On The Verge

So begins another year in the dead of winter. It seems to me my birthday would have been a better fit since it falls on the vernal equinox in March when buds rather than champagne corks are popping open.

(Spring has worked well for me though I never got around to thanking my parents for their visionary family planning.)

On the other hand, whatever happens in the spring has been gestating all winter as we gain 1-2 minutes of light each day and 3 minutes by mid-January. By February, it reaches one hour.

In human terms, up to 40,000 cells slough off every minute when we are young; much less so as we ripen into the beautiful creatures we come to be. For better or worse, new cells replenish us, imperceptibly. We are so new, over a lifetime, it's amazing we're recognizable. In fact, we are probably the only ones who think we haven't changed a bit. 

All of which brings me to think how we are constantly on the verge, regardless of the calendar. It's not a bad place to be, unstuck and in some sort of transit, toothbrush at the ready.

Fortified with more light than yesterday and a new set of cells, just maybe we can come to a new aha, hear something in a Brahms piano concerto or Charlie Parker solo or a tenderness from Chet Baker or a Jane Hirshfield poem we had missed before. Then we can take that riff and that phrase so the radiance on our face will melt the mask off an I.C.E agent such that he will see himself in his prey, and he too will be on the verge.

Kindness, I submit, is contagious. Small acts, along with intention, can overwhelm the haters and deniers._____________________

Now I must pause and see whether I agree with the above. I do not. I wish it were so and I suppose it can't hurt. 

However can playing well with others overcome the man-child who runs with scissors? How can his supporters be reached when they deem ignorance and arrogance a virtue? I ask you.

Public demonstrations may move the needle an inch or two even as they entrench his core. After today's outrageous act in Venezuela, it may dawn on some Independents that running with scissors does not serve their interests. It smells of Putin. Panama beware. And Greenland too may be on the verge.

The new year brings with it a new muscular foreign policy which  renders the emperor even more naked than before. Will he finally be seen?  

Spinning 2025

Little wheel spin and spin, / Big wheel go round and round.

           Buffy St. Marie

I'm not going to contaminate this pristine page by listing all the crimes and indecencies committed by our executive, nor shall I dwell on the unconscionable indifference to human life in Ukraine and Gaza and the high seas. Sadly, 2025 will also be remembered as the year of two devastating fires. 

Instead, I am looking for good news. It does seem that the calendar has moved very slowly. The best news is that the year is just about over. My main takeaway is to take it away. I’m ready to gather these past twelve months in a Hefty bag and dump them in the non-recyclable bin.

Here's something to note: the grasshopper sparrow is making a comeback, and let us not forget, the Galapagos tortoise isn’t extinct after all. In fact, science has discovered 70 new species this past year even as 3,000 are now on the endangered list……along with objective truth which has taken a big hit along with compassion. Our planet is twice as green as it was two decades ago. New greenery has been planted the size of the Amazon Rainforest largely due to efforts in China and India. However, my three-year-old orchid finally committed suicide.

Then there is eggplant parmigiana, everything bagels and my discovery of a new flavor ice cream called Black Cherry Root Beer Float and, of course, all things pumpkin. Furthermore, I can report that the dog I don't have didn't die. 

On good days I can shed my walker and manage with a quad cane. Give me a top hat and I’m indistinguishable from Fred Astaire except I can’t sing or dance and Ginger is nowhere in sight. 

I find that the sight of me with a walker brings out kindness in others, such as holding a door open. In a strange way, I feel we are helping each other. I've seen faces change. Their moment of caring is a gift I have given them; an opportunity for both of us to tap into our well of humanity in that brief interchange.  

The Janus Head New Year's Day prescribes a farewell and then a hello. At this age I’m eager for more hellos. More days of wonder and ponder. I hope not to leave this realm with such a contemptible man at the helm. Somewhere along the way, his supporters have become a congregation of the lost.

Time is what I’ve grown to treasure, to halt the hours, to in-dwell and cherish the surround of love I have come to know. The country is scarred but I still try to meet each day with reverence and gratitude.

I can't come to the phone right now. I’m communing with the last leaf on the coral tree outside the window clinging to a memory of summer. The two of us.

As Robert Bly put it in his poem, Wanting To Steal Time,………….Every noon as the clock hands arrive at twelve, / I want to tie the two arms together, / And walk out of the bank carrying time in bags.

J.C. In Our Midst

J. C., you are Jewish Christian, on your hero's journey as Joseph Campbell, our poet-President Jimmy Carter, daring artists Joseph Cornell and Judy Chicago, you are beautiful as Julie Christie, sing like Judy Collins and Johnny Cash, sometimes imperious Julius Caesar, mischievous Jiminy Cricket, curious as a Jellico cat, jeepers creepers, you are a juicy cantaloupe, jeweled constellation, jacaranda cresting and a jubilant cello. 

Hang around, please, there is much in disrepair. We need you to mend the withered hearts, cease all fires, to recognize ourselves in each other. There are odes yet to be written, yet to be sung.

Three Men Who Invented Christmas

Not the Christmas of nativity and midnight mass but the one celebrated with Santa Claus, gift-giving, open-hearts and merriment.

Clement, Charles and Thomas never met but each, in his way, gave us the images, without which we’d be bearing the solstice with indifference or seasonal melancholia.

It was Clement Moore (or was it?) who penned, what is arguably, the most popular poem in American history, A Visit From St. Nicholas, later to be known as The Night Before Christmas. Moore was a professor of Hebrew and Biblical Studies at a Theological seminary and later at Columbia. Who knew?

The authorship has been disputed for the past two hundred years. Though it was published in 1823, Moore didn’t claim to be the poet until 1837. The family of a colleague named Henry Livingston also claims it as theirs.

Whether they engaged in a food fight with peppermint sticks is not known. Who cares, one might ask. More importantly, the poem introduced us to St. Nicholas, complete with his fleet of driverless Uber-reindeer and the rest is history. Now, every kid in America goes through stages of belief and disbelief. Hopefully we learn the difference between the literal and metaphorical.

In 1843, Charles Dickens was nearly broke. His two previous novels, Barnaby Rudge and Martin Chuzzlewit, were flops. In six weeks, he wrote the novella, A Christmas Carol, to great acclaim. In the transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge, he captured the spirit of generosity and set the scene over which the Western World has been idealizing ever since. It has also spawned Hallmark cards and holiday movies. Our threshold for such is raised during the month of December. You'll hear no Bah Humbug from me.

162 years ago, Thomas Nast was hailed by Abraham Lincoln as the greatest recruiter for the Union army. He was regarded as the father of American cartoons. His image of Santa Claus found wide distribution through Harper's Weekly. As an ardent abolitionist he put the beard and outfit on a chubby Santa along with Union soldiers. It associated the Northern cause with the hearth and charity. In the same way Irving Berlin's White Christmas was a boost to the morale of the Allied army during WWII.

Nast’s depiction of cherubic Santa came to him partly from the folklore of his native Germany and partly from Clement Moore’s poem, The Night Before Christmas. Perhaps the most amazing thing about Nast is that he never learned to read or write. His wife is said to have read the poem to him as he made his engravings. It was also his inspiration to locate Santa in the North Pole along with elves and a workshop, making him a universal figure for all children.

Nast also created the Republican elephant, the Democratic donkey and he added the whiskers on Uncle Sam. During the Gilded Age he was as famous as his friend, Mark Twain. A household name in the mid 19th century he is now a name only history buffs recognize.

For the rest of us who do not live out loud and may not even exist according to Google, there are enough daily acts of kindness, beyond all measure, to assure our claim for remembrance among those we have touched. 

Goodwill is a word we hear a lot these days. If the meaning escapes us, just think of how Donald Trump would act and do the opposite. 

 

 

Winter Seen

Season of the sun in its faraway tilt,

days of opposites, of compensation;

silent night and jingle bells,

while cash registers ring themselves

out of the red, hearts shrink, pockets swell,

skeletal sycamore outside the window

in its requiem mass against hallelujah

spruce, lit and tinseled inside.

The glitz we insist upon

to propitiate the gods

against the dying of the light.

We gift wrap our eyes.

to imagine the fabled baby

within a manger of bulbs

on the wild desert floor.

Deck the halls with lit menorahs

to answer the sun in its apogee.

 

Only by great exertion can those

in the hemisphere below  

take our myth as theirs,

of candles or White Christmas,

sleighs dancing through the snow

in a one-horse heat of December summer,

just like the ones they never knew.

 

As in the cycle of my life,

now in the mind of winter,

I feel no discontent on my inscape,

in spite of the shadows cast.

Something new is daily born.

Brothers

My brother Arthur, was an only child for 4 years. Then I was born. I don’t think he ever forgave me. Thirty years later he was dead. Driving at midnight with a high blood alcohol level, he went into the side of a mountain. I've always wondered if he was drawn to see what was on the other side. 

Arthur had a passion for jazz. I’d like to think he was carried along on the waves of a bluesy sax into his own private paradise. Or maybe he heard a calling from the keyboard of Thelonious Monk. I realized later that I never really knew him.

I did know my friend Stanley who is more of a brother to me. We were born five weeks apart. Even our Social Security numbers are consecutive, since we went together for our cards. I’ve known Stan since kindergarten where he was the wardrobe monitor and I, the milk monitor. Or was it the other way around?

In our misspent pre-teen years and beyond, we studied together, went to the beach, ballgames and movies, and took a ten-day bike trip around New England together.

We also engaged in some dumb activities, like following odd people. One such was a man who walked the neighborhood talking to himself. Of course, he’d be considered more normal now than those who don’t talk to themselves. But then it was perverse. Once he led us down into a subway station and emerged on the other side of Queens Blvd. We imagined he was leading us into his nether region.

In fact, we were the odd ones, clumsily looking for the margins of acceptable behavior. Stan and I agree that we were socially retarded then. While normal kids were discovering girls, we were discovering how to hit a curveball or other Olympic-grade sports with the schoolyard as our venue. We even invented a new country on the map and a language known only to us.

I don’t mean to imply that we excelled as athletes, but we were world-class fans. Whatever character traits that confers, I have no idea except it has provided us with a vault of memories and an alternative universe to visit when the real world makes less sense.

We have lived our lives a continent apart but we call each other regularly. In a recent conversation, I was shocked to learn about  an aspect of our relationship, not so brotherly after all. I always knew Stan had a fine singing voice but I did not know he sang professionally in a choral group.

His mother had urged him to pursue music as a career and first to learn the piano. Unbeknownst to me, I was the villain in his family circle because I, unwittingly, pulled him away from his piano lessons with my two passions in those teen years. Namely, sports and politics. I had no idea of my deviltry until last week. At least, I’d been spared eighty years of penance.

Our immersion in politics never left either one of us. When we were sixteen, we got stoned at a concert. Not in today’s sense but literally attacked with rocks thrown at us as we took to the floor of a bus among shattered glass. We had attended the Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill, which was then deemed a subversive act. This was the beginning of the Red Scare that gripped the country in 1949.     

For my role in diverting Stan from his path as a possible diva at the Met, I plead no contest. At the same time I am left wondering what else I missed looking back down all those decades. What I had thought was an open book, turned out to be just a few chapters. Yet the pages Stan and I shared in the chronicle are still to be cherished. He went on become a PhD biochemist; I presume he sings in the shower.

  

Days of Infamy

December 7th, 1941 was a marker for me; a frozen moment in the album of my life. It was mid-day on a Sunday. I was eight years-old, going on nine if anyone had asked. I would be older than that by the next day.

I was in my father’s drugstore, stacking cigarettes, Chesterfield next to Camels next to Lucky Strike. and listening to the brown Bakelite radio. Ace Parker went back to throw a pass when the football game was interrupted. That ball is still spiraling in my head.

Pearl Harbor, the announcer said, in a voice weighted and alarmed. Pearl who? This was a different Pearl than my friend’s sister. I knew that much.

My father, who was nearly imperturbable, was seen for the first time, agitated. The few customers who didn’t know one another, suddenly shared the same worried face and curses. I listened hard and felt the quake, the seismic shift. It was my initiation into the grown-up world.

The next day PresidentRoosevelt (who had become a single word) declared that the date of the attack will live in infamy. His intonation sounded biblical to me, coming as if from on high. I had not heard that word, infamy, before and I doubt I’ve heard it since until this current regime’s overthrow of our democracy.

That winter I learned whom to hate. There were blackouts and air raid wardens. I bought 10 cent savings stamps going toward a war bond. When Kramer’s grocery store had butter, I stood in line with a rationing book. I learned how to knit squares which would become blankets. Rubber soles were replaced by a synthetic substance that left a black streak.

Refugees joined my class. They were better students and seemed always to skip to a higher grade. Years later, I learned that Kew Gardens was a destination for Jewish families in flight from Europe.

Five months after Pearl Harbor the U.S. Navy sank four Japanese aircraft carriers at the Battle of Midway. A local movie house in my neighborhood renamed itself the Midway Theater.

Those were years of one nation indivisible. We cheered the Allied bombers over Berlin or Tokyo and we hissed the swastika and the Japs.

It was a great time to be 9,10,11 and 12. We all knew right from wrong. Hollywood agreed. By September 1945, I wondered what newspapers would have to print. The war was over. Evil was defeated. I was twelve and that chapter was closing. Roosevelt had died and God along with him. Infamy, unnamed, was yet to come. Again, I was on the verge.

If I were allowed one question to ask President Trump it would be: Why did we fight WWII?