Fathering

At age thirty, in 1963, I was the father of three daughters. There is no rehearsal for the human drama known as parenting. It is all improvisational theater. My wife and I stumbled and bumbled our way along. Having children, you hear a calling for your nature to nurture.

At the same time, we were discovering ourselves. She was taking courses in college while I was trying to come to terms with my chosen profession. My own education was limited to Pharmacy with very little exposure to the humanities. I found myself getting a smattering of knowledge from my wife’s school books. She was a sociology major. I even wrote some of her term papers. 

While struggling with who we were, Janice was born in 1962 with a profound hearing loss. We chose to enroll her in the John Tracy Clinic where for four years she learned to lip-read and speak. Oralism became her first language. Signing came later. Whether this was the wise choice remains an unanswered question. In any case, mothering and fathering took on an enhanced role. We taught her every word she knew at that time. 

Janice hears through her eyes. When she entered the public school system at age six her receptive language expanded through signing with her new friends. Her special needs reset our attention given to her sisters, Shari and Lauren. 

I look back through an opaque lens. So much is a blur. Shari was tasked, too early, to take on household chores and baby-sitting. Her mother was overwhelmed. I did much of the laundry and shopping while working six days a week. What held us together, I hear you ask. 

Lauren had her own special needs as a middle child. I remember her difficulty with math and how I devised some crazy way for her to never forget that 8 plus 6 is 14. Then there was her dancing, in the living room, to music from Zorba the Greek. I passed along my love of Gilbert and Sullivan. Words became a fascination for her along with history. She was the only Caucasian in her black history class.

Shari grew up with a strong sense of herself. She was an excellent student. I witnessed her world becoming wider the evening I took her to a Joan Baez concert. Her first job was at a donut shop which opened at 4 AM. catering to truckers. I drove her. She is the only one of us who learned sign language and fingerspelling. Did we deprive her of a part of her childhood by burdening her early on? Another question I can pose to myself but not answer. 

It pleases me so much that all my daughters have access to their inner worlds. Shari has rendered her imaginative life onto canvases. Lauren writes with verve and wit and Janice has a lively curiosity about the world as she probes her own inscape. 

I take great pride in each one though I cannot take credit. They took in the good stuff and ran with it far beyond my reach. I have no great formulas or insights on how to be a father other than to be myself and model that behavior. Whatever values and the even temperament I possess, were probably bequeathed to me by my father. 

Daddys are supposed to set the world right. By that measure, I have failed miserably. The schoolyard bully who ran with scissors and threw spitballs is running the country while those who played well with others seem doomed. I can only hope that the rubble of democracy I have left my children contains some soft clay and seeds sufficient to repair the wreckage. 

I'd like to believe they all got the message that, to a certain extent, life is malleable and they can be their own sculptors.

Now I turn to Janice, Lauren and Shari to care for me as the future presents itself. Where did they ever learn to be so caring, wise and loving? I look to them each for their unique form of daughtering. 

Speaking About Talking

The last time I spoke was a few weeks ago at Mavis' 97th party when I read a few of my rambles. Speaking is planned, talking is what we do over a bagel or a Chinese chicken salad. I'm just saying.

There's a line in the Maltese Falcon when Sydney Greenstreet says to Bogart, I love to talk to a man who loves to talk. He then laughs his enormous guffaw. I too love to talk. I can't say enough about it. Even more, I enjoy listening. An interchange is a beautiful thing, sometimes a found poem when it flows spontaneously.

Here is a phone conversation I had with a dear friend who died about 10 years ago.

She……Hello, Peggy?

Me…….This is Norm

She……Why do you sound funny?

Me…….I’m in the shower.

She……What are you doing there?

Me…… Next to washing …..I do some of my best thinking in the shower.

She……Maybe you should wake up in the shower.

Me…… I’ve been here since last Thursday.

She……I think you’re clean by now.

Me…    A microscope shows all the organisms in our eyebrows and fingernails.

She…… And some of them are good bacteria, I’ll bet.

Me…… I wish they were labeled.

She……All creatures great and small.

Me……As we speak, trillions of microbes are going down the drain.

She……Sounds like my portfolio.

Me-       I don't even have a portfolio.

She……Failure makes you try harder.

Me…….What are we talking about? I suppose you want to speak to Peggy.

She……I forgot why I'm calling.

Me…….That’s OK. I forgot why I’m in the shower. Peggy is in the bathtub.

She........Is she thinking, too, or just getting clean?

He…….. I can hear her singing.

________

I can almost hear the first known conversation spoken in grunts and gesticulations around the fire. Your cave or mine? Have I got a headache. You’re getting old. You’re 23…. Tomorrow, you hunt and I’ll gather.

The greatest leap forward was Bell's invention of Hello. Prior to Hello people didn’t know how to break the ice. Now they say What’s happening? or just Hey. If the next sentence is about the weather, you're off to a bad start. Yet, much can be said for non-verbal communication; it beats non-communicative verbiage.

Marina Abramovits, the conceptual artist, conversed wordlessly  with folks from one minute to several hours as they wished. This took place at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010. A friend of mine waited in line for seven hours to have her audience. A few seconds of eye contact brought tears to both their eyes.

So much can be expressed through our eyes, facial gestures and body language. Even in normal discourse silence is essential. As the old adage goes, If you have nothing to say the very least you can do is shut up.

On the other hand, one wonders how so little can be said in so many words. But enough about Trump. 

How many times have I overheard a monologue in a restaurant where two or three people are seated at a nearby table and only one voice is audible?

Nothing beats soulful communing; discourse without self-censure. Layers are peeled back in self-discovery just in being present for each other.

Talking to friends in an honest exchange, sharing new ideas or revelations is, itself, a subversive act. Kindred spirits in conversation create a form of resistance against a repressive regime. 

Crickets and Cicadas

Poets have been writing about cicadas since Euripedes sent his toga to Eumenides for repair, and the other day I overheard someone in line at the market speaking about crickets. I have now learned that cicadas are a completely different species from crickets. They sing by day while the crickets croon by the light of the silvery moon.

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 college graduates, heavily in debt and needing 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. Male crickets have that instrument on their wings, and there's the rub, while male cicadas have their noise-makers on their tummies. When a swarm of them lets loose they can reach 90 decibels. Females have better things to do. It turns out those chirps come from troubadors crooning their repertoire of mating songs. 

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. I can hardly wait for my next incarnation.

The most famous cricket is, of course, Jiminy Cricket which I always took as one of those euphemisms for Jesus Christ along with Jeepers Creepers or Jumping Jehoshaphat. Some crickets can jump as high as five feet which is higher than Jehoshaphat.

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

Taking A Deep Breath

I read somewhere that we hold thousands of smells in our olfactory vault. I wonder if I can trace my way back from today’s burnt bagel to yesterday’s gasoline fumes at the pump….and back ninety-three years to my first diaper change. I think it was on a Thursday but I really don't want to talk about it.

Donald has provided us with the malodorous stench of arrogance, degeneracy and malice. I need to clear my lungs. The flower section of Trader Joe's has many spring blossoms and some have no odor at all. Both the orchids and tulips have traded vivid colors for scent. Even those hot-house roses come to us deodorized. I feel cheated. My nose leads me to the stargazers to take a deep whiff.

Peggy first wrote her poems in a notebook with a number two pencil. I’m the guy who sharpened them. I admit getting a temporary high from the shavings. Not high enough to write my own poem but often achieving a height sufficient to write a blog.

I’m seldom hungry………until I see and smell the plate. That wakes my salivary glands and I get in trouble trying to subdue the flow. As I write this I’m thinking of the rhubarb crumble I recently devoured. Speaking of food I’m the only one I know, outside of my daughters, who doesn’t like feta cheese. In fact I can’t stand it. My brain registers it as vomit. Blame it on a blemish in my double helix.

Among other vapors I could live without are newly laid black top, coconut, rancid acacia and asafetida. I don’t expect anyone to connect with the last two. They transport me back to those years in pharmacy. In my days at my father’s drugstore, there were no glued labels. The pharmacist made his own out of acacia powder dissolved in water turned upside-down with gauze covering the opening of a wide-mouth jar. After a week or two it stunk and that rancidity has never left me. Asafetida is a gummy substance used to ward off evil spirits which emits a pungent odor one wants to run from out of the room along with the spirits.

Childhood fills my nostrils. There were faint vapors of chalk mixed with bubble-gum from baseball cards. (I was so dumb I saved the gum and chewed on the cards.) Airplane glue got me for a short time. Neatsfoot oil soaking into a leather mitt. Citronella to repel mosquitoes. Licorice or wild cherry syrup in cough medicine made respiratory infections not all that bad. The eucalyptus and compound tincture of benzoin in the vaporizer took away our suffering. My father’s store breathed a curious mixture of aromatics which he carried on his body … a smidge of Evening in Paris perfume comingled with tuna fish from the sandwich board along with malt from the fountain and all this triturated by the overhead fan with crude drugs leaking from the apothecary jars, sometimes sulfurous, mostly warming, ancient, botanical, and slightly intoxicating.

Subways smelled of sweat especially with raised arms holding onto dangling straps. The straw seats retained traces of everyone who sat there. We inhaled each other and exhaled our communal air. Maybe we even got to like what we smelled recognizing a whiff of ourselves in the mix.

Then there was Mrs. Spizzeri’s parmesan cheese cooking on the second floor from which I dashed holding my breath on the way to the sanctuary of my apartment 3 FB in our four-story walk-up. Today I love eggplant parmesan which tells me how far one comes away from those first foreign aversions before our noses accommodate and finally embrace them.

Our inspirational leader has mastered the art of deceit. But I'd like to believe that Truth always passes the sniff test. I cannot define it but I know it when I smell it.

Simple Times

Whether the late 1930s and 1940s really were simpler times, or I only thought so as seen through child's eyes, remains an unanswered question. 

I never got around to asking my father what he thought. He may have yearned for 1910 when it was an even simpler time.

Socrates complained that the youth of his day had bad manners, contempt for authority and disrespected elders. I imagine he also longed for those simple times of Homer.

Are those the years Donald is yearning for or, at least, peddling as paradise, when it is actually closer to the American mythos. While sloganeering to make us great, he is, in fact, making America grate.

We idealized the past because we had no idea of the troubles behind our innocence. I was blind to the hardships leading up to the war, the bestiality of the Holocaust and the imagined threat of nuclear annihilation.

World history and personal history have a way of conflating in one’s mind. I like to believe that America came of age exactly when I did. I was a good boy and the U.S. were the good guys. 

The simplistic patriotism of the forties yielded to a more ambiguous post-war, cold-war decade just as I was disabused of thinking I had all the answers. Hollywood grew nuanced along with me. Suddenly the good, clean-cut detective had a back story. He was a recovering alcoholic or fathered a child he abandoned in Italy. And the villain had a good heart beneath his grizzled veneer.

The broadcast-journalist, Tom Brokaw, called those men and women who endured unimaginable tough times both during the Depression, then later as G.I.’s, as The Greatest Generation. If they were the greatest I would have to settle for being only the goodest. We behaved ourselves, conforming as we did, until the sixties when we unconformed, got iconoclastic and less simple.

Simpler times may be another way of expressing a longing for youth itself, particularly for those who never grew up. The seismic changes that have quaked us into today’s world create a certain nostalgia for those snows of yesteryear. 

Much as I find history compelling, there is a trap romanticizing the past. In the 17^th century nostalgia was regarded as an affliction, a form of melancholia prevalent among sailors who  couldn't wait to return home. Maybe we are all rowing to Eden.

One day I’ll ask my grandchildren if millennials think of these times as simple. They probably won’t entertain such thoughts till they reach middle age and look back having lost their simple child’s eyes. By that time mobile phones will have been implanted in newborn’s fingers at birth. It’s really a simple procedure.  

In The Middle Of the Air

When those in human bondage looked down they saw cotton. When they looked up they saw sweet chariots coming for to carry them home. 

Ezekiel saw the wheel / Way up in the middle of the air / Ezekiel saw the wheel way in the middle of the air

Little wheel run by faith / Big wheel run by the grace of God / Ezekiel saw the wheel way in the middle of the air.

Now you never can tell what Ezekiel will do / way in the middle of the air / He lie about me / He lie about you / way in the middle of the air.

They may also have seen Lucifer falling from grace. According to Mormons Lucifer was Jesus’ brother. Not so, say everyone else. After all, only begotten sons generally don’t have brothers. Especially to rival them. Lucifer was no ordinary sort. When he fell, he landed with a thud not unlike Humpty-Dumpty who was too much for all the King’s horses and men.

Lucifer was one of those pagan figures appropriated by the Christians to suit their fable. He was, in fact, the name for Venus, the morning star which seemed to fall out of sight daily. The New Testament took his beauty, his brightness and worldly brilliance and consigned him to eternal deviltry. How dare his curiosity which can lead to defiance. 

Lucifer also takes the rap for Adam munching on that forbidden apple. Have a piece of fruit, he said, and for that gets a sentence of life plus forever. The lesson is, don’t mess with the fiction on the all-time bestseller list.

Icarus was another mythological young man who dared to defy authority. His father, Daedalus, warned his boy not to fly too close to the sun or his feathered wings held together by wax would melt. The accepted lesson seems to be that Icarus displayed hubris and paid the ultimate price. The way I see it the kid showed gumption. Who listens to their father? Fathers are yesterday’s news. The next generation pushes the envelope. How else would we have Saran Wrap?

If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him…is the name of a great book by Sheldon Kopp. Kill him metaphorically, of course. Listen to authority and then go beyond. Listen to yourself.   

Icarus was out there investigating the middle of the air and then took the plunge. But there is more to the legend. Breughel, the Elder, painted the scene depicting the legs of a figure going into the sea while a plowman is tending his field, oblivious to the important splash in the water.  Benign neglect? Calloused indifference? There is a Flemish saying, And the farmer continues to plow, describing man’s indifference to human suffering.

In 1938 W.H. Auden took that theme and ran with it. In his poem, Musee des Beaux-Arts, the poet imagines several Breughel paintings showing townfolk ice skating, playing or doing chores and never looking up to the middle of the air. Auden was dismayed at the rise of Nazism on the eve of World War II. His poem was a cautionary tale of wanton disregard for the peril at hand.

This is my long way around to warn a somnolent American public of the imperative to vote in the primary coming up and then again in November. (The expected turnout is 38% in California). Too many voters seem uninformed or complacent, busy in the counting house counting all their money or at the table eating bread and honey. We are in great peril.

Now is not the time to caulk the bathtub or become a no-show because our Democratic candidates are less than perfect. 

The Devil Donald and his sycophants with their brimstone of malice and mendacity must be defeated. To his supporters I say, question authority. The man at the podium is a false idol with no chariot to deliver you. He lie about you. He lie about himself.

Pickled Herring

My thoughts are turning to pickled herring. This is what happens to nonagenarians. I'm thinking how Mavis can’t get enough of it and Adele and most of my other friends who, at least, never said a bad word about the stuff...except for Judy who has my condolences.

It may be a generational matter. My daughters have also shown no inclination for herring, but they all have other redeeming qualities.   

And then there is Putin who looked in the mirror one morning and saw Pushkin eating pickled herring. Napoleon might have conquered Russia if he didn’t run short of herring to feed his marauding troops. When invading Russia one is advised to pack sufficient barrels of pickled herring along with warm underwear, but not in the same suitcase. I’m sure the Russians never run out when they gobble up territory on their western flank.

Danes are crazy for the stuff and Latvians and Estonians. If I were stuck on the Monopoly board on Baltic, which is my lot, pickled herring would be a staple as it is for those folks in northern waters.

When I used to put out pickled herring for our Sunday Salon, back in the day, it was always the first to vanish. I wonder if some friends brought Zip-lock bags and slipped a few bits and pieces into their pockets.

Schmaltz herring is also worthy of mention....all those consonants supported by a single vowel. It is herring at its most plump, just before spawning. Best devoured with sour cream, dark bread, potato and onions. It offers transit right back to the shtetl. 

Herring is not a bottom feeder as some creatures so designated to vacuum the ocean floor. Knowing herring as I do I might presume that is beneath them. They feed largely on plankton rendering them low in carbs and high in an alphabet of vitamins including the all-important D and Omega oil without which one can expect to die a day or two earlier than previously fated.

Some like it split, salted and smoked which goes under the name, kippered herring. If I were a herring I’d much prefer being pickled. However the kippered variety had been the breakfast of Brits for centuries which may have kept the empire from falling. When it did fall, Kippers also fell out of favor. By the 70s, due to its association with the past, it was no longer part of the full English breakfast, replaced by eggs, bangers and blood pudding. What a loss. However it is now making a comeback as those rebellious Boomers are getting aged themselves

The purpose of this tribute to pickled herring is to fill up the page on a subject I really knew nothing about. Here's a tidbit to drop at a dinner party sure to get you reinvited: herring don't get to be called by that name until they mature from being merely sardines. In fact, there is no single fish named sardine. They can be any tiny fish. Whether there is an initiation or Bar Mitzvah to earn herring-hood from sardine-ness has not yet been determined.