he’s gone from a New Deal to a Fair Deal to a Raw Deal. It is my movie again.

For the gangsters in the palace, the jigs up. Lay down your algorithms, the citadel is surrounded, come out with your hands up.  The carefully scripted rampage of chaos has been exposed as the funeral of our country. Not a single edict issued addresses the lot of the aggrieved. MAGA gripes will become mega-grief as they see they've been thrown under the bus.... until a lightbulb goes on over their collective heads.

Poets will legislate. (Men have been dying for lack of it.) People will migrate as they always have. I’ll have written my own letter of transit. I am shouting on the rooftops of my keyboard.

Before the credits roll, there are flashbacks to those early years when I had all the answers in my back pocket. Simplistic truth had me in the dark till I let in question marks. The musical score modulates between doubt and exclamation points. The camera finds me in close-ups, the soft skin inside my fist, open head, open heart. The camera doesn't lie.

Potato Thoughts

 The potato is a tragic vegetable. In 1992 Dan Quayle couldn’t spell it and lost the election. In today’s dumbed-down America his ignorance would have been enough to sweep him into office.

The church at first denounced the tuber since it was not mentioned in the Bible. Makes sense to me. I doubt if sweet potato fries or potato latkes were mentioned either and now I’m getting hungry. It’s too bad, news of their condemnation didn’t reach Ireland in time for the blight of 1845-1850 which wiped out a third of their population, half through death and the rest by emigration to supply the Boston and New York City police force.

At first potatoes were scorned in Europe because they looked misshapen like leprous limbs and therefore must be the source of leprosy. A brilliant piece of illogic which might also have concluded that eating carrots and celery would lead to a tall and lanky population.

More likely, too many potatoes could hasten the onset of diabetes. They are high in carbohydrates but otherwise quite nutritional. At least they sustained the down-trodden during a century of the Industrial Revolution, but barely. They grow in soil otherwise nonarable which describes the land tilled by the peasantry. 

The region around Chile and Peru bequeathed potatoes to the world. Remains have been found which date back twelve thousand years. Spanish Conquistadors, obsessed with gold, had to settle for sweet potatoes. China, of all places, produces more of them now than any country. French fries must be America’s revenge to the Chinese who are becoming a fast food nation thanks to McDonald's and KFC. Leon Trotsky, who seemed always to be on the wrong side of history, thought it could feed Mother Russia but Lenin decreed there be all that wheat and no potatoes so now they drink it as the Mother of all Vodka.

Mash it or hash it, bake it or pancake it. Soup it, stew it or scallop it. The Pomme de terre, being of the earth for earthlings, is well-named by the French. The English boiled theirs which may account for the fall of the British Empire.

Potatoes can change lives. When the actress, Doris Roberts, was in kindergarten she had one line in a play. She said, I am Patrick Potato and this my cousin, Mrs. Tomato. She heard laughter and decided to be on the stage from that moment on. Kids learn to count, one potato, two potato, three potato, four. When they grow up they will join a nation of couch potatoes munching on chips that we can’t eat one of.

My mother was famous in our family for her lumpy mashed potatoes; it was a perfect complement to burnt liver. As a result I had a fondness for potato salad. An early memory of potatoes occurred watching old war movies when a soldier was given K.P. as punishment. The next scene saw him peeling spuds.

One of my first poems depicted an imagined scene of my grandfather, as a boy, hiding from the Cossacks in a cellar and finding his way across the ocean on the rhizome of a potato. Indeed great migrations might be attributed to the wings of the tuber.

John Reader, in his book, Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent, argues that this ubiquitous vegetable played a major role in the rise of both Western civilization and the current Chinese ascendancy, mostly by keeping the multitude’s bellies full and their tolerance for poverty high; and that’s no small potatoes.

Perhaps life, as it is lived, is a series of small potatoes. As Alan Watts put it, Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

Super Bowl Sunday

It happens every year at this time. Two teams in their colored underwear will pretend to clash, brutally, and we will pretend to care as we stuff our faces with planets of pizza, guacamole and beer. We gather together on Super Bowl Sunday in a debased form of Thanksgiving.

Think of the camaraderie of eleven men huddling in brotherhood on the field while 120 million Americans commune, both brainy and brainless, putting aside our IQs, such as they may be, and slip on our fangs for a few hours.

For one afternoon. fandom triumphs over factions. Unless Donald takes the occasion to annex Greenland, MAGA and un-MAGA will redirect their animus to the gladiators on the field. The antics of the regime will give way to the theater of two football teams.

What we witness is a human drama unfolding, unrehearsed and unrigged. No one will be moving the goalposts. It cannot be hacked by Putin or the Chinese, nor lied about on Truth Social. Nor can the outcome be overturned by some archaic electoral contrivance. Perhaps it is the rules of the game we yearn for.

It is hoped that the snarls will be left on the couch, and our aggression might be sublimated for a while. Dare I say, mercy might even be tapped into? 

An estimated 1.4 billion dollars will be wagered, enough to rebuild Gaza or send Elon into orbit. We will bet on the outcome, whether the total points scored are even or odd, on the coin toss and even the length of the national anthem.

Football is a reenactment of WWI where trench warfare was measured in yards gained as the combatants were carried away in stretchers. To reduce the carnage of war to an entertainment of contained violence is both a way of exorcising hostility and legitimizing it. Yet, for aficionados, it is a game of strategy and finesse. The players are merely pawns in the coach’s chess game.

Clearly football games are not everyone's cuppa. For those non-observant of this national holiday, it may be the perfect time to caulk your bathtub or take advantage of empty freeways, parks and noiseless restaurants.

Yes, the hoopla around the pre-game is disproportionately self-important, faintly militaristic and super patriotic. The halftime show has my finger on the mute button. All of it is indefensible yet there are times when we, en masse, are encouraged to confront the mystery of life where rationality doesn't reach. Rituals, such as this, answer that call. 

 

 

Two Old Poems

Rectangles and Howls

 

The plan for a hike in Sycamore Canyon

became a picnic on a bench at La Brea Tar Pits

Urban bucolic, I’m thinking

as we share a submarine sandwich

while a crane lifts a mastodon

from a river of primordial ooze

running deep under Wilshire Blvd.

where saber-toothed felines

are caught in claw and snarl

under the subterranean parking lots

of insurance companies.

The black cauldron bubbles

of prehistory in our nostrils

and my old brain almost remembers

the happy accidents it took to survive.

How it has all come to this:

A paved swamp with rectangles gone wild

on a street of museums, hung dreams and howls.
__________________________________

Out of Suburbia

 

I have come from abandoned streets

and serious lawns, from rooms of deep pile

thinking perpendiculars.

In the mall, a collusion of displays,

among the well-fed hungry.

The palm tree brought to live under skylight

hasn’t enough arms for me.

The orange grove is paved over

by on-ramps and off-ramps.

 

I return to search the manicured wreckage

for the man who sleeps in my body.

Listen, a sound beats beneath cut roots.

Nests grow in the metal tree on each roof

and a controversy of birds stirs the air.