Perchance to Dream

A good night’s sleep is one of those inalienable rights Thomas Jefferson forgot to mention. We spend a third of our lives with our eyes closed. That would be 31 years for me, the equivalent of a second life.

We need to have our batteries recharged and log in some quality REM time. As the Bard said, sleep is the balm of hurt minds. It is both the repository of our unremarkable yesterdays and the seed of our tomorrows.

As we move into our twilight years sleep becomes increasingly elusive. It ain’t fair. Last night I got up at 4:07 as the clock in my bladder dictated. For the next 4 hours I was in a hypnagogic state, half asleep and half awake, and the third half thinking great thoughts such as why is the bottom of the pillow cooler than the top or why did I eat that bowl of ice cream at 8 o’clock. Obviously, because I can’t resist chocolate malt crunch. As a nonagenarian, I’ve earned that indulgence….with impunity, so I thought.

As I recall I had no problem sleeping as an infant though I can’t imagine what I dreamed about; maybe my minus time in that embryonic sea. Since I was born a few days after Hitler took office maybe I sensed the dark times ahead and cried for a u-turn. On the other hand, FDR was just inaugurated and he proclaimed that I had nothing to fear but fear itself (whatever that meant).

But I digress, The subject is sleep and I’m nodding off as I'm writing this. 

I’m well-versed in all the sleep-aids. If I contemplated their side-effects, I’d be up all night with anxiety. Sleep is really a brain thing. My simmer-down gear is in need of repair. I certainly have more memories than plans. All those shards serve as pot holes on the road to oblivion; plus those vivid images of events that never happened except in the hive of my imagination. 

Some people have success with mantras; not I anymore. Though repetitions of Beaujolais, Beaujolais did carry me off for a while. I offer it to anyone for a mere 39 cents and the key to their safe deposit box.

Naps are as mysterious as sleep itself. If I set out to take a nap, it’s hopeless. However, once I start reading in late afternoon, I often drift off in mid-paragraph on the first page. For reasons unknown this doesn’t work for me in bed. Too much intention, I suspect. Sleep does not answer to commands; it only comes unbidden.

I read somewhere that butterflies, bullfrogs and baby dolphins never sleep and giraffes get away with a half hour nap now and then. Even if they wanted to, where would they put their necks? The more I think about it the less reason I have to complain. 

To sleep, perchance to dream, ay there's the rub. What if these past 18 months have been a mere nightmare from which I will soon wake up?

 

Remembering Peggy

 To celebrate May 2^nd, the birthday of my late wife, Peggy, I thought I'd offer some excerpts from her poetry onto this page. She wrote from her own singular perch. Her language startles with its disparate leaps over a vast inscape. Well into her nineties, she was writing a poem every day with over 150 published in literary journals. Peggy's poetry was an extension of her irrepressible appetite for life, how she met each day with exuberance, gratitude and love.

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He sees her face half shadowed tilted upward / in the curve of promise, smooth as an early apricot. / He will marry her and plant skyscrapers in their backyard. 

If there is champagne enough / let's give another hoist to the boy / who laughs at the tired shadows on the wall / and paints his reckless masterpiece / with no further expectations.

The sound of blues, not my own / but the low-down songs of women. Love stirs my coffee / the velvet of Yes / A white horse gallops. 

Her fingers trace highways along his arm / In a moment there will be wings, a blue heron / He moves in her direction / as though singing were a map.

Arithmetic leads to ultimate divisions / land mass under water / Yet a boy paddles a bark canoe / confident of the current.

This hiding in the tunnel of myself / denies the chairs their rightful place. Light through the window creates a momentary event / shadows in a drift toward after.

The man I meet on page 125 is now in pieces. / The mirror slants but will not lie / I would prefer to wander the streets of Paris with the artist /despite the chill.

In the hum of murmurations / every bird adjusts astonished air / Clouds contort, these mindless wheels / in the world without allegiance / Horses, round-rumped, dare me to look away.

Women survived in the dark, like feet in pinching shoes until / they turn from Molly Barnacle’s, yes to / Bartleby’s, I prefer not.

The sky bends with the hawk / you answer, your words like water … / and then, the ocean, the wedge / partial like us. / Your look rests on the curve of my cheek.

Can these days really be winter / with your words that match / the fingers as you touch / what you know of me / and even what you don’t?

Everyone looks out the window / wondering if the headlines / move the earth or what / brings hot lentils to the table.

Death has no et cetera / I borrow a motley palette from myself / The canvas will not stretch. / Still-life does not hold still. / Blue oranges turn to mauve, turn to gray. / Unfamiliar music enters the room. (A Mother’s Lament)

As the self pledges its allegiance / to a tidiness of napkins on the table / we stir the gibbous moon into our cups.

The flap of disappearing wings through the open window / This day was for sleep, the accuracy of dreams / closer to words on the notebook’s page / the loss of love.   (for Elizabeth Bishop).

The woman at the piano wears a hat. / His black trousers hold his impatience. / It is 1891, a coachman with tired horses knocks. / At the opera, singers will break the air. / She thinks of his mouth, the taste of wildwood cherries / yet, returning, knives hang in the clock.

Breakfast on the balcony / unlike the insistent birds I wouldn’t interrupt / your timbered voice carrying its sex / filling me with all I know and cannot know of you.

I watched them talk at Sunday supper / My uncle had lost his thunder into buttered toast / waiting for events that already happened / My eyes fixed on the enameled porcelain table / its corner nicked to black. (After the market crash, 1929)

My knees need grease / but the mellow sax delivers me from evil. / Growing old is a privilege, faith / its own vehicle, even as the cab keeps its motor running / and the eucalyptus tree bends lower every year.

Inspiration is drawn to pushy tides / away from headlines and oratory / she hears instead an empty glass on wood / shivers her to what lies below/ Images find their words in the telling, / A cold stone appears in her hand.

I wear the enamel pendant for the shy unsaid / A woman in Japan looks through a rim of tears / He has not gone far, but away / still, she will not say to him / “These days remove me from myself” / her mouth, thick with silence.

For me, a bite of crusty bread / its center soft, a little sour. / Just yesterday you told me / that my love of pan rests in the middle of companion / break bread indeed with the taste of your touch.

Words proclaim the sacred in the unlit candle, / a chipped cup in the sink / This holiness isn't waiting for Godot.

In the airport fog, under his slouched hat, there is Rick / deciding for teary Ilsa, that for them / the slings and arrows might only amount to a hill of beans / and Paradise lost was just as good as Paris regained.

Losing It

 It is normal to lose things. Pauline Kael lost it at the movies. I wonder if Arthur Sullivan ever found his Lost Chord. At this age all of my friends are orphans, even if Oscar Wilde said it was unfortunate to have lost one parent but to lose both appeared to be carelessness. We lose our innocence, our virginity, our hair and our teeth, all in the natural order of life and some of us lose our marbles. I remember when Peggy went on a diet and lost height. In World War I a whole generation was lost literally and the decade after, the survivors were lost figuratively. How a whole continent got lost we won’t know until someone from Atlantis shows up for an interview. While looking for some lost object a few years ago I had a brilliant insight, namely that everything is somewhere. Plato couldn’t have said it better or even Yogi Berra. My friend filled her bathtub in anticipation of a water cutoff from the hurricane. By morning the water was gone. I think it turned up in a flooded street in Glendale. Today I was looking for an important paper and decided it wasn't so important after all; at that point I found it. A few weeks ago I lost my keys and found my glasses in the search. I can hardly wait to lose my credit card so I might find my lost library card. It’s actually fun looking for my cell phone and hearing it beep, Here I am, under a stack of newspapers. Then there’s the frustration of looking for something so important, I put it in a special place; so special that I have no memory where that might be. A few weeks ago I took it to a new level. I spent three days looking for a prescription received by mail order. I had a distinct memory of opening the package and putting the contents on the dining room table. I could picture it. Finally I called the pharmacy and found out they hadn’t sent it yet. I was looking for something that wasn’t there. I had heard how effective it is to form an image of a lost article before setting out on the hunt. As one faculty diminishes, another rushes in. Everything may, indeed, be somewhere but not necessarily in this realm. The next time I start looking for something I’d better make sure it’s not all in my head like Donald who lost the election but attacked the scorekeeper, referees, umps and the five million in the stands. And now we have just about lost our democracy, our civility and the reasons we fought WWII.

Book and the Godhead

The breaking news was that there was breaking news for the first time. Sometimes the news is so epochal it cannot be seen. So it was about 3,500 years ago when the alphabet first appeared and put to use writing a narrative we call the Bible.

In his 1998 book The Alphabet and the Goddess, Leonard Shlain argues that the onset of writing brought about a gender change of the godhead. Out with goddess, in with a male god; in fact, out with images all together.

There is ample archeological evidence of female figures suggesting matriarchal societies in pre-literate times. First was not the word but the image. Yet it is notable that prohibition of graven images comes up as the second commandment. Thou shall not kill  does not appear till number six.

Men controlled the Bible. It is attributed to scribes and to Yahweh, word by word. Whether from right to left or left to right one reads in a linear sequential order. As literacy grew with the advent of the printing press, in the mid-15^th century, the consequences of print technology became more profound and pervasive.

Marshall McLuhan made the case that by extending the visual sense in this way it led to individualism, the nation-state, capitalism and to a way of viewing the world in distorted ways including misogyny and domination.

Reliance on print and its corollaries started to decline with the electronic age. Books by Virginia Wolff and James Joyce chipped away at the straight-ahead narrative.

Arguably, we are now in the post-literate age. Iconography with the return of images and signifiers are more easily read by Gen Z, along with graphic novels, and a gestalt of surfaces, phrases and bytes. Simultaneity has replaced the linear sequential.

Perhaps the Trump-era of male domination is the last gasp of the warrior age. I’d like to believe we are on the verge of a new consciousness informed by feminine principles and communal values.  

                                                                                                                                                                                 

Wets and Dries

For my birthday last month, my friend Larry presented me with a stack of prescriptions scribbled by doctors one hundred years ago. All of them had a smattering of Latin phrases and were written for syrups, fluid extracts, crystalline powders, emulsions etc... all from natural sources.

When I entered pharmacy college in 1950 those same substances were still in use. By the time I graduated, they were gone. The garden of botanicals had vanished. Exotic vapors had escaped along with rhizomes, roots and excrescence on some trees. No leaves macerating, nor acacia rancid in the glue bottle. It was those arcane names that drew me in and their intoxicating breath.

They asked me, what’ll it be? You’re seventeen. Who are you? I only knew who I wasn’t. My brother, four years older, with a tool box, tinkering under the hood, never owned a library card. No. I would become my father.

I entered his world of pharmacy as it was withering but still with ancient aromas I had inhaled as a kid. Apothecary jars on the shelf labeled podophyllin, glycyrrhiza, aqua hamamelidis. The glossary became a second language.

When I got my license, the Edenic garden was nearly gone. It had become bottled alphabetically. The aromatic elixirs had disappeared or fallen into disrepute. Squibb, Parke-Davis, Upjohn, Eli Lilly, Burrough-Wellcome claimed the space, now deodorized. But we still had the Wets and Dries.   

That’s what we called them. Compound tincture of benzoin and oil of eucalyptus were some of the wets. The stuff put into a vaporizer whose mingled odor in the steam certified a sickroom. Bicarbonate of soda was one of the dries. They were sold over-the-counter as part of a section dividing the prescription area from the front.

The front was where customers stood. Back in the day the Rx compounding area was raised so the pharmacist was looked up to as he presided between globes of colored water. My father was on that pedestal for me but now I was eye to eye with a man faking a cough to get his hands on a bottle of Terpin Hydrate with Codeine, aka G.I. Gin, which was among the wets. His signature in the registry book was required; today it was Joe Smith, tomorrow Bill Blotz. Poor guy. If the codeine didn’t get him, the alcohol did.

Wets and Dries are the last gasp of early pharmacy. Old preparations or chemicals so long in use they couldn’t be patented and sold as proprietaries still hang on. Iodine would be one; spirits of camphor another one. Epsom salts, in five pound boxes remain, usually filling the bottom shelf of the section. Flowers of sulfur (brimstone) used for acne, no longer. The wets included oil of clove for toothaches, gentian violet (anti-fungal), cascara sagrada (laxative), spirits of ammonia (smelling salt), peppermint water (mild carminative) and Stokes expectorant (demulcent and cough suppressant). Those names still get me.

I'm of two minds about these old world remedies. They are part of my early romance with pharmacy yet I also tend to discount their therapeutic value in modern medicine. When I hear of someone relying on these organic, alternative medications, I cringe. Otherwise enlightened people spend money for worthless products as if they are striking a blow against Big Pharma. The result is what I regard as a multi-billion dollar hoax industry.

In the 1970s, the FDA required proof of efficacy and safety for all items sold having a therapeutic effect. There was no pharmaceutical company to bear the expense of an approval process. Old standards such as Mercurochrome fell away along with dozens of others. 

I also fell away but that drugstore air remains in a corner of my lungs, pungent, floral and earthy in a special proportion which I can conjure with any number of old-world words…cimicifuga, asafetida, opodeldoc.

Uniforms

Watching ball games, as is my vice, I have come to accept men running around in their colored underwear, or rather their uniforms. It doth proclaim them.

Before Zuckerberg’s t-shirt or Steve Jobs’ turtleneck there were suits. Three-piece or gray flannel or those you could buy at Sears with two pairs of pants, all wool gabardine. Men wore them to see a play or fly from here to there. These days, even sports jackets are so yesterday they're ripe for a comeback. 

I wore a smock, on and off, for fifty years as a dispenser of assorted remedies and assuring words. I don’t miss mine at all.

Maybe they’ve been replaced by tattoos. We’re not our job anymore; we are individuals each making our own major statement. Egalitarianism allows us to dress down, to slum or choose a wardrobe out of thrift stores. Designers have lines of scrupulous sloppiness with ventilation at the knees. There are friends I have never seen in jeans and others who always wear them. To each his uniform.

All of which leads me to remember vanished uniforms along with the jobs themselves. Whatever happened to that young woman with her bright jacket and flashlight patrolling the aisles as she hushed us and ushered us kids into the dark movie house, darker still because it was Saturday afternoon and we always came in the middle of a film. Was she dreaming of being discovered, projecting herself on the big screen. Or did she fade to black?

Gone, too, is the doorman with his epaulets, our peacetime commander who lived on tips. He waved, whistled and launched a thousand taxis. Doormen disappeared or did they just live in movies set on Park Ave? I imagined these quasi-aristocrats fled Europe as professors or constables and had to settle for the ignominy of brass buttons.

And where are the elevator operators, in authority for the length of their shift, traveling vertical miles on one spot from Icarus to Orpheus as they alone contracted and expanded those wrought iron lungs?

The usher had no name but saw plenty of wandering arms in the balcony. Maybe the other two wrote novels in their heads from snatches overheard. They answered to first name only and remembered to speak politely to Mr. and Mrs…. on the 23^rd floor.

They slipped away unnoticed, loud uniforms, shiny buttons and all. Jackets and caps now in vintage shops, indignity and pride embedded in the fabric. In one pocket dried lipstick and a stick of gum. In another an empty flask and a check for two bucks, uncashed.

Misadventure

It’s only money. If the object of life is to die broke, I’m well on my way. For $545 I could have bought a magnificent dinner on some rooftop restaurant for a few close friends or better yet, donated to a fund for saving the lives of bombed out children with medical needs.

But none of the above happened. Instead, I paid that money to retrieve my car after it was towed away for parking in a spot designated (in small print) for valet service owned by an upscale eatery called Elephantine.

I had met my two friends at the Laemmle theater in Santa Monica for a three o’clock showing of the new Christian Petzhold film, Mirror-3. All his movies are highly recommended.

In the last two works by this director, cars play an important part. In this current one, an accident kills the driver but his passenger escapes unharmed and that sets in motion the entire narrative. His previous film entitled Afire involves two men dying as they try to tow their own car. For me, it was a bad omen foretold.

Does anyone really believe in omens? After all, the Ides of March passed unremarkably. Synchronicity is another thing. As I was reading the word moth, a moth flew out of nowhere. It happens all the time. Not only moths but friends or relatives die or win lotteries at the moment they might enter your mind even though you haven’t thought of Uncle Max for eleven years.

We enjoy these random happenings as if portals to a place beyond. We crave transcendence. Surely, there must be another dimension, why else would my car be towed?

So there I was staring at the empty space where I had parked my car. By this time, Adele was about 15 blocks away but stayed on the line with me. Tamara was walking and graciously came back to be with me even as her husband Basil was waiting for her return. I thought I spotted Petzhold filming the entire human drama unfolding.

I was given a number to call. The police were very understanding of my predictament particularly when I played my age card and reliance on my walker. They arranged for a police car to pick me up. The officer was a model of human kindness as he first drove me to the police station to pay the fine, then to the towing place (which was closed) and lastly took me home.

Janice drove me to pick up my car this morning. Now, I have almost filled a page distracting me from my carelessness, from that elephant in the room.