Guilt

When the judge in a courtroom drama asks the defendant to rise…I get up from the couch. This is what happens from taking on the world. There is much to account for. Historians may well ask where were you, Citizen Levine, when your country napalamed Viet Nam, overthrew Allende, invaded Iraq and tortured prisoners.

It’s bad enough that I swiped a deposit bottle from the back shed of a candy store when I was twelve and then brought it in the front door for the 2 cents. I also re-used an un-cancelled stamp once or twice and sneaked into a second movie at a multiplex. It’s been a life of crime, I admit.

For those of us with a conscience even these misdemeanors weigh heavily and grow exponentially in the fecund soil of the unconscious. In my dreams I most often find myself in the shoes of an escaped felon even if I forgot what it is that I did. I’m tired of being the international drug lord, serial killer and embezzler. I’m ready to turn myself in and confess to every unsolved case on the police blotter.

This could be my shadow-self. That guy who has been following me behind the newspaper on the subway, that goon holding up the lamppost across the street at midnight. I could be that double-agent urban guerrilla who forgot his assignment.

May I approach the bench, your honor? I ask that the jury disregard these previous remarks. My client is given to delusions of depravity. If he fell asleep in Star Wars-3 and woke up in Star Wars-5 it was unintentional. As for his alleged crime at age twelve the records will show that he never was twelve. He skipped from age eleven to thirteen. Further forensics will reveal that it wasn’t his DNA on those un-cancelled stamps. The defense rests.

The prosecution asks the jury to consider the accused acts of omission as well. In his near 83 years this country has gone off course and he did nothing to stop the skid. When we recklessly allied ourselves with corrupt scoundrels Mr. Levine merely whimpered in protest. Where was he when we kicked the hornet’s nest in the Middle East, engineered coups, occupied sovereign states, assassinated with drones and violated the Geneva Convention? The chronicle of History will show he tacitly endorsed these nefarious acts by his vigorous inaction.

We, the jury, find the defendant shall be sentenced to another year of guilt-ridden dreams. He shall be haunted by every cardboard box at the off-ramp, be made to feel the sting of para-military police rage and the toxic tongue of dangerous fools.

Rain, Reign and More Rein

Finally some wet followed always by official doomsayers warning that it doesn’t make up for a decade of drought. Grow up, El Nino! Give us a manly dump, something we can slurp and slosh in. Something biblical as befits your name, Christ Child, El Nino.

In return, fish and plankton will die off the coast of Ecuador and Peru as the Pacific heats up. It will also parch Eastern Australian and Indonesia. It’s Nature’s equation of life and death. Fisherman of South America suffer for the farmers of North America. A regime change from bottom to top.

Reigns elsewhere also fall. The reign in Ukraine is likely on the wane. Terrains of Husseins are going down the drains. Upheavals, carnage, migrations. The map quakes. This God squabbles with that God. A crowd of prophets and loss.  Heads roll. Fidel and Infidel. Miscreants foul the air with noxious words.

God forbid one of them takes the reins and rustles the horses in a November night then gallops us into an apocalypse. Can we really elect a gladiator / highwayman /  horse thief?

Only one week into the year so we can’t give up. Rain will quench the valleys green. Crops will be picked with illegal hands and undocumented lettuce will return us to salad days.

It is high noon in no-man’s land and faraway reigns will exit town on the next stage to Yuma. The axe-happy thugs shall meet their maker in a bar-room brawl.  I know. I saw the movie….even though the fame of John Wayne remains largely unexplained.

Losing It

The other day I spent two hours looking for our telephone book. It’s a red one about 5 by 7. Maybe you’ve seen it. Usually when I lose something I find something else that I lost but didn’t know it. This time I got so flustered I also lost one of our land-line phones.

I hate wasting my time looking for things when I could be wasting my time doing other meaningless things. I once spent an entire day looking for Peggy’s medication that hadn’t arrived yet in the mail.

Now in the search for both the phone and phone book, I hit upon one of the most profound thoughts in the history of epistemology, namely, that everything is somewhere. I’m not sure if the inverse is also true… that nothing is nowhere. But I am willing to go out on a limb and declare that some things are certainly somewhere.

Life is a series of losses. We lose our virginity and that’s really a gain. We lose our innocence but not entirely if we’re lucky. Peggy went on a diet and lost height. Then there are a series of lost causes. Even countries have disappeared from the map. After World War I an entire generation was lost. One by one our children scatter and we gain a bathroom. We lose our temper, a few teeth, hair and hearing. I’ve lost my shirt once or twice by dumb investments. In the end we lose our marbles.

Slowly we get dispossessed. It all starts with a prodigal sock which slithers out of the washing machine and makes its way across the street where it shows up in a garage sale a year later. I have lost two cameras while on trips abroad and a sweater which I left in a New Orleans taxi.

I’m stalling now waiting for my lost objects to make an appearance. I have imaged them both, pleaded, meditated and chanted for their safe return.

Aha, you rascal you. Here it is. The red phone book was leaning against a photo of Peggy wearing a red robe. Two minutes later I got a vision of the phone tangled in the bed sheets and there it was just where I left it.

I hope they didn’t feel neglected but in mitigation I must admit I was looking for them with only one good eye. My sinister eye has been delinquent for the past two weeks. Now I’m only hoping my lost vision returns.

Remembering Ernie White

He was a sophisticated man. A dear friend and a highly regarded psychiatrist with a well-developed aesthetic. Yet he also had a bit of Huck Finn in him. He gave mischief a good name.

Ernie loved language like nobody else I’ve ever known. He elevated listening to an art form. He investigated words, their sound, their weight and elasticity. Also their derivation. We enjoyed many moments together knocking phrases around to see if they stood up to scrutiny.

Ernie liked to tell of his days of truancy in elementary school. He refused to make the curlicues in penmanship demanded by his teacher. For this he was banished from the room, made to stand outside in the hallway when his favorite story was being read.

Maybe it offended his aesthetic, his singularity. He owned his own voice, his particular way of seeing. I cherished the way Ernie had of re-framing a work of art or a film or a life experience.

He integrated this particular gift through his profession, his appreciation of art and his entire being. Like any artist he was both intensely present and deliberately truant. He found his perch … just outside the door.

I’d like to believe that during these past few years when he fell nearly silent he was still present refusing life’s needless curlicues.

My Number One Christmas Song

I can almost remember Christmas in a previous incarnation. There I was back in merry old England with fellow wassailers, scarf flowing, hot toddy running warm and wild in my veins while our dulcet tones harmonized a repertoire of carols. A ha-penny or slice of mince pie was our recompense. Off behind the snow bank Charles Dickens could be seen scribbling his tale of a repentant Scrooge making his way to Bob Cratchit’s hovel. One man’s stab at addressing income inequality.


Many carols came out of Victoria’s reign. Even Old King Wenceslas, as we know it, was written during the mid-19^th century. The Czech king actually lived nine centuries before. That was one of my favorites until I worked in a store where it was played on a continuous loop and numbed me into a catatonic stupor. It got so bad I welcomed Jingle Bells and Bing Crosby’s syrupy, White Christmas.

The one song commemorating the birth of baby Jesus that has always caught my fancy is the Cherry Tree Carol. It tells of Mary and Joseph on their way to Bethlehem. Stopping in a grove of cherry trees Mary asks Joseph to gather some berries because she is with child. Her husband angrily tells his pregnant wife to have the father of the child do it. At this point, Jesus, speaking from the womb, lets Joseph in on their little secret by commanding a branch to lower with an offering for his mother. And the rest is pseudo-history.

The song goes back to the Middle Ages. It doesn’t have the usual refrains of other carols. Whether this is a nativity carol or a ballad seems to be a matter for scholars to ponder along with the number of angels dancing on a pin.

On yet another level it can be taken as the subversive Jesus with his seditious ideas about rich man/poor man, cheek-turning and do-unto-others, being carried by the feminine sensibility. This is not to be confused necessarily with the female as in Carly F. or Sarah P. The message brought into the world is being delivered to the masculine ear.

Or we can forget all that and just enjoy the haunting melody.


Joan Baez has a beautiful rendition available on you tube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYaFGSG_x80

Janus-Head

The two directions could also pertain to our current divide. This country is more polarized than ever between people who agree with me and those who don’t. I suspect my ten worst anything list is their ten best. I’m comforted to know that a mere 24% of Americans are registered Republicans and 40% of them adore Donald Trump which means 90% of us don’t. But then there are those Independents who have allowed fear to damage their moral compass.

On yet another level there are times when I know the Janus-head feeling. I don't always agree with myself. That other face may be my disowned one. It's not a bad thing to stand on a threshold looking at both the wreckage and repair of one's life.

At this age I certainly have more memories than plans, more auld lang syne, old time's sake, times gone past, old long ago. Any excuse to raise a cup and bend an elbow, works for me. And so we sing with blood alcohol rising:

And there's a hand, my trusty fere! 

And gie's a hand o' thine! 

And we'll tak a right gude-willie waught, 

For auld lang syne.

It makes a lot more sense after emptying a bottle of bubbly. The song laid fairly dormant till Guy Lombardo, my least favorite big bandleader, popularized it on radio in the late 20s and then later on TV. Had Robert Burns known about this he would have disowned the tune. But he didn’t own it to begin with. Its origins go back before the Scot.

On the Eve I always talk to my friend, Stanley, who remembers me from kindergarten as I do him. He promises not to reveal how I embezzled money as milk monitor and parleyed eleven cents into an empire of high-rise buildings in Manhattan. Like many memories this never happened but it could have been how a certain Republican candidate got his start.

This past year has been packed with notable events to record. We look forward to taking at least as many trips next year as in 2015…without leaving our computer screen. Traveling is far less strenuous with You Tube plus photos from intrepid friends and family.

I can also report that the dog we don’t have didn’t die. My three daughters graduated from high school but that was 35-40 years ago. I finally got enough punches on my car wash card to get a freebie in October. Everyone I know will soon be a year older except Peggy whose spirit is of no age.

Like the fabled Janus we look ahead, we look back and all the rest of the time we live in the moment. There goes another one.

Wanted: New Name for the Common Cold

Outside it was 29 degrees. The temperature in my body reached 102.6, rectally speaking. I was nine years old in 1942. The war wasn’t going too well; not over there and not inside me with germs, (were they not Germans?) invading my nostrils, east and west and the only throat I had. My bones felt like they’d been overrun by a Panzer division. My mother blamed the dreaded draft and the three sweaters I didn’t wear.

When Dr. Schildkraut was summoned for a house call I hoped my fever stayed up deserving of his attention. He stood at my bed carrying that outside air with him. What my mother cursed as miasma suddenly was transformed into fresh air. He scoped my ears, tongue-depressed me with an AH and prescribed Argyrol to paint my throat. He also ordered Empirin Compound, Neo-Silvol nose drops and Terpin Hydrate with Codeine cough syrup along with Compound Tincture of Benzoin for the vaporizer.

Argyrol, by the way, may have had no therapeutic effect but it made Albert Barnes a millionaire with money sufficient to pack his museum with great impressionist art…but I digress.

All of those remedies have since been declared worthless even if the smell felt good. We’ve come a long way. Yet we’ve lost some good words in our progress. The doctor diagnosed my misery as The Grippe. When I returned to school at least my larynx and pharynx had earned the purchase of that word, Grippe. Anyone can have a cold but to be in a vise was serious stuff. We have to do better with our nomenclature if we want a Telethon to wipe out the Common Cold. A cold is bad enough even without the adjective.

When I came to California I first heard the word, Croup, a barking cough. Now that’s a good one. It gets closer to croaking. Back east we didn’t bark, we whooped, as in Whooping Cough or Pertussis. We also had nasal Catarrh or Rhinitis, a copious discharge of mucus from inflamed membranes. Those words elicit more sympathy than running nose or sniffles.

Back among the pages of Charles Dickens, people suffered from much better sounding ailments such as chilblains, ague, apoplexy or dropsy. Folks had consumption before it was even conspicuous. Such maladies have either been eradicated or the words have passed into the romance of medical glossaries. Even lumbago has evolved to sciatica.

It might take lower respiratory bronchitis with pulmonary involvement to get the remaining Dr. Schildkrauts of the world out on a bitter winter night in Los Angeles when the thermometer dips below 60 degrees. More than likely the call to a doctor will just say to dial 911 or get yourself to the emergency room.