Mumsie Lives

There comes a time in life, like it or not, to acknowledge whose son I am. Marketing was a day my mother’s mishegoss was on full display. Schlepping packages was much more colorful than merely carrying them. From many a stick-ball game I had to absent myself to lug the groceries up three flights in our walk-up apartment.

I think she found a perverse joy in her aggravation. Has anyone before or since haggled at the checkstand? I haven’t tried except to drop that word, haggle, and see what reaction I get. Usually a laugh.

As far as I can recall she confined her excursions to the A&P and a once-a-week ten block walk to a kosher butcher. She was under his spell, convinced he held the best cuts especially for her. Where I saw splattered blood on his apron she probably saw roses blooming. The shop is alive in my mind with its chicken feathers, sawdust floor and strands of fly paper.

I find myself shopping at no less than six markets. Mumsie would be proud. Gelsons is now having their grand-opening in our neighborhood.  I ventured in yesterday to mingle with the 1% and case the joint. I expect they will be my place if I’m trying to impress a visiting dignitary.

Smart and Final, which I call Finally Smart, is my choice for Good Earth Sweet & Spicy tea. I can also be found at the 99 Cent Store. Nothing is beneath me. They carry a low-carb cereal called Twigs as well as honeydew when in season. It is the very same melon Costco offers for three times the price.

The big-box store supplies most of our provender. It’s a great challenge eating a dozen plums before they go bad. But I can’t resist the bargain. If I were shameless like Mumsie I’d start selling them off while waiting in line or go door-to-door when I get home. On the other hand one never knows when the Mormon Tabernacle Choir may drop in for an after-theater snack.

Ralph’s market gets the lion’s share of whatever Costco doesn’t stock. They also carry low-carb bagels and Carbmaster yogurt with a small fraction of the carb content compared to the regular brands.

The sixth store to provide a small chunk of comestibles is Trader Joe. When I run in for one item I invariably end up with six. They have the world’s largest selection of guilt-free junk food. In addition T.J. can be counted on for quick frozen dishes and the best mushroom soup in town.

One might ask, what about Whole Foods and the farmer’s market. If I ever reached for an over-priced tomato my inner-mother would slap my hand. She didn’t know from organic or local produce. If one must choose between pests or pesticides (for half the price) I’ll go with chemicals and wash the carcinogens down the drain. Indefensible as it may be, blame my mother and leave me alone.

   

The Anniversary of Myself

In a few days I shall be a year older. So says the calendar. The vernal equinox is supposed to be the time for flowers to bloom in the spring, tra la.

I can no longer rely on the coral tree outside my window. It is lagging a couple of seasons behind with green leaves just now going golden in the autumn of its cycle. If this is a signifier I’ll take it. At 83 I’m well into my winter.

I’ve always counted on the coral tree to celebrate my birthday with its array of orange-red candles. On San Vicente Blvd approaching the beach, there are two miles of coral trees already in bloom. They were planted in 1950 when the red car line was ripped out and have since become a treasured landmark. At least they preserved the red.

Our illustrious mayor, Sam Yorty, whose mouth far exceeded his brain in its evolution, declared the coral tree was in keeping with our Spanish / Mexican heritage even though it is indigenous to South Africa.

Unlike myself, the trees evidently enjoy being pruned. Otherwise their limbs give way posing a danger to passing joggers. There are worse ways to die than being felled by a barked limb festooned with red floral lanterns. In my next incarnation I wouldn’t mind becoming a tree particularly a flowering one with its own calligraphy of twisted branches and a nest or two in the crook of its elbows.

The runners remind me of my younger glory days when, as a freshman, I was a sensational star athlete for the Brooklyn College of Pharmacy varsity basketball team. The older I get the better I used to be, as Sandy Koufax put it. I actually played only four games when it became clear I couldn’t memorize structural formulas and dribble at the same time.

Wait, I think I hear a choir of song birds from the coral trees of San Vicente singing Happy Birthday…or is that a garbage truck backing up?

Nothing can surpass Peggy taking me to dinner with one of her poems written for the occasion. Our 32^nd anniversary of moving in together will be coming up a few days after my birthday. Back then Peggy was twelve years older than I but she has subtracted a year every birthday so now I am twenty years her senior. That must be why the coral tree outside our window is so confused.

Remembering Barbara Pascal

There are those in our midst whose measure of worth is not the achieve of… though she did achieve.

Nor is it anything to be quantified or Googled…though she certainly did make her mark in the Art Book world.

The way I remember Barbara is how I always felt so fully met. So received. A reception that elicited a loving response in return.  Even on her down days when you could almost hear her silent struggles.

I loved the way she would talk back to the T.V. set…no don’t open that door……….or you deserve what you got, you bum. Barbara wanted to set the world right.

I found such delight in her wackadoddle emails. Every other word was mis-spelled as if it had arrived, unfiltered, from her own distant country. 

Yet for all the indecipherable sentences it bore Barbara’s unmistakable sui generis signature. A stream of her immediacy.  

She sought the seclusion of the Hebrides, both the real and imagined place, an inner-Hebrides away from the clamor without and within.

Most of all, I think, she wanted to curl up on a cozy couch with book in hand, preferably a book about books, lost in their pages. She was herself, at times, an open book albeit with yet un-cut pages. Highly collectible. Worn a bit on the edges. Else fine. A rare first edition. One of a kind. 

Finding Your Disowned Trump

In 1980 as part of a group poem Allen Ginsberg gave his class the opening line, I’m going to vote for Ronald Reagan because…

It was an exercise in liberating the imagination by probing the part of the brain we don’t wish to visit. In another sense he might have been asking us to embrace, if for a moment, that dark side of our self where our own Ronald Reagan lives.

In this vein I’ve decided to list my reasons for voting for Donald Trump without the usual filters of my censorious mind.

1-   Because I didn’t burn the raisin bread toast this morning and Peggy is well and therefore the world is already perfect.

2-   Because I hate figs, feta cheese and fettuccine for no good reason.

3-   Because I just lied about the fettuccine.

4-   Because it will bring us closer to revolution.

5-   Because I’ve always loved Canada

6-   Because sometimes I need someone to hate

7-   Because I’ve always secretly wanted to act in a movie about Nazi Germany.

Now I am traveling inward to find my own Donald Trump. Here I am, age fourteen, berating some twelve–year old kid on the soft-ball team for dropping a pop fly. Maybe I also ridiculed his speech defect or promised to negotiate a higher grade for him with his teacher.

Come to think of it I did meet my inner Trump in 8^th grade. I had been in P.S. 99 since Kindergarten obeying all the rules and behaving myself. I sat up straight, played well with others and didn’t run with scissors. It was time to overthrow the regime, to burst out of my knotted tie, my penal servitude.

I became part of a gang of guys, dedicated to malicious mischief, who nominated the worst student among us for class president to deliver a speech on Graduation Day. Robert Haimowitz had been left back 2 or 3 times. He was probably autistic or brain-damaged. In today’s world he would have been in a Special Needs program. We were cruel and stupid, feeling our oats.

We got him elected. Ms. Seabury, our teacher conferred with the principal and un-elected him. We were reprimanded soundly. The snicker disappeared from my face. For a few hours I walked in Donald Trump’s shoes feeling superior. Do his voters realize they are having their Robert Haimowitz moment?

 

Campaign 2016

Nothing ignites passions like hatred; not love, friendship, nor respect.  It is the entire Republican platform. Derision. Talk softly and you are a loser. Jeb got jabbed with it.

And this is still spring training. Between Super Bowl and Super Tuesday, our two highest holidays. Just a preview of coming attractions. They are clawing each other as if their own MGM lion has been un-caged. Bed-wetter. Choker.

Soon our national pastime, quadrennial carnival will begin in earnest. It’s safe to assume they are saving their best poison barbs for the post-convention full-frontal assault.   

Must we hear that Trumpet?  That rouged-faced, straw-haired Colonel Blimp give ‘m his old razzle-dazzle? Yes, we must. I, for one, offer myself as human sacrifice to lend him my ears and root for the bully-blusterer to jeer himself to ignominy while dragging down the entire GOP ticket. The party of Lincoln, born 1860, dies 2016.

I want him to unload his glossary of invective, release his noxious air. Target skin color, the weak and defective, men who sweat, and those disgusting women who use the bathroom.

I want to hear more about that wall that keeps us from rapists which grows not from grass roots but drops from his sky of pies.

We have lived through a coup d’etat. The Republicans have applied the brake and break to functioning governance. They have subverted the judicial and legislative branches.

I look to their putative candidate to march them into the sink hole. He speaks fluent trash and is wearing no clothes. In full transparency the party of fear and loathing has been un-masked.

Have you no decency, Senator, attorney Welch asked rhetorically of Joe McCarthy. In fact he didn't but the great majority of us will repudiate this litany of name-calling.

It was Chekhov who said that nothing unites us like hatred. If he was right we are doomed. I’m betting he got it wrong.

Political Junkie

If Marx was right that religion is the opium of the masses then politics must be the myopia of the asses. I know, I’ve been a political junkie for the past seventy plus years.

While other kids were engaged in wholesome activities like swiping broomsticks in apartment basements to use as stick-ball bats I was upstairs running from apartment building to apartment building distributing pamphlets against the Taft-Hartley Law. I went to hootenannies and listened to Paul Robeson singing about the Spanish Civil War. Most elections were a lost cause but we had the best songs.

Is it my imagination that each presidential race is a little more insufferable than the one before? It’s only February and I’ve already had my fill. I don’t think I can take another eight months of Trump’s inanities, Rubio’s robotics or Cruz’s snide mendacity. I also can’t handle Hillary’s je ne sais quoi. I’m even weary of Bernie’s rants against that famous street in lower Manhattan…. and I don’t disagree with him.

In fact I’ve been waiting lo these many decades for someone to say what Bernie is saying. Maybe that’s why his message felt stale to me upon arrival. I could have told the world that in 1945. Maybe I did but did they listen? No.

Now the truth is out there, the S word has been uttered in public and he has driven Hillary so far to the left she is squirming. He has ignited a new conversation. Yet on Monday, Wednesday and Friday I want Bernie to leave the race. On Tuesday, Thursday and weekends I’m ready for Hillary to do the same. One of them has to go.

It is beyond my imagining that my attorney Bernie could win a general election. More likely he would lose Yuge, unless the folks in Alabama confuse Bernie Sanders with Colonel Sanders and think they are ordering fried chicken.

Of course it is possible my myopia doesn’t allow me to see the revolution at hand, that the down-trodden masses are rising up and demanding their due, that racists are confessing their pathology, and big banks can be redeemed by Jimmy Stewart so we can all have a Wonderful Life.

It is also possible that those of us who dislike Hillary Clinton but don’t quite know why have been persuaded by a pervasive campaign of gender politics. Racism morphs easily into misogyny. Methinks her ambition and testiness would not be remarked upon if she were a he.

If the Clinton machine prevails on March 1^st they will most likely be the party choice with a big boost from those 712 super delegates. In that scenario I say, step aside, Bernie. Please. Hillary needs to address the unpersuaded. She needs to answer the Republicans not defend her credentials as a Progressive. She must recapture the narrative among the millennials in our midst.

If the Bern catches a wind and scorches Hillary she should know for whom the alarm tolls. Her time may be up.

Those who control the arsenal for Conservatives are salivating over the prospect of attacking a Jewish Socialist. I’m sure they also have Bengazi drones and email drones ready to drop on HRC. Let’s give each a chance to prepare strategies against their vitriol.

Ideology aside, the imperative is for a Democrat POTUS to insure a left-leaning SCOTUS. In the world of real politik our best bet for profound change is to sweep the stench of Scalia from the high court and install a progressive for the next generation.

Let me know when it’s over. I don’t think I can handle all the bluster and rhetorical noise until November. Yet I also know the hold it has on me and the pain of withdrawal. I don’t stand a chance.

Missing: Two Hours

As years pile up under the heading of, The Past, most of what just happened is beyond retrieval. Yet, if pressed, we could probably recover yesterday and maybe the day before that.

I’ve always been amused to watch a witness on TV courtroom drama recall in great detail what occurred on the evening of Oct. 23^rd eleven years ago.

I just lost two hours. My version is that I was under an anaesthetized sleep. I was in the pre-op area asking the anesthetist for a slightly heavier dose than last time I underwent this procedure. I’m not fond of being half-awake with a covering over my face except for an aperture exposing my left eye. The next thing I knew I was back in the same place two hours later.

Nothing unusual about that. Except that’s not what happened. During my post-op visit to the doctor the following day he told me I was fully awake responding to his orders to move my eye-ball up, down or sideways. How could I have been so present and absent at the same time?

I shall never forget what I cannot remember. This is a classic case of an unreliable narrator. There were possibly a half dozen witnesses to document my behavior. Maybe I also sang a medley of arias from Gilbert & Sullivan or recited the roster of the 1941 Brooklyn Dodgers. Maybe I killed cock robin. I’ll never know.

I saw that movie, the one where a hypnotized guy is instructed to scale the wall of a mansion, memorize the combination to the safe behind the portrait hanging in the great hall, swipe the crown jewels and deposit them under a specified park bench. And then return to his job as mild-mannered pharmacist in Grover Corners.

But inspector, I’ve been here the whole time, triturating counterclockwise with my mortar and pestle.

Oh yeah, then what is that mud doing on your shoes? And how do you explain an eye-witness who saw a man in a hospital gown, open in the back, leaping over a six foot high hedge with a counterclockwise look on his face and a shiny object in his hand with your fingerprints?