Tragi / Comedy

As Plato said to Aristotle, deeply embedded in the core of tragedy lies comedy. Or was it the other way around? It doesn’t matter because I just made that up. However, I think I am experiencing a seminal smile welling up at the very moment of calamity.

It seems that a happy nation of obese termites has made a meal of our kitchen cabinets. The banquet has apparently been going on for years. When this was brought to the attention of our landlord, she agreed, with a push from my daughter, to replace the lower cabinets....all the wood grain resurfaced  by white paint.

At the same time, she spotted a family of spiders which I had provided with a habitat in the rear of a pantry shelf. Suddenly I become a hero among wood ants and Eensie-Weentsie Aranea. To my landlord, ever-salivating with the thought of eviction, this was strike one.

About two weeks ago while washing Peggy’s compression stockings in my sink I was called away to tend to her urgent need. My ever-diminishing mind failed to hold the two thoughts in my mind at once. Ten minutes later I had flooded the area around the sink. The small rivulet was easily soaked up by five towels. However, water was spotted dripping into the parking area of our apartment house. My inability to multitask was strike two.

We lived without access to our kitchen for eight days as they removed everything including the kitchen sink. I then dislocated my trigger finger, Peggy lost a tooth, the in-home caregiver failed to show up, I lost another 2.5 pounds, Peggy went into atrial fib and I started to dream about living in a cardboard box at the off-ramp.

Today the landlord informed me that the water damage extended eight feet under the floor board and a wall would have to be knocked down. Perhaps this was a good time for a tsunami to wash us away. I have always wondered what a ocean view would look like in Nebraska.

Our insurance company has already turned down the claim. It seems our renter's coverage only applies if the dog we don't  have bites a neighbor. It may also apply if one of Peggy's stuffed animals turns feral.

I forgot why I am writing all this. I think I may have already left this mortal coil and I have landed in some Marx Bros. movie. Bring on Harpo. The only thing that really matters is Peggy’s heart which has, once again, bounced back to sinus rhythm. Her pulse has returned from a fluttering 108 to tranquil 72.

I’ve now been informed that the wall will not need to fall. Three fans and dehumidifiers may be enough but all the furniture (except bed) is to be moved into the living room. Our place is indistinguishable from a condemned building in Aleppo. 

I’m still looking for the humor in all this. The best I can do is laugh or is that a grimace? I wore a white shirt today; when I walked into our new kitchen I vanished.

 

Crickets and Cicadas

It seems that everyone is talking about them. Well, maybe not everyone but poets have been writing about cicadas since the Greeks and just this morning I overheard someone in the laundry room speaking about crickets. Now I have learned that cicadas are a completely different species from crickets.

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 people who graduated college heavily in debt and needed 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. Only male crickets have that instrument on their wings while male cicadas have their noise-makers on their tummies. Not sure how gender politics may look upon this.

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.

The most famous cricket is, of course, Jiminy Cricket which I always took as one of those euphemisms for Jesus Christ along with Jumping Jehoshaphat.

People actually grow crickets in farms. Who knew? They can be used to increase protein intake for the 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.*

*Those last two words are taken from Leonard Cohen's Heart With No Companion

 

 

 

A Day at the Market

Here I am taking my place with the day-old bread and dented cans. You can find me among the damaged goods and packages beyond their shelf-life; anything on this table eighty-eight cents. More and more, lately, I’m able to do less and less.

The shopping cart is my walker. I’m in the line that doesn’t move. The man who waters the lettuce gives me a drink. I’m getting my news from the National Enquirer. Half a mermaid was found in someone’s tuna fish sandwich. Obama is leaving Michelle for 37^th time. JFK was cited in some Louisiana swamp.

Life is happening in the express lane. Eyes affixed on apps with bulletins and news breaking into bar codes. We are practically unmasked. Naked in our consumption.

There goes Walt Whitman hearing America singing and smoking leaves of grass. I’m hearing Benny Goodman Sing, Sing, Sing.

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

Yet, it’s all here. This garden of tulips still breathing Amsterdam air. The Impressionism of the Produce Dept., melons pregnant each with their own palette. Monet, splashing. Jackson Pollock, dripping. Picasso making daffodils from a bunch of bananas. Rauschenberg is smiling at the collage on the conveyor belt beeping away and bagged while Calder studies the balance of the display at the end of a gondola.

There’s a wedding procession coming down two aisles to take their vows at the check stand, reception in the parking lot. Here is the marriage of everything, baked and frozen, fresh and wilted, organic and forbidden. Tops off the carrots. Peel me a grape.

 

Standing Up

Yes, yes, life is a fountain, an underground spring with hidden sources. And we are detectives seeking them within and without; not only the life-affirming elements but those forces which subvert this process.

I gained a pound this year, all in my nose. I can smell trouble. It’s my middle name. There is a stench of democracy dying in State Houses abetted by the high court while senators cower and bloviate.

Whatcha know Joe?

I don’t know nothin.

Whatcha know Joe,

Tell me somethin.

 

Joe Manchin, the senator from West Virginia has trouble standing up for what he avows. He is a master equivocator, a spineless man who refuses to rock the boat.

In the dark but brilliant TV series, Death and Nightingales, on Starz, the woman love/hates the man who has betrayed her. He has already dug her grave. Now he is rowing with her to an island; he cannot swim. She dares to stand up in the boat and he is overthrown by the rocking. She stood and asserted her power.

The filibuster remains as a vestige of the Jim Crow South. Recently thirty-five Republicans prevailed over a bi-partisan majority of fifty-five by invoking this retrogressive tool. Senator Joe can't bring himself to reverse this malevolent arithmetic.

Maybe the Red State Democrat is as drowsy as the narrator in Keats’ Ode to A Nightingale, with a longing to flee the world. But democracy like the nightingale is not made for dying. Keats wrestled with the notion of easeful death but emerges. May Joe wake from his intoxication with the power gained from what John Keats called embalmed numbness.

 

The Great Unsaid

There’s a lot of noise out there. One can mistake it for a majority. Nazi America. January 6^th.

Theodore Roethke, the poet, wrote how he wanted to make his silences more accurate.

Sherlock Holmes told Dr. Watson he was an invaluable companion because of his gift for silence.

Henry Fonda portrayed men of few words. I can’t say enough about how I admired that.

Gary Cooper always played Gary Cooper but the way he gulped and said, Yup, spoke volumes to me.

Harpo expressed what Groucho couldn’t. The world was a broken piano and he made a harp of it.

Trump, with a megaphone, was loud and ignorant. Now, in  exile, he shouts his lies even louder.

Blessed is the man, said George Eliot, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

I need sunshine and the paving stones of the street without companions or conversation, only the music of my heart for company, said Henry Miller (of all people).

I once participated in a Quaker meeting where nothing was said. We shared the silence and felt closer for it.

What is music without intervals?

How much better is silence, to sit by myself with this coffee cup, this knife and fork, things in themselves, myself being myself………something invisible to others having shed its attachments.   Virginia Woolf

Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us? Lawrence Durrell

As happens sometimes, a moment settles and hovers for much more than a moment. John Steinbeck

Lincoln’s ten sentences at Gettysburg followed a notably unremembered two-hour speech.

90% of conversation is unspoken and silent films lost that to talkies with vacuous dialog along with the language of cinema, the artful camera.

Nuts, was the American General’s reply to the German demand to surrender during the Battle of the Bulge in Dec.1944. Short and to the point. Trump deserves nothing more.

Writing While Watching

The thing I love about baseball is what most people don’t like. Too damn slow! But how else could I write a blog while watching? Poets need their space to roam, their outfield grass. The batter steps out of the box, calls for time, knocks at the dirt, that isn’t there, from his spikes. The poet takes out the comma he put in ten minutes ago. He is looking for a startling phrase, a fat fastball down the middle but instead he’ll take a walk.

Slow is under-rated. It is why time-lapse photography was invented. Give the game its due. If you want action turn on the basketball game. I’ve been ignoring the season the way I have no taste for fast food. Eating a taco on the run doesn’t stand a chance next to high tea.

Yet here I am watching the last two minutes of the Laker game which can take half an hour; the clock seems to slow down. The season is over and now the real season begins with the playoffs. LeBron James is a dribbling Baryshnikov. Michelangelo would have yearned to render him in marble. His look is menacing to the opposition. His body twists and spins into unexpected stanzas. His quick release is like a charged language, sprung.

Grown men in their colored underwear are running back and forth across the page talking fluent trash even with the mute button on. Two zebras with whistles among the gazelles as words roll beyond the margin like loose balls.

It’s all about that hole bigger than the sum of its dimension. Athletes live for holes, from little to big.....golf, billiards, hockey and soccer. A space to be filled, but none to match this game of basketball like a gush of participles dangling on the rim, dropping or sputtering away into the delete button. It’s about getting into the right juxtaposition. Fakes, double pumps and slam dunks when that line, that leaping image brings it home.

This is not baseball, slow-mo and stoic on a summer day. If the National Pastime is that unhurried refuge basketball has caught the zeitgeist. It is the inner-city ferocious tango of finesse and power. Each point scored a punctuation, an assertion to redress a grievance. A riff from Charley Parker.

They are putting it to the gods. The god of normalcy, of margins, making it jagged. LeBron is Icarus defying Newton; he is the apple that won’t fall…yet, graceful beyond any gothic arch with his game-face a gargoyle, the way you might strain to reach for a word not yet grunted, hang-time longer than a sentence by Proust and when he returns to that wood, this page... cartilage might tear as if the small syllables of breath denied his ancestors and his brothers. The score is settled for a moment. The blank page is filled, never quite saying the unsayable.

 

Cousins

Given that my mother had five brothers and my father fractions 

of siblings you would think I’d have had cousins by the dozens. I 

probably do but I’ve never met them.

My mother created a mystery in our family by not speaking to 

her brothers in those years of my growing up. Not Harry or 

Irving or Mickey, Sammy or Nat. It has left me wondering what 

sort of treachery those guys were up to. Did they put a 

cockroach 

in her porridge? Or dip her pigtails in the inkwell of life?

In fact, I have a fuzzy memory of my grandma and grandpa 

living with us when I was about five years old. My theory is 

when they died, my mother paid for the tombstone and her 

brothers-five never came through with their share. My mother 

was not one to let go of a grudge.

Whatever damage those nasty brothers did, my mother went 

through life in combat mode with a tongue sharp as a bayonet. 

She stabbed the butcher with his finger of the scale. She pierced 

the vitals of the super when he held back on the heat coming 

through the radiator. She damned the neighbors and cursed God 

for God knows what. Yet behind all that was the fear of a little 

girl which I attribute to Harry, Irving etc… A simple case of post 

traumatic familial syndrome.

My father was the Nobel Peace Prize winner of the family 

system. Destitution of his early years somehow got translated 

into equanimity. When I say fractions of brothers and sisters, I 

refer to his three half-brothers and one half-sister from a father 

who had gave him up to be raised by an aunt and uncle and then 

went on to have 4 more children all raised in an orphanage.

I shouldn’t put all the blame on my absent cousins. I left New 

York at age 21 and settled in Los Angeles. I sought the seclusion 

that a cabin grants…away from my sisters and my cousins and my 

aunts……..to paraphrase G&S’s HMS Pinafore. I made no 

effort to seek them out nor did they. I wonder if they hold 

annual cousin gatherings with an empty chair set aside for me to 

come busting up through the cake.

It’s been a cousin-less life for me except for one. Irving’s 

daughter Mildred holds a special place though I have only a 

picture of her with my brother, and me off to the side, around 

age five. They were both about four years older than I. 

Mildred famously did not marry. When I got up the nerve to call 

my aunt Anna about thirty years ago to inquire about a possible 

blight in the family tree I asked about Cousin Mildred. You 

know, Anna said, she never got married. And so, Mildred was 

henceforth to be known as Mildred-Who-Never-Got Married. 

Good for you, Cuz. You answered your own drummer.

The road to cousinhood may be a happy union. John and Abigail 

Adams were 3rd cousins. Obama is cousin to six other 

presidents. 

On the other hand, monarchs in England, Germany and Russia 

were cousins whose family squabble killed over twenty million in 

World War One. I might be better off going it alone.