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.

Pickled Herring

My thoughts are turning to pickled herring. This is what happens to nonagenarians. I'm thinking how Mavis can’t get enough of it and Adele and most of my other friends who, at least, never said a bad word about the stuff...except for Judy who has my condolences.

It may be a generational matter. My daughters have also shown no inclination for herring, but they all have other redeeming qualities.   

And then there is Putin who looked in the mirror one morning and saw Pushkin eating pickled herring. Napoleon might have conquered Russia if he didn’t run short of herring to feed his marauding troops. When invading Russia one is advised to pack sufficient barrels of pickled herring along with warm underwear, but not in the same suitcase. I’m sure the Russians never run out when they gobble up territory on their western flank.

Danes are crazy for the stuff and Latvians and Estonians. If I were stuck on the Monopoly board on Baltic, which is my lot, pickled herring would be a staple as it is for those folks in northern waters.

When I used to put out pickled herring for our Sunday Salon, back in the day, it was always the first to vanish. I wonder if some friends brought Zip-lock bags and slipped a few bits and pieces into their pockets.

Schmaltz herring is also worthy of mention....all those consonants supported by a single vowel. It is herring at its most plump, just before spawning. Best devoured with sour cream, dark bread, potato and onions. It offers transit right back to the shtetl. 

Herring is not a bottom feeder as some creatures so designated to vacuum the ocean floor. Knowing herring as I do I might presume that is beneath them. They feed largely on plankton rendering them low in carbs and high in an alphabet of vitamins including the all-important D and Omega oil without which one can expect to die a day or two earlier than previously fated.

Some like it split, salted and smoked which goes under the name, kippered herring. If I were a herring I’d much prefer being pickled. However the kippered variety had been the breakfast of Brits for centuries which may have kept the empire from falling. When it did fall, Kippers also fell out of favor. By the 70s, due to its association with the past, it was no longer part of the full English breakfast, replaced by eggs, bangers and blood pudding. What a loss. However it is now making a comeback as those rebellious Boomers are getting aged themselves

The purpose of this tribute to pickled herring is to fill up the page on a subject I really knew nothing about. Here's a tidbit to drop at a dinner party sure to get you reinvited: herring don't get to be called by that name until they mature from being merely sardines. In fact, there is no single fish named sardine. They can be any tiny fish. Whether there is an initiation or Bar Mitzvah to earn herring-hood from sardine-ness has not yet been determined.

Carrots-Recycled

 I ran into Smart & Final the other day and came out finally not so smart. In my haste, I passed the produce section and remembered that we had run out of carrots. I grabbed a package and got home to discover I had just purchased 26 carrots. It must be the industrial size for restaurants. The average American eats 10,866 in a lifetime. This should make up any deficit I may have had.

I do love carrots as much as the next guy. I like to peel them. I like to dip them in whatever dip we happen to have. I enjoy the way they crunch and how noble I feel eating them instead of one of those unmentionable sweet snacks for which I have a special tooth.

For the past three days I’ve been eating carrots at the rate of Bugs Bunny. I remember, as a kid, hearing that carrots were good for the eyes. It made sense; I’d never seen a rabbit wearing glasses. Research shows that rabbits really don’t eat carrots; another lie I’d been raised on and swallowed. Now, after my eleventh carrot, I’m beginning to lose my taste for them.

This must be the source of food-phobias. A dear friend of mine dislikes all fruits except apples. I’m imagining he was trapped under a truck-load of peaches, apricots and plums as a child and was traumatized. How else to explain anyone disliking summer fruit? One day I may trace my hatred of coconuts. If I were shipwrecked and floated on an orange crate to a desert island with a coconut grove I would pass it by and take my chances.

But I digress. The subject is carrots. If I weren’t so busy blabbering, I’d bake a carrot cake. I just looked it up. There are 943 recipes for carrot cake. The average one lists 13 ingredients and carrots are the tenth, behind flour, sugar and cream cheese. Each serving adds 47 grams of carbohydrates to one’s diet. Forget it.

If you take the wrong freeway and find yourself in the Hebrides, Scotland toward the end of September you might wonder why carrots are being dug up by the locals. It is, of course, to celebrate Michaelmas. Wild carrots are ritually gathered. It is an occasion for revelry and why not, I ask you?

Carrots translate to some fairly strange words in other countries. Spain calls them zanahoria. In China they are huluobo and marchew in Poland. Remember this. It could come in handy one day.

Starlings seek out wild carrots which kill certain mites in their nests. The carrot contains a compound that repels mites and inhibits their egg-laying abilities. How starlings know to choose parasite-deterring plants like the wild carrot remains a mystery. I might go on a starling hunt tomorrow and drop some carrot-mush in their flight-path. Then again parasites need love too. Let the birds fend for themselves. Better not mess with Mother Nature.

Final thought: If I had 26 karats instead of carrots I'd be a rich man but I'd rather remain lucky instead.

Certain Words

Apart from their unfortunate attachments, two of my favorite words are syphilis and diphtheria.  Their mellifluous sounds roll off the tongue. However, their baggage consigns them to the unutterable column. Such a waste of lyricism.

Emergent, is another word I admire not for saying but for what it contains. It has urgency, even emergency. It is dynamic, seeded with something new.

Also, hiding in emergent is the word merge. I’m all for it. The way column A drifts over to column B. Sweet and sour, hot and pungent. Some films, seemingly big, are also notable for small moments. Amid the high decibels and extravagant (extra vagrant) production, are artful scenes, possibly memorable.

Could it be that categories are our feeble way of trying to organize the chaos?

 If you think you know me, you don’t know the half. Apple-pears and fusion food. Hybrid gender. Hybrid cars. Quantum particles, Quantum waves. 

For the unknowing eye baseball is boring; football, brutal and basketball is swagger. For those of us with arrested development like myself, basketball is balletic, football is chess with fractures and baseball, life itself.

When Donald first reared his artificial head I saw Bozo the Clown, P.T. Barnum, then Jim Jones, Huey Long and finally Adolf or Benito. The question still remains: handcuffs or straight jacket or both? His mouth is a weapon of mass destruction. The soulless manipulator and mindless sociopath have merged, and we must now confront our underbelly.

In the literary world a memoir is likely to have as much fiction as a novel and a biography can be cherry-picked into a hagiography. Some narrative poetry reads like a conversational anecdote.

I started writing poetry about fifty years ago in between labels as a pharmacist. After my work found its way into literary journals, I began to question what made this a poem and not a paragraph. There began the merging. Some words sing; some need line breaks but others shed the stanza and are comfortable as prose or blogs. There may be poetry hiding in the sentences.

My first book is entitled The Marriage of Everything. I see life as a web of connective tissue. The rose with its petals; the rose with its nettles. Life can be both enhancing and death-defying. The two in a melodic dirge. The Streets of Laredo. Mack the Knife.

In the merging, what emerges is not necessarily progressive. Maybe we needed this historical moment to pause, value what we cherish and experience its fragility as the fabric trembles. Latent strains of racism and misogyny have been uncaged and legitimized. The malady of our times is as malignant as syphilis or diphtheria. 

 

Mother's Day Rememberance (from back when)

 My mother was a woman of the century. Literally. Her birthday was January 1^st, 1900. The date itself is auspicious and a bit suspicious. I’ve heard that many immigrants choose that date as a way of disowning their past and claiming an American heritage. Of course, that would have been an erasure on the part of my grandparents.

The reason I even question her date of birth is because she played loose with her age along the way. In the 1930 census she claimed to be twenty-seven. Be that as it may she lived in the lower eastside of Manhattan with six brothers and got her education in the university of the mean streets. Life was combat among the pushcarts and tenements. As the decades went by no one had told her there was no war. Truce had been declared but not for my mother. Her life’s journey of eighty-eight years was a chronicle of an awkward assimilation while, at the same time, proclaiming a disidentification with the Old World. 

She lived as if haggling was for life itself.  My mother was ever on the lookout for a thumb on the scale or a rotten apple slipped into her bag. To get to her butcher she passed three others because she believed Murray the chicken plucker saved the best cuts just for her. I remember his blood-stained apron, that sawdust floor and the hanging flypaper.

While she was in the trenches in this extended skirmish with shopkeepers and the superintendent of our four-story walk-up, my father was the voice of tranquility. Through her blurts of aggravation I came away with a vocabulary of Yiddish curse words. She cursed the grocer, the landlord, the fascists and she cursed God for God knows what.

Though my dad worked long hours and was often absent in my tableau of childhood, he pacified the household. It was his temperament that was to be my inheritance. His soft voice prevailed over her loud complaints.

Beneath her pugnacity was the vulnerable little girl, teased by six brothers, who grew into a fearful woman. Those wounds were scarred over and her skin grew tough. She did mellow in her twilight years even as her trepidations became more evident.

Look. at those magnolias I called out on our last drive through  the prettiest street with the prettiest homes. Just keep your eyes on the road, she replied from the back seat where she did all her driving. My mother had a particular terror of trucks which she seemed to regard as assassins.

Her unease in this world denied her so much of the gardens and good life during her near century. I never saw her laugh. This Mother’s Day I want to celebrate her for her love which I somehow never doubted and recognize all the joy and awe she may have  missed in her daily struggles. 

I'd like to believe she had her own inner life I wasn't privy to. Maybe she even heard the mermaids sing.

 

Movie Momenta Recalled

There must be a moment in time when the accepted phrase suddenly smells rancid and turns into a cliche. Maybe it's that end of the day when thinking outside the box is itself a box and you want to avoid it like the plague since it's just the tip of the iceberg, truth be told.

Having been suckled on movies of yesteryear I'm thinking of all those lines that became standards....until they faded away in a great dissolve....or not.

We have to talk.

Uh, oh, this can mean only one thing, and it isn’t about the burnt toast; more like your life is about to become toast.

I'm gonna lay low in Jersey till the heats off. 

It's no use, Muggsy, they'll get you for packing a rod and send you up the river to do a stretch in the big house.

What have we got? / Thirty-year-old male. Bludgeoned to death. We've ruled out suicide.

You’re probably wondering why I called you all here today.

Brace yourself for a transfer to North Dakota if you still want that raise promised eleven years ago.

Won’t you sit down? 

I think this went onto the cutting room floor about sixty years ago. I’d never heard it said in real life.

Shall we risk the trifle? 

Delivered to Jean Moreau by Joan Plowright, in a half-giggle, conspiring over high tea, both no longer young. Naughty, naughty. 

Such a spot of bother.

Words which could have come out of the mouth of Lord Grantham in Downton Abbey when told his valet was arrested for stealing his fob.

What'll you have? / I'll have what she's having. And I'll have what he's having....OK. 86 on the egg salad and two BLTs-down.

The problems of three people don’t amount to a hill of beans.

So said Bogey to a bewildered Ingrid, the words having been written by the Epstein brothers at a stop sign on their way to the studio, nowhere near Casablanca.

Where were you last night?

I can't remember back that far.

What are you doing tonight?

I never plan that far in advance. 

There is a specialist in Vienna who has developed an experimental surgery. It’s our only chance.

The bearded doctor with a monocle declares success as he removes the bandages to the chagrin of the greedy nephews imagining new-found riches unaware the rich mogul has left his fortune to his pet turtle.

 

It's not what it looks like. I can explain everything.

Actually, it is what it looks like. You don't need a partner to test the new mattress.

How long since your last confession?

Trump: I never confess to anything. If I replace your old organ and repair the stained-glass window, do we have a deal?

Perchance to Dream

A good night’s sleep is one of those inalienable rights Thomas Jefferson forgot to mention. We spend a third of our lives with our eyes closed. That would be 31 years for me, the equivalent of a second life.

We need to have our batteries recharged and log in some quality REM time. As the Bard said, sleep is the balm of hurt minds. It is both the repository of our unremarkable yesterdays and the seed of our tomorrows.

As we move into our twilight years sleep becomes increasingly elusive. It ain’t fair. Last night I got up at 4:07 as the clock in my bladder dictated. For the next 4 hours I was in a hypnagogic state, half asleep and half awake, and the third half thinking great thoughts such as why is the bottom of the pillow cooler than the top or why did I eat that bowl of ice cream at 8 o’clock. Obviously, because I can’t resist chocolate malt crunch. As a nonagenarian, I’ve earned that indulgence….with impunity, so I thought.

As I recall I had no problem sleeping as an infant though I can’t imagine what I dreamed about; maybe my minus time in that embryonic sea. Since I was born a few days after Hitler took office maybe I sensed the dark times ahead and cried for a u-turn. On the other hand, FDR was just inaugurated and he proclaimed that I had nothing to fear but fear itself (whatever that meant).

But I digress, The subject is sleep and I’m nodding off as I'm writing this. 

I’m well-versed in all the sleep-aids. If I contemplated their side-effects, I’d be up all night with anxiety. Sleep is really a brain thing. My simmer-down gear is in need of repair. I certainly have more memories than plans. All those shards serve as pot holes on the road to oblivion; plus those vivid images of events that never happened except in the hive of my imagination. 

Some people have success with mantras; not I anymore. Though repetitions of Beaujolais, Beaujolais did carry me off for a while. I offer it to anyone for a mere 39 cents and the key to their safe deposit box.

Naps are as mysterious as sleep itself. If I set out to take a nap, it’s hopeless. However, once I start reading in late afternoon, I often drift off in mid-paragraph on the first page. For reasons unknown this doesn’t work for me in bed. Too much intention, I suspect. Sleep does not answer to commands; it only comes unbidden.

I read somewhere that butterflies, bullfrogs and baby dolphins never sleep and giraffes get away with a half hour nap now and then. Even if they wanted to, where would they put their necks? The more I think about it the less reason I have to complain. 

To sleep, perchance to dream, ay there's the rub. What if these past 18 months have been a mere nightmare from which I will soon wake up?

 

Remembering Peggy

 To celebrate May 2^nd, the birthday of my late wife, Peggy, I thought I'd offer some excerpts from her poetry onto this page. She wrote from her own singular perch. Her language startles with its disparate leaps over a vast inscape. Well into her nineties, she was writing a poem every day with over 150 published in literary journals. Peggy's poetry was an extension of her irrepressible appetite for life, how she met each day with exuberance, gratitude and love.

  ____________________________________

He sees her face half shadowed tilted upward / in the curve of promise, smooth as an early apricot. / He will marry her and plant skyscrapers in their backyard. 

If there is champagne enough / let's give another hoist to the boy / who laughs at the tired shadows on the wall / and paints his reckless masterpiece / with no further expectations.

The sound of blues, not my own / but the low-down songs of women. Love stirs my coffee / the velvet of Yes / A white horse gallops. 

Her fingers trace highways along his arm / In a moment there will be wings, a blue heron / He moves in her direction / as though singing were a map.

Arithmetic leads to ultimate divisions / land mass under water / Yet a boy paddles a bark canoe / confident of the current.

This hiding in the tunnel of myself / denies the chairs their rightful place. Light through the window creates a momentary event / shadows in a drift toward after.

The man I meet on page 125 is now in pieces. / The mirror slants but will not lie / I would prefer to wander the streets of Paris with the artist /despite the chill.

In the hum of murmurations / every bird adjusts astonished air / Clouds contort, these mindless wheels / in the world without allegiance / Horses, round-rumped, dare me to look away.

Women survived in the dark, like feet in pinching shoes until / they turn from Molly Barnacle’s, yes to / Bartleby’s, I prefer not.

The sky bends with the hawk / you answer, your words like water … / and then, the ocean, the wedge / partial like us. / Your look rests on the curve of my cheek.

Can these days really be winter / with your words that match / the fingers as you touch / what you know of me / and even what you don’t?

Everyone looks out the window / wondering if the headlines / move the earth or what / brings hot lentils to the table.

Death has no et cetera / I borrow a motley palette from myself / The canvas will not stretch. / Still-life does not hold still. / Blue oranges turn to mauve, turn to gray. / Unfamiliar music enters the room. (A Mother’s Lament)

As the self pledges its allegiance / to a tidiness of napkins on the table / we stir the gibbous moon into our cups.

The flap of disappearing wings through the open window / This day was for sleep, the accuracy of dreams / closer to words on the notebook’s page / the loss of love.   (for Elizabeth Bishop).

The woman at the piano wears a hat. / His black trousers hold his impatience. / It is 1891, a coachman with tired horses knocks. / At the opera, singers will break the air. / She thinks of his mouth, the taste of wildwood cherries / yet, returning, knives hang in the clock.

Breakfast on the balcony / unlike the insistent birds I wouldn’t interrupt / your timbered voice carrying its sex / filling me with all I know and cannot know of you.

I watched them talk at Sunday supper / My uncle had lost his thunder into buttered toast / waiting for events that already happened / My eyes fixed on the enameled porcelain table / its corner nicked to black. (After the market crash, 1929)

My knees need grease / but the mellow sax delivers me from evil. / Growing old is a privilege, faith / its own vehicle, even as the cab keeps its motor running / and the eucalyptus tree bends lower every year.

Inspiration is drawn to pushy tides / away from headlines and oratory / she hears instead an empty glass on wood / shivers her to what lies below/ Images find their words in the telling, / A cold stone appears in her hand.

I wear the enamel pendant for the shy unsaid / A woman in Japan looks through a rim of tears / He has not gone far, but away / still, she will not say to him / “These days remove me from myself” / her mouth, thick with silence.

For me, a bite of crusty bread / its center soft, a little sour. / Just yesterday you told me / that my love of pan rests in the middle of companion / break bread indeed with the taste of your touch.

Words proclaim the sacred in the unlit candle, / a chipped cup in the sink / This holiness isn't waiting for Godot.

In the airport fog, under his slouched hat, there is Rick / deciding for teary Ilsa, that for them / the slings and arrows might only amount to a hill of beans / and Paradise lost was just as good as Paris regained.

Losing It

 It is normal to lose things. Pauline Kael lost it at the movies. I wonder if Arthur Sullivan ever found his Lost Chord. At this age all of my friends are orphans, even if Oscar Wilde said it was unfortunate to have lost one parent but to lose both appeared to be carelessness. We lose our innocence, our virginity, our hair and our teeth, all in the natural order of life and some of us lose our marbles. I remember when Peggy went on a diet and lost height. In World War I a whole generation was lost literally and the decade after, the survivors were lost figuratively. How a whole continent got lost we won’t know until someone from Atlantis shows up for an interview. While looking for some lost object a few years ago I had a brilliant insight, namely that everything is somewhere. Plato couldn’t have said it better or even Yogi Berra. My friend filled her bathtub in anticipation of a water cutoff from the hurricane. By morning the water was gone. I think it turned up in a flooded street in Glendale. Today I was looking for an important paper and decided it wasn't so important after all; at that point I found it. A few weeks ago I lost my keys and found my glasses in the search. I can hardly wait to lose my credit card so I might find my lost library card. It’s actually fun looking for my cell phone and hearing it beep, Here I am, under a stack of newspapers. Then there’s the frustration of looking for something so important, I put it in a special place; so special that I have no memory where that might be. A few weeks ago I took it to a new level. I spent three days looking for a prescription received by mail order. I had a distinct memory of opening the package and putting the contents on the dining room table. I could picture it. Finally I called the pharmacy and found out they hadn’t sent it yet. I was looking for something that wasn’t there. I had heard how effective it is to form an image of a lost article before setting out on the hunt. As one faculty diminishes, another rushes in. Everything may, indeed, be somewhere but not necessarily in this realm. The next time I start looking for something I’d better make sure it’s not all in my head like Donald who lost the election but attacked the scorekeeper, referees, umps and the five million in the stands. And now we have just about lost our democracy, our civility and the reasons we fought WWII.

Book and the Godhead

The breaking news was that there was breaking news for the first time. Sometimes the news is so epochal it cannot be seen. So it was about 3,500 years ago when the alphabet first appeared and put to use writing a narrative we call the Bible.

In his 1998 book The Alphabet and the Goddess, Leonard Shlain argues that the onset of writing brought about a gender change of the godhead. Out with goddess, in with a male god; in fact, out with images all together.

There is ample archeological evidence of female figures suggesting matriarchal societies in pre-literate times. First was not the word but the image. Yet it is notable that prohibition of graven images comes up as the second commandment. Thou shall not kill  does not appear till number six.

Men controlled the Bible. It is attributed to scribes and to Yahweh, word by word. Whether from right to left or left to right one reads in a linear sequential order. As literacy grew with the advent of the printing press, in the mid-15^th century, the consequences of print technology became more profound and pervasive.

Marshall McLuhan made the case that by extending the visual sense in this way it led to individualism, the nation-state, capitalism and to a way of viewing the world in distorted ways including misogyny and domination.

Reliance on print and its corollaries started to decline with the electronic age. Books by Virginia Wolff and James Joyce chipped away at the straight-ahead narrative.

Arguably, we are now in the post-literate age. Iconography with the return of images and signifiers are more easily read by Gen Z, along with graphic novels, and a gestalt of surfaces, phrases and bytes. Simultaneity has replaced the linear sequential.

Perhaps the Trump-era of male domination is the last gasp of the warrior age. I’d like to believe we are on the verge of a new consciousness informed by feminine principles and communal values.  

                                                                                                                                                                                 

Wets and Dries

For my birthday last month, my friend Larry presented me with a stack of prescriptions scribbled by doctors one hundred years ago. All of them had a smattering of Latin phrases and were written for syrups, fluid extracts, crystalline powders, emulsions etc... all from natural sources.

When I entered pharmacy college in 1950 those same substances were still in use. By the time I graduated, they were gone. The garden of botanicals had vanished. Exotic vapors had escaped along with rhizomes, roots and excrescence on some trees. No leaves macerating, nor acacia rancid in the glue bottle. It was those arcane names that drew me in and their intoxicating breath.

They asked me, what’ll it be? You’re seventeen. Who are you? I only knew who I wasn’t. My brother, four years older, with a tool box, tinkering under the hood, never owned a library card. No. I would become my father.

I entered his world of pharmacy as it was withering but still with ancient aromas I had inhaled as a kid. Apothecary jars on the shelf labeled podophyllin, glycyrrhiza, aqua hamamelidis. The glossary became a second language.

When I got my license, the Edenic garden was nearly gone. It had become bottled alphabetically. The aromatic elixirs had disappeared or fallen into disrepute. Squibb, Parke-Davis, Upjohn, Eli Lilly, Burrough-Wellcome claimed the space, now deodorized. But we still had the Wets and Dries.   

That’s what we called them. Compound tincture of benzoin and oil of eucalyptus were some of the wets. The stuff put into a vaporizer whose mingled odor in the steam certified a sickroom. Bicarbonate of soda was one of the dries. They were sold over-the-counter as part of a section dividing the prescription area from the front.

The front was where customers stood. Back in the day the Rx compounding area was raised so the pharmacist was looked up to as he presided between globes of colored water. My father was on that pedestal for me but now I was eye to eye with a man faking a cough to get his hands on a bottle of Terpin Hydrate with Codeine, aka G.I. Gin, which was among the wets. His signature in the registry book was required; today it was Joe Smith, tomorrow Bill Blotz. Poor guy. If the codeine didn’t get him, the alcohol did.

Wets and Dries are the last gasp of early pharmacy. Old preparations or chemicals so long in use they couldn’t be patented and sold as proprietaries still hang on. Iodine would be one; spirits of camphor another one. Epsom salts, in five pound boxes remain, usually filling the bottom shelf of the section. Flowers of sulfur (brimstone) used for acne, no longer. The wets included oil of clove for toothaches, gentian violet (anti-fungal), cascara sagrada (laxative), spirits of ammonia (smelling salt), peppermint water (mild carminative) and Stokes expectorant (demulcent and cough suppressant). Those names still get me.

I'm of two minds about these old world remedies. They are part of my early romance with pharmacy yet I also tend to discount their therapeutic value in modern medicine. When I hear of someone relying on these organic, alternative medications, I cringe. Otherwise enlightened people spend money for worthless products as if they are striking a blow against Big Pharma. The result is what I regard as a multi-billion dollar hoax industry.

In the 1970s, the FDA required proof of efficacy and safety for all items sold having a therapeutic effect. There was no pharmaceutical company to bear the expense of an approval process. Old standards such as Mercurochrome fell away along with dozens of others. 

I also fell away but that drugstore air remains in a corner of my lungs, pungent, floral and earthy in a special proportion which I can conjure with any number of old-world words…cimicifuga, asafetida, opodeldoc.

Uniforms

Watching ball games, as is my vice, I have come to accept men running around in their colored underwear, or rather their uniforms. It doth proclaim them.

Before Zuckerberg’s t-shirt or Steve Jobs’ turtleneck there were suits. Three-piece or gray flannel or those you could buy at Sears with two pairs of pants, all wool gabardine. Men wore them to see a play or fly from here to there. These days, even sports jackets are so yesterday they're ripe for a comeback. 

I wore a smock, on and off, for fifty years as a dispenser of assorted remedies and assuring words. I don’t miss mine at all.

Maybe they’ve been replaced by tattoos. We’re not our job anymore; we are individuals each making our own major statement. Egalitarianism allows us to dress down, to slum or choose a wardrobe out of thrift stores. Designers have lines of scrupulous sloppiness with ventilation at the knees. There are friends I have never seen in jeans and others who always wear them. To each his uniform.

All of which leads me to remember vanished uniforms along with the jobs themselves. Whatever happened to that young woman with her bright jacket and flashlight patrolling the aisles as she hushed us and ushered us kids into the dark movie house, darker still because it was Saturday afternoon and we always came in the middle of a film. Was she dreaming of being discovered, projecting herself on the big screen. Or did she fade to black?

Gone, too, is the doorman with his epaulets, our peacetime commander who lived on tips. He waved, whistled and launched a thousand taxis. Doormen disappeared or did they just live in movies set on Park Ave? I imagined these quasi-aristocrats fled Europe as professors or constables and had to settle for the ignominy of brass buttons.

And where are the elevator operators, in authority for the length of their shift, traveling vertical miles on one spot from Icarus to Orpheus as they alone contracted and expanded those wrought iron lungs?

The usher had no name but saw plenty of wandering arms in the balcony. Maybe the other two wrote novels in their heads from snatches overheard. They answered to first name only and remembered to speak politely to Mr. and Mrs…. on the 23^rd floor.

They slipped away unnoticed, loud uniforms, shiny buttons and all. Jackets and caps now in vintage shops, indignity and pride embedded in the fabric. In one pocket dried lipstick and a stick of gum. In another an empty flask and a check for two bucks, uncashed.

Misadventure

It’s only money. If the object of life is to die broke, I’m well on my way. For $545 I could have bought a magnificent dinner on some rooftop restaurant for a few close friends or better yet, donated to a fund for saving the lives of bombed out children with medical needs.

But none of the above happened. Instead, I paid that money to retrieve my car after it was towed away for parking in a spot designated (in small print) for valet service owned by an upscale eatery called Elephantine.

I had met my two friends at the Laemmle theater in Santa Monica for a three o’clock showing of the new Christian Petzhold film, Mirror-3. All his movies are highly recommended.

In the last two works by this director, cars play an important part. In this current one, an accident kills the driver but his passenger escapes unharmed and that sets in motion the entire narrative. His previous film entitled Afire involves two men dying as they try to tow their own car. For me, it was a bad omen foretold.

Does anyone really believe in omens? After all, the Ides of March passed unremarkably. Synchronicity is another thing. As I was reading the word moth, a moth flew out of nowhere. It happens all the time. Not only moths but friends or relatives die or win lotteries at the moment they might enter your mind even though you haven’t thought of Uncle Max for eleven years.

We enjoy these random happenings as if portals to a place beyond. We crave transcendence. Surely, there must be another dimension, why else would my car be towed?

So there I was staring at the empty space where I had parked my car. By this time, Adele was about 15 blocks away but stayed on the line with me. Tamara was walking and graciously came back to be with me even as her husband Basil was waiting for her return. I thought I spotted Petzhold filming the entire human drama unfolding.

I was given a number to call. The police were very understanding of my predictament particularly when I played my age card and reliance on my walker. They arranged for a police car to pick me up. The officer was a model of human kindness as he first drove me to the police station to pay the fine, then to the towing place (which was closed) and lastly took me home.

Janice drove me to pick up my car this morning. Now, I have almost filled a page distracting me from my carelessness, from that elephant in the room.

 

 

Taking Back The Moon

The silver apples of the moon / The golden apples of the sun.

                                                     W.B. Yeats

The moon has always been the province of poets and songwriters. And now it is a destination.  No, not for low-housing, but as a base for further space travel. One hopes not for colonizing other planets.

Of course, we knew early on it was our satellite but wolves howled at it and troubadours pined under it to the point of lunacy.

For Somerset Maugham in The Moon and Sixpence, it represented the sublime. For Shakespeare, inconstancy. Eugene O'Neill saw the moon as a symbol of redemption in his A Moon for the Misbegotten. 

In Peggy's poem, Under the Unwed Moon, she wrote, The moon in the force of its pull releases the buried bones.

It also hit your eye like a big pizza pie. The moon can’t help it if it rhymes with June, balloon and sleepy lagoon. For Robert Graves in his book, White Goddess, the moon was the supreme muse; the feminine aspect which represented birth and the life of the imagination.

No argument from me though I was brought up thinking it was made of green cheese with cows jumping over to the fiddle of hi diddle-diddle.

Gilbert and Sullivan borrowed the moon in Trial By Jury.

     The moon in her phases is found the time, winds and the weather / You cannot eat breakfast all day nor put two Mondays together.  

Here G&S remind us that Monday is a contraction of Moon-day.

Again, in the Yeoman of the Guard, the moon belongs to lovers.

   It is sung to the moon / by a love-lorn loon ….. He sipped no sup, and he craved no cup /As he sighed for the love of a ladye.

In my day, which is close to prehistory, there was Les Paul and Mary Ford's rendition of How High the Moon and Audrey Hepburn singing Moon River. How many times did Frank Sinatra fly to the moon on gossamer wings? Cat Stevens walked to fame in Moon Shadow.

It's once in a blue moon that we get such as Beethoven's Piano Sonata Number 14, thirty years later renamed Moonlight Sonata. And then there was Claude Debussy's Clair De Lune.

That word lunacy has a troubled history. In the ancient world a full moon became the culprit for an unsound mind. It also got tied in with female menstruation which was a mystery to unsound males. Lunatic asylums were so named for millennia. It was Barack Obama, in 2012, who signed a bill striking the word from all legislation forever more. It wouldn't surprise if Trump restores it. 

Go ahead, let NASA circle the moon. From where I stand it still casts a spell, bitten, gibbous or full.

Emergency of Spring

Millions marching costumed as wildflowers emerge on city streets in exodus from the king’s bondage, his masked storm troopers, Middle East / Wing in rubble, he's desecrated the oval, eggs of Easter- yeast rising as an insurrection against depravity in an upheaval against the edicts of war as buildings fall with children huddled, like petal-closed buds, their unlived lives, a procession merging hands across America, of chariots swung low, tendrils, rhizomes, old and new testaments derived from testicles held in oath, phallic spires, erection-resurrection toward a promised place, pass the bitters, bless the wine, good eggs hard boiled go up the hill with Jesus, Moses and Jack and Jill to fetch and pitch nine commands and one for extra innings, take two for C.B. De Mille with his cast of thousands, no time for leavened bread, for corn rye sliced thin with seeds, but seeds, yes seeds for hope and homelands, for miracles, for turning cheek to cheek, think Fred & Ginger, think love against which hate has no answer cause Jesus don't like killing no matter what the reason for, the equinox is vernal, something to shout about, a havoc of poppies wearing April dresses, odes of them in terraced stanzas strutting their stuff from plots to flower pots to bombed and empty lots; let me hear that trumpet in the daffodil, the sax in the foxglove, what was dormant is now emergent...

 

Ladybug and Distant Carnage

 I'm walking in the park and now I reward myself with a gulp of cold water from a thermos. I have covered the equivalent of about 4 blocks with the help of my walker. This is my half-way point today. I find a bench with a back. No small thing. It's only  springtime but the living is easy.

My trusted walker does more than keep me vertically balanced. It has a pouch. How else could I have lugged this nearly 800-page book by Rebecca West?

I settle into a shady spot on this sunny afternoon half a world away from the atrocities of overhead missiles and drones. No sirens, no blasts. I have been sheltered my entire life from the daily struggle to survive. I can dial my reality. Now images of destruction, now commentary, but all at a distance. The remote in my hand is well-named. I can even mute toxic voices.

The story I’m reading is The Return Of The Soldier; a tale set in the English countryside between the two world wars. The soldier suffers from what was then called shellshock. Lives were squandered in that so-called Great War which was a crime against humanity. Deliberate slaughter is unknown in other species.

It is as if I am reading about myself sequestered in bucolic civility while across the water limbs are lost, children orphaned and telegrams are making widows out of wives. My life is spared, even charmed, by the cosmic crapshoot of geography.

After a few minutes, a ladybug lands on my page. She is a model insect to behold with six black spots enclosing a larger one almost heart-shaped in the middle on a reddish dome. I am transfixed as she struts across the margin. I understand this is a sign of good luck, as if I needed that affirmation. In mid-sentence she opens her wingspan and flies away. My version of shock and awe.

The beauty of this beetle has distracted me. Ladybugs are revered in gardens as a natural predator against aphids and mites. One can eat 5,000 in a lifetime. However, they, in turn, are the prey of birds and some larger insects.

Just when life seems pacified, I’m reminded of these conflicts unseen being played out in the grass, even underground. Should I take back what I said about wars among other species? No. Their cycle of predation is their ecosystem. We have no excuse. We have been gifted with ponder and the capacity to love while at the same time, cursed with anxiety and fear leading to domination.

The father of a 3-year-old alongside my bench, remarked on Rebecca West, which gave me hope yet for civilization. I thought of a book by the poet Ann Lauterbach called On A Stair which she said could also be pronounced Honest Air. I felt reinvigorated walking back.