Known By His Legacy, Not By His Name

Pharaohs sought immortality through mummy-wrap, entombing themselves with a few of their favorite wives, servants and pets. For those of us without the shekels to build a pyramid we may be best remembered by the deeds we bequeath. At least the gift endures if not the name of the giver.

Consider the image we have of Santa Claus, the Republican elephant, Uncle Sam and the Democrat’s donkey. One man created the first two and popularized the others. He is credited with being instrumental in the elections of three presidents: Grant, Hayes and Cleveland. Lincoln called him, our best recruiting sergeant.  He was hailed as the father of the American cartoon. His fifteen minutes of fame lasted forty years. During the Gilded Age he was as famous as his friend, Mark Twain. A household name 150 years ago, now only history buffs know Thomas Nast.

He is said to have added the whiskers to Uncle Sam and depicted him often enough for it to become a national icon. Nast was an ardent abolitionist and supporter of Native Americans and Chinese-American rights. He was the main attraction at Harper’s Weekly for several decades. When he left in 1886 the magazine lost its political significance.  One of his passions was exposing the corruption of Tammany Hall -- Boss Tweed in particular. Nast was offered a bribe by Tweed of $500,000 to leave the country. He declined.  In fact it was Tweed who fled after his arrest and was identified in Spain by Nast’s caricature drawings.

Nast’s depiction of cherubic Santa came to him partly from the folk lore 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.

Later in life he started his own publishing house and newspaper (he was not related to Conde Nast) and still relied on friends to read the sentences out of which came his drawings. He saw words as pictures. One of them is worth a thousand of these squiggly things. History and the passage of time do strange things, lifting some names up and devouring others. Even though Thomas Nast got misplaced in the national chronicle his contribution is beyond authorship.

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.

WORDLIZING

I love words (as opposed to grunts)----I can’t say enough about them but I’ve never been drawn to word games until Wordle came along and suddenly all five-letter words leap off the page. Now it would take a twelve-step program to get me back to normalcy. In keeping with my pentagonal-pointed head I thought I’d try to write a paragraph of five letter words.

Every month, a pious rabbi has lunch with a crazy mayor over a white table cloth. One sits in a green chair with a black skull cap, where he is known to bless his bagel and broth. The other, a cynic, curses his bacon salad with gusto though he has a noble ethic. They argue then agree about a vigil and a rally by a kiosk, while across the space a woman wears a glove which does not quite fully cover her elbow to wrist to pinky and thumb with her alien aroma scent of vapor neither poppy, aster nor daisy: maybe a pearl petal of a night-bloom plant meant to evoke a smile to drain the frown, smirk and sneer on the mayor known for his pluck and spunk though his scalp was shiny, not to speak of Putin with his shirt off or Biden of three score and more or even brain-empty, lying and manic Trump but more like ruddy mango or peach not to imply that one was meant to drive a Lexus to Texas or, if a lemon blest by a psalm from a rabbi, to the fifth state in the lunar cloud of Venus or some other realm so have a piece of fruit and a slice of bread. Raise your right index digit if all this can yield anything more than a mummy in Egypt for what it’s worth. If any of this makes sense please check into a psych floor at Pismo Beach, or Yorba Linda or any other five-letter hospital.

Visiting Old Addresses

If people had followed me around for the past sixty-five years buying and selling real estate and done exactly the opposite, they'd be multi-millionaires today. Every decision made was the wrong one. I bought high and sold low or moved when I should have stayed. It takes a special skill to have lived here since 1954 and not made a nickel on my six houses.

For my birthday, with my daughters Janice and Lauren, we visited three of those houses. One might say it was like returning to a crime scene but I would never say such a thing. More of a mnemonic recollected in tranquility as each tree, door or window became a breadcrumb in the thrill-a-minute chronicle of my life. I couldn’t help wondering if I had purchased one house instead of the other that my trajectory would have taken me in some other direction. Perhaps I wouldn’t have lived this lucky life so I’m happy to have traveled my path with no pot of gold to show for it.

For my daughters it was of course a far different experience. They now see with sixty-year-old eyes what they had lived with child wonder. What seemed very large was, in fact, quite small. Space had been rearranged. Saplings, now full grown. One could barely hug its circumference. Neighborhoods are no longer recognizable except for one or two landmarks. The first McDonald’s in the San Fernando Valley is still where we left it around Victory Blvd. and Coldwater Canyon. Such historical sites might be a telling artifact in some future archeological dig.

No doubt, their childhood memories are embedded in those rooms and alleys, under trees and patches of grass. Discoveries along with traumas. Hearts crushed and small epiphanies. What once seemed a major turning point might now barely register. We noted the pre-school where I would drop Lauren off on my way to work and where a school bus picked up Janice. The garage converted to a den and a patio disappeared.

I was not the most popular guy on the block. My bumper stickers got me in trouble with neighbors when I blew my cover advocating fair housing and school integration. Somehow, I escaped without having a cross burning on my front lawn.

In another instance I didn’t fare well because the previous owner had invited everyone to swim in the heated pool. It turned out he had diverted the electrical wiring so it bypassed the meter.  All this drama in sleepy suburbia while a controversy of crows cackled on the roof antenna.

By far, the most important address of my life is the roof over my head I’ve been renting for the past thirty-seven years. Thank you, God, for rent control, one of your best ideas since parting that metaphorical sea. Show me another and I just may… never mind. This apartment is my greatest asset, a miracle, which almost makes up for all those lost properties. 

Many years ago a dear friend who was also a psychiatrist said I didn’t love money enough. One doesn’t argue with that observation especially since he was a Jungian; I could turn into an archetype.

I try to give money its importance ranking it high just behind emotional needs and health. Some things are important and some things are more important.

                                                                                                                                                                                                          

 

My Soon Birthday

The person I once was is still me

                               Helen Bevington

In a few days I will be ninety; a ridiculous number that doesn’t compute in my head. I suppose my life is more than half over and that reminds me of……the thought just escaped me. For all the millions of cells which have sloughed off millions more have replenished my central headquarters. My secret for longevity is to ignore all secrets for longevity. I used to say my gevity was long enough but alas.

If I may be permitted to indulge my curmudgeon side…save your money on vitamins, minerals, herbal teas etc… I regard them as a hoax industry. The body is remarkably self-healing. Unless you are trapped in an abattoir you will get enough fruits and veggies to sustain your bodily needs without any nutritional supplements. I know of no one who has died of scurvy, beriberi or pellagra.

Growing old is a great adventure. It is a time of becoming. My clay is still soft. The juices flow even as we become the irrelevant other. Otherness is a noble state. It comes with eyes to see obliquely and a license for mischief or at least permission to cultivate eccentricities. Go ahead, play the age-card.  It gets you some measure of deference and thirteen bagels as a dozen.

True, when John Keats was my age he’d been dead for sixty-five years. Some people squeeze in their genius in a few short years, others spread it out. It is a problem which has never concerned me.  It’s too late for greatness; I’ll settle for goodness as each day is fully met with reverence and wonder.

The calendar is a supreme fiction as Einstein almost said. We live in the illusion of time. The great ledger will show I was born on March 21^st, 1933. I never got around to commend my parents for their auspicious family planning. A tribute to their vision that I should arrive with the vernal equinox which is spring’s birthday, at least in the northern hemisphere. I was umbilically blessed as I swam to dry land from that embryonic sea. My entrance arrived in concert with buried bulbs emerging, coral trees hanging their red lanterns and migratory whales spouting their hallelujahs.

It was also 14 days after FDR took his oath of office. His intonations about nothing to fear were reasurring to me after that first slap. 

On the day of my birth, which is a year before my first birthday, the weather report was sunny with increasing darkness at night. To have entered this world on the equinox, with twelve hours of light and the other half in darkness has granted me an even disposition except when dealing with computers, streaming sites, smart phones and all other companies who answer the phone declaring that my call is very important to them. They test my threshold of endurance. My shadow side also includes animus towards religious orthodoxies, willful nescience, political mendacity and goat cheese. With all the rest, I’m fine.   

My nonagenarian birthday cake with its six rows of fifteen lit candles would be enough to burn down the house. I’ll pass for a symbolic pie in my face. There must be a poem in all that. It’s enough to imagine it. I don’t have to write it.  

These past eighteen months have been a time of grief and renewal.  Following Peggy’s legacy …. I am filled with love and gratitude for my family and friends, with enthusiasm and discovery of new resources within. I can still hear the music of the orchid on my window sill as well as its wagging tongue. Having seemingly died it is now in its third purple bursting resurrection. Every day is the birthday of the day before. No end in sight.

 

That Small, Shared Sanctuary

I don’t think Virginia Woolf had a bathroom in mind when she wrote about a room of her own…….. and yet it is a sort of sanctuary. A hot shower on a cold morning is my idea of bliss. I do my best imagining with water streaming in my face. My blogs are just the fraction remembered that didn’t go down the drain. These days the two well-placed grab-bars keep me upright so I won’t end up taking a bath in the shower.

For our good-bad president L.B.J. the bathroom was the room where it happened. There are photos of him barking orders or even conducting interviews while on the pot. One wonders how many villages were eliminated with napalm as he eliminated his evening meal.

As a mere slip of a lad, I remember my days as admiral of the fleet launching my two sailboats in the bathtub. Lava soap must have contained pumice for hardcore filth while Lifebuoy took care of the rest. The shampoo was something called tincture of green soap followed a fine-comb for no good reason I can think of. Did I sing? Of course. To my tone-deaf ear I was Nat Cole or Sinatra. It may be why our neighbors never spoke to me.

I don’t recall fighting for the bathroom in the morning. Our schedules must have meshed. However there were minor skirmishes for the shared bathroom among my three daughters getting ready for school. My deaf daughter would happily test her hearing aid batteries by bellowing a rendition of her favorite songs as she imagined them. Somehow, we all survived.  

Bathtubs can be a life and death matter. Elvis died in one, without his blue suede shoes, as did Lenny Bruce. Thomas Merton, priest / poet was electrocuted as he got out of the tub.

However, Winston Churchill liked to immerse himself presumably without his cigar. He demanded that his water remain at precisely 98 degrees which required continuing additions of hot water. No wonder Stalin had his way at Yalta. William Howard Taft, at 320 pounds, got stuck in one. It was rumored that when he entered, enough tub water was displaced to flood some hotel room.

In American politics  the country may be divided between those who shower before going to work as opposed to those who shower when they come home. Unfortunately, the next election may be decided by those who do not shower at all.

As the bathroom is the only locked door in the house it becomes the small room for large acts, some forbidden. It is a hiding place from the madding crowd where a cigarette can be smoked, a banned book read or a solitary haven for deep breaths and recentering.

Matter of Fact

As a remedy for my creative lassitude, I started to watch Jeopardy on the recommendation of a smart friend.  It’s a good way to measure how much I don’t know, never knew or forgot. It is also an exercise which speaks to me of the irrelevance of facts, particularly in this age where the encyclopedic mind has been replaced by a Google click to Wikipedia. I also note that speed is valued over deliberation as if to mimic a computer itself. Then there is the difference between information and knowledge and dare I say, wisdom. The only wisdom I have is that it doesn’t have much to do with tidbits of who and what.

On the other hand, names and places can serve as a form of mental aerobics. It may keep the synapses from lapsing. There are certain names which I would gladly purge from my memory vault which have long since outlived their shelf-life yet still cling to my marrow. This is especially true of sports figures and movie factoids. Nomenclature from my years as a pharmacist still lingers for no good reason except to drop at a cocktail party when I have nothing else to say.

My friend Roger once told me of a question put to him during his naturalization proceeding. Who won the War of 1812, he was asked. His answer was, I don’t know. That’s correct, said the examiner, nobody knows. Roger was a step smarter than any contestant on Jeopardy. 

Here’s a question I would put to Jeopardy. What is the “o” doing in that word? It has to do with its derivation from the French jeu parti.

As I move into decrepitude with the threat of cognitive dissonance looming in the short term, I can imagine how Jeopardy might serve as a wake-up call to my grey matter. On rare occasions I blurt the right answer. Vasco de Gama, I yell, or Seneca Falls but it takes me a while to get up from the couch to take a bow.

There is something anachronistic about the game show. It harkens back to a radio program from the late 1930s called Information Please. However in that case the questioner, Clifton Fadiman, engaged in amusing repartee with guest panelers, headed by Oscar Levant. The questions became subordinated to the conversation. In those days we honored the range of intelligence; today it is more of a freak show.

In our dumbed-down current state we dismiss intellectuals as egghead elites or savants as if they are necessarily out of touch with the pulse of real folks. Polysyllabic words are suspect. Even delicatessen has been whittled down to deli. Just don’t try ordering blintzes in a trattoria. That might be a case of double jeopardy.

Lox and the Poet

Having written about herring, I’ve had a groundswell (of two friends) demand that I give equal time to salmon. Wild salmon lead a life of high drama, particularly in the third act. Having swam the swim their opera ends with a heroic struggle upstream, against the current, dodging hungry bears, only to spawn in exhaustion and die from the effort. The continuation of the species is assured as the curtain goes down. 

The alternative is to be caught and poached, baked, broiled or ignominiously smoked and sliced thin, the equivalent of a deathbed root canal. 

A platter of lox brings to mind a poetry group I attended at Beyond Baroque about thirty-five years ago. Part of this happened and part sprang, swimming upstream, from the river of my imagination. There was a poet in that workshop whom I shall call Manny Platz. We all read our work and cringed waiting for an assault from the esteemed leader who often ripped our deathless words to shreds.To save his soul Manny stopped coming after a while but reappeared one day as a waiter at Murray’s, a local deli.

It came to pass that it was Murray who published Manny as a menu item, a found poem with a greater audience than any literary journal and no one to tear him down. Yelp was not yet.

A year later he was suddenly gone. Where’s Manny, I asked the manager. He quit and went to Nova Scotia, I was told. His words were now legendary.

       The Ballad of Manny Platz

 

Was he thinking Nova Scotia even then,

of running a bait and tackle shop,

getting no bites, poem after poem,

every other Tuesday in the workshop?

God knows the place was rotten with hunger.

 

Too deep or not enough, they said.

Too poetic for a poem.

I don’t believe a word of it

or write what you know.

 

Between rejections, he waited tables

At Murray’s Deli, lived off tips,

and wrote what he overheard in booths.

Years of kreplach and knishes,

then Murray published him under lamination.

A Manny Platz of Five Stanzas: Lox with moxie,

any new-fangled bagel, cream cheese, onion

 and two eggs scrambambled.

What is it like to see your name,

on the page next to

an Elliot Gould (chopped liver) 

or a Lenny Bernstein (philharmonic Reuben)?

I’m out of here Manny said, 

heading for Nova Scotia

 

to pull salmon and smoke it

from inexhaustible waters he practically owns,

where every poem swims, leaping

against all that’s expected and safe.