Waiting Rooms

An …ologist for every organ. In a single week we might spend time, between us, with a dermatologist, ophthalmologist, cardiologist, neurologist and oncologist; to say nothing of internist and orthopedist. In addition we know the fish tanks, art works and magazine selections of phlebotomists, laboratory and X-Ray technicians, and out-patient surgeries. And then there’s our dentist. Cracked teeth, crowns and implants seem to be the latest cash-cow among our friends these days.

Still, all our equipment is original, minus an organ here and there. One gets emotionally attached to one’s body parts. I’m even starting to mourn my haircuts as my bald spots claim more scalp. Just protecting what we’ve got takes up so much time it’s fair to ask how we ever managed to fit in a vocation.

There are worse places than waiting rooms. Many pages have I read waiting to be called. Of course getting called is just the first station in the drill. I’ve practically gone through a New Yorker half undressed in the examining room, which raises the question whether it is better to sit in the waiting room or wait in the sitting room. My preference is to go through novels fully clothed occasionally glancing up at the fishes.

We never leave the house for an appointment, each without a good read. If it weren’t for doctor visits we’d probably be paying more fines for overdue library books. Of course we also get diverted by a Smithsonian or National Geographic but then we run the risk of learning something………for twenty minutes before forgetting it.

Peggy probably writes more than she reads. She finds examining tables, even gurneys congenial to composing her poems. If she had her hands free she’d surely do it inside an M.R.I. I require a keyboard since I literally can not read a single word of my handwriting. In fact, I have no handwriting. The small muscles controlling my fingers are dysfunctional so that every letter I scrawl looks like part of an E.K.G.

And so we wait….and read ….or write….or ruminate….or sleep. Or maybe talk to each other or a fellow waiter. Some people are eager to tell you how much worse their headache is than yours. But most are supportive and chatty with the company that misery famously loves.

The ultimate waiting room is like a bus idling until a minion is reached taking us to our just dessert. Or the place where the accused paces while the jury weighs or maybe hangs. And these days we don’t even get our parking validated.

However even as our fate awaits us we don’t have to sit around waiting for it. We can rage, now and then, against the dying of the light… thank you Dylan Thomas….or just ignore the whole damn thing. When our name is called we’ll know it.

Communication, Heightened Here, Broken There

Saturday, early afternoon, our book group considered Shirley Hazzard’s novel, The Transit of Venus. Her writing was lyrical to some but lost in flight to others as it orbited the room. Like much serious literature her language provoked both gasps of joy and grumbles.

We then raced off to Dodger stadium to witness either an exhibition in offensive ineptitude, the artistry of pitching or both. The single run and lone hit for the victorious opposition came as a result of a miscommunication between our pitcher, catcher and shortstop. The catcher gave hand signals for a pick-off play, not read by the infielder and the winning run scored. Momentary inattention broke the chain. A flubbed gesture of arms so that the good news never reached Ghent. Some what makes it across the abyss and some what fails. During the ballgame we rose, as a collective, for the 7th inning stretch, listened to Irving Berlin’s anthem of God’s blessing and pretended to believe it, as we pretended that the game really mattered. Then we swayed uncaring if we ever got back, under the spell of the popcorn, crackerjacks, green grass and crack-of-the-bat.

Everyone was on the same page at the Lighthouse Cafe, Sunday morning, for the big band of Mike Barone; eighteen musicians seamlessly picking up each other's threads weaving into some crazy quilt. Here was a heated musical conversation between reed and brass punctuated by piano, bass and drum. Trombones and horns answered tenor, alto and baritone sax. Trumpets chased the flight of the bumble bee. Flugelhorn dialoged with dueling saxophones. Melancholy Baby was resonant with our bones as if they were born knowing and had a re-birth rocking us in our chairs. Some of the solos seemed to dive off the Hermosa Beach pier and ride back on the white caps.

Magnificent Muddle

I can feel something pulling me toward simplicity and I don’t like it. There was a time I had penchant for chaos, or at least, a manageable chaos. For most of my years in the pharmacy, where one would assume an orderly dispensing area, I was bored enough to allow a muddle of papers, vials, pens, bottles etc… It was my way of creating a small challenge to find a passage through to order. It wasn’t done intentionally; the seeming disarray evolved as a daily act against repetitive brain disorder. Now I notice my small pleasure when bills get paid, checkbooks are balanced, even when I’m chauffeured around, relieved of navigating. It must be a sign of aging, this intolerance for restaurants which serve NOISE as their specialty. The world is a noisy place, I know, but why seek out ambient decibels to accompany conversation? 

Soldiers are sent off to war as an act of simplifying complex dynamics into poles of good and evil. It provides a semblance of purpose reinforced by danger, as Shirley Hazzard put it. Every nation seizes the moral high ground with noble words and enough bombast to dispel doubt. Doubt is my default position. One of my most enduring lines, which Peggy commissioned to be written in a calligraphic hand and then framed, comes from a poem I wrote about friends who joined the Jim Jones sect. The phrase is, Dying begins when doubt is forbidden. I intend to keep alive by doubting and allowing loose ends to dangle. When I reach a point of irresolution I know I’m getting close to the truth, noisy as it is… the book or poem which throws me out of the car in an unknown place yet also feels familiar because this is where I live. The painting which claims my attention for its deliberate blur or distortion of what is safe or easy. The piece of music that has me stretching to a spot off the map. 

When I set out to write a blog like this, the blank page is another country. The vehicle runs on fumes of language. It sputters and lunges as if I have a drunken co-pilot. It has me walking like Groucho or Chaplin. I heard an entomologist say that the reason we are afraid of bugs is that we can’t predict the pattern of their movement. We have trouble making room for zigs and zags. Yet there is also the impulse to push button and walk across the street just like the chicken. Maybe aging happens on two tracks; one wants to seize the day, grab it by the collar and slap it around until it’s under our control and yields some meaning. The other takes us through a dreamscape with Mr. Rios, that mysterious companion, whispering in our ears to release our grip and let it all happen. At some point the simple and ambiguous converge. Maybe it was both, all along, simply unknown in terms of how things work and unknowable in so far as why. I shall open the window and let in the clamor as the garbage truck backs up; after all, it’s my garbage they are collecting. 

 

What starts off as a simple pastoral scene, confluence of bat and ball, has me running, in these later innings, uphill around the bases. I am rounding third trying to stretch a triple into an inside the park home run. Now I'm sprawled out in a cloud of dirt, a grainy tangle that could be a Rauschenburg collage of bodies, opposing uniforms contorted with blazing numbers, 32,609 umpires in the stands and the dark shadow of the final arbiter bent over, ready to pronounce me safe or out.

Friends

When I was a street urchin just out of knee pants I had four best friends. Johnny Kassabian was in the apartment next door. Peter Dalebrook lived on the other side of the building and Frank Loeb was across the street. Stanley, my life-long brother, was six blocks away. Only Frank and Stanley liked each other. All the rest never hit it off. I've always wondered how I could befriend people who weren't friends with one another. Isn't that a violation of some geometric theorem?

Fifty-five of our closest friends gathered for Peggy & Sam's 180th birthday bash yesterday. Many had never met before but as far as I know there were no food fights or even minor skirmishes. It was such a pleasure to see people mingle and spark the air with their own particular voltage. New geometric configurations everywhere I looked. Most of us are still vertical; some bent, a bit diagonal. By my arithmetic there was about 4,000 years of wisdom and folly under that roof. Talk of infirmities was put aside. I heard more about plans than memories; upcoming travel to New York, Glasgow, Paris or Barcelona. I can't decide whether to go to Cornwall or Costco. Still ripe, not yet deciduous, we are.

I'm sure any of us could gather a like number of friends who may not have met before. It shows the many facets in the diamond. Old friends, new friends, friends of friends, neighbor friends, poetry friends, sports buddies, literary junkies, music aficionados, movie buffs and friends you forgot from where or how but just plain love. Often it turns out that old friends make new friends from the mix and that is gratifying. Lately I've noticed how some are just one friend away from having known us all along. But I suppose when you live in a small town like Los Angeles these things can happen.

Many of our friends are happily retired now, well into their second or third incarnation, re-making the world. In the room were potters, printmaker, photographer and poets, dancer, singer, musician, woodworker, artist, essayist and thinkers of great thoughts. Some have never stopped their movie-making and playwriting; many electrons bumping into each other and charging the air; many hills of beans. In addition are most of us, fully present as caring persons whom we hold close.

I told Sam that he is the ideal ex-husband-in-law, how we’ve grown close as extended family. And how I first met him and Peggy 54 years ago when they hosted a UCLA poetry group…. even though neither of them remember me since I was just a slip of a lad. We go way back and will continue to be here for one another, for better or wrose through surgeries or holidays.

Here are the words I put together to toast Peggy:


Peggy at Ninety

Of all the gin joints in the galaxy
we met first in ’57 when I was mere
and you were already launched
into orbits of art and leafy things

then in 1980 when our way was milky
my Fahrenheit frost, your centigrade sun
abruptly ablaze,
a glance became an avalanche
you effervesced in an eighth day of creation
glaciers calved from rupture to rapture
you Buzzed my Berkley, Budda’d my Pest
and we traveled through this
heart of light and darkness
the Africa of you, your Sahara and Serengeti
my call to prayer.
Not just your adjectives, laden as they are
but the verb of you
its many swerves and swoops
you make the gibbous moon, full.

How I witness you un-moored,
your voyage out,
singing with the genius of the sea
even in your Krishnamurti hush
seeing what is
you are the quiet noticer of rust
the peeling crust of masonry,
you rescue weeds, read
the calligraphy of un-leafed trees.
What feeds the violet on the sill
if not your spirit in the fuse,
who like Yahweh does a constant collage;
you architect the shards.

You are my high and low holidays,
my feast and my fast.
Your birthday is mine, each morning a genesis,
an afternoon exodus, an evening revelation and return.

Now at ninety, the fiction of calendars.
Ninety cannot even keep a straight face
so curvolinear it is. A kind of fuzzy math is at work
where you lose a year at each birthday.
Soon I’ll be a nonagenarian and you……
a Yes-Yes genarian

Mother's Day

Barely in time for Mother’s Day, some important news just reached me about my mother. The true where and when of her comes from my daughter, Lauren, who plumbed the archives and discovered that my dear departed Mom did not take the A train from the Bronx into this world on January 1st, 1900, as she always claimed. Instead she arrived here as a toddler in steerage from the shtetel probably a year or two before that.

We now know that my grandparents checked in at Ellis Island sometime in 1900. The only way she could have been born here, as she said, is if the boat landed at dawn and her mother gave birth that afternoon. Sorry to take away that auspicious birthday but it is likely a fib. Why quibble about the time and place?; because her secret tells me much about her and myself.

(My friend, Ed, once told me of a visit to his Grandpa, after many months away. During that interval Ed had grown a mustache. When the old man opened the door and saw his face he ran and hid in the closet. His mind had snapped back to those days of pogroms. Cossacks had the mustache. Jews had the beards.)

In those days new arrivals had much to put behind them. Life among the Jewish peasantry of Eastern Europe was filled with dread and danger. A knock on the door or the sound of hooves was a signal to hide. Secrecy and cunning were necessary for survival which translated well into the push-cart life in America along with a high value for education, helping them to assimilate.

In contrast to these immigrants who were heavily liberal Democrats are the more recently arrived Russian Jews. My experience with those who emigrated during the last decade of the U.S.S.R., is of a population which retains their native language, despises Gorbachev and votes as a Republican block. They tend to be observant in religion and are congenital entrepreneurs. They straddle the Communist culture of entitlement while embracing opportunistic Capitalism. But I digress.

My mother was a fearful person frightened, I suspect, by her five brothers who themselves carried their early traumas into the household. No wonder she spent her life dis-identifying with the Old World. The fiction of her birth date in New York City must have been prompted by a mixture of shame and her need for re-invention. She stuck to her story and deserves credit for her imagination.

Until the end, when she mellowed a bit, her days were spent planning for worst case scenarios; she squeezed some life from my hand, crossing the street as if cars were assassins, merchants out to steal her purse, landlords gouging her on the rent. Even as she concealed her true birthplace she revealed it in all the curses she carried in her mouth and the aggravation that stooped her back.

I tried to hold my mother as a negative model. I would speak softly, trust everyone and presume benign traffic in the world. However I also own my inheritance. I absorbed her denial of tradition, avoided Yiddish roots and rituals and anything with a whiff of the Old World as if I, too, had just fled mustachioed Cossacks ready to loot my village. If this explains the genesis of my disdain so be it. I prefer to think of it as an affirmation rather than a rejection. My belief turns toward a universality that bridges differences and celebrates life across borders and walls. Bless my mother for her arduous journey and her great fabrication which landed me here.

The Head Of The Dragon

After all the back-slapping, breast-beating, drinking and dancing on Osama's watery grave, comes the sobering slap in the face that, dead or alive, nothing much has changed except Al Quaeda needs a new poster boy and the president gets a needed bump in the polls.

For ten years we have been shadow boxing. At a great cost of lives, resources and a bending of the American psyche we have sought Osama bin Laden's head on a platter as if that were the single embodiment of all villany. Now that we've decapitated the dragon is the matter settled? Have their perceived grievances been addressed? Is it justice that has been served or retribution? Does death ever bring closure? It does to those who think in punitive terms in that interminable cycle exchanging eyes for teeth.

In psychological parlance shadow is one's disowned self. There is much in our culture and our geo-politics that is seen as threatening by the Muslim world. To some extent, that view is shared by American fundamentalists. Both rant about a secular, godless society, about vulgar language, images and about those fissures in society which foreshadow rapid changes in mores and family structures. Shake hands with the American religious right. While the changes that modernity has brought cannot be reversed we must let them evolve according to the traditions and mores of each country however repugnant their social order may be to us.

Certainly the tribal authority and upheaval of woman's role is at stake. Our collective glee over bin Laden's demise feels fairly tribal, to me, also harkening back a few thousand years.

I understand the national grief of 9/11 and the state of siege we have lived with since then, to one degree or another. However isn't this hunt and slaying of the designated evildoer more symbolic and illusory than real? I'm inclined to reserve my celebration for the day we bring our legions home. A strong case can be made that American troops on foreign soil engender the very terrorism that we seek to eliminate. Is it really a good day for America or an occasion to reflect on our goals and the price we have paid subordinating means to ends.

Peggy Day

Peggy will be 50 years into her forties on Monday. This will make her ninety by the fiction of the calendar but I've seen nonagenarians and she's no nona.

At one time she had twelve years on me but since we've been together she has taken off a year each birthday and now I'm older. The disparity in our ages has become my challenge to keep up with her imaginative energy.

Every day I bear witness to her creative burst. She is effervescent, writing a poem a day for the past 8 months. There’s nothing to it when you are plugged into the muse, overhearing the music of the realm and noticing the extraordinary ordinary that passes by us mere mortals.

Even as stenosis narrows her spine she shows no shortness of breadth. Her enthusiasm for life takes her to the far reaches beyond all margins. Her collages are visual poems rubbing disparate images together to create sparks.

Her words on paper probe and extend the limits of language. Often I will run into the market to pick up a few items and when I return she has written a poem based on a casual observation in the parking lot, juxtaposed with some remark from the radio drizzled with a dream figure and an old song lyric thrown in. She breathes a rarefied air.

Even more than the making of a poem is the living as a poet. Peggy listens with antenna ears, sees with connectivity and thinks metaphorically, at the ready to transform this into that. No stump goes un-noted, no night sky; even our short walks find her salvaging a mottled leaf or pod.

She can't be in a waiting room for a minute if she doesn't strike up a conversation with another woman, nurse or technician. She'll make a new sister or she'll be Mom to a young person she didn't know ten minutes before.

Four score and ten is a lot of bubble baths, a lot of quiet moments between the exuberance which people don't see much when she might be meditating or journal- writing or filling her common place book, a chronicle of assorted articles, art pieces cut from magazines, ticket stubs, greeting cards etc... I even made the cut with some of my poems.

Three years ago I wrote:

Four score and seven years ago
your mother brought forth
in the continent of her arms
a new notion
conceived in libidity
and dedicated to prepositions
and exclamation points
of which there is no created sequel.


I stand amazed with it all .......her elongation of youth, an ageless presence, a life fully lived, irrepressible in its wonderment. My only wish is for many more May 2nds in our astonishing life together.