Winter Seen

Season of the sun in its faraway tilt,

days of opposites, of compensation;

silent night and jingle bells,

while cash registers ring themselves

out of the red, hearts shrink, pockets swell,

skeletal sycamore outside the window

in its requiem mass against hallelujah

spruce, lit and tinseled inside.

The glitz we insist upon

to propitiate the gods

against the dying of the light.

We gift wrap our eyes.

to imagine the fabled baby

within a manger of bulbs

on the wild desert floor.

Deck the halls with lit menorahs

to answer the sun in its apogee.

 

Only by great exertion can those

in the hemisphere below  

take our myth as theirs,

of candles or White Christmas,

sleighs dancing through the snow

in a one-horse heat of December summer,

just like the ones they never knew.

 

As in the cycle of my life,

now in the mind of winter,

I feel no discontent on my inscape,

in spite of the shadows cast.

Something new is daily born.

Brothers

My brother Arthur, was an only child for 4 years. Then I was born. I don’t think he ever forgave me. Thirty years later he was dead. Driving at midnight with a high blood alcohol level, he went into the side of a mountain. I've always wondered if he was drawn to see what was on the other side. 

Arthur had a passion for jazz. I’d like to think he was carried along on the waves of a bluesy sax into his own private paradise. Or maybe he heard a calling from the keyboard of Thelonious Monk. I realized later that I never really knew him.

I did know my friend Stanley who is more of a brother to me. We were born five weeks apart. Even our Social Security numbers are consecutive, since we went together for our cards. I’ve known Stan since kindergarten where he was the wardrobe monitor and I, the milk monitor. Or was it the other way around?

In our misspent pre-teen years and beyond, we studied together, went to the beach, ballgames and movies, and took a ten-day bike trip around New England together.

We also engaged in some dumb activities, like following odd people. One such was a man who walked the neighborhood talking to himself. Of course, he’d be considered more normal now than those who don’t talk to themselves. But then it was perverse. Once he led us down into a subway station and emerged on the other side of Queens Blvd. We imagined he was leading us into his nether region.

In fact, we were the odd ones, clumsily looking for the margins of acceptable behavior. Stan and I agree that we were socially retarded then. While normal kids were discovering girls, we were discovering how to hit a curveball or other Olympic-grade sports with the schoolyard as our venue. We even invented a new country on the map and a language known only to us.

I don’t mean to imply that we excelled as athletes, but we were world-class fans. Whatever character traits that confers, I have no idea except it has provided us with a vault of memories and an alternative universe to visit when the real world makes less sense.

We have lived our lives a continent apart but we call each other regularly. In a recent conversation, I was shocked to learn about  an aspect of our relationship, not so brotherly after all. I always knew Stan had a fine singing voice but I did not know he sang professionally in a choral group.

His mother had urged him to pursue music as a career and first to learn the piano. Unbeknownst to me, I was the villain in his family circle because I, unwittingly, pulled him away from his piano lessons with my two passions in those teen years. Namely, sports and politics. I had no idea of my deviltry until last week. At least, I’d been spared eighty years of penance.

Our immersion in politics never left either one of us. When we were sixteen, we got stoned at a concert. Not in today’s sense but literally attacked with rocks thrown at us as we took to the floor of a bus among shattered glass. We had attended the Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill, which was then deemed a subversive act. This was the beginning of the Red Scare that gripped the country in 1949.     

For my role in diverting Stan from his path as a possible diva at the Met, I plead no contest. At the same time I am left wondering what else I missed looking back down all those decades. What I had thought was an open book, turned out to be just a few chapters. Yet the pages Stan and I shared in the chronicle are still to be cherished. He went on become a PhD biochemist; I presume he sings in the shower.

  

Days of Infamy

December 7th, 1941 was a marker for me; a frozen moment in the album of my life. It was mid-day on a Sunday. I was eight years-old, going on nine if anyone had asked. I would be older than that by the next day.

I was in my father’s drugstore, stacking cigarettes, Chesterfield next to Camels next to Lucky Strike. and listening to the brown Bakelite radio. Ace Parker went back to throw a pass when the football game was interrupted. That ball is still spiraling in my head.

Pearl Harbor, the announcer said, in a voice weighted and alarmed. Pearl who? This was a different Pearl than my friend’s sister. I knew that much.

My father, who was nearly imperturbable, was seen for the first time, agitated. The few customers who didn’t know one another, suddenly shared the same worried face and curses. I listened hard and felt the quake, the seismic shift. It was my initiation into the grown-up world.

The next day PresidentRoosevelt (who had become a single word) declared that the date of the attack will live in infamy. His intonation sounded biblical to me, coming as if from on high. I had not heard that word, infamy, before and I doubt I’ve heard it since until this current regime’s overthrow of our democracy.

That winter I learned whom to hate. There were blackouts and air raid wardens. I bought 10 cent savings stamps going toward a war bond. When Kramer’s grocery store had butter, I stood in line with a rationing book. I learned how to knit squares which would become blankets. Rubber soles were replaced by a synthetic substance that left a black streak.

Refugees joined my class. They were better students and seemed always to skip to a higher grade. Years later, I learned that Kew Gardens was a destination for Jewish families in flight from Europe.

Five months after Pearl Harbor the U.S. Navy sank four Japanese aircraft carriers at the Battle of Midway. A local movie house in my neighborhood renamed itself the Midway Theater.

Those were years of one nation indivisible. We cheered the Allied bombers over Berlin or Tokyo and we hissed the swastika and the Japs.

It was a great time to be 9,10,11 and 12. We all knew right from wrong. Hollywood agreed. By September 1945, I wondered what newspapers would have to print. The war was over. Evil was defeated. I was twelve and that chapter was closing. Roosevelt had died and God along with him. Infamy, unnamed, was yet to come. Again, I was on the verge.

If I were allowed one question to ask President Trump it would be: Why did we fight WWII?

Small Planets Apples Are

Pluto, a crab apple, spins forever dwarfed.

Gibbous moon, half bitten by Steve Jobs.

Apple as a pupil in the universe of the eye.

And walk among long dappled grass / And pluck till time and times are done / the silver apples of the moon / the golden apples of the sun.  W. B. Yeats.

First forbidden but thank god she took a bite so all the rest of us could get curious and disobey.

Even if, as some say, it was a pomegranate, full of apple-like seeds aspiring for applehood.

Out of Eden down the primrose path Johnny Appleseed spread the seeds out of which came apples pressed for cider. Drunk is much preferred over foul water.

I was seeded in the Big Apple before it was a household moniker. Did I give an apple to a teacher? I wouldn’t put it past me.

I bobbed for apples once; I think a tooth fell out. Maybe it was one of those poisoned ones left over from the wicked witch.

Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me. Glenn Miller, Bluebird Records, The Modernaires. 1943

What’s not to love in the geometry of it? Apple, baseball, eyeball, roundabout and circle of friends. 

Jonathan and McIntosh, Fuji, Gala, Honey Crisp, and Granny Smith. Shoo fly pie and apple pan dowdy / I never get enough of that wonderful stuff.

What bounces and rolls, apple-like, marbles to golf balls to basketballs go into holes. Slam dunk. Some become balloons.

On a train riding out of Delft the man seated across was peeling an apple with the agility of a sculptor. Green skin curled around the white flesh, a vernal equinox separating itself in readiness from the last snow of winter.

Cezanne painted apples and more apples. He unstilled their still-life. The world was his apple as it orbited the bowl.

But I am done with apple-picking now / Essence of winter’s sleep is on the night / (with)The scent of apples I am drowsing off. 

So says Robert Frost, not me. Small planets apples are. Like oranges without the rind to peel. Just sink your teeth to feel the juice of life dripping.

This is how one becomes a writer: A ten-year old on the lunch line at school spots a bowl of apples with a sign saying: Take one. God is watching. A bit further on he/she sees a plate of cookies and writes his/hers first short story: Take all you want. God is watching the apples. 

Stuff

Thinking about the sacrificial turkey for the annual Thursday feast, it occurs to me that I'd be more likely to stuff my face with stuffing than with the bird itself. Stuffing often contains unexpected stuff, from oysters to popcorn. Not the same stuff as in stuff happens. More like, I can’t enough of that wonderful stuff.

Stuff is what contestants have a surfeit of on quiz shows. The current champ on Jeopardy knows enough stuff to stuff a gaggle of fowl. He delivers his answers like a verbal machine gun. I can’t understand a word he says but they get an approving nod leaving his rivals in a huff and making him a kind of stuffed shirt until last night when he was dethroned. But he walked away with enough bucks to strut his stuff.

When asked about his early childhood, he revealed that he could recite the Presidents in order before he could read. Maybe he got a head start boning up, umbilically, in that embryonic sea.

I could almost name our Presidents when I was ten or eleven. I say almost because I always got stuck around Millard Fillmore until I figured out a way to get unstuck. Fillmore comes between Polk and Pierce. This pointed knowledge was enough to etch itself to my bones. I probably thought of myself as hot stuff. Otherwise, Fillmore is distinguished for being the most undistinguished occupant of the Oval Office, with Tyler and Taylor not far behind.

Why do we remember some stuff while other stuff just sloughs off as fluff? My guess is that memorizing this useless bit of presidential stuff was accompanied by a trauma or got attached to an emotional event that caused it to cling to my marrow.

Now, eighty-two years later I find myself laden with this sort of stuff in my head. It might be useful if I find myself in an MRI drifting off, thinking of Millard Fillmore which ought to be enough to induce a semi-sleep state. As Shakespeare said, We are such stuff as dreams are made of.

Fantasy Thanksgiving Party

I had a very busy Thanksgiving. Nothing happened, except in my head. The bash was my fantasy dinner. Not to offend any friends, I invited only dead people.

Robert Kennedy shows up but is inconsolable, grieving over his son who has besmirched his name in the great hereafter. 

Carl Sagan is briefed at the guest list but decides to opt for a table in one of those other galaxies.

James Madison is in distress over what we’ve done to his Constitution and joins RFK in the corner.

Fellow plantation owners, George and Thomas, will only eat white meat. They are seated between Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin getting an earful on the soul of America while Billie sings about strange fruit.

Fred Ebb is composing, Come to the Cabernet, My Friend. Dorothy Parker says, I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy. Mark Twain has stopped smoking cigars for the third time today. When told how books were written on the dangers of tobacco, he says he never reads health books because one can die of a misprint.

Molly Ivins says if Bush was a shrub then Trump is a stump and that his brain is so shriveled he needs to be watered twice a week. Winston Churchill arrives, uninvited, when he heard something about the soft-underbelly of Turkey.

Homer and Virgil are having a food-fight over the Iliad and Aeneid. Homer accuses Virgil of ripping off his epic work. The Roman admits he’s always had it in for the Greeks since he heard Cleopatra was in bed with laryngitis.

Freud arrived declaring that he never travels without his couch. He is upset when Sinatra starts to sing, You Make Me Feel So Jung.

Here comes Spencer Tracy showing off his red hair which no one ever saw on the big screen. I have to include him because he always reminds me of my father, even though my mother could never be mistaken for Katharine Hepburn.

John Keats and W.B. Yeats are over there in the corner trying to get their names to rhyme. In the other corner Einstein is talking to the Barber of Seville about, at least, a trim. Descartes is quibbling with him whether mc should be cubed instead of squared. When offered a glass of champagne he says, I think not, and disappears.

Socrates declines a swig of Merlot remembering the last time he had a drink. Euripides is conferring with Shakespeare whether or not to be or have been.

Lincoln wants me to check if the current president ever slept in his bedroom. I assured him Biden had the sheets changed since Donald probably donated them to the KKK.

Antonin Scalia crashes the party. He is arguing with everyone citing Hammurabi's Code and a list of proclamations from the Oracle of Delphi to support his notion of originalism. When he gets up to scream at the assembled, Rosa Parks takes his seat.

John Donne just popped in reminding us all that it is an astonishment to be alive and it behooves us all to be astonished... even though he is enjoying his afterlife.

Charles Simic, newly unalive, says that he wrote to annoy God and make death laugh.

I work the room seriously overhearing.

 

Many Thanks-Day

What a concept, setting aside a day for gratitude, for goodness gracious. And we gather together and eat and drink and eat some more. Yet between the stuffing and cranberry sauce, I wonder how many of us think about the fact that we are all offspring of immigrants.

The origin of all this goes back to those 132 (102 passengers and 30 crew) people on the Mayflower whose descendants now number 35 million worldwide. Only 10 million live here. The rest are in Canada, the motherland or possibly in witness protection programs.   

Those were the folks who came to dinner on Native land 404 years ago, shared the feast, then killed their hosts and never left. From the point of view of the Wampanoag tribe, it was the beginning of the end. From the POV of turkeys, 45 million give up their white and dark meat every last Thursday of November. From our perspective it could be Immigrant Day, or at least. Pilgrim Day, since we are all on a pilgrimage. Instead we forget about all that and gather together to ask the Lord’s blessings.

He hastens and chastens His will to make known. There is much to chasten or rebuke these days and He’d better hasten. That hymn we used to sing in school was written about 500 years ago during a war between Catholic Spain and Protestant Holland. It’s always a good idea to have God on your side, especially during one of his tantrums.

So strange how holidays evolve or devolve, depending on whether you are in the oven or in a chair in the Norman Rockwell tableau, showing eight eager faces around a table about to be served the perfect turkey by the perfect aproned mother with the approving patriarch at her side. Among those seated is a male, half-turned away in disdain. This, I believe, was Rockwell himself who had a hidden life.

Unlike one of the Americana depicted on those covers of the Saturday Evening Post, he was married three times, and was probably a closeted gay man who always vacationed with his male buddies. He was also a civil rights advocate. His Four Freedoms were championed by President Roosevelt and made into posters which hung everywhere during WWII. The Thanksgiving picture was his interpretation of FDR's speech about Freedom From Want. Even Willem de Kooning, the abstract expressionist, admired his work. Who knew?

Not to end on a sour note, I need to say that Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. No Hallmark cards, no hoopla or parades, no religiosity. Only family and friends in a communal dinner, forgiving each other their trespasses, even the crazy uncle living in the attic.

I note this day with much gratitude for my lucky life, for my three very special daughters and extended family, my forty years of Yes with Peggy and my loving friends now enriching my life. I should also express a special thank you to my 5th grade teacher who cast me as Miles Standish, rather than the turkey, in the Thanksgiving play.

The Birth Of Our Nation

The twelve-hour Ken Burns history of the Revolutionary War on PBS is not only a documentary; it is a document. In his unique way using paintings, voiceover, commentary, letters, diaries, sound effects and music, the stills come alive. This series should be seen by every American as part of our heritage.

Viewers are shown how our war for independence fit in a global context. What started as a redress of grievances grew to a full revolution against the most powerful empire at that time. To a great extent ours was a proxy war between Great Britain and France. Without French finance and materiel we would have likely been known as lower Canada, a dominion of the Crown.

Our battles with the British were just a part of the conflict. At the same time there were a dozen skirmishes with Native Americans and between tribes, slave uprisings and ongoing bitter combat between the loyalists and patriots; that was basically a civil war between families and friends. There were also divisions between New Englanders and those in states with plantations, a preview of what was to follow 85 years later. Implicit in that division were the seeds of an anti-government sentiment, particularly in the Scots-Irish of the South.

Even George Washington is shown with several military blunders yet he emerges as the heroic figure who deserves credit for holding the rag-tag army together.

It calls into question the motives of some of our Founders. John Hancock was a smuggler whose ships brought in goods from Caribbean islands eluded the British navy. John Paul Jones was a pirate and Washington, himself, a land speculator on Indian territory.

Women were dispossessed and endured terrible hardships during the six years of fighting. The letters of Abigail Adams are heartfelt and beautifully crafted works of literature. The hand-to-hand battles were largely fought by unpropertied men who were denied the vote at the end of it.

My guess is that most Americans don’t know much more than a few images of the Boston Tea Party, Washington crossing the Delaware River and Valley Forge. After watching this series one gets the full canvas with an understanding of the complex forces intersecting at the birth of our nation.

It was Emerson who wrote the phrase, The shot heard 'round the world. He had the vision to recognize those first shots at Lexington as the opening salvos which would resound among subjugated people everywhere, leading eventually to overthrow their domination by imperial powers. 

The question today is whether that new experiment called Democracy from 250 years ago can endure against the monarchial forces in our midst. 

Thinking About How We Think

Getting through the day requires a mind-set unknown to past generations. Not only must we give ourselves over to our phones but considering all the deceit out there, we also need a certain suspension of disbelief. 

Americans of all persuasions are world-class consumers. Try finding a parking spot at Costco. We are saturated with commercials, even with the mute button on; fed fabrications, exaggerations and images leading us astray from reality. Nowhere more so than with ads for prescription meds. The voice over recites: Side effects include falling hair, memory loss, kidney damage and necrosis of the liver, while kids are blowing bubbles, kites are flying, a dog just caught a frisbee and an apple pie is coming out of the oven. 

On some unconscious level we have swallowed the association. (Sorry, chum, the new car does not come with beautiful people.) We seem to have an enormous capacity for being led astray and furthermore, we are paying to be lied to in the price of the car, the mattress or the cheeseburger.

We also vote as consumers, buying into promises and half expecting to be cheated. In this scenario, truth is a non-operative word. At the far end of the spectrum we have a man in the bully pulpit who has mastered the art of faux-authenticity with inane blurts repeated to numb the brain.

But enough about Trump.

We are conditioned to straddle two worlds, the humdrum and the as if.  They overlap and become almost undifferentiated at times. The imagination insinuates itself into the mundane. Wallace Stevens called it the necessary angel; that force which lifts us above the fray while our feet are stuck in the muck.

All this is a preamble to consider authenticity and artifice. The French New Wave in the late 1950s set out to overthrow the artificiality of studio-made cinema which lacked an edge and spontaneity of real life. It was deemed too literary, insisting on a resolution of conflict.

After a while the rebellion itself had a whiff of pretension. Yesterday’s defiance becomes tomorrow’s convention. It seems to me we now have a healthy mix of artifice along with raw bursts of reality.

As consumers, my hunch is we all share a hunger for moments of transcendence whether classical forms, World Series, British mysteries, documentaries, theater pieces or live music…and all the rest I left out. The options have never ranged so far afield, even as tickets are obscenely overpriced.

Warhol made art out of kitsch or was it just more kitsch? In this era of commodification, everything is monetized and that, I suppose, becomes yet another art form. Have Gen Z consumers discovered a new way of perceiving which has enabled them to find meaning through random surface images or phrases? What we regarded as depth, may have been an illusion based on our backstory and how we came to be us.

The current generation which shows an indifference to history also rejects narrative, tracing a protagonist through time. Resolution has given way to open text. What we regard as psychological depth, the new sensibility sees as just another construct, no closer to truth than a montage of surfaces. 

Like it or not, technology alters consciousness, the ratio of our senses and how we take in information. In my dotage, I find myself clinging to what I once believed were the eternal verities.  

Soggy Words

We don’t get much wet in this rescued desert so days like today come with the hazard of flash floods, mudslides and tornados. All of which the MAGA minions will blame on our Gov. Gavin Newsom. So far, the deluge hasn't lived up to the rumor.

Ironic, that Texas is parched with many houses sinking because of the lowered water table. There might be a metaphor in all this but it eludes me. Gov. Abbott and his gerrymandered oilmen disallow any mention of climate change, even as they argue whether to build desalination plants. And if one or two know better, there is the silence of the spineless. 

When I was a kid, shortly after the fall of the Roman Empire, weather wasn’t a topic for discussion, except for cancelled picnics and rained-out ballgames. It was a minor bother, not a cause for evacuation. I wonder what in thunderation we did to foul the air we breathe and carbonize the firmament to the danger point. We now have hundred-year hurricanes, fires, droughts and storms every 2-3 years. Weather has become a hot potato.

I want to turn to kinder thoughts about rain since someday I may be a flower with my throat open eager to be quenched. Umbrellas are flowers sprouting as seen from above. Renoir's palette captures Parisians, like a garden unfurled. And then there is Hiroshige's people hurrying across a bridge under fine lines of a sudden shower. Are those umbrellas or parasols?

I'm looking outside at some droplets on a leaf. They look like the pearl earrings Vermeer lit. I'm remembering the wet cobblestones in Delft and how we sloshed our way to the closest bruin cafe. 

Come on sky, let it go! End the fire season emphatically. I want to see Gene Kelly splashing. I’m thinking puddles. Where are you Ethel Waters, Gale Storm and Claude Rains? Go ahead, rain on my parade. 

 

 

An Answering Voice

There are times when I find that I don’t fully agree with myself. An answering voice to my last blog quietly demands this page.

Silencing the commotion in my hive is also a noble state. There is a point where busyness is mere noise, bustle and blather. The agitated mind is not a good listener.

Alexa is playing Yo-Yo Ma. I can feel my brain drifting. Its motion is not darting but following a slow pulse, contoured like a wave. No lyrics accompany this cello.            

I am not to be interrupted while I’m unbusying myself, like a plane jettisoning fuel, emptying the weight of words, the cargo of exhausted ideas.

Portals and pores are opening for deeper breaths. If I think of Trump, he is summarily dismissed. My store of vituperative adjectives is also overthrown. There is an enormous shadowed place but a tropism bends toward the light.    

Can I reach stillness? Only a hush. An interval between fathoms of the bowed instrument.

In the silence it is as if going to the well, not to quench my parched throat but to water the soil wordlessly.

Holding both stillness and busyness in tandem feels like home. Each is fed by the other. The contradiction is life itself.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Full Of Busy

True magic inheres in the ordinary, the commonplace. Everything around them is pure miracle. Only petty minds yearn for the supernatural.     Edward Abbey      

I concur. I can’t imagine anything more surreal than witnessing the deconstruction of America. Duchamp’s urinal might be the fitting iconography.  

These days, I spend quality time gazing out the window in the amaze of its miracle. There are enough high trees spared by bulldozers to imagine whose woods these were a hundred years ago when I swung from branches in my loincloth. Imagination is the renewable sanctuary; my unlived or disowned life.

It’s all here, the still-life on the table. I welcome the haphazard. The word itself makes me happy. I have an affinity for a modicum of disarray as if everything is unfinished, caught for a moment in flight on its way to elsewhere.

William Carlos Williams said, No ideas but in things. I would amend that to things in motion, upon which so much depends. The red wheelbarrow is only glazed with rainwater for a few minutes.

Last night I lost my mouse. How could I lose a mouse? It was just in front of me but now gone. Maybe I had dropped and kicked it; I got a flashlight to look under the couch. Nada.

A wise man once said that everything is somewhere. This morning, I tried putting on my shoe but there was no room for my foot. The mouse had found a homeland. I admire its vision and kinetic energy.

In those gangster movies of the 40’s, Bogie or Cagney were sent up the river, taking the rap for another hood who is laying low till the heat’s off. In the next scene they’re planning a prison break and if that fails we see one of them or George Raft walking down that last crooked mile, getting an earful of Jesus on his way to the chair.

I would hope that the notion of flux also applies to myself. I expect to be dead for a long time. Until then I want to evolve. My memoir is a run-on sentence, unpunctuated, a vessel unmoored. Even in my contemplative, sedentary life I would like to be full of busy as Abigail Adams put it.

               

Two Guys And History

History has a way of rewriting itself. November 5th was Guy Fawkes Day, going back to merry old England in 1605 when he conspired to blow up the House of Lords. The thwarted plot was in protest against the persecution of Catholics by King James. Apparently it wasn’t so merry for everyone.

Now, five centuries later, kids create straw-filled effigies and go around asking, "A penny for the old guy?" It morphed into a frolic around bonfires whooping it up at the end of harvest time; a sort of British version of what we call Halloween.

That was once a pagan ritual, usurped by Christians to honor all saints but not over my dead body said the peasants (that’s us) who spooked the church to concede the 31^st of October to a bit of mischief and costuming.

In my misspent youth that night was marked by chalking buildings and each other. For those bent upon small anarchies, an overturned garbage can or toilet papering a tree was tolerated.

One wonders how history will treat the reign of the guy who has shredded our Constitution, defaced the White House and subverted our Justice Department and the Courts. Will kids orange their faces, on his birthday, wear red ties and compete for braggadocio prizes and the most outrageous lies or wear masks and beat each other up, celebrating it as Bully’s Day? Will he be pitied or scorned? Or will it be a day of national shame? How to mourn the dilapidation of language and restore it?

Whatever happened to chalk? And where is the Boy Scout Oath of helping each other, of telling the truth and keeping promises, of being a friend to people very different from you, being respectful for the rights of others?

Seemingly, all is forgotten in these uncaring times. In the sausage factory of history there's no telling what we are given to swallow. Maybe Peter the Great was terrible and Ivan the Terrible was great. 

Guy Fawkes set out to explode the British government and our Guy is imploding the cherished democracy we loved. If their Guy is celebrated as a day of revelry and fireworks maybe ours will also be remembered with festivities noisy enough to silence his villainy. Ridicule may be the best answer, or better yet, note our Guy's Day with kindness and love, for everything he wasn't.

Humpty-Dumped

The conversation went around like the two pizzas on the table, from strategies for survival under a monarchy to the day of the dead, pass the prosecco, while in my head I drifted to the image of a golem, made from debris and clay to the 1955 song, People say a man is made out of mud / A poor man’s made out of muscle and blood and from there I went to the new Frankenstein movie…was he not a golem, first a protector then turned monstrous like some countries, pass the pepperoni, roaming the heartland written by eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley, fearing machines gone wild, made by us yet no longer of us, like AI, fed by humans to rock and roll like the pizza that ate Chicago or was it a tomato escaped from a BLT when this Frank/Golem/ Grokenstein rolls over the ballroom where the wing once stood adding to the carnage of our times mixed with the mushrooms of mother earth and the dead mingled with the undead hallowed to trick us to treat the stuffed hollow man, on the night of golden golem toilet seats (not on the menu), to Tuesday’s gathering in the piazzas where we owe our souls to the company store while billions turn to trills, bubbles famously burst and all the king’s horses couldn’t put Humpty’s heritage together again.

 

Remarkable

We are the hero of our own lives or, at least, the leading actor. It’s our movie and come to think of it, we might also be part anti-hero, fool or victim along the way.

I have never thought of myself as remarkable. To prove it, I googled my name and saw that I barely exist. Other remarkable men with my name take up the first six pages.

I imagine each Norm Levine regards himself as the name brand and all the others as generic equivalents. That would be defined as mentally healthy. 

Remarkable is a remarkable word. Whether I am remarkable is something I leave for others to remark upon. The word itself is really neutral. 

What I know for sure is that life itself is spectacular, miraculous and astonishing. This time granted us is to be revered. The older I get, the word grateful takes on more meaning. And to live with gratitude is to caretake this ecosystem and each other. 

Even while witnessing the wreckage of our once civil society I still celebrate my good fortune not only for this accident of geography that deposited me here and not there, but also for having lived my life being fully met in loving relationships. Love, that is, in its many permutations.

I've now reached the age when that adjective, remarkable, has flipped. After seven test tubes of blood, my lab results have come back and my doctor makes the sweetest pronouncement: unremarkable, a state devoutly to be wished for.

I am in awe of creative people who have widened our perceptions and shared their achievement. At the same time some of us tend to an interior landscape with nurturing and small wisdoms that further contribute to our evolution and do so unnoticed. Both are the measure of our humanity. We are all remarkable.                                   

World Serious

 Even as Western Civilization is burning, Nero and I are fiddling with our respective sports of the day. At least we have progressed from lions and gladiators to men in colored pajamas swatting flying objects with wooden sticks.

Baseball awaits. The World Series nudges the World Seriously for my attention. The outrage and wreckage of breaking news will yield to the poetry, drama and timelessness which baseball offers. It has been my alternative universe since my father took me to my first game at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn in 1939. 

I'll be there taking my position on the couch wearing my game face. No fangs, but I may cheer and jeer sufficient to sublimate my hostility. Fandom is an inexplicable state. Belief in the primacy of the real world is suspended. Childhood is reenacted. It is theater. It is the restoration of law and order. It is civility. It is life.

At 162 games, the regular season is far too long. The postseason adds another dozen or more. Players are hurting and tired. Yet they are also juiced. Heroes will emerge extending the reach of the human body, but none are likely to display the arrogance of their act nor any vilification of the opponent as we see from the President. 

Baseball is a game of failure. It is a humbling experience. After an overdose of audacity, we welcome those moments of humility. 

The outcome of the World Series will change nothing on planet earth. Glaciers will continue to melt while ICE will remain cold and heartless. Perhaps people will note how rules prevail inside the stadium as opposed to the lawlessness of the real world.

This page was written while watching the game. The pace of the game allows for thoughts to compose themselves. Baseball halts the clock and that alone is worth the price of admission.

Kindred Faces

To say that Trump is indulging in a bit of overreach is like saying that Moby Dick was a large hunk of gefilte fish. In fact, we are witnessing nothing less than a coup, the systematic overthrow of our constitutional democracy. 

His nine months in office is a pregnancy which has birthed a newborn monarchy, complete with babbling incoherence and diaper pins stuck in vital organs of the body politic.  

Trump dominates the news cycle with daily tantrums and bullying edicts. It is as if he is throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks. The country is covered with toxic ragu which has metastasized to the point where many people are inured to the daily outrage and lethal consequences.

We mock him with inflatables, and he mocks the population with infantile contempt. A normal person might pause and weigh the discontent. Instead, he issues a video of himself dumping excrement over the nation; a Trumpian version of let them eat cake.

Seven to eight million protesters spread out over a thousand cities and towns showed up for this second No Kings Day. The anger on faces seemed to be subsumed by the joy of camaraderie. If the art and poetry of signs fell on deaf ears in the White House, the sheer numbers could not be ignored. 

I would like to know how many in those numbers voted for Trump. How many minds have been changed during the past nine months? How many elected MAGA legislators and jurists have taken notice? And what will it take to grow a spine on Senate and House members before they become fearful of losing their seat in the next election, rigged as it may be? 

Word has it that twelve million is the number to reach critical mass which would move the needle. That represents 3.5% of our population and shall be the goal for future demonstrations.

In the meantime, I play a dirge on my keyboard. Funereal words interrupted by sprouts and glimmers from millions of kindred faces radiated with hope. 

 

The Bridge

The brink, the verge, the plunge

jumping into the deep, the unknown

opening scene for dozens of movies

(Final Destination, Cliffhanger)

usually saved by a bystander,

maybe waiting for an intervention

(Last Train To Lisbon)

maybe not…man leaped from Golden Gate

(Gone In Sixty Seconds)

changed his mind on the way down

then saved by a sea lion. 

(Kevin Hines, five years ago)

The shore is also a bridge, a border,

between this water, this dry land

an edged place of ultimates   

where the Red Sea parted, 

or the troubled West Bank

the shores of Longfellow's Gitchigumee 

we all come to the shore

not just finally but many times

to cross our Rubicon, get ferried 

or else find the pebble at our feet

polished to jewel

like that tree planted by the water

we shall not be moved 

across this moment of great divide

where even Hiroshige's is a bridge too far.

23 Skidoo

One of those phrases common in my early years which meant, better get the hell out of here.... and it did. The expression died and no one seems to have missed it. Its provenance leads me down to many forks.

One path goes to the notion that skidoo is shorthand for  skedaddle which was a term used in the Civil War meaning retreat with haste. Another tale is that the wind currents cause a swirl around the Flatiron Building on 23rd St. in Manhattan causing one to flee. And then there is the claim that racetracks had room for only 22 horses at the starting gate so the 23rd horse had to skidoo from its position in the 2nd row.

When I hear 23rd my mind jumps to the 23rd psalm. From there I wonder about that strange Wordle word, psalm. 

In ancient times it used to be a verb, to pluck as a stringed instrument. A psalm became any song sung to the strings of a harp. If we listen, a certain music can be heard, a rhythm, a pulse to defeat the noise out of which we can create a psalm of our own.

The keyboard is my harp. Words are lyrics cocooned as I am in my imagined green pasture beyond the fray, while preparing a table for distant enemies who have trespassed on the fellowship I have always known, when we once shepherd each other.

We have become a nation in the valley of shadows, skedaddled, turbulent and polarized. Can we turn that word to pole us across the river?

Another well-traveled word is rival which came from river. Originally it meant a person using the same stream as their neighbor and the river was a shared resource. Sadly, the meaning flipped from communal to competitive and the parties became rivals.

The tracing of words foretells the chronicle of man, at least in this 23 skidoo society into which we have devolved. Sit down, rival, have a piece of fruit. May breaking news be the bread between us. Let our rod and staff lead us to still water, cups running over. 

 

Coping

When I’m not gnashing my teeth, I’m girding my loins. Just like you. I’m done bashing the guy. To say his ignorance is only overshadowed by his arrogance only serves to vent my spleen. The case has long since been made and reinforced daily. Yet no instance of stupidity or sadism is enough to rouse his slumbering constituency.

The nagging question is how to cope. I had my turn at the barricades. Resistance at my age precludes marches and rallies. The human potential that has been deported, defunded or suppressed has to be met with acts of the imagination and soulful relationships supporting each other. 

Much can happen over poke bowls or falafel wraps. Kinship is always on the menu.  

The moral violence in words and deeds which seems to accompany breaking news, must be answered with a surge of music, art, dance or poetry. I would also include simple kindness and civil discourse as a creative moment. Our descent into depravity requires nothing less, though everyone will write their own prescription.

The values once regarded as givens in our former democracy are not only under assault but have been replaced by lawlessness, greed and a wanton disregard for human suffering.

So we reach for even small acts of transcendence. Brush on canvas, fingers on the keyboard, communing with nature, sounds from Brahms to Coltrane, transport from artistry on stage or screen; anything which offers a lift serves to restore what has been lost or under siege.

Why just last night......

Words

It’s all true. Every word I've written has been plagiarized ... from the dictionary. I have only rearranged their order. These days, dictionaries have gone the way of encyclopedias and the thesaurus. Even spell check will soon be a relic, to be replaced by the dreaded AI. The world doesn’t hold still for a minute.

Words come and go faster than the last great idea I had. Some are on life support while others are screaming their first breath in the maternity ward.

The sentinels at the gate can’t agree on what to include. The Cambridge Dictionary added over 6,000 new words this year while Merriam-Webster allowed a mere 370. I think the lexicographers ought to have a softball game and settle the matter or shout each other under the table.

Words are wondrous things. I can’t say enough about them. A few squiggles on the page or on the lips can be life-changing. The marriage vow: I do or Hell, no, I won't go.  

There was a time when the well-turned phrase would get you re-invited to the next dinner party. Ask Henry James. I doubt if he ever ate at home.

Up until WWI, speechifying was conflated with intellect. During that crime against humanity, soldiers lost limbs and long-winded phrases died in the trenches. A generation was lost along with polysyllabic words; staccato jazz translated to clipped sentences. 

Concision entered poetry. Literature became stripped of frippery the same way the Bauhaus School brought unornamented Modernism to architecture. The old standard of florid sentences in which the subject was separated from the predicate by pages of commas and semicolons was no longer considered a thing of beauty.

Even if Faulkner didn't get the memo, Hemingway made brevity the new standard. It doesn’t get any shorter than his short story: Baby shoes for sale; never used.

When did minimalism become such a virtue? Are we a lazy people or just in a hurry on our way to nowhere? Is this payback for long-winded bloviating; those orators in the halls of Congress or men of the cloth intoning everything God has to say?

Now the pendulum has swung and some fine words are hanging by their thumbs. LOL. The internet has us writing in fluent acronyms. IMHO, this is a small step for man and a giant step on the wrong road for mankind. We may end up conversing in shrugs, nods and grunts.

On the other hand, nothing is more democratic than language. Each word is an agreed-upon utterance rising organically by popular consent. Words morph from other words and also die from exhaustion. Awe used to be my religion. Now it has become limp from overuse; an awesome shame. 

Brevity has shortened our perceptual span. Linguists believe that language precedes thought. Fewer words limit ideas. A broad vocabulary trains the mind to think in more nuanced ways. In less than a year our native tongue has been demeaned by simplistic terms and name-calling. Deceit leads to debasement. 

T.S. Eliot described poetry as a raid on the inarticulate. We are all poets and we struggle to capture those feelings for which words fail us. Let us find ways to express our vehemence against this tide, even as we revivify language to support and find soulful connections with one another.

Autumn Barely

The calendar says fall has begun. Indeed much has fallen but not the foliage yet. Harvest may have begun elsewhere along with swollen gourds. The only seeds I have sown yielded my three wonderful daughters. still in the summer of their lives. 

I know the season has turned over only because Trader Joe's has gone orange with all things pumpkin, from soup to nuts and more importantly, long-awaited ice cream. 

As for nature, autumn arrives noiselessly on its own slow clock. Unlike the maples and sycamores of Vermont whose rust and ruddy leaves die like divas ablaze in a golden deathbed scene, ours just get drained of chlorophyll, curl up and drop, then become fish and swim away in the great cycle. However we are still far from skeletal boughs.

I doubt if my demise will be operatic. Some might say: I thought he died years ago. In fact, maybe I did and it slipped my mind in which case this has been an afterlife beyond my expectations. In the meantime, I feel evergreen, still filled with pluck and spunk. My branches may be bent but are not quite brittle and most names etched in my bark are still retrievable.

In order for it to be autumn, I have to be in the mind of autumn. Here in the Southland, summer has a long lease. We still have days in the eighties even as we may yearn for a change of palette from green to burnt sienna. So we have to create markers that signify the season.

One such is the weekend football games which continue to infantilize me now and then or, at least, keep the child in me alive. Passion for my team has a short duration and is inexplicable, which is probably why I can't give it up. The outcome changes nothing. I have a penchant for some things that resist the rational. 

Football also brings its own weather. It's a way of feeling the brisk air. Put the kettle on. We need our small pleasures to keep the wolf from the door. If, as Emily Dickinson wrote, hope is a thing with feathers, there is a mourning dove nesting outside my window. 

I shall take this as a portent of change. Godlessness works in mysterious ways.

Invasions

In September 1939 Hitler invaded Poland, the opening salvo of WWII which ended up killing 85 million people. Putin invaded Ukraine in Feb. 2022. 

Over the past nine months The United States has invaded itself. We are no longer the country I once knew, having traded golden knick-knacks for the Golden Rule. We used to be the land upon which God shed his grace and crowned thy good with brotherhood. Grace and brotherhood have been replaced with avarice and vengeance.

Louis the 14^th said: L’etat c’est moi, I am the state. This is the most succinct statement proclaiming the absolute right of kings. We are well on our way in our descent to monarchical rule.

Invasions are seldom contributions to mankind. However, there are exceptions. Almost one thousand years ago a French contingent from Normandy crossed the channel and defeated the English at the Battle of Hastings. It might be regarded as a food fight in which French toast bested English muffins, and the result was eggs benedict. Besides their French cooking and new-fangled weaponry, they introduced their Latinate-Romance language, forever softening the English tongue. And the Norman Conquest bequeathed me my name.

To stretch a point, another instance of a good invasion was the introduction of cowpox to treat smallpox. Edward Jenner is credited with this first vaccine. The word itself is derived from the Latin, vacca, meaning cow. In fact, the notion first came from West Africa where the disease was managed by allowing small amounts of live virus to colonize healthy people and stimulate the immune system to create antibodies. Indeed, smallpox is the first human disease to have been completely eradicated.

Thanks to vaccines, we have virtually eliminated polio, mumps, measles, whooping cough, diphtheria, tetanus, chickenpox, rubella, and hepatitis. Dictators tend to disparage science because it is based on independent thought and critical thinking. Evidence-based inquiry is deemed a threat while junk science and conspiracy theories are encouraged.

It is therefore not coincidental that our new regime has aligned itself with the anti-vaccine movement. Ultimately, the death toll from this senseless alliance can rival the aforementioned wars.

Rounds and Squares and Flakes

Consider the snowflake, each unique as a QR code, given all the possibilities for crystalline formations. Better yet, let’s talk about cornflakes, equally un-replicable. If a cornflake were an island, as it is in a bowl of milk, it would show one deep harbor after another. No perpendiculars. You have to admire it for that. It’s as jagged as the right-hand margin of a contemporary poem, asserting its sui generis voice.

I am gazing into my bowl looking for the meaning of life. It’s as likely here as in the cottage cheese ceiling or the book I just found on my shelf,  written by some guru in a loincloth and scrupulously unread. Some flakes resist sogginess almost successfully, others succumb to milk from cows or almonds.

Where are you going with all this? I don’t know but I’ll think of something.

Truth be told I left cornflakes behind along with Wheaties many bananas ago.  Now, I’m a Catalina Crunch and blueberry sort of guy. But those old orange, rectangular boxes deserve a special place in my thrill-a-minute-life. Wheaties were probably my first newspaper as I spooned and read about their designated heroes. For a street urchin as I was, the athletes on the box became my brief idols. There was a certain magic in those words. I was becoming knowledgeable about something my parents knew not. These days the only thing I read on the box is the carbohydrate and fiber content. 

To stretch a point, American history took an unfortunate turn when, in 1937, Ronald Reagan became a celebrity at least in Iowa when he won the Breakfast of Champions award for best broadcaster of baseball games sponsored by…you guessed it, Wheaties. From there it was a short step into the Oval Office. Presumably, he was gobbling Wheaties in Hollywood, and as Governor of California and then, and then. Of such stuff B-movies are made. Is this a great country or what?

Now it’s time to talk about how cereal boxes are stored in the pantry. My stepdaughter used to alternate her three cereals, flakes, rounds and squares on consecutive days of the week. If it’s Wednesday it must be Cheerios. This became Christie’s way of ordering through the small anarchies of life.

Friend Fred arranged all his cans alphabetically. As he tells it this was done in case he wakes up suddenly blind, he could grab the tuna fish and know it isn’t salmon. I call it the Artie Shaw Syndrome. The clarinet playing band leader and leader also of obsessive compulsives, insisted all pillowcases face the same direction. Eight marriages later he wrote about it. 

Fred can’t play Begin the Beguine but has other endearing qualities. He was miffed when his daughter and son scrambled his pantry as a prank. They even switched the Hi-Lo Flakes with Bran Buds. 

He was confronted with the chaos of life. But he recovered in time to email them that he was sitting at his desk with his will and an eraser. Humor is the best revenge. As for the turmoil of existence I have no urgent need to tidy it up. Earth is round, borders square and life is irregularly flaky.

Yes, I know, sophisticated people scoff at cereal. A few cups of coffee rev their motor. Call it my arrested development. But my morning bowl has gotten me this far. Every day snaps, crackles and pops, in no particular order.

Odysseus and His Odyssey

The new movie called The Return begins at the end of Odysseus’ twenty-year travail. Ralph Fiennes is washed ashore on Ithaca, haggard looking but ever resourceful and muscular, while Juliette Binoche is no less cunning as she ravels and unravels the fruit of her loom. The scenes of them together are well-worth the ordeal of watching the rest of the film with its gratuitous violence.

Constantine Cavafy's poem Ithaca calls into question, is it the  destination or the journey. The promised land may be illusory. We strive for some ultimate sense of returning home, which ain’t what it used to be. As Thomas Wolfe put it, You Can’t Go Home Again. Yet we all have our Ithaca.

The illusion has been paved over or seen now with new eyes. In baseball one travels around the diamond to reach home plate in a cloud of dust. Is he safe or out? Only the imp-ump-god knows. What’s a Homer for?

Was Odysseus safe? Not until he emptied his quiver of arrows into the eager hearts of Penelope’s suitors. On full display is our hero’s devious ways, hubris here, self-possession there, lust and fidelity in his many turnings. 

Why do we still read the Odyssey today? Maybe to see the soft clay we are made of. Odysseus is a model of Western man, blemished as he is, and his multitudes within; the entire aggregate of men in all their passions and follies. 

In the Odyssey he is alternately punished by Poseidon and saved by Athena. Yet he emerges as man, alone, without providential intervention. He is without a moral compass, a cork on the waves given to expediency without any ideology other than survival. There are no moral imperatives to guide him. No sense of the greater good nor any ethical standards other than looking out for number one.

He returns to Penelope because he needs the feminine principle to make himself whole. Warriors require the other to recover their humanity. Eros is the creative life force. Will the patriarchy ever learn?

Few of us reclaim the throne unless self-actualization can be seen as royalty. I would say it is. And that sense of a life well-lived comes from the journey itself. What greater adventure than this wild span of years full of stumbles, detours, overhead light bulbs, being fully met and with moments of reverence for the all of it.   

A Funny Thing Happened On My Way To Oblivion

Aside from Facebook, I have a list of 65 friends to whom I send my blogs. Google, in their infinite reach, tells me how many click on the link I provide.

I’ve been posting about two each week for sixteen years. On average, about 25-40 open and presumably read my ramblings. All of a sudden, starting about two weeks ago, I am being read by over twice the number on my recipient list.

Welcome, I think but who are you? I don’t know whether to be flattered or frightened. Imagine having 65 of your closest friends over and 150 crash the party. Food for thought is soon gone. Some of these strangers may even be wearing masks. 

Is that you, Igor? How’s the weather in Kazakhstan? Or are you stuck in some subterranean boiler room in an abandoned warehouse? Worst case scenario, I’m being scrutinized by recently-released thugs 3 floors under the White House. Maybe ICE is checking to see if my grandfather arrived at Ellis Island with an undocumented Kaiser roll.

Or could my new-found set of eyes be an array of Musk-made bots? There are no buts about a bout with a bot. One would think AI has better use of their time than scrutinizing the squiggles of an iconoclast in his 93rd year. Why bother? Soon, I shall wither away from natural causes anyway, unless I find myself first having lunch with a suicide bomber.

True enough, I've been vehement over the forensics leading to the demise of America. I had expected to go out hearing about the land that I love... through the night with a light from above and not a requiem for a country, disappeared. The wars which I thought were won against human bondage and fascism, seem now to have both been lost. 

I will try to ignore that uninvited goon-bot leaning against a lamppost across from my window at midnight, whether he exists or not. Instead, I'll gaze at the apostrophe of a moon, possessed of all the wonder over which it presides. 

After further research, Google tells me I have readers in China and Hong Kong. Next time, I’d better read the fortune cookie for a coded message. It's only fair, if I show them mine, they should show me theirs. I never give up hope that Lao-Tzu will turn up.

Instead, I usually get some version of, Have a nice day. Indeed, I shall, with gratitude for this lucky life, and moments still pulsing from every one of my ninety plus years, from column A and column B, the sweet, the sour and spicy of it all.        

Word of the Year

My vote goes to performative.  Of course, spoken words are different from written words and this is one I’ve never uttered but it keeps popping up in print or from the mouths of talking heads.

Gaslighting had its run and now feels sort of stale. I expect performative to have the same fate. On the other hand, as long as Trump reigns, the word fits.

When Donald first appeared on the political stage, he had already gained his chops on reality T.V. Since then, we have witnessed the transformation of politics into show business; lethal show biz at that. Now, only about a third of the country is laughing. Call it theater of audacity and mendacity. Call it performative.

He knows how to get his name on the marque. Bless him, as on Fox News, ridicule him or curse him as we do in my circle of friends, but it isn’t possible to ignore him.

Whether his antics, part ignorance and part arrogance, can be dismissed as a mere performance is no longer relevant. He may be playing the court jester but he is also the man on the throne. And each reckless and mindless edict has historic consequences wrecking countless lives.     

When he staged an illegal political photo op at Arlington cemetery that was performative but relatively harmless. Renaming the Gulf of Mexico and now the Defense Dept. is also designed partially as performance. When he set up a camera crew to show him kissing the flag or the Bible that was also performance art, but his behavior goes much further than that. 

His announcement which threatened Greenland's sovereignty is both spectacle and a blatant violation of law. The destruction of a vessel and crew in international waters because it might be heading here and it might be carrying drug smugglers is also performative, but deadly. 

With a wink toward his MAGA minions he parades weaponry and paves over roses. To borrow from G&S Pinafore, He is the monarch of the realm / born to overwhelm / And ply his power as the office grants / And so do his children and his sycophants.

Historians will describe him as a narcissistic misogynist with arrested development, void of empathy and any discernible ethos, They will have to add performative to that list of adjectives. 

Truth Be Told

The answer is Montenegro or Bobby Riggs or Gloria Graham. These days lunch could not be complete without looking up some piece of trivia on our smart phone. It leaves no question unanswered except, perhaps, for the meaning of life, what are we doing here and what just went wrong with our country. If we can’t deal with the overwhelming questions at least we placate our brains with the small stuff.

As was recently pointed out by Ken Jennings, the M.C. of the quiz show Jeopardy, facts are more than trivia. In fact, trivia is more than trivial. The word goes back seven centuries when it referred to three essentials of a liberal arts education, rhetoric, logic and grammar. A massive dose of each is achingly needed in our citadels of power.

In this age of mendacity, conspiracy and gullibility, facts have been relegated to versions of truth on one channel, twisted on another and ignored by most. Objective truth went out with landlines and dictionaries. However a lie does not become true by repetition. 

I doubt if any of our ancestors had as much knowledge crammed into their grey matter as we do. Our heads are stuffed with gigabytes (whatever that means) of facts. Too bad knowledge doesn’t translate into wisdom. 

Was it Plato or Yogi Berra who said, knowledge is knowing that tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in fruit salad. Actually, it was Miles Kington who deserves attribution. He also said that a pessimist sees a glass as half empty. An optimist is the guy who drinks what’s there’s and orders another. I know all this because I just looked it up…but at least I waited till I came home.

The fact of the matter is that while, botanically speaking, tomatoes are seeded plants and therefore fruits, the Supreme Court, in 1893, ruled that they shall be designated as a vegetable and taxed accordingly as a veggie import.

Knowledge has a shelf life. Wisdom is more like what we know but cannot quite articulate. Wisdom is likely to be an interrogation. Why and how rather than who or when. Possibly what happened when we didn’t notice. The ineffable. An instance of congruence in the discord. A pattern seen from a distant perch.

Knowledge has its place. It is one step ahead of info, data and nomenclature. If they opened me up, out would come pouring a compendium of pharmaceutical terms, a dictionary of words and an encyclopedia of political events, a smattering of history & geography, a gaggle of ballplayers, movies, actors, big-band leaders and a libretto or two from Gilbert and Sullivan. The stuff that might get me on Jeopardy.     

It may be that wisdom comes in two sizes. The great wisdom said to be found at the foot of the Himalayas or the fleeting variety at the bottom of your oatmeal bowl. When the Zen novice arrives at the monastery seeking answers he is told to wash his bowl. The floating world is that which eludes Google over lunch but may be accessible to the dishwasher in his reverie. 

In simplicity and silence, one learns to listen for the wisdom which lies within, sort of like knowing what it takes not to add tomato (or ketchup) to the fruit salad.

Just a couple of decades ago we might have gathered for lunch and have a conversation over Chinese chicken salad without needing to know what country in Europe has the second tallest men (Montenegro). We might have left the table just wondering. Where has all the wonder gone?

Migrations

In epochal terms, the history of our planet is marked by migrations. From whales and butterflies to humans. Out of Africa to the Eurasian land mass, Mongol tribes emigrated to Europe and Europeans colonized the Americas, displacing the tens of millions of indigenous people who had made their way here from Asia.  

We, Caucasians of European ancestry, are illegal immigrants. We were not invited by the American Indians. We are the men and women who came to dinner, killed our hosts and never left. Now we declare ourselves landlords, lording over this land called the United States.

This land was made for you and me and us and them; the ribbons of highways and amber waves of grain. Through slave labor, European squabbles, war crimes, famines, pogroms and opportunity we forged a nation of immigrants and now we desecrate Emma Lazarus’ poem on the Statue in New York harbor and slam the door shut on the huddled masses yearning.

The soul of this country aches with blues and celebrates in jazz. Its mythos was seeded by Hollywood and its Jewish moguls and the American Songbook was composed by first generation immigrants from Eastern Europe. The Chinese built our railroads and Irish forged our labor unions. Every poetic leap, financial risk, strive and stumble is attributable to children of immigrants.

One might wonder why Central America has always been our impoverished neighbors. President Monroe declared it our protectorate 202 years ago. The years since have been marked by U.S. rapacious corporations, maldistribution of land with puppet governments propped up by U.S. agencies. And now their people flee. No surprise.

I believe our resistance to migrants is a last gasp against mass migrations in decades to come. I won’t be here to witness millions from equatorial regions moving toward the poles as the planet heats up. Large areas will become inarable and uninhabitable. Perhaps Greenland will become green.

Through heedless exploitation, avarice, neglect and denial, world powers are rendering our orb unsustainable for human habitation. Maybe, just maybe, one day we will see ourselves as brothers and sisters, guardians and gardeners of the planet. And maybe one day my pixie dust will be on the wing of some migratory bird looking down on land without borders. Or maybe not.

 

Out Of Vilna (from 2019)

Thanks to my middle daughter, Lauren, we have discovered the soil of our family tree. Going back four generations our roots belong in Lithuania….at least on one side. Lauren is our chronicler and noticer. While others ask what, she with her wide eyes, asks when and where.

She is the one who spots the incongruous hat or shoe in the canvas be it a scene in a movie or a photo album. She has always been able to identify the year and location of an image by what the apparel doth oft proclaim.

A sense of antecedents drives her questioning. I share that curiosity but on a more macro plane. Lauren sniffs out details, the animating particulars in order to create a soulful presence. She reminds me of all the questions I never asked.

In her seventeenth year Lauren left regular high school to finish in an independent studies program on her own. After two months she took and passed an equivalency exam which gave her a diploma. That spirit of self-discovery has never left. She answers to her own interrogating voice searching for beginnings. That wondering and wandering began her Out of Vilna moment.

My grandfather, Morris, made his way out of Vilna in his seventeenth year also. His journey brought him to the lower east side of Manhattan in 1887. It was a difficult decision and it was also an easy decision. Tough to leave family and friends behind along with the teeming cultural and literary scene in Vilna which was the Paris of that region. The Jewish population of the city reached 40%. Yet it was also a city under siege by Poles, Belarussians and Prussians. Pogroms ate away at the outskirts. Conscription was the fate of young men. I imagine young Morris hiding in a cellar from a band of drunken, mustachioed Cossacks. Perhaps he was concealed under a large stack of potatoes and he found his transit on one of their shoots.

He was part of a mass migration from Eastern Europe to Hamburg to New York harbor. Was he by himself? We don’t know yet. But I’m sure he traveled in steerage coming up on deck to pass that newly installed Statue of Liberty, then on to Ellis Island and from there to a tenement on a street of pushcarts. In 1891 he met Yetta and the tree was watered.

In my seventeenth year I was lost. I might as well have been in Vilna on the wrong road out. I had no idea it was a family tradition. Girls were still a foreign subject. Politics and sports were my strong points. I thought I knew the good guys from the bad guys... in government and on the playing field. I wasn’t altogether wrong but not altogether right either. A year later I chose my profession and four years after that I was married. Not very prudent with either choice……….but then again I wouldn’t have Lauren to learn from if I had embarked on that road not taken.

Did my father have his Out of Vilna intersection? I’ll have to make this up because I forgot to ask. He either didn’t finish or never started high school. Too poor. He sold newspapers on Flatbush Ave. and played the mandolin in a pick-up band, a piece of DNA not passed along to me. He earned loose change cashing in deposit bottles or as a runner dashing from the telephone in the candy store to fetch a neighbor from the 4th floor of a walk-up. He left his Vilna behind when he met my mother who tutored him for the two-year pharmacy college straight through to his license.

Morris, can you hear me? We’re all in your debt. Had you stayed in Vilna none of us would be.