Counting My Chickens

John Maynard Keynes put it this way: Capitalism is the astounding belief that the wickedest men will do the wickedest things for the greatest good of everyone. But enough about Trump.

When greed and arrogance are valorized and smarts are vilified, I need a remedy. So, I stroll in the garden I don’t have and pick up the cello I don’t play. Yet the coleus leaves are bent as if toward music and leaves are falling into goldfish.

Having taken refuge inside Keats’ odes and urn I emerge rhyming with every word and empowered like a heroic couplet.    

I am insinuated with sky. Today’s dome was particularly vast, saturated with a blue not-seen-before. It was furrowed with cloud formations like rows in a vineyard or a wrinkled brow having just discovered a cure for loathing.    

Breath held becomes breath released sufficient to refresh the foul air. Gusty winds enter windows to vent the miasma. Spring bulbs stir in anticipation.

Thanks, will be given. No food-fights over white and dark meat. Our Founding Fathers are my fantasy guests seeking forgiveness for the sin of an Electoral College.

This page was written as I watched my Dodgers come from behind to win the World Series. The losers did not call for a recount of the score nor did they threaten the umpires or overthrow the stadium. May life follow baseball. 

In the Fall of ‘41

Often, I am eight. returning to that time of two awakenings. Franklin Roosevelt’s intonation came from the radio speaker. His voice was God’s voice and spoke of infamy at Pearl Harbor. The war rearranged faces. Emotions were suddenly made public. I felt the barrier dissolve between adults and myself. It was my portal into a world beyond my small one.

Two months before December 7^th I had another initiation which sounds frivolous. The World Series was the World Serious to me. The Dodgers were playing the Yankees as they are today. A Yankee player struck out to end the game, but the game did not end. Without going into details, what seemed like victory turned into defeat. Baseball is a lesson in failure but failing gracefully. There would disappointment but tomorrow's a new ballgame. I learned it that day and never forgot.

Memories are moments that cling, momentous or puny; it doesn’t matter. The declaration of war by Germany four days after that December Sunday prompted Churchill to dance the jig. He knew our entry into the European theater would save England. For me, it would set into motion a cluster of childhood tableaus.

There would be air raid drills and blackouts, rationing and war bonds. Refugees entered my class. The Four Freedom posters by Norman Rockwell appeared on our school room walls. I rejoiced with Allied victories and wept with Roosevelt’s death.

As for baseball, there were historic feats performed that summer of 1941 which will never be equaled. But I was too young to take note. It wasn’t until that day in October that I was ready to take on the world. The attack on Pearl Harbor was a tragic event but there would a reckoning.  

 

The Taste of the Lie

The taste of the lie was good and sweet on my tongue

                     Yehudi Amichai, Israeli poet

I’m sure Homer felt the same way. Of course, there probably was no Homer. He/she was likely a scribe or select group of scribes setting down on paper the agreed-upon lie (myths) which came from a chorus of troubadours or mad poets singing of tall tales and legends from a millennium back in time. These were the lies that spoke truths.

Those in ancient times who lent their ears knew they were receiving wisdom through metaphor, not to be taken literally. I expect that other gatherings also knew the stories were parables of a shared ethos. And so it was that the tribe called Hebrews cohered.

In an oral culture, my guess is that information was passed along in broad terms with an accepted disregard for precise detail. Each happening was embellished and gods were introduced to be the embodiment of events or behaviors otherwise unaccountable. Small truths became big truths at the end of the telephone tree.

Could it be that the liar in our midst is a man of prehistory? His private delusions, which are all self-serving fabrications, are received not literally but as some sort of ventriloquism of the aggrieved followers' complaints and vague aspirations.

Just as a pre-literate society had no concept of literal truth so too is today’s post-literate herd of sheep heedless of fact-based actuality. We are witness to a congregation of the lost. He grunts, they grunt. He mocks, they mock, and it is multiplied by the megaphone of social media. When they chant his curses of an imagined threat, they don’t realize they are vilifying projections from his own psyche. His words are swords, barbed on his tongue, bitter on our ears.         

The line from Amichai’s poem comes out of the mouth of a ten-year-old boy. I went to another synagogue, he says, enjoying the taste of his lie. It is the precursor of a budding imagination, with a fragrance of the faraway. When his father dies, in the poem, he return's the lie, I've gone to another life.

When the sociopath speaks, he is either incapable of perceiving reality or deliberately distorting it to aggrandize himself. If he had written the Greek tragedies, they would have all been about Zeus, not Achilles or Odysseus, and certainly not about Penelope.

Last Thoughts On the All Of It

If I were you, I wouldn’t bother reading this. Seriously, who wants to waste their precious time with another article about the election? Not me or rather, not I. In fact, I’m on a twelve-step program trying to withdraw, but I’m only up to step three or four. It’s so hard.

When I look at a piece of Kleenex, I not only see a pristine, fluffy white tissue, so perfect in dimension, so sublime in texture and virginal, instead I see rectilinear Pennsylvania. As I hold it in my two hands, I am gripping Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and blowing into the red, rural middle. This has to stop.

What would Wordsworth do in times like this? Wander lonely as a cloud? I’d much rather be a swinger of branches in Frost’s birches. In his poem, the boy climbs to the top knowing to descend to the ground. There is no place better. So it is, I am earthbound, wondering how we have come to the brink.

Here’s my theory: We suffer from electile dysfunction. We go limp in November. Maybe his red tie arouses. MAGA’s appeal is directed to the glands rather than our brains. Their mendacity is a perverse aphrodisiac. Their repeated lies are a siren-song. If this were Masterpiece Theater we’d be witnessing Downstairs voting for Upstairs. The underserved identify with the privileged.

Americans are world-class consumers. We acquire and we think like consumers which is to say we really don’t think much at all. We vote the same way we buy a car. Not for its carbon footprint, or safety or economy so much as the cluster of images attached to the commercial. When new pharmaceuticals are advertised on T.V., we are seduced by the accompanying montage of family picnics or robust bodies even as the adverse side effects are being recited. The substance gets lost.

Ironically, we grow cynical at the same time. We know, on some level, we are being conned, but we have grown to accept that as being the way things are. Decisions are made by skimming the surface. Woe is we.

 

 

What Daddies Do

Yes, it's true. I've made a mess of this jigsaw puzzle world. Pieces are missing and other frayed by neglect or broken by breaking news.

I was raised with cross ventilation and now the air is noxious. I am shouting on the rooftop into a miasma. The planet is febrile. Beyond the reach of alcohol rub. My father repaired my world and now I must do the same for my three daughters. This is what Daddies do.

I won’t let the orange tide be pulled by a lunatic moon. Your sandcastles will endure. Once erected they are untouchable.

I shall don my pharmacist smock and descend to a subterranean laboratory with its smoking cauldron. Add a feather of dove, eye of newt, pluck wild berries, some rough-hewn bark and the root of aromatic abracadabra.

I’m remembering how my father healed my universe. Tapping a crystalline power on one side of the torsion scale, adding a grain or scruple on the other. He achieved an equipoise yet he also allowed himself to grind fascists into dust in his mortar and pestle. Vehemence and gentility in equal measure. May I bequeath that to you.

If this was a torn page of history, I would use my glue stick. If a table fell apart, I’d get my toolkit, even read the damn manual since these are no ordinary times. If that doesn’t work, I’ll find a bridge to Portugal or Costa Rica and I will lay me down.

There is something you have beyond the reach of polls and poles. That space, that room of your own, your orchard or riverfront of your own composition. There you will meet yourself and form a circle of like minds and hearts.

 

Donald, Doyle and Penny Dreadfulls

It is a stretch, I know, to find the thread between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Donald J Trump but I’d like to give it a go. Arguably, Doyle’s invention of Sherlock Holmes and Donald’s invention of himself are both characters on the spectrum. One is a benign obsessive compulsive sleuth and the other a malignant sociopath.

 Sherlock Holmes was a fit for the late Victorian age. Trump is less of a man than a scourge who sensed a vacuum created by an age of dislocation and festering grievance. The sleuth with the deerstalker hat was a noble outlier; the Donald is a megalomaniac who offers a satchel full of fibs and empty promises. 

Penny Dreadfuls were read by an estimated one million Londoners each week. They were illustrated sensationalist rags with stories of cheap thrills, piracy, murders and science fiction, aimed at young men. They ripped off versions of Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, Dickens and Doyle.

Holmes’ exploits were fodder just as Trump and the National Enquirer used each other to fabricate his exploits while vilifying his enemies. For eight years they had Barack and Michelle divorcing with as much credibility as a JFK citing or alien landing. The Dreadfuls were the social media, the Tic-Toks and Tweets of the day. Both were the creation of fevered minds. At least the 19^th century version presented itself as fiction while Donald seems unable to distinguish fact from fable.

The British Empire was at its peak. Think globalization. Big bucks were being made by a few people. The air was foul. Science seemed out of control with epochal technology. The bucolic countryside was fast disappearing with a growing divide between rural and urban consciousness. There were 200,000 prostitutes in London. Homelessness, filth and indenture coexisted alongside a genteel civility. People knew their place. Social mobility was virtually unknown. Rigidity and rectitude were giving way to randomness and relativity. Society was held together by a veneer of respectability, class fixity along with a sense of order and resolve. Every disruption had its resolution.

Enter Sherlock Holmes. He brought rationality and logic. He deduced. He rooted evil out and restored civility. He was their defense against a random universe. He never died because he never lived. Arthur Conan Doyle’s invention rested on the shoulders of Edgar Allen Poe’s inventions and upon Sherlock’s shoulder came Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe and Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade…the genre is still digging.  Detectives detect. They mostly act on their own as benevolent vigilantes offering the illusion of justice.

The new sheriff with the technicolor hair who rode into America’s heartland, on the last train from Yuma, is Donald Trump, that old robber-baron, land-grabber, in disguise. He and he alone nails the most-wanted posters to the wall. He leads the posse, locates the hanging tree and prepares the noose. He is the faux-detective offering simplistic words with a ten-year old’s vocabulary to complex problems.

Yet both Doyle and Donald appear at pivotal moments, albeit 125 years apart. Brits also encountered immigrants from their jewel, India. Holmes pandered to Londoner’s xenophobia with a distrust of foreigners. Many Indians ended up in Newgate Prison on the barest suspicion. Gay behavior was criminalized just as many red states would have it today. It would be decades before women were fully enfranchised in England. Their first voting rights act in 1918 was restricted to propertied women over thirty. 1895 Britain and red-state U.S. bear some resemblance in their racism and misogyny.

The name Sherlock suggests razor sharp certainty. I suppose he would be repulsed by the fuzzy mind of Donald. The man from Baker Street could surmise a man’s entire profile by a glance at his hands and the smell of his tobacco. Our guy from the high tower smelled angst and fear and inflamed it into irrational rage. There is a toxicity afoot surrounding Trump, something like the yellow fog that fell on London Town back in the day. Moriarity is in our midst. 

 

 

My Deaf Daughter

Sixty years ago, my daughter Janice was almost two. This was about the time we got the diagnosis that she was profoundly deaf. There had been clues earlier but my wife and I dismissed them as if we were deaf to her needs, even when I dropped a bag full of coins on a wood floor and Janice didn’t stir.

We made a decision which was controversial then as it is today. Our choice was to follow the course of the John Tracy Clinic which was to go with oralism as her first language, rather than sign language.

The third option was called a total approach which sounds wiser, but we bought into the idea that, given the two modalities, deaf children would be more inclined to use their hands and less likely to speak intelligibly.

The program at the Tracy Clinic was a four-year commitment. Under the guidance of a tutor, Janice learned how to lipread and speak, one word at a time. Her first word was not denotative but an action verb which literally demonstrated the power of speech. The word was open and her world opened.  

Our task was to create situations which encouraged her to open doors, boxes, bottles, books, fists et al. We had her put her fingers to our mouths to feel the breath of that word.

I'm reminded of the kindness people show in a special needs setting. There is an inherent goodness in caregivers, and, to some extent, everyone shows their best self. Being a nonagenarian, I experience some of the same deferential treatment. Even if I don't need any help, I enjoy the human interchange.

By age six Janice had about a hundred-word vocabulary she could speak and read many more words on the lips. When she entered public school, she quickly learned sign language. Today she has a very large command of the language both receptively and expressively.

Did we do the right thing? I believe we did, however the argument for early signing also has merit. Some would argue that by forbidding her to use her hands in those formative years we denied her the expression of her feelings and other abstract ideas.

In the deaf community, oralism is frowned upon, yet Janice can function to a great extent in the hearing world because of her early skills. I marvel at her hard-won independence and how she navigates her life having never heard her own voice. I also love watching her orchestrating a manual ballet as she communicates with her deaf friends on her video phone. She has felt the walls of this world and learned how to climb them.

 

 

Straight, Square and Smooth

By the 6^th grade the person I would never become was made clear to me. I was in shop class with the assignment to create a breadboard from a slab of wood. If we lived in a true meritocracy I would still be there, that old man in the back row shaving a hunk of wood for the 80^th year.

Straight, square and smooth the teacher demanded. What’s wrong with a bump here and there, my inner voice yelled back. I discovered two things in that class. First, that I was basically inept and secondly that I have a thing for irregularity. Maybe being ept is overrated.

Think of the beauty of a deckled edge. Let the border rise and fall and damn the perpendicular. It’s life’s grooves and edges, the sputters and stumbles, the jagged right-hand margin of a poem that lends its character. I wouldn’t give them up any more than the moon could relinquish its craters. 

You can have your Wyoming and Colorado, ruler sharp, I’ll take loosey-goosey Michigan or Florida which looks as if it might break away at any moment. Do people still have breadboards? Most loaves are pre-sliced and for baguettes, I just rip and chew. My breadboard looked like it conformed to teeth-marks.

Nature has no straight lines. Antoni Gaudi said it first and his wavy architecture replicates an organic flow as if on the way to the next best thing.

There I was with my diminishing rectangle of wood that refused its next incarnation as something straight, square and smooth. I admired its grit, dips and uprisings. It was to be my road map, prefiguring a contrarian nature and a nose for connective threads, however coarse.

Of those three Ss, I must admit some allowance for smoothness as in skin (my favorite organ) or cobblestones and then there are smoothies but graveled with berries, of course. At this point of my life, it’s safe to say I will never accept that 6^th grade mandate. One man's failure is another man's ept.

Turning

Since the vernal equinox happens on my birthday in March, I have to give the fall equinox its due. It happens here like a rumor, as silently as that needless “n” in autumn. You’d never know summer is done with temperatures reaching into the nineties for the next week.

To get into the mind of the season I need to imagine the cycle turning in a change of palette from greens to rust, burnt sienna and yellows. Where are those migrations overhead, flannel pajamas, itchy sweaters, russet pears, chestnuts of childhood?

Of course we do get oranged in advance of Halloween. Pumpkins show up in ice cream, soup, pasta, pudding, pie, even beer. I could die happily buried inside Trader Joe's.  

Here in Los Angeles, we don’t have harvests or swollen gourds except for those trucked in. However, there are seasons we carry within. We flower and we fold. Each of us has all the facets, a rhythm or impulse to bend toward the light and then retreat inward. 

Another falling is the tossing away of election junk mail into the wastepaper basket. Half the country has been falling for the ill-tempered lunacies of Donald Trump. May he slough off the body politic a month from now in some massive descent. 

The Roman poet Virgil wrote, See Naples and Die. If he had lived in New Hampshire he'd have said, see maples, and die.

I’ve been to New England to watch the spectacle of ruddy sycamores and maple leaves dying in all their glory. From a distance they looked like a wildfire. It was operatic. Golden groves of trees majestic in their last gasp death-bed scene. Divas, all of them. Fall is a season of life and death.

If I were a tree I too would be in my foliage or beyond. Some of my favorite hair has fallen. My limbs are getting brittle. Even names carved long ago into my brain are fast fading. I am weathered and wind-bent in my bough. Exaltations of larks no longer nest in my branches.

Autumn is portentous of winter’s finality; the last act, 4th quarter. But it also carries the hope and expectation of one more go round. The curtain comes down, the curtain goes up again. Why not? Another opening, another show.

With luck we’ll soon have an incontinent sky to wet us. Umbrellas will open like black narcissus. I want to be caught in a downpour. Drench me. Let me be pelted and puddled. Parched earth will be heard slurping. I can feel it already in my arthritic bones.

The planet’s lease shall be renewed.

 

Earliest Memory

I can still hear those sirens and smell the smoke. I was between three and four years old watching a car ablaze from my third story window. I saw the red truck with a big hose and the flames. I’ll never forget it. Too bad it never happened.

For about eight decades I regarded this scene as my earliest memory. Then it occurred to me that I had a picture book about fire engines. Those images flew off the page and torched the parked car three stories below.

Better yet, I can mark that moment as when I felt the power of books sufficient to spark my imagination. A year or two later I learned how those squiggles on the page called words could ignite my inscape and make the world luminous.

Returning to that window I do remember a new apartment building going up across the street. There was a derrick, mounds of earth and bricks were stacked up.

The entire block was to be a series of five story apartments except for one house with chickens in the front yard. Over time we played marbles in the dirt where the chickens were partitioned off. I was introduced, without ceremony, to this tribe called children. It was an aural culture with unwritten rules passed from the ten-year-old elders to us little tots.

There was a rhythm to street games from stoop ball to hopscotch to double Dutch jump rope. We had our own benevolent leaders who knew a small something that allowed the flock to cohere, until one day they outgrew us, and the hierarchy shifted without a peep.

Written words would overthrow the oral, but language of the street still has echoes for me long after it vanished into chalk dust or flew away in the smoke, higher than a pop fly.