Berra Not Serra

An astute friend pointed out that on my list of quotations, I failed to include any words of wisdom by our singular 20th century philosopher Yogi Berra.

Berra elevated common sense to an artform and he did it unwittingly. His blurts became immortal and raised illogic to new heights. When Plato heard Yogi speak, he rethought the shadows on his wall, even though he'd been dead for over 2,500 years. 

It's been said that much of what Yogi is said to have said, he never said. Spinoza would have scoffed and Schopenhauer would have shrugged.

Yogi's most profound statement came when he advised a slumping teammate to try swinging only at strikes. Pause and consider these words to live by. First, it means recognizing when a strike is right in front of you. Then it means not swinging when the ball is out of your zone.

Take it out of the ballpark. We are all standing at the plate with a bat in our hands; we’re all seekers looking for our pitch. Few of us are finders because we are not seeing what we've been waiting for. To be present is to see and listen, to pick up what others let go by. Berra knew when to swing. He was a seer.

As Popes go, the late Francis ranks high on my list. He seemed more catholic than Catholic, yet he chose to elevate Junipero Serra to sainthood in Sept 2015. His papal decree got it all wrong. 

He canonized the colonizer, Junipero Serra. At the time of the American Revolution Serra was busy in California jamming catechisms down the throat of indigenous people whether they liked it or not. (As if they didn't already have a spirituality we could have learned from). There is evidence that he enslaved the Indians and forced them to build nine missions. Beware of anyone with a messianic urge.

The Church was part of the Spanish rapacious power structure; a shameful chapter in European history still with its aftershocks. 

No doubt by some act of providential intervention Yogi Berra chose that September week in 2015 to die.

Yogi was born in St. Louis, played in New York and spent his retirement years in New Jersey. When his wife asked him where he'd like to be buried, he said, Surprise me.

Now here was a man who not only performed miracles, he was one. He took the fork in the road less travelled to get to the restaurant nobody went to anymore because it was too crowded. 

It is also a fact he was among the first to land on Omaha Beach in the liberation of Western Europe. He was wounded but fought on and received the Purple Heart among other citations. This is enough to be sanctified.

His feats on the field also left the crowd scratching their heads. His strike zone seemed to extend from one dugout to the other. He swung at pitches from his shoelaces to his helmet. Yet he never struck out more than 38 times in a season. Compare this with today’s sluggers sometimes whiffing over 200 times. As Yogi said, 90% of the game is 50% mental.

I can think of no other person whose legacy is to encourage aphorisms from others and, by public acclaim, have it attributed to himself, though he denied it. He has become a repository of twisted common sense, even posthumously with no end in sight. As Yogi said, the future ain't what it used to be.

At the mention of Yogi Berra’s name, a certain bemusement crosses our face. While Father Serra stole the native language, Father Berra's casual erudition is well on its way to immortality. Yogi not Junipero, Berra not Serra should have been sainted.

Choice Words

Here are a few quotes I've picked up along the way:

Rumi said, If everything around seems dark, look again, you may be the light. __________________________________________

The only aristocracy is that of consciousness. 

D.H. Lawrence

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The more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people. -Vincent van Gogh

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The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second. -John Steinbeck, 

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Fascism can no longer be seen as an evil force visited upon the public from above but a sickness that lives within each individual and could easily be tapped given the appropriate circumstances and timing. Sherill Tippins

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Voltaire wrote, God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

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Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. -Arundhati Roy

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“I begin to think, that a calm is not desirable in any situation in life. Every object is beautiful in motion; a ship under sail, trees gently agitated with the wind, and a fine woman dancing, are three instances in point. Man was made for action and for bustle.” Abigail Adams

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All children are poets

until they stop reaching for

butterflies that are not there. Dunya Mikhail

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The only way human beings can win a war is to prevent it. -George Marshall

All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography. -Federico Fellini

So we buy handbags and hats and other overpriced appurtenances of successful people because we have to nurture our confusing identities. Wan A. Hulaimi

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Colum McCann said: "I think a good novel can be a doorstop to despair. I also think the real bravery comes with those who prepared to go through that door and look at the world in all its grime and torment, and still find something of value, no matter how small."

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Scratch a pessimist and you find often a defender of privilege. -William Beveridge 

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The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives." Albert Einstein

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You’ve got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body’s sermon on how to behave. -Billie Holiday

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In the end, the poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see--and what we see is life. -Robert Penn Warren, novelist and poet (24 Apr 1905-1989) 
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The world-wide food shortage that threatens up to five hundred million children could be alleviated at the cost of only one day of modern warfare.  Peter Ustinov

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Charles Simic said:  Awe is my religion, and mystery is its church.”

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It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves. -Edmund Hillary

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Adrienne Rich said, Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone."

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It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?" Vita Sackville-West

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 "There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army." John Ashbury

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A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment, / to laugh and cry with the same eyes, / with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them, / to make love in war and war in love.  Yehuda Amichai

Independence Day

The irony is inescapable; celebrating the birth of our nation as it was in the maternity ward, even as it is now in the emergency room. Our job is to keep it from the morgue.

In fact, the signing in 1776 did not declare the establishment of a new nation. It declared the severing of ties with our mother country. At the time we were a loose confederation of colonies. The word nation first appeared in 1783.

250 years ago was not all that different from today. The division between blue and red states is deep. Our country is almost as fissured as in the antebellum period. 

The legislative branch is dormant. The judiciary contorts itself to find justification for the dissolution of our democracy as it grants the president authoritarian powers with impunity. We are witnessing an imperial presidency which our Founders would have disavowed.

Surely, we did not break with one monarchy to embrace another.

Back in those good ole days of 1776 the colonies were split into three camps. The four New England States, (NH, MA, RI and CT were founded largely by those seeking religious freedom. They became more literate by reading the Bible. Too cold for growing crops in inarable soil year-round, they lived on logging, fishing and shipbuilding.

The middle ones, PA, NJ, NY and DE furnished wheat and grain. Their population was more diverse with settlers from Scandinavia, Germany and Holland and were known for greater religious tolerance. The upper Midwest might be regarded as our purple states in today's electoral map.

The five Southern States were home to four of our first five presidents, aka Founding Fathers. They relied on slave labor for their wealth and were later ardent supporters of state's rights.

The racism of the 18th century in all its virulence, poisons the air again today, with discriminatory hirings and firings as well as denial of voting rights. Until we confront our sins of human bondage, racist behavior will continue.

At the same time, we are also a country born out of the Enlightenment. Our founders were deists who relied on reason, rejected dogma and the divine right of kings. This new experiment called Democracy was a beacon for those seeking new opportunity and in flight from oppression.

We have always been a fractious country. As we celebrate our document of aspirations, we must also acknowledge the stains in our heritage. The tree of Democracy demands watering and custodial care as well as action against the blight which threatens our beautiful country at its roots.

 

  

Straddling Two Worlds

 I am currently reading three books. One is by Thomas Mann's son Klaus written in the early 1940s. He traces the early years of his life in that illustrious German family and the descent of his country into Nazi barbarism. The second is an anthology of short stories which Adele and I read over the phone. We've discovered some gems including works by Tim O'Brien, Joyce Carol Oates, Charles Baxter and Lorrie Moore.

Short pieces of fiction tend to concentrate on a single moment as a way of penetrating the subject. Reading aloud adds a new dimension, lifting characters off the page into a new life as we assume their voices.

The third is a new autofiction by Ben Lerner entitled Transcriptions. His novella reminds me how those of us over fifty straddle two cultures. The analog world of straight-ahead sequential movies and fiction. I didn't even have a telephone til I was thirteen. (None were available during WWII). We talked to each without rushing to recover forgotten names and we walked away with unanswered wonder. More personal, less performative.

Contrasted with this is the virtual universe of mobile phones, Zoom meetings, Facetime, instant images and breaking news. We have learned to live with simultaneity, fluent in a gestalt of surfaces. No, I don't want to see a photo of your french toast.

Lerner creates situations in which technology fails, and the character has to revert to his elemental senses such as listening and taking time in our rush to nowhere.

To a certain extent, Hitler was a product of that newfangled technology in the 1930s called radio. While he ranted with fury, mesmerizing his flock, FDR also utilized radio, delivering his fireside chats which often drew an audience of over sixty million. The medium lent itself to opposite messages, but it was the force that moved millions.

Our would-be dictator has mastered social media with his midnight rambles, hogwash and decrees as if his delusions crossed the blood-brain barrier to his new bamboozled reality. Every morning the world waits with held breath for his latest blabbering; and that is the name of the game.

I read Klaus Mann's autobiography to gain insight into the degradation of two proud cultures. The parallels are clear. The lesson learned is the fragility of the human spirit particularly in periods of epochal changes. The two worlds I straddle not only mark changes in sensibility due to technology but also challenge us to stay centered during these years of infamy, breathing the foul air of indecency and lust for power. 

By The Dawn's Early Light

Up at five.

Have to pee. No, you don't. Yes, I do.

Waking does not end the dream.

Reviewing that embryonic summer of ’32, 

umbilically speaking.

Half awake but woke and half in pillowed drift,

turning swords to words,

over my head in this stream of streams,

a hummingbird in strenuous stillness,

ashore to find my loom of hanging threads.

I do everything I never ever...

Run three miles,  Fifty push-ups.

Pilates, Tai Chi, Yoga …no sweat.

Pedal to Patagonia on stationary bike.

Walk the dog I don’t have.

Water my pet rock, Feed the fish,

Listen to Art Pepper.

Prune the herb garden.

Thinking about Johnny Mercer songs.

Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe.

Other train songs... Chattanooga Choo-Choo (1941)

Tempus ... big hands ... fugit.

This Train Was Made For Glory. Midnight Special.

Planning my afterlife.

The java is roasted, the bagel is toasted.

An occasional rhyme happens

in this familiar chaos I call order

to meet another ho-hum day.

Last train to Clarkesville.

 

All Happening At The Market

Here I am taking my place with day-old bread and dented cans. Yet not beyond my shelf-life. 

I'm walking here, I'm walking; the cart is my walker. It leads me to berries and cherries. I shall not want. The man who waters the lettuce anoints me. My life runneth over. I fear nothing as I walk in the shadows of gondolas. 

Shoppers affixed on bulletins breaking into barcodes breaking into QRs to be scanned. We are being tracked and surveilled into the nakedness of our consumption. Buy one, second half-price.

There goes Walt Whitman hearing America's yawp through leaves of grass. I’m listening to Benny Goodman's clarinet 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. Answers are in Jeopardy.

Yet, it’s all here. This garden of tulips breathing Amsterdam air. Picasso turning bananas to goldfinch. The still life of peaches is stirring. Teas steeping. Sodas fizzing. Heirlooms pulsing. Pollock dripping. Ginsberg howling. 

Melons pregnant each with their palette. Celery stalks at midnight. Monet stroking impressions of lotus. Larkin cultivating his depression from Wordsworth's daffodils. Rauschenberg eyeing the assemblage on the conveyor belt beeping and bagged while Calder studies the balancing display at the end of an aisle.

There’s a wedding procession coming down two aisles to take their vows at the check stand, I now pronounce you. Reception in the parking lot. It's the marriage of everything, baked and frozen, fresh and wilted, organic and forbidden. Tops off the carrots. Peel me a grape.

 

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.