A Funny Thing Happened On My Way To Oblivion

Aside from Facebook, I have a list of 65 friends to whom I send my blogs. Google, in their infinite reach, tells me how many click on the link I provide.

I’ve been posting about two each week for sixteen years. On average, about 25-40 open and presumably read my ramblings. All of a sudden, starting about two weeks ago, I am being read by over twice the number on my recipient list.

Welcome, I think but who are you? I don’t know whether to be flattered or frightened. Imagine having 65 of your closest friends over and 150 crash the party. Food for thought is soon gone. Some of these strangers may even be wearing masks. 

Is that you, Igor? How’s the weather in Kazakhstan? Or are you stuck in some subterranean boiler room in an abandoned warehouse? Worst case scenario, I’m being scrutinized by recently-released thugs 3 floors under the White House. Maybe ICE is checking to see if my grandfather arrived at Ellis Island with an undocumented Kaiser roll.

Or could my new-found set of eyes be an array of Musk-made bots? There are no buts about a bout with a bot. One would think AI has better use of their time than scrutinizing the squiggles of an iconoclast in his 93rd year. Why bother? Soon, I shall wither away from natural causes anyway, unless I find myself first having lunch with a suicide bomber.

True enough, I've been vehement over the forensics leading to the demise of America. I had expected to go out hearing about the land that I love... through the night with a light from above and not a requiem for a country, disappeared. The wars which I thought were won against human bondage and fascism, seem now to have both been lost. 

I will try to ignore that uninvited goon-bot leaning against a lamppost across from my window at midnight, whether he exists or not. Instead, I'll gaze at the apostrophe of a moon, possessed of all the wonder over which it presides. 

After further research, Google tells me I have readers in China and Hong Kong. Next time, I’d better read the fortune cookie for a coded message. It's only fair, if I show them mine, they should show me theirs. I never give up hope that Lao-Tzu will turn up.

Instead, I usually get some version of, Have a nice day. Indeed, I shall, with gratitude for this lucky life, and moments still pulsing from every one of my ninety plus years, from column A and column B, the sweet, the sour and spicy of it all.        

Word of the Year

My vote goes to performative.  Of course, spoken words are different from written words and this is one I’ve never uttered but it keeps popping up in print or from the mouths of talking heads.

Gaslighting had its run and now feels sort of stale. I expect performative to have the same fate. On the other hand, as long as Trump reigns, the word fits.

When Donald first appeared on the political stage, he had already gained his chops on reality T.V. Since then, we have witnessed the transformation of politics into show business; lethal show biz at that. Now, only about a third of the country is laughing. Call it theater of audacity and mendacity. Call it performative.

He knows how to get his name on the marque. Bless him, as on Fox News, ridicule him or curse him as we do in my circle of friends, but it isn’t possible to ignore him.

Whether his antics, part ignorance and part arrogance, can be dismissed as a mere performance is no longer relevant. He may be playing the court jester but he is also the man on the throne. And each reckless and mindless edict has historic consequences wrecking countless lives.     

When he staged an illegal political photo op at Arlington cemetery that was performative but relatively harmless. Renaming the Gulf of Mexico and now the Defense Dept. is also designed partially as performance. When he set up a camera crew to show him kissing the flag or the Bible that was also performance art, but his behavior goes much further than that. 

His announcement which threatened Greenland's sovereignty is both spectacle and a blatant violation of law. The destruction of a vessel and crew in international waters because it might be heading here and it might be carrying drug smugglers is also performative, but deadly. 

With a wink toward his MAGA minions he parades weaponry and paves over roses. To borrow from G&S Pinafore, He is the monarch of the realm / born to overwhelm / And ply his power as the office grants / And so do his children and his sycophants.

Historians will describe him as a narcissistic misogynist with arrested development, void of empathy and any discernible ethos, They will have to add performative to that list of adjectives. 

Truth Be Told

The answer is Montenegro or Bobby Riggs or Gloria Graham. These days lunch could not be complete without looking up some piece of trivia on our smart phone. It leaves no question unanswered except, perhaps, for the meaning of life, what are we doing here and what just went wrong with our country. If we can’t deal with the overwhelming questions at least we placate our brains with the small stuff.

As was recently pointed out by Ken Jennings, the M.C. of the quiz show Jeopardy, facts are more than trivia. In fact, trivia is more than trivial. The word goes back seven centuries when it referred to three essentials of a liberal arts education, rhetoric, logic and grammar. A massive dose of each is achingly needed in our citadels of power.

In this age of mendacity, conspiracy and gullibility, facts have been relegated to versions of truth on one channel, twisted on another and ignored by most. Objective truth went out with landlines and dictionaries. However a lie does not become true by repetition. 

I doubt if any of our ancestors had as much knowledge crammed into their grey matter as we do. Our heads are stuffed with gigabytes (whatever that means) of facts. Too bad knowledge doesn’t translate into wisdom. 

Was it Plato or Yogi Berra who said, knowledge is knowing that tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in fruit salad. Actually, it was Miles Kington who deserves attribution. He also said that a pessimist sees a glass as half empty. An optimist is the guy who drinks what’s there’s and orders another. I know all this because I just looked it up…but at least I waited till I came home.

The fact of the matter is that while, botanically speaking, tomatoes are seeded plants and therefore fruits, the Supreme Court, in 1893, ruled that they shall be designated as a vegetable and taxed accordingly as a veggie import.

Knowledge has a shelf life. Wisdom is more like what we know but cannot quite articulate. Wisdom is likely to be an interrogation. Why and how rather than who or when. Possibly what happened when we didn’t notice. The ineffable. An instance of congruence in the discord. A pattern seen from a distant perch.

Knowledge has its place. It is one step ahead of info, data and nomenclature. If they opened me up, out would come pouring a compendium of pharmaceutical terms, a dictionary of words and an encyclopedia of political events, a smattering of history & geography, a gaggle of ballplayers, movies, actors, big-band leaders and a libretto or two from Gilbert and Sullivan. The stuff that might get me on Jeopardy.     

It may be that wisdom comes in two sizes. The great wisdom said to be found at the foot of the Himalayas or the fleeting variety at the bottom of your oatmeal bowl. When the Zen novice arrives at the monastery seeking answers he is told to wash his bowl. The floating world is that which eludes Google over lunch but may be accessible to the dishwasher in his reverie. 

In simplicity and silence, one learns to listen for the wisdom which lies within, sort of like knowing what it takes not to add tomato (or ketchup) to the fruit salad.

Just a couple of decades ago we might have gathered for lunch and have a conversation over Chinese chicken salad without needing to know what country in Europe has the second tallest men (Montenegro). We might have left the table just wondering. Where has all the wonder gone?

Migrations

In epochal terms, the history of our planet is marked by migrations. From whales and butterflies to humans. Out of Africa to the Eurasian land mass, Mongol tribes emigrated to Europe and Europeans colonized the Americas, displacing the tens of millions of indigenous people who had made their way here from Asia.  

We, Caucasians of European ancestry, are illegal immigrants. We were not invited by the American Indians. We are the men and women who came to dinner, killed our hosts and never left. Now we declare ourselves landlords, lording over this land called the United States.

This land was made for you and me and us and them; the ribbons of highways and amber waves of grain. Through slave labor, European squabbles, war crimes, famines, pogroms and opportunity we forged a nation of immigrants and now we desecrate Emma Lazarus’ poem on the Statue in New York harbor and slam the door shut on the huddled masses yearning.

The soul of this country aches with blues and celebrates in jazz. Its mythos was seeded by Hollywood and its Jewish moguls and the American Songbook was composed by first generation immigrants from Eastern Europe. The Chinese built our railroads and Irish forged our labor unions. Every poetic leap, financial risk, strive and stumble is attributable to children of immigrants.

One might wonder why Central America has always been our impoverished neighbors. President Monroe declared it our protectorate 202 years ago. The years since have been marked by U.S. rapacious corporations, maldistribution of land with puppet governments propped up by U.S. agencies. And now their people flee. No surprise.

I believe our resistance to migrants is a last gasp against mass migrations in decades to come. I won’t be here to witness millions from equatorial regions moving toward the poles as the planet heats up. Large areas will become inarable and uninhabitable. Perhaps Greenland will become green.

Through heedless exploitation, avarice, neglect and denial, world powers are rendering our orb unsustainable for human habitation. Maybe, just maybe, one day we will see ourselves as brothers and sisters, guardians and gardeners of the planet. And maybe one day my pixie dust will be on the wing of some migratory bird looking down on land without borders. Or maybe not.

 

Out Of Vilna (from 2019)

Thanks to my middle daughter, Lauren, we have discovered the soil of our family tree. Going back four generations our roots belong in Lithuania….at least on one side. Lauren is our chronicler and noticer. While others ask what, she with her wide eyes, asks when and where.

She is the one who spots the incongruous hat or shoe in the canvas be it a scene in a movie or a photo album. She has always been able to identify the year and location of an image by what the apparel doth oft proclaim.

A sense of antecedents drives her questioning. I share that curiosity but on a more macro plane. Lauren sniffs out details, the animating particulars in order to create a soulful presence. She reminds me of all the questions I never asked.

In her seventeenth year Lauren left regular high school to finish in an independent studies program on her own. After two months she took and passed an equivalency exam which gave her a diploma. That spirit of self-discovery has never left. She answers to her own interrogating voice searching for beginnings. That wondering and wandering began her Out of Vilna moment.

My grandfather, Morris, made his way out of Vilna in his seventeenth year also. His journey brought him to the lower east side of Manhattan in 1887. It was a difficult decision and it was also an easy decision. Tough to leave family and friends behind along with the teeming cultural and literary scene in Vilna which was the Paris of that region. The Jewish population of the city reached 40%. Yet it was also a city under siege by Poles, Belarussians and Prussians. Pogroms ate away at the outskirts. Conscription was the fate of young men. I imagine young Morris hiding in a cellar from a band of drunken, mustachioed Cossacks. Perhaps he was concealed under a large stack of potatoes and he found his transit on one of their shoots.

He was part of a mass migration from Eastern Europe to Hamburg to New York harbor. Was he by himself? We don’t know yet. But I’m sure he traveled in steerage coming up on deck to pass that newly installed Statue of Liberty, then on to Ellis Island and from there to a tenement on a street of pushcarts. In 1891 he met Yetta and the tree was watered.

In my seventeenth year I was lost. I might as well have been in Vilna on the wrong road out. I had no idea it was a family tradition. Girls were still a foreign subject. Politics and sports were my strong points. I thought I knew the good guys from the bad guys... in government and on the playing field. I wasn’t altogether wrong but not altogether right either. A year later I chose my profession and four years after that I was married. Not very prudent with either choice……….but then again I wouldn’t have Lauren to learn from if I had embarked on that road not taken.

Did my father have his Out of Vilna intersection? I’ll have to make this up because I forgot to ask. He either didn’t finish or never started high school. Too poor. He sold newspapers on Flatbush Ave. and played the mandolin in a pick-up band, a piece of DNA not passed along to me. He earned loose change cashing in deposit bottles or as a runner dashing from the telephone in the candy store to fetch a neighbor from the 4th floor of a walk-up. He left his Vilna behind when he met my mother who tutored him for the two-year pharmacy college straight through to his license.

Morris, can you hear me? We’re all in your debt. Had you stayed in Vilna none of us would be.

Melville and Imagined Whales

Ahab's pursuit of Moby Dick is the great American allegory. There is no hissing the villain or cheering the hero in the book. Melville (call him Ishmael, the outsider) presents the white whale as demonic and ferocious on one page and noble on the next. In one chapter on whiteness we are reminded that his absence of color sums up the ambiguity of both the pursuer and pursued. Ahab's ill-fated mission is to uncover the ultimate mystery, blinded as he is by the enormous whiteness.

Add to this our contemporary understanding of the oceanic ecosystem and we grow indignant as Melville maligns our cuddly behemoth. Of course, the journey of the Pequod is not to be read literally. The author is after far greater game.

Were the architects of our misadventure in Southeast Asia testosterone-driven men bent on domination? Yes, of course, many were though some were just simple, self-serving fools. Nor can Ahab be captioned only as a crazed monomaniac…though he was. He was a seeker of truth, as well.

Four presidents were complicit in the tragedy of our knuckle-headed misadventure in Vietnam. Their acts were committed in the Cold War context premised on the belief that this Leviathan called Communism would gobble up one country after another and darkness would descend upon civilized life. Instead, they created their own doom. They mistook a small country’s determination to shake off colonial rule, for the Communist dragon. Now, the Hanoi regime is one our favorite trading partners.

Ahab’s mission was revenge for the loss of a limb which Freud regarded as castration but more importantly to pierce the mask of Moby Dick, to destroy that which lies behind the face of so-called evil. His zeal was messianic but the imagined outcome was unattainable just as religious fanatics, with colossal wrongheadedness, obsess over an imagined godhead in whose name all manner of evil is enacted; crusades, inquisitions and virulent hatred of the other. 

Maybe it’s a stretch too far to grant a crazed Dulles, McNamara, Rusk and a bellicose Pentagon similar status as Ahab, of being knights-errant chasing an illusory dragon. In fact they were all part of an apparatus befitting an American empire.

Aside from the war crimes of napalm, defoliants, stacks of body bags and a nation torn asunder the tragedy of Vietnam was our excruciating refusal to come to terms with our role as replacement for European colonialism. When you think you are menaced by this whale called Communism you see whales everywhere and end up supporting every corrupt tyrant on the map who declares himself anti-whale.

It was a dark time in American history lit by some bright songs and burning draft cards and the emergence of a counter-culture. Yet just as Ishmael survived the wreckage on a floating coffin we are carried away in our leaking ship of state, still wounded, still haunted. 

Presidents and potentates require whales to stay in power. All they need to do is convince the ill-informed that they are under siege. If there are perceived barbarians at the gate they are a projection of his own barbarism. We have kept the rapists and felons out so that the rapist and felon can rule. 

Reagan had his 8-day whale of a war with Grenada as if the tiny Caribbean island were a threat to invade our frozen yogurt stores. The Neo-Cons under Bush had their own apparition obsessed with weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. 

Donald has set half the country against itself with the illusion of a diabolical deep state, painting government welfare programs as a monstrous force. 

Imagined whales are essential for tyrants and autocrats. I would argue that Bibi, like Ahab, is a vengeful hunter and his whale is Hamas. With a harpooned mind he has created an invisible demonic force impervious to extinction because it is an ideology which has seethed and festered for decades of humiliation, occupation and subjugation. 

Melville described his book (to Hawthorne) facetiously, as wicked as if he was possessed by witchcraft. In fact, his trespass was to dare go face to face with an imagined supreme being.

Ahab, like many among us, abhors the enormous unseen forces in tumultuous times and seeks simplistic answers. He was driven by a passion to confront the unknown and unlock the mystery. His failure defines existential man. Of course, we cannot know what evil lurks nor achieve perfect enlightenment, only strive to embody the divine or glimpse it as in a brief candle. 

Living / Dying

The coral tree outside my window is thick with green sleeves. The red conical blossoms are gone. They had their six weeks of fame with throats open wide and nectar dripping. Sometime in June they vanished, replaced by poisonous pods. Fortunately, the hummingbirds know when to poke their elongated snouts in for a drink and when to abstain.

At the same time large green leaves have been roused from their slumber, waking into verdant wakefulness. As throughout all life, it’s a matter of, Hello, I must be going. The curtain goes down at the same time as the curtain goes up. I know the feeling.

Like Schrodinger’s cat, alive and dead at once, we are in both the maternity room and intensive care. On a societal level, the death of democracy is much more in evidence than anything nascent. Yet while they are killing us (not so) softly with their song, I’m listening hard for the start of something big.

Meanwhile our planet begs for remedial care. We are losing over one hundred species a day according to some computer models while over 200,000 people join the human race daily. Make room for an additional two billion by 2050.

Schrodinger’s cat was simply part of a thought experiment set out to challenge Einstein (of all people) and demonstrate a fallacy of quantum mechanics. If this or any creature were confined in a box bombarded by electrons or any other lethal substance there is a point where it might be said to be both alive and dead, yet on observation this cannot be true. Beyond this oversimplification I get a brain ache. But the concept fascinates me at least metaphorically.

In the course of an ordinary day, living/dying happens, unremarked upon. Each day we may die a little and the next day, revive a little. I was recently told how, in conversation between two women, one became radiant from within as if being seen for the first time. New life, emergent, is no small thing.

 I take my cue from that tree busy making chlorophyll for green leaves and their day in the sun while those operatic flowers are hitting their high notes of the season with all corpuscles bursting, divas that they are.

Trash Talk

Alerted by the beep of breaking news 

I see his name on a continuous loop

tossing out a litany of puff, 

thanking us for attention to this matter,

the likes of which.. blah, blah

which muddies the muddle

as the green garbage truck,

upon which so much depends,

embraces the blue trash can

with its yellow arms like an enormous hug,

then lifts and dumps the barbed rambles

 into its hydraulic gut,

without any deliberation,

crushing ninety gallons of malice and blather

into a fraction of its thirty-ton cargo

which is why poetry is best as concision,

shucked corn, tops off the carrots,

the distillate, barely adjectival,

as it grinds rancid words into

hard-earned mulch

from which orchards may sprout

or even a thorn of a rose pushing up 

through the floor of his ballroom.

Fools

There was a time when one wondered if he was a clown, a criminal or a psychopath. One such a man was Adolph Hitler. Now we have one among us. Any notion of his being a mere fool was slowly dispelled. For a while the idiocy obscured the menace. His inanities and profanities are now met with impunity. In fact, his simplistic utterances delivered with a ten-year-old vocabulary seem to endear himself all the more to his base. It gives a bad name to fools.

The archetype of the fool has traveled from Greek literature through Shakespeare into the 19th century and beyond. There are simpleton fools and wise fools. In literature they have often been characters who speak truth to power. Kings tolerate jesters, at least up to a point. They are amused by harmless antics. On the other hand, there have been periods when retardation was treated with scorn and worse.

The Bard gave life to fools with Falstaff in Henry IV, to King Lear as well as the motley fool in As You Like It. At times they act out the primitive instincts or the disowned self of their masters. Their wise words can be subversive but allowed in jest. Shakespeare gave them a voice to reveal an aspect otherwise denied the audience. Profundity disguised as comic relief.  

The fool was always the outsider who reframed the situation, offering a new dimension acceptable to the power elite. Mark Twain got invited to sit at the dinner table with robber barons of his day. Morgan, Carnegie, Vanderbilt and Rockefeller took his sarcasm, dealt in the haze of cigar smoke. The Gilded Age was added to our language by Samuel Clemens. Apparently, they welcomed his celebrity along with his wit.  

After WWI, fools found a home in periodicals, movies and then radio. Chaplin, the Little Tramp, poked his cane at millionaire tycoons on behalf of the working class, even though he, himself, was one of the richest men in Hollywood. The Marx Brothers also made their fortune playing audacious fools.

Audiences loved them and nobody more than the millionaire moguls of Hollywood. Never under-estimate the capacity of the power-elite to promote faintly subversive voices as long as they can monetize their presence.  

Dorothy Parker quipped, How could they tell, when President Coolidge died. Mort Saul, Tom Lehrer and George Carlin were far from fools as they jabbed convention along with words of Molly Ivins in print.

Political satire flourished on T.V. up until now. Our current monarch has very thin skin. The man has no decency, no empathy and no sense of humor. Wit directed at the man in the Oval is no longer permissible. It seems that the late night truth-tellers have a short lease from their corporate-owned networks. 

What the Tudor kings allowed has now been muzzled. The fool is dead; long live the fool.

Mystery of the Spheres

In the span of my decades, I’ve lived through the ripening of our sphere as if a round fruit which now, hour by hour, is rotting. Planet Earth reduced to a melon.

Cut open the orb at its peak and you release the sun and the moon, the music of the spheres. Can it be, what seemed like progression was, in fact, cyclic? The straight line, actually bent. The Allies and Axis of 1941, flipped five years later and now the enemy is ourselves. The crystal ball bounces and rolls.

Melons fiercely hold their mystery. I’ve seen buyers at the market knocking on their skin and listening as if they could overhear a conversation among the pits. I’ve grown accustomed to the unknowing. It reminds me of something close at hand.

I’ve been watching it for the past six days. I pick it up and feel for? For what, I don’t know. This morning, I spoke to it. Are you ripe and ready? I think I heard a high pitch beep but that may have been a garbage truck backing up. What the hell, I bought it last Thursday. If I wait another day I may have missed the propitious moment. Everything in its time.

There are no signifiers. No bag of waters breaking. No contractions at short intervals. Every birth is Cesarean. So now I am making my incision straight down the mid-sagittal line to eventually create perfect quadrants….as if the judge from Uzbekistan is scrutinizing my grip for Olympian gold.

One nation indivisible, we pledged and we were when I spoke those words during WW II. Today we are a divisible zig-zag, as is this fractious globe, subject to a thousand cuts.

I would grant this honeydew an 8.7. I think it was a day away from sublimity. I wonder if melons rate us on a scale ranging from feckless to reckless. He who hesitates gets mush. He who rushes gets a sort of potato.

With a little bit of luck, our lifespan peaks when the world is ripening. By that schedule I should have checked out ten years ago or maybe hang around for another ten.

In honeydew talk I would hope for the pulpy flesh, lunar-luscious, in its prime as it reaches its upward slope when it sings, no zings, as if summoning Orpheus with his lute in the lost language of melon.

 

Unforgetting

I promised myself I wouldn’t do this. But I cannot let the anniversary of the last days of Peggy’s life go unnoted. I celebrated her birthday on May 2^nd and now I find myself commemorating the way she lived her dying four years ago. She lived 100 years plus 100 days.

Over our forty years together, Peggy and I created a soil in which our love watered and sunned a garden. I find myself imbued with that love as I embrace my remaining years. When she died, grief felt to me like self-pity. Instead, I celebrate the gift she bequeathed. When I go, she said of my future, go for it. I have.

While under hospice care she continued to write poetry until a week before the end on August t5, 2021. She faced the east window and communed with a hummingbird while singing along with the Irish folk group, Celtic Thunder. Below are excerpts of poems she wrote leading up to her death. All are taken from her chap book, Two Is A Sacred Number.*

I’ve taken some liberties with the lines I chose. I have conflated the overwhelming love she radiated with her embrace of the ultimate unknown. Both love and dying, I believe, are aspects of letting go, a mysterious transport.

 

A love that springs from nothingness, with opulence expanding,

To welcome each day in the flourish of this enormity,

our constant wedding.

Love has its own arithmetic,

Knows only how to increase.

 

From this window, larger than these years

you bring me vessels for the insistence of green.

Through your eyes I see rivers to remind us

what keeps moving, fluid as bodies.

You have traveled me here, out of a thirsty night

through advancing dark, into a moist

and sudden incandescence.

Love flares from its invisible yes.

 

Flesh answers more than desire

I/you forget to be old.

A Mozart rondo filling me with now.

 

Through the crack in the bedroom wall,

Green mystery makes its way.

When you enter among monarch butterflies

what I see comes to this:

The tree-lit park, touch of silk

The taste of tangerines.

 

Where we have traveled has carried me home.

I find my way to the orange sunrise

Even at the ebb of my long life.

* Peggy wrote under her maiden name, Peggy Aylsworth. Her poetry books are available from Amazon.

The Revolutionary Macaroni

Some words travel well and tell a slice of history in their migration. Take macaroni, for instance.

Yankee Doodle went to town / riding on a pony / stuck a feather in his cap / and called it macaroni.

We sing this song signifying patriotism. Yet I doubt many Americans have the slightest idea what they are singing about. Hint: it has nothing to do with pasta.

In the early 1700s, a macaroni was a word the Brits used to describe a well-traveled, sophisticated man. It then morphed into an effeminate male, foppish in his fashion.

By the time of the French & Indian war, circa 1760, the macaroni flipped again. It suddenly became a term of ridicule designating a country bumpkin trying too hard to look like a gentleman, thus meant to mock the American colonist.

In fact, it was sung in derision for the lowly rebel who thought he could stick a feather in his cap and call himself a dandy, a macaroni. Note that he rode a pony, not a horse. A doodle is a simpleton. And what, I hear you ask, is a Yankee?

The original Dutch settlers were the subjects of derision again by those nasty invaders from England. The Englishmen (John Bull) called those from the Netherlands, (Jan Kees), hence Yankees. Seems like everybody had names for the other. So much for the nonsense of national identity.

By the time of the Revolutionary War, the entire song was stood on its head. The tune of King George’s bad guys was adapted by us, the good guys, and suddenly it became a symbol of patriotism. When the Red Coats surrendered at Yorktown, Washington had his army band strike up a rendition of Yankee Doodle.

It was as if the entire war was fought over who owned Yankee Doodle. Or, as I’d like to think, it was a triumph of the common man. My other takeaway is how gusts of new consciousness move language and carry the seeds for revolutionary change. Keep your eyes on the MAGA macaroni.

  

Public Square

They have tables and they have chairs. We sit under our favorite ash tree and chew on big and small ideas over lunch. On weekdays my friends and I often gather in this public courtyard and order a choice of salad, pasta or pizza to-go for $9.00. The venue is Il Forno Restaurant on Ocean Park Blvd and 29^th St. It’s the best kept secret in Santa Monica.

I suggest that Zelensky and Putin meet here and end the carnage in Ukraine. BYOB, bring your own borscht. Let them first have a food fight if they must and then settle in and save their people from further bloodshed and displacement. Nothing ever happens on an empty stomach, so go ahead, Vladamir and Volodymyr, keep eating. Share your salad and pasta. Nobody's looking. 

On another table Bibi, Trump and the Ayatollah could spring for falafel and then get real. After hostages are freed, Gaza can be declared a demilitarized free city with open access and reconstruction. Let them admit their shame as pasta slides off their forks. Then the three of them can start writing their Nobel Peace Prize joint acceptance speech.  

The tables are round, great for conversation. We huddle and think great thoughts. Basil expounds on pre-history and intergalactic speculations. Dean offers his views on Erasmus’s advocacy for humanism as opposed to Martin Luther. I sit in awe of my learned friends, busy contemplating the arrangement of broccoli and peppers on my vegetarian pizza.

There is much to be said for a public square. It wouldn't hurt if speakers on phones were banned as a courtesy. It is hard to find such a space without going to the park and dealing with picnics and flying frisbees. 

But for civil discourse on the meaning of life in a godless universe and other light subjects, nothing beats my courtyard on Ocean Park Blvd. where revolutionary plots can be hatched at the drop of Caesar salad, and you can't beat the price.

Off to the side, I spotted a rather stout man giggling under a bodhi tree. But that may have been an apparition.

 

Dick, Hank and Donald

The reign of Donald the 1^st has me thinking how he will be regarded by future writers and even those in our midst, when normalcy is restored.

This led me back to Richard the 3^rd, and how he was maligned by Shakespeare, writing in the service of Elizabeth, the reigning Tudor of the day. Dick was deposed by Hank, the 7^th, father of the next Henry whose depravity we can’t seem to get enough of.

This is the way it goes with a monarch. Fawning sycophants blowing sweet nothings into his ear until they stumble and lose their heads. It then takes someone like the Bard to set in stone the deviltry of his patron’s predecessor.

While Hank-8 is buried at Windsor Castle, Dick-3 rotted in Potter’s Field for five centuries and then got paved over as a parking lot. His skeletal remains were exhumed a few years ago and revealed a counter narrative to the one Will Shakespeare spun.

No twisted, withered arm, his back less hunched or humped into a mountain as Shakespeare had it, and no unequal, limping legs. More importantly, Richard III allowed for petitions of the poor and set up legal aid for them in a Court of Requests, later abolished by his successor, Henry VII. He protected merchants by prohibiting the importation of goods from abroad, exempting books which he encouraged for the people. Laws, henceforth, would be written in the common tongue.

Conversely, one wonders how the mountain of retrogressive acts by Donald will be remembered. Will Trump, the man-child,  become a dynasty like the Tudors? Yahweh forbid. 

16th and 17th century media in the hands of great pens could move minds just as Fox News and social media does today. Even in the 19th century Charles Dickens' Tale of Two Cities became the accepted version of the French revolution. 

I probably won't be around to have my question answered. My guess is it will take a generation or more to repair the damage done to the fabric of this once great nation. Even worse, Donald's push for fossil fuels and callous indifference toward the degradation of our environment may doom the planet irreparably. 

I expect there will be dozens of poets, essayists, playwrights and novelists eager to unravel Donald's gibberish and translate his jejune vocabulary to adult language. The challenge is to grasp the full extent of his appeal, where it came from, what sustains it and how a country embraced spectacle over substance, nescience over research, and how indecency, malice and incoherence became a virtue.  

I seem to have written myself to a summer / winter of my discontent. I allow this to happen on Tuesdays and Thursday. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday I convince myself that sane voices will prevail and on weekends I let the miracle of life wash over me and plan my afterlife. As Jimmy Durante used to say, Let me hear dat trumpet. Dat's no trumpet. Dat's no trumpet. Dat's a trumpet. 

 

Friends

As our country grows more unrecognizable each day, friends are poring over maps considering spots to relocate, at least till we collectively come to our senses. I expect to stay put and ponder about leaving this world for the next one. Do you mean there is no next one? In that case I’ll check out Emily’s List for an ice floe and be done with it. 

This brought to mind phone calls from a couple of my dear-departed but wacko friends a while back. She left a message on my answering machine: Sorry I missed you but maybe you’re not back yet from Mexico. Hope you are having a good time in San Miguel Allende. I thought to myself: Did I forget to go to Mexico the way some folks forget to have children? Maybe I should hop a flight and look for the expat community. 

When she reached me, she apologized saying she was thinking of somebody else who went to Hawaii. This is the way it works with octo and nonagenarians. I told her I couldn’t make it to Mexico but I’d been drinking margaritas to make up for it. I was glad not to have gone to Hawaii since I have a profound dislike for all things coconut. 

She said she was sorry to hear about my allergy to peanuts. I was also sorry to hear about it since I’d just had some peanut sauce with Chinese food. Was my body beginning to itch all over or was that a reaction from the coconuts I didn’t eat by not going to Hawaii? At least I didn’t have jet lag. 

I thanked her for saving me a visit to the dermatologist as well as an intestinal disorder from suspicious lettuce where I might have perished from dehydration in an emergency room, an unclaimed body with a tag on my toe. 

We need friends like this in our twilight years to check up on us as our diminishing memory turns into galloping senility and other childhood diseases. The phone is ringing again. This time from a friend who started telling me about the time he set fire to the shower curtains while his mother was taking a bath. He was seven and apparently a very curious boy. I didn’t ask when he was weaned from the breast. It was 1934 and times were tough. I’m sure this is not why he called but I forgave him his trespasses. How we segued to this defining moment neither of us could recall. That’s how life works. The chronology turns to mush. 

How I ever got to my ninety-third year when just yesterday I was eleven can only be explained by missing a plane to Mexico because of the skin rash I didn’t get from not eating Chinese food in the bathtub with burned coconuts or was it caramelized walnuts?

Even as the specter of a dictatorship looms large, I plan on living out my shelf-life blabbering in blissful incoherence. Flights of imagination will be my letters of transit out of this world.

  

In Search For Beginnings

Nostalgia has a bad name; always has. Longing for the imagined past can be a delusional exercise or at least a sentimental journey. In the 17^th century it was regarded as a sickness, a form of melancholia suffered by seaman who couldn’t wait to return home. Try getting your HMO to cover that.

Yet, raise your hand if you replay those glory years. That home run I hit in the schoolyard is still orbiting a distant galaxy. The older I get, the better I used to be.   

I like a beer now and then but can’t tell the difference between Schlitz, Pabst, Miller or Modello. Yet, I also can’t forget one of their old commercials…which shows what sort of programs I watched. We only go around once in life and should therefore (spend our remaining days drinking Schlitz beer) or as he put it… live it with all the gusto you can.

What about harps and wings sprouting from my shoulders? Sounds like heresy to me and I’ll drink to that.

One man’s gusto is another’s big yawn. At the moment my attention is turned back to how I got from there to here; the breadcrumbs of my madeleine. I have always associated the recovery of time past as a personal detective story and a comedy. I think of Peter Falk as Colombo - Columbus in his crumpled overcoat discovering the new world called Truth or beginnings. There’s just one more thing…

Maybe this comes from seeing too many movies as a kid. The intrepid sleuth snooping, the black sedan trailing him, the goon holding up the lamppost across the street, getting bopped in the alley, everyone a suspect and all of them assembled in the last scene. The detective deduces and detects. He unravels the essential mystery at the core as if now I know why my brother died early, why my father could barely read, and my mother trusted no one or... how I was gifted with three loving daughters having stumbled and bumbled my way along and then got so lucky.

It's not fair that we’re allotted only one childhood, and we are too busy living it to have taken notes. Maybe that’s what old age is for. To rewrite everything I should have said and the dumb things I shouldn’t have, those years of zits and scars.

Julian Barnes wrote, A child wants to see. He was able to walk and could reach up to a door handle. He did this with nothing in mind that could be called a purpose, merely the instinctive tourism of infancy. A door was there to be pushed; he walked in, stopped, and looked.

In my infantile tourism I am at a window about three flights up looking down. A car is on fire, and I hear sirens coming. Across the street there is a derrick moving dirt and bricks are being laid. Another apartment house is going up.

I’m not so sure anymore about the car fire because I may be confusing it with my Little Red Fire Engine book. The dirt-mover is certain. It is on Talbot Street. in Kew Gardens, and I am between 3 and 4. Why that image while thousands of other sights have been shredded? It was unusual enough to be retained and when I see bricks mortared today it comes back to me. How does this figure in the detective story?

Guilt. Something went wrong. I wonder what I did or didn’t. I was a poor eater. I violated the clean plate policy. Serious stuff. People were starving in China… because of me. I wasn’t listening. Didn’t wear galoshes. That third sweater. Went out unprotected. No wonder I got measles, mumps, whooping cough, even scarlet fever. What about polio? Don’t go swimming. And head lice? Don’t lean back on the movie chair. Don’t. Don’t. How will I ever remember all these don’ts?

The don’ts get embedded. I fight for every Do. The derrick moves the dirt. I climb the hill, gradually find my gusto. Case closed………but not so fast. I wouldn’t do that if I were you.

Poetry and Populism

If Walt Whitman lived today, what song would he hear America singing? In his day he must have heard the agony of the lash and sound of sweet chariots coming. He had an ear for the suffering as he tended to war-wounded and he heard the rattle of gold amassed during the Gilded Age. 

He knew the commonweal. Untamed himself, he sounded his own barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. Whitman contained multitudes. He gave voice to the working man, to each leaf of grass, to this cradle of democracy endlessly rocking.

The decline of our country can be marked by the radical change of what we used to call the masses. In Depression days after the 1929 Crash, the rural poor seemed aligned with an urban working class. They may have been largely uneducated, racist and Bible-thumpers, but they understood exploitation and bank foreclosures. And they understood that their staunchest friend was the federal government.

In addition, they could smell a demagogue when Huey Long was renounced as he tried to establish a mobocracy in Louisiana.

Credit the Republican Party with dumbing down the underclass, keeping their collective minds off their own well-being and turning their animosity against the single institution which has always benefited them the most, the government in Washington, where any semblance of a safety net was given birth.

Informed populism scares corporate America; but an aggrieved, ill-informed and misled populace is a grave danger to the very welfare of the masses and to democracy itself.

Would Whitman be mourning that our fearful ship is done, as he grieved over the loss of, Oh captain, my captain, Abraham Lincoln? Would he further write that the lilac last in the courtyard bloomed? Or could he find the cadence that beats jubilant our feet. He wrote that the future is our masterpiece as yet unwritten.

As Eliot wrote: There will be time for you and me to drop a question on our plates / a time for a hundred visions and revisions. / There will be a time for us to wonder and to dare.

To answer the tragedy unfolding in the fields and the streets where we now shackle the huddled masses, I turn to Stevens' line, After the final No, there comes a Yes. 

The Rectangle and the Round

 A baseball is exactly like an orange except one gets crushed and the other squeezed and the one is filled with cork and the other with pulp but otherwise they are identical in size and shape and every other way except for the rind in the orange and the yarn in the other covered in cowhide and stitched and if you threw the orange to a batter you'd get juiced, pulped and pitted and I don't imagine the orange would curve or sink or flutter like a knuckleball but otherwise they are indistinguishable in the dusk with the light behind them.

If you stick a band-aid on the orange, it might fetch triple figures and become a museum piece as a decontextualized construction demonstrating the use of two disparate objects in juxtaposition causing a shift in our way of seeing and our conception of space.

The distinction between art and life has been closed. Pause is music. Sitting in a chair can be a dance and a clothesline is sculpture. Baseballs and oranges have a kind of beauty but beautiful is no longer the operative word in Art. We are suspicious of prettified images. Poetry is criticized for being too poetic. The pendulum has long since swung away from ornamental, classical forms. Museums might as well remove their walls... Chris Burden's installation of Urban Lights adorn the entrance to the L.A. County Museum of Art and in the rear is a 340-ton boulder, Levitated Mass.

It is enough to have our perceptions rattled. A bandaged orange forces us to see the imagined wound, the confluence of round and rectangle shapes and the natural and man-made incongruities. After being saturated with objects online, in magazines and on our tables every waking hour the effect is to grab us by the collar and LOOK but look with different eyes. The art is in the experience of looking. For a brief moment the orange and the viewer may be transformed.

Better yet consider a blue, orange and red Band-Aid. Or if the orange were a rectangle and the Band-Aid round it would alter our senses even further. If you showed a straw coming out of an orange-colored baseball as a source of Vitamin C it could also take its place on a gallery wall in exhibition and shift our perceptions and maybe that's the name of the game.

Now consider sharp rustbelt Pennsylvania poking into amorphous Ohio; the rectilinear against roly-poly Ohio, beginning and ending with O. Sparks fly or at least rust.

Hi diddle-diddle, see cow jump over moon or the long arm of ICE coming out of the Oval and stabbing its victims. Art and life,

both tumultuous. 

   

Fourth of July

Ironic to be celebrating the founding of our country when in reality we are bearing witness to an extended deathbed scene. Hour by hour the precepts which bound our nation are being overturned. Absent is the legislative branch. Usurped is the Justice department. Bought is the judiciary. Mocked is the Constitution and its amendments. In less than six months, we have descended into quasi-monarchy. Threatened is dissent and betrayed is the populist constituency which gave him their votes.

This is the day to be cherished, flawed as it is when Thomas Jefferson declared that all propertied white men are created equal. The rest of you guys, get over there. And you too, wives, sisters and daughters. You may be equal but we plantation owners are more equal. After all, there is cotton to be picked, stolen land to be tilled, bales to lift and barges to tote.

Falling as it does on a Friday, means we have an extra day to buy a mattress, set off senseless firecrackers frightening pets, igniting fires and causing Ukrainian refugees to deal with episodes of post-traumatic stress syndrome. 

Otherwise, happy 4^th of July. If backyard BBQs and picnics are the signifiers, count me in. Any excuse for eating and drinking with friends will do just fine. It’s the next best thing to Thanksgiving.

This is no year for fireworks. The country is already combusting. Let this 4th of July be a time to revisit and redress the omissions and injustices baked into our document's yeast. 

Three of our first five presidents died on this day. If they could be brought back, they would shudder to see how the birth of this nation has been subverted. How a home-grown despotism has replaced the monarchy they rebelled against.

The legacy of Independence Day is still aspirational. The descendants of Thomas Jefferson's 230 slaves have been emancipated on paper but not yet freed from economic suppression, disenfranchisement and daily indignities, Now, that festering worm of racism in the minds of the dominant class is directed against asylum-seekers of color whose ancestors once occupied this land.

The temptation is to buy that mattress and sleep for the next three years, but we may wake up in a state of shame, dependence and decay with our former document in tatters. Better yet, let that mattress spring us to action.

Walking the Walk

At age fifteen, I ran from one apartment house to another dodging superintendents while distributing leaflets against the Taft-Hartley Bill and campaigning for the Progressive Party in the 1948 election. A year later I stood tall at the Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill, N.Y. 

In the 60's I was out there in front of defense plants in silent vigils or at demonstrations protesting the Vietnam war and the draft. Before that the issue was fair housing.

These days, I just talk the talk.

For over fifty years as a pharmacist, I was on my feet all day, sometimes eating lunch on the run. I rarely sat down, performing miracle healings eight hours a day. (Hold down the applause). 

The problem with being 92 is that my architecture and entrails are also 92, beyond their shelf-life and out of warranty. Back at my 88th birthday I felt like I was 60 years into my 20s, racing around as caregiver for Peggy. Then, halfway to 89, just after Peggy died my ambulation hit the wall. People don't stroll much in L.A. anyway. One might get arrested for vagrancy. 

Up until about a year ago, I walked about ten blocks every day. Janice, my daughter dear, saw to it. She didn’t take any of my guff. I didn’t know I had any guff. In fact, I don’t even know what guff is except that I had it now and then, in resistance.

When I say ten blocks, I mean five blocks and back and with my walker. In effect, I was rolling; I could barely keep up with myself when the incline was downhill. I might even have passed Sisyphus.

We took the same route every day, so I became acquainted with the sidewalk. It is a topographical adventure negotiating the reptilian roots and fissures. Levels change every few steps as if I was walking on the roof of an underground civilization bulging here and caving in there.  

My next move was to a park where the path was level. It is a passing parade with kids climbing trees, elbow by elbow. There goes a frisbee into the mouth of an Irish setter. I greet joggers and dog-walkers but pass unnoticed to most whose world is in their mobile phone. I'm also passed by women of color pushing strollers with white skin babies. Ball games and picnics are my distractions along with deep whiffs of pine needles and freshly mowed grass.  

That was then. Nowadays my arthritic ankle and knee along with some autoimmune disorder and balance issues makes walking more challenging.

At this point I pause, leave my keyboard and head for my favorite park to test myself. I walk the equivalent of about three blocks keeping pace with the snails. I can hear my several joints screaming as I put weight on them. It is bone on bone without any cushion from cartilage. I can still make some poetic leaps and jump to conclusions but, I suppose, that doesn't count.

Metaphorically, walking the walk stands in opposition to talking the talk. Action vs. lip-service. However, when I’m not grimacing, the two are complementary and each can be transformational. My imagination gets ignited as I mosey along. Poems get born. Walking can be an interrogation into shuttered regions. Any day now I may come up with the meaning of life. Until then I’ll keep meandering through the thickets and dunes of my inscape.

Joe Whose Coat Had Many Colors

When Joseph and Mary got to the inn 

God forgot to make reservations 

and there was no room except in the manger. 

That's what happens without Planned Parenthood

and Joe Biden out of office.

If the Big, Beautiful swindle bill gets through 

it may rouse Joe the Plumber.

Whatcha know, Joe? Do you still no nothin?

Eighty years ago, Jo Stafford addressed G.I. Joe 

as she sang You Belong To Me. 

After the good war was over Joe McCarthy 

in his drunken stupor thought he saw Joe Stalin 

in every movie studio, every barber shop, 

and the bottom of every bottle he drank. 

Senator Joe was born with Joseph Conrad's

Heart of Darkness. 

Joe DiMaggio and Joe Louis would have been next. 

Even Trader Joe could have been a traitor. 

It took Joseph Welch to ask if he had even an ounce of decency. 

How many cups of Joe will it take 

to wake America to the needs of the average Joe?

Joseph Campbell found heroes with a thousand faces

as he breathed new life into the archetypes.

Maybe the greatest Joe of them all was Joe Green.

Not Mean Joe Green, the football player 

whom I wouldn't want my sister to marry if I had one 

but Guiseppe Verdi, aka Joe Green,

composer of twenty-eight operas

including Aida to whose theme we dutifully marched

entering the auditorium at P.S. 99

with Joseph Koplowitz in front of me

and Josephine Palmeri behind. 

 

From My Pleasure to No Worries

The devolution from an expression of delight to two negatives traces our decline as a culture.

No worries? Bad enough the singular worry. Why would I worry? I came to this restaurant filled with gratitude for being alive, in good health with loving family and friends and now you are telling me not to worry. All I requested was a napkin or was it some bread and in return I’m told not to worry. Could it be there is a table across the room next to a suicide bomber which is the one to start worrying?

No Worries has me yearning for those good old days of No Problem, at least it wasn’t plural. When did You’re Welcome get dropped? Granted that didn’t make much sense but a welcome is better than a warning of impending peril.

Don’t mention it or Not at all, had a good run. I want to petition for the return of, My Pleasure or Happy to Oblige. With it might come the restoration of civil discourse and the end of road rage, incivility and vilifying public figures.

When I do a favor for a friend, I really do take pleasure for the opportunity to express my gratitude for their friendship. Is this now subversive in our country where empathy has been relegated to the sucker file and self-aggrandizement is declared a virtue?   

But what if I want to worry? It's like my right not to Have a Nice Day. Even with my napkin and bread the planet is being choked with foul air and homeless people are begging for shelter. There are currently 43 million displaced persons in the world through war or famine. Equatorial regions have been rendered non-arable from global warming.  No worries indeed!

Maybe the servers are talking to themselves trying to make it through another day. Returning to my salad, I'm eating undocumented greens picked, prepared and served with an illegal smile. No Worries has become a mantra against being snatched up by masked men before the next shift. 

We live in an age of obliquity. Not only deviating from moral rectitude but also a time of indirectness. Can I get you a drink? I’m Good. I didn’t ask whether you’ve behaved yourself today or whether you are an ethical person or a good for nothing. I merely asked whether you would care for a drink.

Maybe all this is a form of poetry. It was Emily Dickinson who said to tell it slant. No Worries, No Problem, no really. I'm Good.

That Old Divide

Here we are living through the epilogue of the Civil War. The simmering embers of that conflict were never doused, never confronted and never resolved. Slavery was replaced by a virulent racism, lynchings, segregation and a persistent sickness in the soul of America. Even antebellum misogyny is having a revival.

Now, that inhumanity has been rekindled. The hoods of the Klan have been replaced by the masks of ICE agents. A mindless nativism is sweeping the country against people of color.

The degradation of human bondage which served to divide the underclass in 1860 continues today with misdirection of the aggrieved masses to vent their loathing against asylum-seekers. The malice of the administration toward immigrants serves the MAGA constituency not one bit.

There have been 16,000 books written about Lincoln and that war between the states. I’m currently reading two of them. Michael Shaara’s 1975 book, The Killer Angels is considered a classic as it profiles some of the officer combatants and brings them to life on the page. Particularly fascinating are their blunders, their arrogance and in one instance how the southern general, James Longstreet, saw the light in the aftermath and espoused the northern cause.

The other book I started I am unlikely to finish, since it is 725 pages. I was startled to learn that Jefferson Davis's wife, Verina, was opposed to slavery and regarded by some in the Confederacy, as being mulatto or creole. When Davis was jailed for two years after the Union victory, Varina moved to NYC where she worked as a columnist for Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper, The New York World. It was Pulitzer who got Davis out of prison.

This book is called Lincoln vs Davis by Nigel Hamilton. Much is made about these two men and their wives. If Davis’s wife had abolitionist sympathies, Mary Todd Lincoln had siblings fighting for the Confederate cause.

We may have forgotten how families were ripped apart not unlike today. However, since the MAGA control of the federal government. the matter of state’s rights is now reversed. Instead of importing human labor in chains, we are exporting millions of laborers in shackles. Working people of the old Confederate states are once more being misled by the old fallen angels well-practiced in moral vacuity.