Zero

It’s all about zeros. Turn your back and millionaires become billionaires and don’t even talk about trillionaires. Life has increased exponentially and left me still worrying about overdue library books.

A million seconds ago was August 8^th. A billion seconds ago, Bill Clinton said he was feeling our pain. A trillion years back, Neanderthals passed the baton to us Homo sapiens….which eventually led to Elon Musk and Donald Trump thus disproving the progression of our species.

A thousand million gives me a brain ache. It makes my hair hurt. Back in the 1950s my union negotiated a contract which would pay pharmacists $4.00/hour at the end of five years. I thought I’d be rich. At that time, the average pay was $2.00/hour. Now, that’s what I tip the man at the car wash.

Yes, I know, looking back is what old folks famously do, while Gen X, Y and Z look ahead. Who’s got the rosy lens and who sees through a glass darkly? It is too easy to embellish the past; it wasn’t so rosy then but, at least, it offers the illusion of clarity.

I am blind to the future, and the present is nearly opaque. My astigmatism helps me see the world at a slant, which is to say, absurd and askew. Few things compute. Zero which used to signify nothing, now multiplies to the beyond.

I have long had the habit of finding refuge in sports. It seemed fixed in time, impervious to the turmoil of the real world. Aside from a few changes in rules to align with fan’s sensibility it carried the aura of permanence. The sports section was a universe apart from the world of finance and politics. Not so now and probably never was the case. Teams, once family-owned, are now corporate toys.

The recent shenanigans with the ownership of the Dodgers are a case in point. Mark Walter, the team owner, has been cited by the Securities & Exchange Commission and the Federal District Court for infractions. His nefarious acts are under investigation. It calls to mind the close ties between corporate misdeeds and the government which has always been the untold story in sports franchises. The baseball term caught stealing takes on a broader meaning as billionaire malfeasance is uncovered. 

The malicious ignoramus on the throne has a nose for money. He smells those zeros. It has now become obligatory for the captains of industry to fork up a few hundred million bucks to gain his favor when his DOJ is probing one's corporate empire. The money flows at the speed of a click in this zero-sum game. The king is in the counting house counting all his money and the mogul may or may not get his honey.

All this is almost enough to shed my infantile obsession with sports, but not quite.

A few weeks ago, the story concerned Gianni Infantino, the head of FIFA (world soccer organization), cozying up to Trump and nearly ousted by European members. At the heart of organized sports is money (I almost said crime).

Winning and losing on the field is just a micro version of the winners and losers in the scheme of billionaires. It’s all about buying and selling and adding zeros.

 

 

Remembrance

Five years ago today, Peggy died. I'd rather celebrate her on her birthday, not her death-day. Yet here it is and I cannot let this day go without a small remembrance. She said Yes to life in all its offerings. Even in her dying she made of a dirge, a rhapsody. 

 Andalusian Epistemology

Don’t go away. This is not about

anything Andalusian or epistemology.

It is just the punchline of a joke

Peggy and I used to share.

And now I can’t remember the joke.

We used to say those words for the sound of it,

for the polysyllabic stumbling of it all,

for the numbing pretentiousness.

It became a private expression which loses

everything in translation.

I want to ask her to remind me

where it came from

and where the choreography

of our dailiness has gone.

Two, she said, is a sacred number.

Her radiance still lights my way

through this long-night city.

 

Beckett and Brooks

Here I am, Beckett’s character saying, I can’t go on…………I’ll go on. That line from his novel, The Unnamable, was written soon after the end of WWII with all its inhumanity on display. Caught between despair and persistence, was the existential belief that we must make our life meaningful even in a world of the absurd.

Today, we bear witness to nothing less than the systematic overthrow of our founding precepts. Every day, another outrage aimed to subvert our Constitution. I would like to ask one question to the man in the Oval: Why did we enter the war against fascism?

I try to convince myself that writing itself strikes a note of affirmation for the choir of which I am a member. It is an act of resistance and a shout against my own impulse towards futility.

It also makes me think of the line, I got it. I got it. I don’t got it, from Mel Brooks' High Anxiety. I live in that space between what I can carry and what I can't, between what is actual and what I profess. 

I live a privileged life with a closet of clothes, eating when hungry and unafraid of being blown to smithereens. Survival is not an issue.

Yet I pontificate on my keyboard. I get it but I don’t get it. The accident of geography which has deposited me safely flanked by two oceans from a far different reality, has altered my consciousness. It has kept me well-fed and well-clothed but ill-prepared to meet the enormity of daily struggles endured by billions of others.

When I take on the very real perils of climate change and it becomes my weather, my next breath, I fall into inaction and despair... but I go on. 

Pass the Prosecco as the talk goes to the disfigurement of our country literally and ethically. Beckett, with all his melancholia, leaned toward going forward in spite of the pull otherwise. Mel Brooks' character declares he's got it, he's got it, then doesn't. It's too heavy and he lets go. 

As William Bendix proclaimed in Life of Riley, It's a revolting development. Of course, that wasn't a call for revolution, but an incipient revolt may be just what is now taking place. I call it a true populism as opposed to the pseudo populist movement of MAGA.

An aggrieved class is always present under capitalism. Trump told them they were heard and he herded them like sheep, with enough wool to pull over their eyes.

Democrats have a tent full of felines who cannot be herded. Some scratch and their curiosity can be a killer, while others purr. Some cats are hep; others are the donor class who have been declawed. They make good pets. Most people aren't allergic to them as they are to alley cats.

The shepherd tells his flock whom to hate and they say bah on cue. Dems. are a cacophony with an urgency to become a choir.

Going For Broke

By the dawn’s early light, breaking news can break your heart but the heart grows by breaking into chamber music to mend this fractured world.

Breakfast is buttered by a solar spread. Humpty-Dumpty broke into a yellow scramble, then reassembled as omelet, an amulet for the deviled eggs in the Oval.

Today has never happened before with this morning’s minion of ten blueberries multiplied in the bowl while half a toasted bagel breaks into an urgent song to bless the mourning dove on the patio nested in my shoe. A hummingbird flaps a psalm, unheard, sawing  the contaminated air with random grace as light through yonder shadows breaks.

Strange how bro and ken spell split, not as pea soup or bananas  but split as in fracked. Today we break anew going for broke, driven by sun and wind. 

If the bough breaks in the big tent of my party, the cradle of Democracy will fall; let it bend instead, brokered, hemispheres joined, brothers as kindred spirits in a peaceable kingdom against the agreed-upon foe.

 

 

 

 

Better Answer The Phone

It could be Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes with your retirement plan.

Or it might be the governor calling the warden to commute the sentence as Lefty is walking that last crooked mile to the chair. After all, he's clean as a choir boy. The reporters at the saloon won't see the lights dim since the switch in the big house will stay untouched this time around.

It might even be your doctor with the news that your scan showed your prostate cancer has not metastasized into your bones. What happened to the prostate, stayed in the prostate.  Though it revealed severe degeneracy. One cultivates their degeneracy over the years; I call it a life, lived.

That sort of cancer is famously slow growing. So slow I suppose one dies from it posthumously. In fact, over 50% of men in their nineties have prostate cancer. Some of us just don't want to be left out. 

We're told we will die of something else, but we're not given a multiple choice. For my part I'd like to get a phone call informing me that I'm already dead and this is my afterlife. Pass the key lime pie. 

Travelers

With all the attention the movie version of The Odyssey has been receiving my thoughts have turned to another intrepid traveler, Barry Lopez.

Homer’s Odysseus met with every possible temptation, threat and struggle to return home. On one level it is a triumph over what we now call PTSD. Ten years recovery, after ten years as a warrior.

It could also be read as a testosterone-driven adventure for young adults. But it is better understood as an allegory with his ordeals representing a series of psychological states of mind. Each challenge is met with ingenuity, courage, expediency and reason, asserting himself against the fury of the gods. Ultimately, there is a yearning, above all else, for the feminine principle in order to gain his full humanity. 

Barry Lopez died six years ago. His genius ranged from great writing to geology, anthropology and photography, with a fearless exploration of harsh ecosystems, from equatorial deserts to polar tundras. He lived with arctic wolves and survived forty feet waves around Antarctica, as well as witnessing the wonder of one hundred kangaroos leaping in the Australian Outback.

Unlike Odysseus he wasn't seduced by lotus or sirens. He didn't need Circe to lure him into the untamed and unknown. His quest was for the felt experience and the people who live on the margins of survival. He walked into an old-growth rainforest to feel the sense of being lost. At the same time he tested himself enduring spatial closeness. 

His brilliance as a writer cannot be overstated. He was able to transport readers to confront their elemental selves and discover their own inner wilderness. His body of work erases categories. He was an essayist, author of eight works of fiction and winner of the National Book Award for non-fiction. His final book, Horizons reads like a memoir as he recounts six of his previous excursions into nether regions.

Above all else he was a humanitarian with a voice both urgent and lyrical. He wrote of the perils facing our planet even as he delivered affirmations with a reverence for life. I heard echoes of Thoreau and Loren Eiseley, as he noted that undisturbed land not only heals but brings a state of transcendence, releasing us to appreciate the wonder of otherness. He warned that violence to the earth, as in mining or drilling, begets violence to ourselves.

Lopez showed us that constancy is an illusion. The Yupik and Inuit now live with an existential threat of an environment in transition. It has been widely written about but it can only be experienced by being there as Lopez was. His witness adds a new dimension. What is regarded as a dreaded phenomenon to scientists was a numinous moment in time to Lopez. How these people strategize their survival and the thousands of indigenous folks who fought extinction before them, warrant our first-hand attention. We have much to learn from them.

Through his contact with indigenous people from pole to pole, he was able to re-dream the world for us. Against our xenophobia, he pled for diversity, for hard listening to the aborigines and trampled people everywhere, the wisdom revealed in their storytelling. Their art aspires to converse, and such a conversation is imperative. 

It isn't my intention to conflate the lives of Odysseus and Lopez. One was, arguably, the prototype of modern man in an epic poem and the other a real life national treasure. The former made his way to his imagined home after vanquishing all manner of foe while our contemporary polymath found his home among inhospitable locations on the map.   

Barry Lopez's voice embodies the human predicament and a fierce defense of our planet along with a certain poetic cadence aligned with the pulse of the earth.

 

Monarchs

No, not him again. True, they both have a thing for Mexico and favor orange with darkness around their edges, but the ones I’m thinking of have wings and they flap across the border, undocumented. As far as I know none are rapists.

Our subspecies potentate just prances around his gold-gilt bathrooms eyeing spigots and hurls verbal spitballs or gets ridden around the greens putting balls into holes.

Aside from all the other ills of this fragile planet, monarch butterflies are facing eviction from their winter home. The next time your order avocado toast, think again. The fir trees where millions go to cuddle in the winter, are being systematically cut down. Farmers on that land are planting avocado trees in their place. There is no money in butterflies but Mexico produces 80% of the world’s guacamole which fed sports fans while watching the World Cup. There were more tree stumps left than goals scored.

Here I am, trying to catch the butterfly of the moment even though the best I can do is note all the flutterbys I failed to net. Why butter, I wonder? Flutter is better than butter, so say I and now I know the answer though I wish I could withdraw the question: Because their excrement looks like butter says Google, as if it were flying cows. From now on I’ll take my toast dry, thank you, and that could be my butterfly moment with patterns made by my toaster oven on the low-carb, high fiber Keto bread, but hold the excrement, and besides what other species is named after their poop, I ask you?

Monarchs migrate 3,000 miles from eastern Canada to the High Sierras in Mexico. However it takes 4-5 generations for a round trip. They feast on toxic milkweed. Apparently, one creature's poison is another's banquet. Predators find out that monarchs are devoutly to be avoided.

They are defenseless, however, against human predators with our nets and pins. We seem to have cultivated predation into an artform. I can’t imagine that butterflies enjoy being pinned. After all, life is short enough orchestrating their choreography among the wildflowers. Their lifespan is about 6-8 weeks. They must die of exhaustion, a week being a decade but who's counting?

I wonder if their brief days are a frenzy or are there patterns, as in toast, we can't see? Jesus, is that you, Jesus or is it Walt Whitman? To be permitted to hold my gaze into those leaves of grass if only for a split nanosecond, seems to me a better use of butter as they flutter by. Put me on the wings of the lepidoptera as it dreams of its past life as a caterpillar, then a chrysalis; always on the verge of its next incarnation.

The Lost Language Of Chirps

It's come to this. Most of my friends have hearing aids. The rest don't know what they're missing. We get to hear utensils drop in restaurants, highly amplified. We also are treated to closed captioning not only for what is being said by humans but for howls and snarls of lurking beasts as well bird's honks, hoots, twirps and chirps. Not that we hear them but we are told they're happening.

Birds chirping seem to be the obligatory opening lines for detective stories set in bucolic England. It translates to, You'll never guess what's about to happen in this quaint Cotswold village. If nameless birds aren't chirping then gulls must be screeching. I prefer the chirp where I can be lulled into somnambulance. 

If the scene is set in Brooklyn we might get boids choiping particularly on Turd Avenue and Turdy-Turd St. Then we’re in for 90 minutes of crooked cops, back alleys, a topless dancer going to night school for a law degree and a car chase destroying a dozen fruit stands and pushcarts. Is that a chirp or a garbage truck backing up?

However nothing compares to the sunny hamlets with thatched roofs, riddled with crime and no one does it as well as the Brits. Their supply of detective stories is inexhaustible. Tough-gentle, scruffy-clean cut, oversized-frail, alcoholic-teetotalers, clergymen, classicists, hard or soft-boiled.

People with fully functioning ears may not know that a chirping bird is often sufficient to set off a mild-mannered septuagenarian on a killer rampage. Who knew what evil lurked behind those bake sales and cricket matches? Maybe it was the white suits that drove Fitzroy Fitzmorris to plot the demise of the former Lieutenant of the 3rd Fusiliers and local headmaster.

For the first 40 minutes every one of the eleven suspects interviewed tells whooping lies. As the truth is grudgingly revealed it becomes clear, from the couch, who the murderer is…..only to be dashed as his body turns up bludgeoned with a fire iron. 

Suddenly each face changes, birds stop chirping and crows start cawing accompanied by organ music. The Detective Inspector overhears a conversation at the pub and has an epiphany. Everyone is to gather in the library. He methodically eliminates the culprits one by one until……..yes, we say, he didn’t fool me for a minute. It is, of course, the retired benign viscount whose cunning chess moves are played, in human scale, out on the village green. The inspector then returns to take tea with his perfect wife and birds can be heard chirping once more.

Of course, the chirping birds knew all along who did the dastardly deed. If we were fluent in the lost language of chirps we could have saved ourselves all this sleuthing.

The formula, set in Albion stone, is reaffirmed. Order has been restored. Truth will out. The gardens are untrammeled. Songs can be heard from the pub. On the lawn of the manor house a croquet ball has been hit squarely through a portal. We shall, for reasons unknown, sleep well tonight.

Deprived are those without captioning. They have to do their crime-solving without benefit of bird calls. Only we hearing impaired get to know that birds are chirping once again.

World Cup Fans In The Stands

I tried to care about the World Cup but suddenly nothing happened. Like Trump at Madison Square Garden during Knicks basketball playoff game, I nodded off. Yet every time I woke up, I had missed something; a penalty shot, a free kick, maybe even a goal. Perhaps if I took the time to learn what an off-side or an infraction is, it might help. But I'm too ossified to enthuse about men, once again, throwing, kicking or clubbing balls into holes. Yes, it is better than throwing each other into pits, but still.

Go ahead, call me an Ugly American. 3.5 to 5 billion soccer fans can't be wrong. On the other hand, McDonalds sells 76 burgers every second, world-wide. They go for up to $25 at a World Cup match. When they sold 300 hundred billion they stopped counting. At my age big numbers no longer impress.

I'm not one to sneer over sports events. We get to chose our alternative universe. Baseball is in my bloodstream. I can watch a game and write a blog at the same time. I don't scoff at slow. Runs are hard to come by; the average game has about 6-7. 

Basketball has become a too high-scoring game with each team averaging over 100 hundred points. I can handle the last 2 minutes. Football keeps my attention with 30-50 points scored between the 2 teams.  

Fandom makes no sense. I know, I'm one of them. It is an exercise in the irrational which taps into the reptilian brain. It strikes me that the phenomenology of being an avid fan is more pronounced today than ever before. Passions have been sublimated into identification with a particular jersey. Stadiums are bursting with cheers and jeers. The throng is living or dying vicariously with the fate of their team. And yet, nothing in real life changes.

Of course, the fan knows this. We will go home (or get up from the couch) and register the elation or dejection for an hour or two. For those who bet, it's different story. An estimated 50 billion dollars has been wagered on this World Cup. Go figure!

On some level, fans are players in this theater of the absurd. It is a meta world enacting grievances as if the outcome will redress those complaints.

I am taken in by the crowd screaming, praying, rising en masse with each turn, projecting their imagined selves onto the field. The image of 60,000 ardent souls wearing the colors of their team's uniforms, coiled in expectation, is an arresting sight. From a distance it is a Pointillist painting or a Pollock action drip, a splattering of red or smear of green on the canvas. The painter might discover an abstract splash from his palette to capture the vortex of shoe and ball headed for the open net. Or possibly the head of a leaping player altering the trajectory of the soccer ball. 

Half the fans will get drunk in revelry. The other half may also drown their sorrows in drink, cursing missed calls, the refs and their fallen idols who let them down, just like life itself.

Berra Not Serra

An astute friend pointed out that on my list of quotations, I failed to include any words of wisdom by our singular 20th century philosopher Yogi Berra.

Berra elevated common sense to an artform and he did it unwittingly. His blurts became immortal and raised illogic to new heights. When Plato heard Yogi speak, he rethought the shadows on his wall, even though he'd been dead for over 2,500 years. 

It's been said that much of what Yogi is said to have said, he never said. Spinoza would have scoffed and Schopenhauer would have shrugged.

Yogi's most profound statement came when he advised a slumping teammate to try swinging only at strikes. Pause and consider these words to live by. First, it means recognizing when a strike is right in front of you. Then it means not swinging when the ball is out of your zone.

Take it out of the ballpark. We are all standing at the plate with a bat in our hands; we’re all seekers looking for our pitch. Few of us are finders because we are not seeing what we've been waiting for. To be present is to see and listen, to pick up what others let go by. Berra knew when to swing. He was a seer.

As Popes go, the late Francis ranks high on my list. He seemed more catholic than Catholic, yet he chose to elevate Junipero Serra to sainthood in Sept 2015. His papal decree got it all wrong. 

He canonized the colonizer, Junipero Serra. At the time of the American Revolution Serra was busy in California jamming catechisms down the throat of indigenous people whether they liked it or not. (As if they didn't already have a spirituality we could have learned from). There is evidence that he enslaved the Indians and forced them to build nine missions. Beware of anyone with a messianic urge.

The Church was part of the Spanish rapacious power structure; a shameful chapter in European history still with its aftershocks. 

No doubt by some act of providential intervention Yogi Berra chose that September week in 2015 to die.

Yogi was born in St. Louis, played in New York and spent his retirement years in New Jersey. When his wife asked him where he'd like to be buried, he said, Surprise me.

Now here was a man who not only performed miracles, he was one. He took the fork in the road less travelled to get to the restaurant nobody went to anymore because it was too crowded. 

It is also a fact he was among the first to land on Omaha Beach in the liberation of Western Europe. He was wounded but fought on and received the Purple Heart among other citations. This is enough to be sanctified.

His feats on the field also left the crowd scratching their heads. His strike zone seemed to extend from one dugout to the other. He swung at pitches from his shoelaces to his helmet. Yet he never struck out more than 38 times in a season. Compare this with today’s sluggers sometimes whiffing over 200 times. As Yogi said, 90% of the game is 50% mental.

I can think of no other person whose legacy is to encourage aphorisms from others and, by public acclaim, have it attributed to himself, though he denied it. He has become a repository of twisted common sense, even posthumously with no end in sight. As Yogi said, the future ain't what it used to be.

At the mention of Yogi Berra’s name, a certain bemusement crosses our face. While Father Serra stole the native language, Father Berra's casual erudition is well on its way to immortality. Yogi not Junipero, Berra not Serra should have been sainted.

Choice Words

Here are a few quotes I've picked up along the way:

Rumi said, If everything around seems dark, look again, you may be the light. __________________________________________

The only aristocracy is that of consciousness. 

D.H. Lawrence

____________________________________

The more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people. -Vincent van Gogh

______________________________

The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second. -John Steinbeck, 

_____________________________________

Fascism can no longer be seen as an evil force visited upon the public from above but a sickness that lives within each individual and could easily be tapped given the appropriate circumstances and timing. Sherill Tippins

_____________________________

Voltaire wrote, God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

___________________________

Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. -Arundhati Roy

_______________________________

“I begin to think, that a calm is not desirable in any situation in life. Every object is beautiful in motion; a ship under sail, trees gently agitated with the wind, and a fine woman dancing, are three instances in point. Man was made for action and for bustle.” Abigail Adams

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All children are poets

until they stop reaching for

butterflies that are not there. Dunya Mikhail

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The only way human beings can win a war is to prevent it. -George Marshall

All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography. -Federico Fellini

So we buy handbags and hats and other overpriced appurtenances of successful people because we have to nurture our confusing identities. Wan A. Hulaimi

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Colum McCann said: "I think a good novel can be a doorstop to despair. I also think the real bravery comes with those who prepared to go through that door and look at the world in all its grime and torment, and still find something of value, no matter how small."

___________________________________

Scratch a pessimist and you find often a defender of privilege. -William Beveridge 

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The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives." Albert Einstein

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You’ve got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body’s sermon on how to behave. -Billie Holiday

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In the end, the poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see--and what we see is life. -Robert Penn Warren, novelist and poet (24 Apr 1905-1989) 
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The world-wide food shortage that threatens up to five hundred million children could be alleviated at the cost of only one day of modern warfare.  Peter Ustinov

____________________________

Charles Simic said:  Awe is my religion, and mystery is its church.”

______________________________=

It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves. -Edmund Hillary

_________________________

Adrienne Rich said, Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone."

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It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?" Vita Sackville-West

---

 "There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army." John Ashbury

________________________

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment, / to laugh and cry with the same eyes, / with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them, / to make love in war and war in love.  Yehuda Amichai

Independence Day

The irony is inescapable; celebrating the birth of our nation as it was in the maternity ward, even as it is now in the emergency room. Our job is to keep it from the morgue.

In fact, the signing in 1776 did not declare the establishment of a new nation. It declared the severing of ties with our mother country. At the time we were a loose confederation of colonies. The word nation first appeared in 1783.

250 years ago was not all that different from today. The division between blue and red states is deep. Our country is almost as fissured as in the antebellum period. 

The legislative branch is dormant. The judiciary contorts itself to find justification for the dissolution of our democracy as it grants the president authoritarian powers with impunity. We are witnessing an imperial presidency which our Founders would have disavowed.

Surely, we did not break with one monarchy to embrace another.

Back in those good ole days of 1776 the colonies were split into three camps. The four New England States, (NH, MA, RI and CT were founded largely by those seeking religious freedom. They became more literate by reading the Bible. Too cold for growing crops in inarable soil year-round, they lived on logging, fishing and shipbuilding.

The middle ones, PA, NJ, NY and DE furnished wheat and grain. Their population was more diverse with settlers from Scandinavia, Germany and Holland and were known for greater religious tolerance. The upper Midwest might be regarded as our purple states in today's electoral map.

The five Southern States were home to four of our first five presidents, aka Founding Fathers. They relied on slave labor for their wealth and were later ardent supporters of state's rights.

The racism of the 18th century in all its virulence, poisons the air again today, with discriminatory hirings and firings as well as denial of voting rights. Until we confront our sins of human bondage, racist behavior will continue.

At the same time, we are also a country born out of the Enlightenment. Our founders were deists who relied on reason, rejected dogma and the divine right of kings. This new experiment called Democracy was a beacon for those seeking new opportunity and in flight from oppression.

We have always been a fractious country. As we celebrate our document of aspirations, we must also acknowledge the stains in our heritage. The tree of Democracy demands watering and custodial care as well as action against the blight which threatens our beautiful country at its roots.

 

  

Straddling Two Worlds

 I am currently reading three books. One is by Thomas Mann's son Klaus written in the early 1940s. He traces the early years of his life in that illustrious German family and the descent of his country into Nazi barbarism. The second is an anthology of short stories which Adele and I read over the phone. We've discovered some gems including works by Tim O'Brien, Joyce Carol Oates, Charles Baxter and Lorrie Moore.

Short pieces of fiction tend to concentrate on a single moment as a way of penetrating the subject. Reading aloud adds a new dimension, lifting characters off the page into a new life as we assume their voices.

The third is a new autofiction by Ben Lerner entitled Transcriptions. His novella reminds me how those of us over fifty straddle two cultures. The analog world of straight-ahead sequential movies and fiction. I didn't even have a telephone til I was thirteen. (None were available during WWII). We talked to each without rushing to recover forgotten names and we walked away with unanswered wonder. More personal, less performative.

Contrasted with this is the virtual universe of mobile phones, Zoom meetings, Facetime, instant images and breaking news. We have learned to live with simultaneity, fluent in a gestalt of surfaces. No, I don't want to see a photo of your french toast.

Lerner creates situations in which technology fails, and the character has to revert to his elemental senses such as listening and taking time in our rush to nowhere.

To a certain extent, Hitler was a product of that newfangled technology in the 1930s called radio. While he ranted with fury, mesmerizing his flock, FDR also utilized radio, delivering his fireside chats which often drew an audience of over sixty million. The medium lent itself to opposite messages, but it was the force that moved millions.

Our would-be dictator has mastered social media with his midnight rambles, hogwash and decrees as if his delusions crossed the blood-brain barrier to his new bamboozled reality. Every morning the world waits with held breath for his latest blabbering; and that is the name of the game.

I read Klaus Mann's autobiography to gain insight into the degradation of two proud cultures. The parallels are clear. The lesson learned is the fragility of the human spirit particularly in periods of epochal changes. The two worlds I straddle not only mark changes in sensibility due to technology but also challenge us to stay centered during these years of infamy, breathing the foul air of indecency and lust for power. 

By The Dawn's Early Light

Up at five.

Have to pee. No, you don't. Yes, I do.

Waking does not end the dream.

Reviewing that embryonic summer of ’32, 

umbilically speaking.

Half awake but woke and half in pillowed drift,

turning swords to words,

over my head in this stream of streams,

a hummingbird in strenuous stillness,

ashore to find my loom of hanging threads.

I do everything I never ever...

Run three miles,  Fifty push-ups.

Pilates, Tai Chi, Yoga …no sweat.

Pedal to Patagonia on stationary bike.

Walk the dog I don’t have.

Water my pet rock, Feed the fish,

Listen to Art Pepper.

Prune the herb garden.

Thinking about Johnny Mercer songs.

Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe.

Other train songs... Chattanooga Choo-Choo (1941)

Tempus ... big hands ... fugit.

This Train Was Made For Glory. Midnight Special.

Planning my afterlife.

The java is roasted, the bagel is toasted.

An occasional rhyme happens

in this familiar chaos I call order

to meet another ho-hum day.

Last train to Clarkesville.

 

All Happening At The Market

Here I am taking my place with day-old bread and dented cans. Yet not beyond my shelf-life. 

I'm walking here, I'm walking; the cart is my walker. It leads me to berries and cherries. I shall not want. The man who waters the lettuce anoints me. My life runneth over. I fear nothing as I walk in the shadows of gondolas. 

Shoppers affixed on bulletins breaking into barcodes breaking into QRs to be scanned. We are being tracked and surveilled into the nakedness of our consumption. Buy one, second half-price.

There goes Walt Whitman hearing America's yawp through leaves of grass. I’m listening to Benny Goodman's clarinet Sing, Sing, Sing.

There are no women to come and go speaking of Michelangelo or even Joe DiMaggio. Where have you gone, Clifton Fadiman? We need your Information, Please. Answers are in Jeopardy.

Yet, it’s all here. This garden of tulips breathing Amsterdam air. Picasso turning bananas to goldfinch. The still life of peaches is stirring. Teas steeping. Sodas fizzing. Heirlooms pulsing. Pollock dripping. Ginsberg howling. 

Melons pregnant each with their palette. Celery stalks at midnight. Monet stroking impressions of lilys. Larkin cultivating his depression from Wordsworth's daffodils. Rauschenberg eyeing the assemblage on the conveyor belt beeping and bagged while Calder studies the balancing display at the end of an aisle.

There’s a wedding procession coming down two aisles to take their vows at the check stand, I now pronounce you. Reception in the parking lot. It's the marriage of everything, baked and frozen, fresh and wilted, organic and forbidden. Tops off the carrots. Peel me a grape.

 

Fathering

At age thirty, in 1963, I was the father of three daughters. There is no rehearsal for the human drama known as parenting. It is all improvisational theater. My wife and I stumbled and bumbled our way along. Having children, you hear a calling for your nature to nurture.

At the same time, we were discovering ourselves. She was taking courses in college while I was trying to come to terms with my chosen profession. My own education was limited to Pharmacy with very little exposure to the humanities. I found myself getting a smattering of knowledge from my wife’s school books. She was a sociology major. I even wrote some of her term papers. 

While struggling with who we were, Janice was born in 1962 with a profound hearing loss. We chose to enroll her in the John Tracy Clinic where for four years she learned to lip-read and speak. Oralism became her first language. Signing came later. Whether this was the wise choice remains an unanswered question. In any case, mothering and fathering took on an enhanced role. We taught her every word she knew at that time. 

Janice hears through her eyes. When she entered the public school system at age six her receptive language expanded through signing with her new friends. Her special needs reset our attention given to her sisters, Shari and Lauren. 

I look back through an opaque lens. So much is a blur. Shari was tasked, too early, to take on household chores and baby-sitting. Her mother was overwhelmed. I did much of the laundry and shopping while working six days a week. What held us together, I hear you ask. 

Lauren had her own special needs as a middle child. I remember her difficulty with math and how I devised some crazy way for her to never forget that 8 plus 6 is 14. Then there was her dancing, in the living room, to music from Zorba the Greek. I passed along my love of Gilbert and Sullivan. Words became a fascination for her along with history. She was the only Caucasian in her black history class.

Shari grew up with a strong sense of herself. She was an excellent student. I witnessed her world becoming wider the evening I took her to a Joan Baez concert. Her first job was at a donut shop which opened at 4 AM. catering to truckers. I drove her. She is the only one of us who learned sign language and fingerspelling. Did we deprive her of a part of her childhood by burdening her early on? Another question I can pose to myself but not answer. 

It pleases me so much that all my daughters have access to their inner worlds. Shari has rendered her imaginative life onto canvases. Lauren writes with verve and wit and Janice has a lively curiosity about the world as she probes her own inscape. 

I take great pride in each one though I cannot take credit. They took in the good stuff and ran with it far beyond my reach. I have no great formulas or insights on how to be a father other than to be myself and model that behavior. Whatever values and the even temperament I possess, were probably bequeathed to me by my father. 

Daddys are supposed to set the world right. By that measure, I have failed miserably. The schoolyard bully who ran with scissors and threw spitballs is running the country while those who played well with others seem doomed. I can only hope that the rubble of democracy I have left my children contains some soft clay and seeds sufficient to repair the wreckage. 

I'd like to believe they all got the message that, to a certain extent, life is malleable and they can be their own sculptors.

Now I turn to Janice, Lauren and Shari to care for me as the future presents itself. Where did they ever learn to be so caring, wise and loving? I look to them each for their unique form of daughtering. 

Speaking About Talking

The last time I spoke was a few weeks ago at Mavis' 97th party when I read a few of my rambles. Speaking is planned, talking is what we do over a bagel or a Chinese chicken salad. I'm just saying.

There's a line in the Maltese Falcon when Sydney Greenstreet says to Bogart, I love to talk to a man who loves to talk. He then laughs his enormous guffaw. I too love to talk. I can't say enough about it. Even more, I enjoy listening. An interchange is a beautiful thing, sometimes a found poem when it flows spontaneously.

Here is a phone conversation I had with a dear friend who died about 10 years ago.

She……Hello, Peggy?

Me…….This is Norm

She……Why do you sound funny?

Me…….I’m in the shower.

She……What are you doing there?

Me…… Next to washing …..I do some of my best thinking in the shower.

She……Maybe you should wake up in the shower.

Me…… I’ve been here since last Thursday.

She……I think you’re clean by now.

Me…    A microscope shows all the organisms in our eyebrows and fingernails.

She…… And some of them are good bacteria, I’ll bet.

Me…… I wish they were labeled.

She……All creatures great and small.

Me……As we speak, trillions of microbes are going down the drain.

She……Sounds like my portfolio.

Me-       I don't even have a portfolio.

She……Failure makes you try harder.

Me…….What are we talking about? I suppose you want to speak to Peggy.

She……I forgot why I'm calling.

Me…….That’s OK. I forgot why I’m in the shower. Peggy is in the bathtub.

She........Is she thinking, too, or just getting clean?

He…….. I can hear her singing.

________

I can almost hear the first known conversation spoken in grunts and gesticulations around the fire. Your cave or mine? Have I got a headache. You’re getting old. You’re 23…. Tomorrow, you hunt and I’ll gather.

The greatest leap forward was Bell's invention of Hello. Prior to Hello people didn’t know how to break the ice. Now they say What’s happening? or just Hey. If the next sentence is about the weather, you're off to a bad start. Yet, much can be said for non-verbal communication; it beats non-communicative verbiage.

Marina Abramovits, the conceptual artist, conversed wordlessly  with folks from one minute to several hours as they wished. This took place at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010. A friend of mine waited in line for seven hours to have her audience. A few seconds of eye contact brought tears to both their eyes.

So much can be expressed through our eyes, facial gestures and body language. Even in normal discourse silence is essential. As the old adage goes, If you have nothing to say the very least you can do is shut up.

On the other hand, one wonders how so little can be said in so many words. But enough about Trump. 

How many times have I overheard a monologue in a restaurant where two or three people are seated at a nearby table and only one voice is audible?

Nothing beats soulful communing; discourse without self-censure. Layers are peeled back in self-discovery just in being present for each other.

Talking to friends in an honest exchange, sharing new ideas or revelations is, itself, a subversive act. Kindred spirits in conversation create a form of resistance against a repressive regime. 

Crickets and Cicadas

Poets have been writing about cicadas since Euripedes sent his toga to Eumenides for repair, and the other day I overheard someone in line at the market speaking about crickets. I have now learned that cicadas are a completely different species from crickets. They sing by day while the crickets croon by the light of the silvery moon.

You may not care about such things but I imagine a cricket, with no sense of direction, wouldn’t be looked upon kindly in a throng of cicadas. They might serenade him to an early demise.

I always thought cicadas were the highfalutin name used by college graduates, heavily in debt and needing to show something for all that, while the rest of us just say crickets.

Marlon Brando has a great line in On the Waterfront when Eva Marie Saint suggests that he move to the country. He says, Naw, da crickets make me noivous.

He would never have said cicadas. They are related to leafhoppers and spittlebugs (you have to love them for that) and crickets have no such lineage. Neither are they in the locust family in spite of the Bob Dylan song.

Both of them sing as best they can. Male crickets have that instrument on their wings, and there's the rub, while male cicadas have their noise-makers on their tummies. When a swarm of them lets loose they can reach 90 decibels. Females have better things to do. It turns out those chirps come from troubadors crooning their repertoire of mating songs. 

I gave up singing in the 6^th grade when I was designated a Listener. Nothing cricket about that. I’m so tone deaf I have to lip-synch Happy Birthday. If I had wings to rub together, I might have been invited to more parties. I can hardly wait for my next incarnation.

The most famous cricket is, of course, Jiminy Cricket which I always took as one of those euphemisms for Jesus Christ along with Jeepers Creepers or Jumping Jehoshaphat. Some crickets can jump as high as five feet which is higher than Jehoshaphat.

People actually grow crickets in farms. Who knew? They can be used to increase protein intake for livestock. Sort of like Ensure-Plus. They also make Good Bait… one of my favorite jazz tunes.

In fact, cicadas are on the menu throughout Asia. Beware of what you order from column B. I’m told, they taste like mushy asparagus and can never be mistaken for beef broccoli.

I’m glad we’ve cleared up all these matters. Now I’m ready for those summer nights when a choir of either one or both can chirp me back to my misspent youth, suddenly lit by fireflies in the deep silence when crickets hesitate.

Taking A Deep Breath

I read somewhere that we hold thousands of smells in our olfactory vault. I wonder if I can trace my way back from today’s burnt bagel to yesterday’s gasoline fumes at the pump….and back ninety-three years to my first diaper change. I think it was on a Thursday but I really don't want to talk about it.

Donald has provided us with the malodorous stench of arrogance, degeneracy and malice. I need to clear my lungs. The flower section of Trader Joe's has many spring blossoms and some have no odor at all. Both the orchids and tulips have traded vivid colors for scent. Even those hot-house roses come to us deodorized. I feel cheated. My nose leads me to the stargazers to take a deep whiff.

Peggy first wrote her poems in a notebook with a number two pencil. I’m the guy who sharpened them. I admit getting a temporary high from the shavings. Not high enough to write my own poem but often achieving a height sufficient to write a blog.

I’m seldom hungry………until I see and smell the plate. That wakes my salivary glands and I get in trouble trying to subdue the flow. As I write this I’m thinking of the rhubarb crumble I recently devoured. Speaking of food I’m the only one I know, outside of my daughters, who doesn’t like feta cheese. In fact I can’t stand it. My brain registers it as vomit. Blame it on a blemish in my double helix.

Among other vapors I could live without are newly laid black top, coconut, rancid acacia and asafetida. I don’t expect anyone to connect with the last two. They transport me back to those years in pharmacy. In my days at my father’s drugstore, there were no glued labels. The pharmacist made his own out of acacia powder dissolved in water turned upside-down with gauze covering the opening of a wide-mouth jar. After a week or two it stunk and that rancidity has never left me. Asafetida is a gummy substance used to ward off evil spirits which emits a pungent odor one wants to run from out of the room along with the spirits.

Childhood fills my nostrils. There were faint vapors of chalk mixed with bubble-gum from baseball cards. (I was so dumb I saved the gum and chewed on the cards.) Airplane glue got me for a short time. Neatsfoot oil soaking into a leather mitt. Citronella to repel mosquitoes. Licorice or wild cherry syrup in cough medicine made respiratory infections not all that bad. The eucalyptus and compound tincture of benzoin in the vaporizer took away our suffering. My father’s store breathed a curious mixture of aromatics which he carried on his body … a smidge of Evening in Paris perfume comingled with tuna fish from the sandwich board along with malt from the fountain and all this triturated by the overhead fan with crude drugs leaking from the apothecary jars, sometimes sulfurous, mostly warming, ancient, botanical, and slightly intoxicating.

Subways smelled of sweat especially with raised arms holding onto dangling straps. The straw seats retained traces of everyone who sat there. We inhaled each other and exhaled our communal air. Maybe we even got to like what we smelled recognizing a whiff of ourselves in the mix.

Then there was Mrs. Spizzeri’s parmesan cheese cooking on the second floor from which I dashed holding my breath on the way to the sanctuary of my apartment 3 FB in our four-story walk-up. Today I love eggplant parmesan which tells me how far one comes away from those first foreign aversions before our noses accommodate and finally embrace them.

Our inspirational leader has mastered the art of deceit. But I'd like to believe that Truth always passes the sniff test. I cannot define it but I know it when I smell it.

Simple Times

Whether the late 1930s and 1940s really were simpler times, or I only thought so as seen through child's eyes, remains an unanswered question. 

I never got around to asking my father what he thought. He may have yearned for 1910 when it was an even simpler time.

Socrates complained that the youth of his day had bad manners, contempt for authority and disrespected elders. I imagine he also longed for those simple times of Homer.

Are those the years Donald is yearning for or, at least, peddling as paradise, when it is actually closer to the American mythos. While sloganeering to make us great, he is, in fact, making America grate.

We idealized the past because we had no idea of the troubles behind our innocence. I was blind to the hardships leading up to the war, the bestiality of the Holocaust and the imagined threat of nuclear annihilation.

World history and personal history have a way of conflating in one’s mind. I like to believe that America came of age exactly when I did. I was a good boy and the U.S. were the good guys. 

The simplistic patriotism of the forties yielded to a more ambiguous post-war, cold-war decade just as I was disabused of thinking I had all the answers. Hollywood grew nuanced along with me. Suddenly the good, clean-cut detective had a back story. He was a recovering alcoholic or fathered a child he abandoned in Italy. And the villain had a good heart beneath his grizzled veneer.

The broadcast-journalist, Tom Brokaw, called those men and women who endured unimaginable tough times both during the Depression, then later as G.I.’s, as The Greatest Generation. If they were the greatest I would have to settle for being only the goodest. We behaved ourselves, conforming as we did, until the sixties when we unconformed, got iconoclastic and less simple.

Simpler times may be another way of expressing a longing for youth itself, particularly for those who never grew up. The seismic changes that have quaked us into today’s world create a certain nostalgia for those snows of yesteryear. 

Much as I find history compelling, there is a trap romanticizing the past. In the 17^th century nostalgia was regarded as an affliction, a form of melancholia prevalent among sailors who  couldn't wait to return home. Maybe we are all rowing to Eden.

One day I’ll ask my grandchildren if millennials think of these times as simple. They probably won’t entertain such thoughts till they reach middle age and look back having lost their simple child’s eyes. By that time mobile phones will have been implanted in newborn’s fingers at birth. It’s really a simple procedure.  

In The Middle Of the Air

When those in human bondage looked down they saw cotton. When they looked up they saw sweet chariots coming for to carry them home. 

Ezekiel saw the wheel / Way up in the middle of the air / Ezekiel saw the wheel way in the middle of the air

Little wheel run by faith / Big wheel run by the grace of God / Ezekiel saw the wheel way in the middle of the air.

Now you never can tell what Ezekiel will do / way in the middle of the air / He lie about me / He lie about you / way in the middle of the air.

They may also have seen Lucifer falling from grace. According to Mormons Lucifer was Jesus’ brother. Not so, say everyone else. After all, only begotten sons generally don’t have brothers. Especially to rival them. Lucifer was no ordinary sort. When he fell, he landed with a thud not unlike Humpty-Dumpty who was too much for all the King’s horses and men.

Lucifer was one of those pagan figures appropriated by the Christians to suit their fable. He was, in fact, the name for Venus, the morning star which seemed to fall out of sight daily. The New Testament took his beauty, his brightness and worldly brilliance and consigned him to eternal deviltry. How dare his curiosity which can lead to defiance. 

Lucifer also takes the rap for Adam munching on that forbidden apple. Have a piece of fruit, he said, and for that gets a sentence of life plus forever. The lesson is, don’t mess with the fiction on the all-time bestseller list.

Icarus was another mythological young man who dared to defy authority. His father, Daedalus, warned his boy not to fly too close to the sun or his feathered wings held together by wax would melt. The accepted lesson seems to be that Icarus displayed hubris and paid the ultimate price. The way I see it the kid showed gumption. Who listens to their father? Fathers are yesterday’s news. The next generation pushes the envelope. How else would we have Saran Wrap?

If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him…is the name of a great book by Sheldon Kopp. Kill him metaphorically, of course. Listen to authority and then go beyond. Listen to yourself.   

Icarus was out there investigating the middle of the air and then took the plunge. But there is more to the legend. Breughel, the Elder, painted the scene depicting the legs of a figure going into the sea while a plowman is tending his field, oblivious to the important splash in the water.  Benign neglect? Calloused indifference? There is a Flemish saying, And the farmer continues to plow, describing man’s indifference to human suffering.

In 1938 W.H. Auden took that theme and ran with it. In his poem, Musee des Beaux-Arts, the poet imagines several Breughel paintings showing townfolk ice skating, playing or doing chores and never looking up to the middle of the air. Auden was dismayed at the rise of Nazism on the eve of World War II. His poem was a cautionary tale of wanton disregard for the peril at hand.

This is my long way around to warn a somnolent American public of the imperative to vote in the primary coming up and then again in November. (The expected turnout is 38% in California). Too many voters seem uninformed or complacent, busy in the counting house counting all their money or at the table eating bread and honey. We are in great peril.

Now is not the time to caulk the bathtub or become a no-show because our Democratic candidates are less than perfect. 

The Devil Donald and his sycophants with their brimstone of malice and mendacity must be defeated. To his supporters I say, question authority. The man at the podium is a false idol with no chariot to deliver you. He lie about you. He lie about himself.