Walking

I walked a lot as a kid from one neighborhood to the next. Each had its own candy store and a cluster of four-story apartment buildings. I wanted to see what every subway stop in Queens looked like above ground, from Jamaica to Jackson Heights. Walking was what we did in N.Y.C. heedless of red lights and over comatose bodies. Not to linger or mosey but with purpose. Shoemakers thrived on worn-out soles.

Here in L.A. you might get arrested for vagrancy. We drive to the mailbox. At my age when I walk it is with a walker (well-named). I am still an upright ape, perpendicular to the ground. Walking the neighborhood I had to contend with the upheaval of sidewalks so I started doing my ten blocks on the level, paved path winding through a nearby park. There is a controversy of nameless birds chattering in a nameless tree. A boy is climbing to the second elbow. I can no longer tiptoe through the tulips. I leave my meandering for the page through the thickets and dunes of my inscape.

I pretend I’m on a walking tour with John Keats communing with nightingales. Walking tours were what folks did in merry old England. Maybe great writers bumped into great artists. Who knows if Coleridge bumped into Constable? John Keats walked from Hampstead Heath to the Lake District (250 miles) to present his poetry book to William Wordsworth who was probably wandering,  lonely as a cloud, while taking dictation from sister Dororthy and the daffodils. We visited the Wordsworth home in Rydal Mount and there was the Keats book with uncut pages, never opened.

As I walk my imagination runs loose. Images take shape. Just as my stride aligns with the rhythm of my body, my breath becomes the poetry line. A Russian poet spoke about a 500-meter poem and a thousand-meter poem. A walk in the woods was a probe into his unknown regions.

I am walking with an inhalation of newly cut grass in my lungs. A young woman runner zooms past me. I'm also passed by dark-skin women pushing strollers with white skin babies.   

Chuck easy, I’m hearing from the baseball diamond and jacaranda leaves sway without a gust. There goes a frisbee settling into the mouth of an Irish setter. 

I’m chucking easy now beyond the picnic blankets into a stretch of bucolic space with no one except for my daughter at my side whom I looked after sixty-years ago.

Janice is congenitally deaf; she hears with her eyes and speaks not only with her hands but is also intelligible verbally. She’s been where I am not allowed and she carries a certain wisdom I will never know. We walk together in our separate ways. I have seen her fingers in flight like butterflies. We each create our own world, walking.

 

 

Easy Come, Easy Go

Yes, I do dwell on the past. At this age there’s so much of it. I’m driving with my eyes peeled for the montage in the rearview mirror in no hurry to whatever is next.

Even the present is fast becoming the past. There goes another moment on its way to becoming yesterday’s news tomorrow.

I’m reminded of all the phrases we used to say. Words enter our language and creep away without a peep. Easy come, easy go. Do people say that anymore?

Then there are all those euphemisms we blurted which I don’t hear anymore. Gosh, golly or Gad Zukes for God.  Oh my God has made a comback with OMG. Sheesh for Jesus or Jiminy Cricket. I also remember, J. Christ, of Biblical fame. (The last time Jesus was mentioned in the Unitarian Fellowship I attended was when the janitor fell down the stairs.) But I digress…

Owing to our Puritan heritage pseudo-swearwords became popular in the 19th century and mid-20th century. Holy-moly had a long run along with gee-willikers and jumping Jehosophat. Land’s sake left the common tongue in my early days as did lickity split and Dad-rat-it.

Our cursing has evolved. I recall getting into the one and only fight of my life when I was about eleven. Out of my mouth came fucking-bastard-sonovabitch. The words made no sense to me then ... and still don’t but there is something euphonious about those sounds, I might just as well have shouted, plucking-mustard-funovaglitch. Today's trash talk is so commonplace it seems to have lost its teeth. 

As for expressing any sense of exuberance, wonder or even approval we used to say groovy, still say cool but the current exclamation is awesome…unless that’s been replaced when I wasn’t looking.

If someone said you look swell they weren't referring to an inflammation, Even neat is a dead giveaway that the speaker must be either a baby boomer or a fan of TCM.

I don’t long for those good old days. If I did, I could be accused of nostalgia. That is a dreaded condition nobody wants on their medical or literary resume. It’s not even covered by my HMO. At one time, nostalgia was regarded as an affliction common among sailors out of touch from home for months at a time. Today’s version might be getting stuck in an elevator for twenty minutes with no juice on your iphone.

There is nothing more organic than language. It registers every tremble of complaint and exclamation; an equal opportunity phenomena containing both a morgue and maternity ward for words. 

When a demagogue comes along the first casualty is language itself debased by his nine-year old vocabulary and limited to self-serving ends while well-thought words fall on deaf ears. From an historical perspective let it be that our current flim-flam man is a case of easy come, easy go. 

 

 

Triggering Town

This here is a triggering town for blocked writers. It’s so quiet you can almost hear the g’s droppin'. Wet pencils lookin' for words to say what folks say when they ain't got nothin' to say. 

I’m an old cowhand. Like Cooper or Eastwood, a man of few words. And right now even fewer thoughts. The well’s gone dry in my ghost town.

The general store’s boarded up. Yup. The last brawl emptied the saloon. I said set em up Joe but Joe ducked and never came up. The chorus girls left on the last stage out of town with the school marm and preacher. Even the posse’s gone chasin' the sheriff and his sidekick. The card shark’s got nothin' but an arm up his sleeve.

There goes a tumbleweed scootin' down to the old corral. Now the air is stirrin'. I hear somethin' rustlin that ain’t cattle. Could be crickets tunin' up but sounds more like the piano beginnin' to roll. Darlin Lil is kickin' high and showin' her garter.

Lightnin' just split the hangin tree. Slim Pickens swallowed his toothpick. A new lore & oughta marshal is hitchin' up his horse. His gun is cocked over his long johns. He polishes his silver; gives us all a nod, by God.

The clean-cut good guys are showin' gristle and the grizzly bad guys got themselves shaved clean. They're picking up all those g's. There’s Tonto telling his side of the story at Kimosabe College. The un-masked Ranger is cleaning his eraser. Doc Holliday, the barber’s, doing surgery now, pulls teeth too.

Diamond Jim, the railroad baron, grabbed one too many and took a gilded bullet in his wallet. His ranch got foreclosed in an open and shut case.

Andy Devine’s teaching bible school with Gabby Hayes. Buffalo Bill’s gone vegan. Three amigos are hiring to pick the cactus crop across the border. Prospectors are on their hands and knees panning for a meal ticket in the gold dust.

The 3:10 from Yuma just pulled in with a fistful of lawless words. Here come the outlaws from central casting, spitting and cussing looking for work in a crowd scene. A fiddle can be heard. It’s all over and it’s just begun.

I head over to the telegraph office to send a message shot straight from the hip... Get me some wagging tongues….stop… characters wanted... stop… dead or alive.

The Passing Parade

Like it or not we are both in the parade and witness to it. Children and grandchildren of Nazis must have asked their fathers what the hell they were thinking and doing. Collectively they were a nation of sociopaths. Will future generations wonder what happened to America in this era of crime, imbecility and megalomania? We seem to have made a virtue out of this perverse sludge. Whether this period of incivility is the last gasp of neglect, male domination and race-hatred or the first breath of fascism, remains to be seen.

Shortly after WWII a radio program aired on CBS called You Are There. It was a dramatization of pivotal moments in world history as if the current technology was present to broadcast the event. With my face close to the speaker, I listened to Joan of Arc at the stake, Socrates downing his hemlock smoothie and the signing of our Constitution. By 1953 the show moved to T.V. hosted by Water Cronkite whose voice alone lent it further authenticity.

Recently, with the death of Daniel Ellsberg, my friend Adele remembered attending a small gathering in the immediate aftermath, with some Rand employees instrumental in xeroxing those Pentagon Papers. History was being made which eventually ended the war in Vietnam.

In 1949 I was in Peekskill, N.Y. with my friend and family attending a Paul Robeson concert when our bus was hit by a barrage of rocks thrown by a mob of vigilantes. We took to the floor along with broken glass, among the first to say we were stoned at a concert. This was a preview of armed violence sanctioned by police.

Over the decades I arranged for speakers to address civil rights and civil liberty issues and disarmament at the Unitarian Fellowship. Also at rallies, vigils and phone-banks, none of which absolves me from being just a tiny footnote to the chronicle of degradation.

We are all part of what has happened and still unfolding. I fear for my children and all those younger than I, which is just about everybody. The trajectory of history seems to be in retrogression but I choose to regard it as a blip in the upward spiral. I stand at the barricade in the forum of public opinion believing in the force of goodwill and that the precepts of the world’s first Democracy will prevail even as our past misdeeds of human bondage have been exhumed. 

Walter Cronkite’s voice is in my ear saying, You are there.

.

             

 

"I Take My Waking Slow"

So said the poet Theodore Roethke. And so say I. The body wakes bit by bit, first bladder, then brain but not yet the bones. Bones speak by yawns. Stretch a leg, change position and listen to your lonely bones.

It is six something. I know that from the light with a lid half open. I am enough awake to not only think but also to dream. An intoxicating time when the river of thoughts and images flows freely without any sentinels at the gate. The trash of consciousness and the treasure of the subconscious mingle. They come as shards, unfinished symphonies, a torrent of what ifs in the floating world.

The name for this period when creative juices bubble best is called hypnagogic time. Maybe it’s the hour when synapses frolic with neurotransmitters in naked exuberance. Greens and blues marry into teal. The meaning of life is glimpsed and then flies away eluding the net.

I stay put for two hours, plus or minus. A flotsam of dreams surface. The stream also comes with a certain clarity of vision. Unsolvable problems reveal their solution. If I had my druthers, I’d remain in this Xanadu but my bowl of frozen berries and granola calls. Not that I am hungry but I must eat so I can have an appetite for my lunch date. Besides, I have never understood what druthers are.

What survives in this post-prandial state is dubious. If I had written down my small epiphanies, it might have broken the spell and maybe that’s the way it works. A brief glimpse is all we are granted. Full consciousness seems to extinguish that brief candle which illuminated the cave wall. The magic carpet is still in the dry cleaners. The banana is no longer a goldfinch and that dialectic of great ideas clashing was only a garbage truck grinding its weekly meal.

 

My Life As A Bot

No, I am not a robot. At least I think I’m not. Maybe I was assembled in a subterranean laboratory and it slipped my mind. I could be a figment of AI impersonating Norm Levine; a new improved version. I do have a dim memory of my life on Krypton but I don’t want to talk about it. Pass the WD-40.

If I suddenly start speaking in Chinese, I’ll know remedial action is indicated. Then again there are so many experiences I never got around to doing, besides having a pie thrown in my face, I'm ready for another go around.

With a lube job and recharging of my AAA batteries I could skydive, learn to tango or play the trombone. Would I be pushing too hard asking to slam dunk?  

Why waste time with such indulgences when I ought to be planning my afterlife, holographically speaking? With some genetic modification I might perform a medley of my biggest hits, and learn how to carry a tune from here to there. Anything is possible if tampered correctly. All my missing DNA can be reinstalled with a double helix here and some mutant material there.

I could meet other bots for lunch from Marvel confections. Over Chinese chicken salad we’d restore melting glaciers and repair the hole in the ozone layer. Maybe our algorithms could live happily ever after in programmed bliss.

As for knocking good sense into the legions of fools following the felon with the red tie, I expect that might be asking too much. If AI can accomplish that, I’m all for it.

Almost

It has been said that the chances of winning the lottery are just slightly better if you buy a ticket. With this in mind I almost bought one. I figure I’ve saved thousands of dollars over the years almost, but not quite, joining the frenzy. It’s a bargain at a buck a dream but this way I’ve enjoyed speculating over my new-found wealth which is what everybody else does, and saving almost as much as a winning ticket.

Sure I would have had some great moments distributing millions to my children and grandchildren with enough left over to pay off my overdue library books. I could have driven around buying modest homes for everyone living in cardboard boxes at the off-ramps and saved distressed properties from foreclosure. I might have played Mr. Magwitch from Great Expectations as secret benefactor to some unsuspecting youth who extended a kindness when I was in reduced circumstances.

However, when I think of all the attendant responsibilities I’m not sure I could make the adjustment. I’d have to change my bumper stickers, the locks on the door, even my phone number. The thought of moving my fourteen bookcases and objet d’art is too daunting. I expect I’d have cousins, by the dozens, showing up and that is unthinkable.

If I funded a drive to get a picture I.D. for all the disenfranchised voters in the South then I’d probably feel guilty that I didn’t buy mosquito nets for everyone in sub-Saharan Africa, instead. If I rescued inner cities from urban blight I’d probably start worrying about the rural poor, homeless from tornado damage.

I should start by getting my mother out of her trailer in Alabama….except my mother died 35 years ago and she never lived in a trailer in Alabama ....but it's the thought that counts. Already I’m getting dizzy from the burden of saving us from ourselves. The disrepair is everywhere. Philanthropy has its hard days. Uneasy lies the crown.

Almost, but not quite, winning ensures almost, but not quite, worrying about such matters. I can fantasize without having to choose between Amnesty International, Common Cause, N.P.R, Doctors Without Borders or the Southern Poverty law Center.

When I think of changing my lifestyle, I shudder. Fine dining in French restaurants would mean learning which to fork to use, to say nothing of fully operative hands. Almost winning allows me to snack at Costco’s free-food tables with the downtrodden masses, clip an occasional coupon and look forward to my annual rebate. Four more car washes I get a freebee.

Give me the simple life of fixed income and senior discounts. Maybe if I was to the manor born I’d yearn for a return to my aristocratic roots but it’s not in my breeding. The closest I care to come to a regal bearing is a rerun of Masterpiece Theatre's, Upstairs, Downstairs. If I continue to almost buy a ticket my seat at the downstairs table will continue to happily be my lot.

Pulse

My hand shakes. Not all the time but enough to drop the occasional lettuce leaf on my lap or spill soup on the way to my mouth. My days as a brain surgeon are done; but I never had that ambition to begin with. I might as well laugh it off and raise it to the level of a metaphorical positive.

Suppose my hand is keeping rhythm with the pulse of the Earth, the music of the spheres. What if it is a sort of Richter Scale registering the small convulsions of the planet? It is a reminder that there are no straight lines in nature. We move from this to that like the grain in wood. We dip with digressions the way tributaries veer off a river. With fits and starts I sleep, I think, I write.

Before World War One the notion of progress had taken hold given the amazing technological advances and breakthroughs in psychology, particle physics, electronics and the arts. The crime against humanity euphemistically called the Great War ended the illusion of straight ahead progression.

Now we regard the chronicle more like a zig-zag; something like my hand movements. In baseball, pitchers routinely throw with a velocity of ninety-five mph but batters find the balls hittable unless they also have movement or spin.  A straight trajectory doesn’t cut the mustard. It has to have a wrinkle.

Some of the small muscles in my hand have become enervated from a peripheral neuropathy. In addition, my doctor calls the unsteadiness an  essential tremor. I wouldn’t go that far as to call it essential, but then again…. The shortest distance between two points, we were told, is a straight line. But we need a ruler to accomplish that. I’ve never held rules or rulers in high esteem. They reek of absolutes. The crooked line is a tribute to the contours of nature.

My shaking hand conforms to my penchant for permeable membranes, porous borders violating categories such as poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, history and geography, sports and entertainment, even science and the imagination.

Maybe my tremor will be an early warning system. If the Chinese chicken salad doesn’t reach my wagging tongue, I’ll let you know.

 

 

Wars By Proxy

In a sense all wars are fought by proxy. Heads of state have tantrums and the next thing we know Joe the Plumber is fighting Charlie Lunchbucket. Those leaders who belong in an anger management class never met a war they weren't happy to send others to die for. 

In a sense, war is a failure of diplomacy.

Our own Revolutionary War could be seen as another chapter in the European battle for domination, an extension of the never-ending conflict between France and England. Without  Lafayette and Louis XVI's financial aid the outcome would have been dubious. Ironically, our success seeded the monarchy's downfall. 

The war was fought on American soil which was, of course, still Brit soil when it began. But soil is famously fickle having been stolen from the indigenous people, then labored over by imported Africans and finally declared our own. And now to be trespassed by those neighbors to the south whose ancestors once lived here.

The Spanish Civil War was a dress rehearsal for WWII. The relatively small band of Allied fighters, known as the Lincoln Brigade, alongside the defenders of the republic were no match for Hitler's and Mussolini's advanced arsenal. Democracy lost to fascism even though, as Tom Lehrer put it, we had the best songs.

It was widely believed in the U.S.S.R. that Churchill delayed the second front landing at Normandy in the expectation that Germany would eradicate Soviet communism. Another instance of a possible proxy war to the benefit of the Western world. 

After the Second World War the Cold War began when the U.S. fought the U.S.S.R. over who gets the best German scientists. They plucked their share from the East  but the Allies snatched the greater number. Wernher Heisenberg, of Uncertainty fame, was certain about casting his lot first with Great Britain and later with West Germany where he continued work in advanced physics. Another prize was Wernher von Braun along with his team of rocket scientists. He lived happily ever after in the U.S. in spite of the great Tom Lehrer song….

Gather 'round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun

A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown
"Ha, Nazi, Schmazi" says Wernher von Braun.

Don't say that he's hypocritical

Say rather that he's apolitical

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department" say Wernher von Braun

Some have harsh words for this man of renown
But some think our attitude
Should be one of gratitude
Like the widows and cripples in old London town
Who owe their large pension to Wernher von Braun

Fast forward to 2016 when Russian intelligence worked through the night with their nefarious deeds and now yearn for Trump's reelection. One can imagine Chinese hackers also busy at work…and there are more of them. Our hotly contested presidential election may get decided in the basement of a boiler room in Beijing or Moscow.

The current war in which Putin's mercenaries and military have been unleashed against Ukraine is another proxy war. In a larger contest it is NATO versus Russia. Once again, the two great oceans remove us from the dire suffering on the Eurasian landmass. Americans cheer on the good guys from a safe distance. Yet the threat of all-out East-West conflict has never been so close nor the consequences so unthinkable. May saner heads prevail.

Riffs 'Round Midnight

There is a highrise office building with random lights for the cleaning crew which 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 to rig an election. 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 Night Hawk Cafe? ...and is that you Vincent releasing stars onto your canvas? Miles Davis.

Some guy just spilled ketchup on himself while 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 almost smell the java perking 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 woke 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. Along 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.

Could it be, 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.