Movie Momenta Recalled

There must be a moment in time when the accepted phrase suddenly smells rancid and turns into a cliche. Maybe it's that end of the day when thinking outside the box is itself a box and you want to avoid it like the plague since it's just the tip of the iceberg, truth be told.

Having been suckled on movies of yesteryear I'm thinking of all those lines that became standards....until they faded away in a great dissolve....or not.

We have to talk.

Uh, oh, this can mean only one thing, and it isn’t about the burnt toast; more like your life is about to become toast.

I'm gonna lay low in Jersey till the heats off. 

It's no use, Muggsy, they'll get you for packing a rod and send you up the river to do a stretch in the big house.

What have we got? / Thirty-year-old male. Bludgeoned to death. We've ruled out suicide.

You’re probably wondering why I called you all here today.

Brace yourself for a transfer to North Dakota if you still want that raise promised eleven years ago.

Won’t you sit down? 

I think this went onto the cutting room floor about sixty years ago. I’d never heard it said in real life.

Shall we risk the trifle? 

Delivered to Jean Moreau by Joan Plowright, in a half-giggle, conspiring over high tea, both no longer young. Naughty, naughty. 

Such a spot of bother.

Words which could have come out of the mouth of Lord Grantham in Downton Abbey when told his valet was arrested for stealing his fob.

What'll you have? / I'll have what she's having. And I'll have what he's having....OK. 86 on the egg salad and two BLTs-down.

The problems of three people don’t amount to a hill of beans.

So said Bogey to a bewildered Ingrid, the words having been written by the Epstein brothers at a stop sign on their way to the studio, nowhere near Casablanca.

Where were you last night?

I can't remember back that far.

What are you doing tonight?

I never plan that far in advance. 

There is a specialist in Vienna who has developed an experimental surgery. It’s our only chance.

The bearded doctor with a monocle declares success as he removes the bandages to the chagrin of the greedy nephews imagining new-found riches unaware the rich mogul has left his fortune to his pet turtle.

 

It's not what it looks like. I can explain everything.

Actually, it is what it looks like. You don't need a partner to test the new mattress.

How long since your last confession?

Trump: I never confess to anything. If I replace your old organ and repair the stained-glass window, do we have a deal?

Perchance to Dream

A good night’s sleep is one of those inalienable rights Thomas Jefferson forgot to mention. We spend a third of our lives with our eyes closed. That would be 31 years for me, the equivalent of a second life.

We need to have our batteries recharged and log in some quality REM time. As the Bard said, sleep is the balm of hurt minds. It is both the repository of our unremarkable yesterdays and the seed of our tomorrows.

As we move into our twilight years sleep becomes increasingly elusive. It ain’t fair. Last night I got up at 4:07 as the clock in my bladder dictated. For the next 4 hours I was in a hypnagogic state, half asleep and half awake, and the third half thinking great thoughts such as why is the bottom of the pillow cooler than the top or why did I eat that bowl of ice cream at 8 o’clock. Obviously, because I can’t resist chocolate malt crunch. As a nonagenarian, I’ve earned that indulgence….with impunity, so I thought.

As I recall I had no problem sleeping as an infant though I can’t imagine what I dreamed about; maybe my minus time in that embryonic sea. Since I was born a few days after Hitler took office maybe I sensed the dark times ahead and cried for a u-turn. On the other hand, FDR was just inaugurated and he proclaimed that I had nothing to fear but fear itself (whatever that meant).

But I digress, The subject is sleep and I’m nodding off as I'm writing this. 

I’m well-versed in all the sleep-aids. If I contemplated their side-effects, I’d be up all night with anxiety. Sleep is really a brain thing. My simmer-down gear is in need of repair. I certainly have more memories than plans. All those shards serve as pot holes on the road to oblivion; plus those vivid images of events that never happened except in the hive of my imagination. 

Some people have success with mantras; not I anymore. Though repetitions of Beaujolais, Beaujolais did carry me off for a while. I offer it to anyone for a mere 39 cents and the key to their safe deposit box.

Naps are as mysterious as sleep itself. If I set out to take a nap, it’s hopeless. However, once I start reading in late afternoon, I often drift off in mid-paragraph on the first page. For reasons unknown this doesn’t work for me in bed. Too much intention, I suspect. Sleep does not answer to commands; it only comes unbidden.

I read somewhere that butterflies, bullfrogs and baby dolphins never sleep and giraffes get away with a half hour nap now and then. Even if they wanted to, where would they put their necks? The more I think about it the less reason I have to complain. 

To sleep, perchance to dream, ay there's the rub. What if these past 18 months have been a mere nightmare from which I will soon wake up?

 

Remembering Peggy

 To celebrate May 2^nd, the birthday of my late wife, Peggy, I thought I'd offer some excerpts from her poetry onto this page. She wrote from her own singular perch. Her language startles with its disparate leaps over a vast inscape. Well into her nineties, she was writing a poem every day with over 150 published in literary journals. Peggy's poetry was an extension of her irrepressible appetite for life, how she met each day with exuberance, gratitude and love.

  ____________________________________

He sees her face half shadowed tilted upward / in the curve of promise, smooth as an early apricot. / He will marry her and plant skyscrapers in their backyard. 

If there is champagne enough / let's give another hoist to the boy / who laughs at the tired shadows on the wall / and paints his reckless masterpiece / with no further expectations.

The sound of blues, not my own / but the low-down songs of women. Love stirs my coffee / the velvet of Yes / A white horse gallops. 

Her fingers trace highways along his arm / In a moment there will be wings, a blue heron / He moves in her direction / as though singing were a map.

Arithmetic leads to ultimate divisions / land mass under water / Yet a boy paddles a bark canoe / confident of the current.

This hiding in the tunnel of myself / denies the chairs their rightful place. Light through the window creates a momentary event / shadows in a drift toward after.

The man I meet on page 125 is now in pieces. / The mirror slants but will not lie / I would prefer to wander the streets of Paris with the artist /despite the chill.

In the hum of murmurations / every bird adjusts astonished air / Clouds contort, these mindless wheels / in the world without allegiance / Horses, round-rumped, dare me to look away.

Women survived in the dark, like feet in pinching shoes until / they turn from Molly Barnacle’s, yes to / Bartleby’s, I prefer not.

The sky bends with the hawk / you answer, your words like water … / and then, the ocean, the wedge / partial like us. / Your look rests on the curve of my cheek.

Can these days really be winter / with your words that match / the fingers as you touch / what you know of me / and even what you don’t?

Everyone looks out the window / wondering if the headlines / move the earth or what / brings hot lentils to the table.

Death has no et cetera / I borrow a motley palette from myself / The canvas will not stretch. / Still-life does not hold still. / Blue oranges turn to mauve, turn to gray. / Unfamiliar music enters the room. (A Mother’s Lament)

As the self pledges its allegiance / to a tidiness of napkins on the table / we stir the gibbous moon into our cups.

The flap of disappearing wings through the open window / This day was for sleep, the accuracy of dreams / closer to words on the notebook’s page / the loss of love.   (for Elizabeth Bishop).

The woman at the piano wears a hat. / His black trousers hold his impatience. / It is 1891, a coachman with tired horses knocks. / At the opera, singers will break the air. / She thinks of his mouth, the taste of wildwood cherries / yet, returning, knives hang in the clock.

Breakfast on the balcony / unlike the insistent birds I wouldn’t interrupt / your timbered voice carrying its sex / filling me with all I know and cannot know of you.

I watched them talk at Sunday supper / My uncle had lost his thunder into buttered toast / waiting for events that already happened / My eyes fixed on the enameled porcelain table / its corner nicked to black. (After the market crash, 1929)

My knees need grease / but the mellow sax delivers me from evil. / Growing old is a privilege, faith / its own vehicle, even as the cab keeps its motor running / and the eucalyptus tree bends lower every year.

Inspiration is drawn to pushy tides / away from headlines and oratory / she hears instead an empty glass on wood / shivers her to what lies below/ Images find their words in the telling, / A cold stone appears in her hand.

I wear the enamel pendant for the shy unsaid / A woman in Japan looks through a rim of tears / He has not gone far, but away / still, she will not say to him / “These days remove me from myself” / her mouth, thick with silence.

For me, a bite of crusty bread / its center soft, a little sour. / Just yesterday you told me / that my love of pan rests in the middle of companion / break bread indeed with the taste of your touch.

Words proclaim the sacred in the unlit candle, / a chipped cup in the sink / This holiness isn't waiting for Godot.

In the airport fog, under his slouched hat, there is Rick / deciding for teary Ilsa, that for them / the slings and arrows might only amount to a hill of beans / and Paradise lost was just as good as Paris regained.

Losing It

 It is normal to lose things. Pauline Kael lost it at the movies. I wonder if Arthur Sullivan ever found his Lost Chord. At this age all of my friends are orphans, even if Oscar Wilde said it was unfortunate to have lost one parent but to lose both appeared to be carelessness. We lose our innocence, our virginity, our hair and our teeth, all in the natural order of life and some of us lose our marbles. I remember when Peggy went on a diet and lost height. In World War I a whole generation was lost literally and the decade after, the survivors were lost figuratively. How a whole continent got lost we won’t know until someone from Atlantis shows up for an interview. While looking for some lost object a few years ago I had a brilliant insight, namely that everything is somewhere. Plato couldn’t have said it better or even Yogi Berra. My friend filled her bathtub in anticipation of a water cutoff from the hurricane. By morning the water was gone. I think it turned up in a flooded street in Glendale. Today I was looking for an important paper and decided it wasn't so important after all; at that point I found it. A few weeks ago I lost my keys and found my glasses in the search. I can hardly wait to lose my credit card so I might find my lost library card. It’s actually fun looking for my cell phone and hearing it beep, Here I am, under a stack of newspapers. Then there’s the frustration of looking for something so important, I put it in a special place; so special that I have no memory where that might be. A few weeks ago I took it to a new level. I spent three days looking for a prescription received by mail order. I had a distinct memory of opening the package and putting the contents on the dining room table. I could picture it. Finally I called the pharmacy and found out they hadn’t sent it yet. I was looking for something that wasn’t there. I had heard how effective it is to form an image of a lost article before setting out on the hunt. As one faculty diminishes, another rushes in. Everything may, indeed, be somewhere but not necessarily in this realm. The next time I start looking for something I’d better make sure it’s not all in my head like Donald who lost the election but attacked the scorekeeper, referees, umps and the five million in the stands. And now we have just about lost our democracy, our civility and the reasons we fought WWII.

Book and the Godhead

The breaking news was that there was breaking news for the first time. Sometimes the news is so epochal it cannot be seen. So it was about 3,500 years ago when the alphabet first appeared and put to use writing a narrative we call the Bible.

In his 1998 book The Alphabet and the Goddess, Leonard Shlain argues that the onset of writing brought about a gender change of the godhead. Out with goddess, in with a male god; in fact, out with images all together.

There is ample archeological evidence of female figures suggesting matriarchal societies in pre-literate times. First was not the word but the image. Yet it is notable that prohibition of graven images comes up as the second commandment. Thou shall not kill  does not appear till number six.

Men controlled the Bible. It is attributed to scribes and to Yahweh, word by word. Whether from right to left or left to right one reads in a linear sequential order. As literacy grew with the advent of the printing press, in the mid-15^th century, the consequences of print technology became more profound and pervasive.

Marshall McLuhan made the case that by extending the visual sense in this way it led to individualism, the nation-state, capitalism and to a way of viewing the world in distorted ways including misogyny and domination.

Reliance on print and its corollaries started to decline with the electronic age. Books by Virginia Wolff and James Joyce chipped away at the straight-ahead narrative.

Arguably, we are now in the post-literate age. Iconography with the return of images and signifiers are more easily read by Gen Z, along with graphic novels, and a gestalt of surfaces, phrases and bytes. Simultaneity has replaced the linear sequential.

Perhaps the Trump-era of male domination is the last gasp of the warrior age. I’d like to believe we are on the verge of a new consciousness informed by feminine principles and communal values.  

                                                                                                                                                                                 

Wets and Dries

For my birthday last month, my friend Larry presented me with a stack of prescriptions scribbled by doctors one hundred years ago. All of them had a smattering of Latin phrases and were written for syrups, fluid extracts, crystalline powders, emulsions etc... all from natural sources.

When I entered pharmacy college in 1950 those same substances were still in use. By the time I graduated, they were gone. The garden of botanicals had vanished. Exotic vapors had escaped along with rhizomes, roots and excrescence on some trees. No leaves macerating, nor acacia rancid in the glue bottle. It was those arcane names that drew me in and their intoxicating breath.

They asked me, what’ll it be? You’re seventeen. Who are you? I only knew who I wasn’t. My brother, four years older, with a tool box, tinkering under the hood, never owned a library card. No. I would become my father.

I entered his world of pharmacy as it was withering but still with ancient aromas I had inhaled as a kid. Apothecary jars on the shelf labeled podophyllin, glycyrrhiza, aqua hamamelidis. The glossary became a second language.

When I got my license, the Edenic garden was nearly gone. It had become bottled alphabetically. The aromatic elixirs had disappeared or fallen into disrepute. Squibb, Parke-Davis, Upjohn, Eli Lilly, Burrough-Wellcome claimed the space, now deodorized. But we still had the Wets and Dries.   

That’s what we called them. Compound tincture of benzoin and oil of eucalyptus were some of the wets. The stuff put into a vaporizer whose mingled odor in the steam certified a sickroom. Bicarbonate of soda was one of the dries. They were sold over-the-counter as part of a section dividing the prescription area from the front.

The front was where customers stood. Back in the day the Rx compounding area was raised so the pharmacist was looked up to as he presided between globes of colored water. My father was on that pedestal for me but now I was eye to eye with a man faking a cough to get his hands on a bottle of Terpin Hydrate with Codeine, aka G.I. Gin, which was among the wets. His signature in the registry book was required; today it was Joe Smith, tomorrow Bill Blotz. Poor guy. If the codeine didn’t get him, the alcohol did.

Wets and Dries are the last gasp of early pharmacy. Old preparations or chemicals so long in use they couldn’t be patented and sold as proprietaries still hang on. Iodine would be one; spirits of camphor another one. Epsom salts, in five pound boxes remain, usually filling the bottom shelf of the section. Flowers of sulfur (brimstone) used for acne, no longer. The wets included oil of clove for toothaches, gentian violet (anti-fungal), cascara sagrada (laxative), spirits of ammonia (smelling salt), peppermint water (mild carminative) and Stokes expectorant (demulcent and cough suppressant). Those names still get me.

I'm of two minds about these old world remedies. They are part of my early romance with pharmacy yet I also tend to discount their therapeutic value in modern medicine. When I hear of someone relying on these organic, alternative medications, I cringe. Otherwise enlightened people spend money for worthless products as if they are striking a blow against Big Pharma. The result is what I regard as a multi-billion dollar hoax industry.

In the 1970s, the FDA required proof of efficacy and safety for all items sold having a therapeutic effect. There was no pharmaceutical company to bear the expense of an approval process. Old standards such as Mercurochrome fell away along with dozens of others. 

I also fell away but that drugstore air remains in a corner of my lungs, pungent, floral and earthy in a special proportion which I can conjure with any number of old-world words…cimicifuga, asafetida, opodeldoc.

Uniforms

Watching ball games, as is my vice, I have come to accept men running around in their colored underwear, or rather their uniforms. It doth proclaim them.

Before Zuckerberg’s t-shirt or Steve Jobs’ turtleneck there were suits. Three-piece or gray flannel or those you could buy at Sears with two pairs of pants, all wool gabardine. Men wore them to see a play or fly from here to there. These days, even sports jackets are so yesterday they're ripe for a comeback. 

I wore a smock, on and off, for fifty years as a dispenser of assorted remedies and assuring words. I don’t miss mine at all.

Maybe they’ve been replaced by tattoos. We’re not our job anymore; we are individuals each making our own major statement. Egalitarianism allows us to dress down, to slum or choose a wardrobe out of thrift stores. Designers have lines of scrupulous sloppiness with ventilation at the knees. There are friends I have never seen in jeans and others who always wear them. To each his uniform.

All of which leads me to remember vanished uniforms along with the jobs themselves. Whatever happened to that young woman with her bright jacket and flashlight patrolling the aisles as she hushed us and ushered us kids into the dark movie house, darker still because it was Saturday afternoon and we always came in the middle of a film. Was she dreaming of being discovered, projecting herself on the big screen. Or did she fade to black?

Gone, too, is the doorman with his epaulets, our peacetime commander who lived on tips. He waved, whistled and launched a thousand taxis. Doormen disappeared or did they just live in movies set on Park Ave? I imagined these quasi-aristocrats fled Europe as professors or constables and had to settle for the ignominy of brass buttons.

And where are the elevator operators, in authority for the length of their shift, traveling vertical miles on one spot from Icarus to Orpheus as they alone contracted and expanded those wrought iron lungs?

The usher had no name but saw plenty of wandering arms in the balcony. Maybe the other two wrote novels in their heads from snatches overheard. They answered to first name only and remembered to speak politely to Mr. and Mrs…. on the 23^rd floor.

They slipped away unnoticed, loud uniforms, shiny buttons and all. Jackets and caps now in vintage shops, indignity and pride embedded in the fabric. In one pocket dried lipstick and a stick of gum. In another an empty flask and a check for two bucks, uncashed.

Misadventure

It’s only money. If the object of life is to die broke, I’m well on my way. For $545 I could have bought a magnificent dinner on some rooftop restaurant for a few close friends or better yet, donated to a fund for saving the lives of bombed out children with medical needs.

But none of the above happened. Instead, I paid that money to retrieve my car after it was towed away for parking in a spot designated (in small print) for valet service owned by an upscale eatery called Elephantine.

I had met my two friends at the Laemmle theater in Santa Monica for a three o’clock showing of the new Christian Petzhold film, Mirror-3. All his movies are highly recommended.

In the last two works by this director, cars play an important part. In this current one, an accident kills the driver but his passenger escapes unharmed and that sets in motion the entire narrative. His previous film entitled Afire involves two men dying as they try to tow their own car. For me, it was a bad omen foretold.

Does anyone really believe in omens? After all, the Ides of March passed unremarkably. Synchronicity is another thing. As I was reading the word moth, a moth flew out of nowhere. It happens all the time. Not only moths but friends or relatives die or win lotteries at the moment they might enter your mind even though you haven’t thought of Uncle Max for eleven years.

We enjoy these random happenings as if portals to a place beyond. We crave transcendence. Surely, there must be another dimension, why else would my car be towed?

So there I was staring at the empty space where I had parked my car. By this time, Adele was about 15 blocks away but stayed on the line with me. Tamara was walking and graciously came back to be with me even as her husband Basil was waiting for her return. I thought I spotted Petzhold filming the entire human drama unfolding.

I was given a number to call. The police were very understanding of my predictament particularly when I played my age card and reliance on my walker. They arranged for a police car to pick me up. The officer was a model of human kindness as he first drove me to the police station to pay the fine, then to the towing place (which was closed) and lastly took me home.

Janice drove me to pick up my car this morning. Now, I have almost filled a page distracting me from my carelessness, from that elephant in the room.

 

 

Taking Back The Moon

The silver apples of the moon / The golden apples of the sun.

                                                     W.B. Yeats

The moon has always been the province of poets and songwriters. And now it is a destination.  No, not for low-housing, but as a base for further space travel. One hopes not for colonizing other planets.

Of course, we knew early on it was our satellite but wolves howled at it and troubadours pined under it to the point of lunacy.

For Somerset Maugham in The Moon and Sixpence, it represented the sublime. For Shakespeare, inconstancy. Eugene O'Neill saw the moon as a symbol of redemption in his A Moon for the Misbegotten. 

In Peggy's poem, Under the Unwed Moon, she wrote, The moon in the force of its pull releases the buried bones.

It also hit your eye like a big pizza pie. The moon can’t help it if it rhymes with June, balloon and sleepy lagoon. For Robert Graves in his book, White Goddess, the moon was the supreme muse; the feminine aspect which represented birth and the life of the imagination.

No argument from me though I was brought up thinking it was made of green cheese with cows jumping over to the fiddle of hi diddle-diddle.

Gilbert and Sullivan borrowed the moon in Trial By Jury.

     The moon in her phases is found the time, winds and the weather / You cannot eat breakfast all day nor put two Mondays together.  

Here G&S remind us that Monday is a contraction of Moon-day.

Again, in the Yeoman of the Guard, the moon belongs to lovers.

   It is sung to the moon / by a love-lorn loon ….. He sipped no sup, and he craved no cup /As he sighed for the love of a ladye.

In my day, which is close to prehistory, there was Les Paul and Mary Ford's rendition of How High the Moon and Audrey Hepburn singing Moon River. How many times did Frank Sinatra fly to the moon on gossamer wings? Cat Stevens walked to fame in Moon Shadow.

It's once in a blue moon that we get such as Beethoven's Piano Sonata Number 14, thirty years later renamed Moonlight Sonata. And then there was Claude Debussy's Clair De Lune.

That word lunacy has a troubled history. In the ancient world a full moon became the culprit for an unsound mind. It also got tied in with female menstruation which was a mystery to unsound males. Lunatic asylums were so named for millennia. It was Barack Obama, in 2012, who signed a bill striking the word from all legislation forever more. It wouldn't surprise if Trump restores it. 

Go ahead, let NASA circle the moon. From where I stand it still casts a spell, bitten, gibbous or full.

Emergency of Spring

Millions marching costumed as wildflowers emerge on city streets in exodus from the king’s bondage, his masked storm troopers, Middle East / Wing in rubble, he's desecrated the oval, eggs of Easter- yeast rising as an insurrection against depravity in an upheaval against the edicts of war as buildings fall with children huddled, like petal-closed buds, their unlived lives, a procession merging hands across America, of chariots swung low, tendrils, rhizomes, old and new testaments derived from testicles held in oath, phallic spires, erection-resurrection toward a promised place, pass the bitters, bless the wine, good eggs hard boiled go up the hill with Jesus, Moses and Jack and Jill to fetch and pitch nine commands and one for extra innings, take two for C.B. De Mille with his cast of thousands, no time for leavened bread, for corn rye sliced thin with seeds, but seeds, yes seeds for hope and homelands, for miracles, for turning cheek to cheek, think Fred & Ginger, think love against which hate has no answer cause Jesus don't like killing no matter what the reason for, the equinox is vernal, something to shout about, a havoc of poppies wearing April dresses, odes of them in terraced stanzas strutting their stuff from plots to flower pots to bombed and empty lots; let me hear that trumpet in the daffodil, the sax in the foxglove, what was dormant is now emergent...

 

Ladybug and Distant Carnage

 I'm walking in the park and now I reward myself with a gulp of cold water from a thermos. I have covered the equivalent of about 4 blocks with the help of my walker. This is my half-way point today. I find a bench with a back. No small thing. It's only  springtime but the living is easy.

My trusted walker does more than keep me vertically balanced. It has a pouch. How else could I have lugged this nearly 800-page book by Rebecca West?

I settle into a shady spot on this sunny afternoon half a world away from the atrocities of overhead missiles and drones. No sirens, no blasts. I have been sheltered my entire life from the daily struggle to survive. I can dial my reality. Now images of destruction, now commentary, but all at a distance. The remote in my hand is well-named. I can even mute toxic voices.

The story I’m reading is The Return Of The Soldier; a tale set in the English countryside between the two world wars. The soldier suffers from what was then called shellshock. Lives were squandered in that so-called Great War which was a crime against humanity. Deliberate slaughter is unknown in other species.

It is as if I am reading about myself sequestered in bucolic civility while across the water limbs are lost, children orphaned and telegrams are making widows out of wives. My life is spared, even charmed, by the cosmic crapshoot of geography.

After a few minutes, a ladybug lands on my page. She is a model insect to behold with six black spots enclosing a larger one almost heart-shaped in the middle on a reddish dome. I am transfixed as she struts across the margin. I understand this is a sign of good luck, as if I needed that affirmation. In mid-sentence she opens her wingspan and flies away. My version of shock and awe.

The beauty of this beetle has distracted me. Ladybugs are revered in gardens as a natural predator against aphids and mites. One can eat 5,000 in a lifetime. However, they, in turn, are the prey of birds and some larger insects.

Just when life seems pacified, I’m reminded of these conflicts unseen being played out in the grass, even underground. Should I take back what I said about wars among other species? No. Their cycle of predation is their ecosystem. We have no excuse. We have been gifted with ponder and the capacity to love while at the same time, cursed with anxiety and fear leading to domination.

The father of a 3-year-old alongside my bench, remarked on Rebecca West, which gave me hope yet for civilization. I thought of a book by the poet Ann Lauterbach called On A Stair which she said could also be pronounced Honest Air. I felt reinvigorated walking back. 

Baseball As Poetry

I’m told by friends, who don’t want to hurt my feelings, that they enjoy my blogs…. except for those about baseball. Of course I sympathize with their impoverishment and must also take up the challenge in remedial education.

Many great poets and writers have embraced the game. Among them are May Swenson, William Carlos Williams, John Updike, Marianne Moore, Donald Hall, Jack Spicer and Shakespeare. I just threw him in to see if you were paying attention.

To turn away from baseball is to reject your ancestry. Rumors have it that early man broke off a branch and swatted away an approaching rock thus giving birth to the rudiments of the game. The wood became a natural extension of an arm and the incoming missile could be the moon or any spherical celestial object. It is the paradigm for our defense against drones. When running, throwing, and catching were no longer necessary for survival they died as essential tools and became an art form or sport.

I can see this was too much of a stretch. It didn’t even convince me. Let me try again.

As if ordained by the gods themselves and brought down from Mt. Olympus, baseball celebrates Euclidean geometry. It turns a square into a diamond punctuated with three pillows, as safe stations, and a metaphoric home. The navigation around the bases is a hero’s journey, Odysseus-like. When home plate is finally achieved it is often accompanied by a cloud of dust to signify the arduous circumstances, with a god-like umpire passing judgement. Perhaps Zeus took pleasure in watching men fail. Sisyphus was not alone in futility. Baseball is so designed to reward a seventy percent failure rate with millions of gold pieces. Add to this, the divine correspondence of nine innings to our allotted decades on earth, with an allowance for extra innings here and there.  

Still not persuaded? Let me put it this way.

Can you hear it? The crack of the bat. The thwack of ball into mitt. The smell of green grass and hot dogs.  Baseball is so pastoral, so American, so deliberate and so inconsequential. Games will be won and lost, setting fans in anguish or jubilation, yet nothing will be really changed. Trump is still with us, the polar ice continues to melt and atrocities continue.

But here’s what changes: From opening day tomorrow to sometime in late October, a human drama will unfold without script. It is neither rigged nor predictable. An alternative narrative is enacted in real time, which makes more sense than this one we gnash our teeth over listening to cable news. The game of baseball offers the illusion, at least, of order, strategy and control. Every stance and swing will be scrutinized and the mountain of verifiable stats may not amount to a hill of beans for the uninitiated but to us the fan(atics) it is its own universe, a ritualized life and death, only to live again the next day regardless.

The game allows men of all sizes and shapes, beer bellies, hulks and shrimps, cerebral and instinctual. It attracts physically endowed jocks and bespectacled nerds. Harvard graduates are now general managers of several teams, trying to outwit their counterparts with new data, yet the core of the sport is an unquantifiable human element. What is more mysterious than a sudden slump or streak, not unlike a poet's writer's block? Even the dimensions of the playing field are inscrutable, with the precision of an infield contrasted with haphazard measurements of the outfield.

Baseball is our answer to the impermanence of life. It defines our seasons. There is an intimacy between pitcher and catcher in a shared fluency of silent gestures. Players are widely positioned spatially with anticipation coiled in their legs to dart at the instant of contact between ball and bat. And all this time the poet watches in the stands with time to ponder how life, itself, is simulated on the field.

Finally I am left with the nagging realization that I am really trying to understand why it is that I still care. The Bible says to put away childish things so I put away the Bible. At my age there is no messianic urge to convert the heathens. Rationalization is as hopeless as hitting a 100 mph fastball.

The 93rd Anniversary of Myself

Don’t make a fuss. It’s only a number. Furthermore, if mindless men in red states prevail, we will suddenly become nine months older than we thought we were. Happy fetus.

I have no memory of my day of birth. (It was 2 days after Philip Roth's and 9 days after Ruth Bader Ginsberg). I expect I was very busy that day taking my first breath and missing my umbilical time as a fish-like substance. Reports had reached me that Hitler was on the rise and I was to fear nothing but fear itself. The thought of eating apple sauce out of a Dust Bowl was not appealing at all.

Birthdays are a floating number. I contain each of my ninety-three years, some a bit more than others. The chronology doesn’t always behave. At age nineteen I was thirty-two and at forty-eight I was finally nineteen. My preference now is to be of no age which is to say, every age.

Here's what I have come to know. The best times are those outside of time when hours fly by unrecorded. Creativity and loving defy all measures of the calendar or clock. 

Being born on the equinox has endowed me with an even temperament. I hear Jung shaking his head that I must be repressing my shadow side. If my animus against all Trump-like substances isn't enough, maybe I am harboring some deviltry myself. It is true that I hate feta cheese and I've been known not to squeeze the tube of toothpaste from the bottom. 

In astrological terms I'm told I was born on the cusp of Pisces and Aries to which I say gurgle and bah.

As for infirmities, I can't think of anything more boring to talk about. So, I won't. I never realized how many body parts I have. Such a mechanism.

Did I ever tell you about the time I… Yes, you did, now be quiet. When all my stories have been told and shamelessly embellished it may be time to look out the window and marvel at this bush I have scrupulously overlooked now bursting with clusters of rhododendrons or that stump on my favorite tree, the result of overzealous pruning. The coral tree will soon be lit by red candles which I shall not blow out.

If I am running out of breath, I'm not yet running out of breadth. The imaginary candles I am blowing out on my imaginary cake do not signify the snuffing out of enlightenment. 

As a blogger I babble along with the proverbial brook though now and then I feel more aligned with the hush of it all. I have already told the world what to do and did they listen? No, they did not. Celebration feels unseemly as long as new wastelands are being created every day by unconscionable acts.

I have now lived almost as long as Poe, Keats and Plath combined, proving there is no divine plan in the allotment of years. My footprint barely registers but perhaps it’s okay not to succeed as long as one does it with an open heart. Born as I was on the first day of spring, I'd like to think I sprouted with the wildflowers.

Peggy died about 4 1/2 years ago. During my widowhood I have been blessed with a circle of loving friends. In her 100th year Peggy told me to go for it; and so I have. One woman, Adele, has become my late in life love. To be fully met in a caring and sharing relationship has added a needed dimension and joy to my daily life. My feet are on the ground but always at the ready for buoyancy.

I'm taking comfort in the words of A.K. Ramanujan, You can count all the oranges on a tree but never all the trees in a single orange. Who knows what juice still remains under the rind?

Notes on Near-Spring

 March is said to come in like a lion and go out like a lamb. For much of the world the lion hasn’t left. It is still a time of carnivores. Now, there is an urgency for spring to snuff out winter’s lease.

Spring is a season of commotion.  Are we on the brink or on the verge? A rapture of buds birthing not quite replacing the rupture and the rubble. To do honor to the fruit and flower we regard, with wonder, its full arc, including its spasm of farewell. The old rot and the new ripe.

Too bad our man at the helm has given the narcissus bulb such a bad name. (Amaryllis and daffodils are in that family.) He seems blinded by his own reflection in the mirror of the pond, covered as it is with slime.

For the rest of us, seasons signify becoming. When I write, my joy is in staying inside the poem or paragraph; not to finish but to luxuriate in the process before it becomes a mere product. Not even to stay but to meander, to hitch a ride on the bus to elsewhere. 

I'm an unmoored vessel sifting through my cargo for new seeds. The mystery is not in the still-life of succulents, but in the cycle of the speckled banana. 

I’m reminded of the way Peggy would write a poem. She could be struggling with some metaphysical concept and along might come a dog or a dog walker with an orange cap. That dog or that cap would enter into her poem, incongruently, which gave the poem an inclusiveness as if to say nothing is apart from anything else and that includes the outer with the inner, the head mingling with the heart. The poem, like all poems, is about the writing of the poem, the futile attempt to say the unsayable and the ecstasy of failing. Wisdom is in the unanswered questions punctuated by an exuberance of exclamation points.

We are creatures in motion even in our sleep. I have an idea and sleep on it. Something happens. I wake up imperceptibly changed, maybe a bit more luscious, like fruit.

Spring is a time to align ourselves with the rhythm of the peach and the melon. Because of bogus ripeness from sulfur dioxide the peach got bitten before its flesh was ready. With the melon I waited too long and had to hurry my devouring. A loving relationship has to do with discovering each other’s rhythms and disequilibrium, the struts and stumbles.

In the film, Woman In the Dunes, a man is seen collecting bugs which live in the shifting dunes. He is later trapped, like one of his specimens, in this habitat along with a woman who has made of it a home. The static world is always in motion like a movable sculpture, while the two of them find their own choreography living a shape-shifting life.  

Oscars Everywhere

These are the months when hyperbolic adjectives are dragged out to adorn movie titles. It seems as if every new film is the greatest, best, most compelling, not-to-be-missed, if-you-see-no-other of the year, the decade, of all-time. All are Oscar-worthy which got me thinking about that name, Oscar, and all the Oscars I have known. The name derives from classic Irish, "friend of deer."

Sixty years ago my first job as a pharmacist was with Thrifty Drugs in Beverly Hills. I was newly licensed and thrust suddenly into a galaxy of Hollywood stars. Cary Grant called up one day to make sure his wife, Betsy Drake’s uppers and downers, were put on a separate bill from his. Robert Cummings stayed young buying vitamins I couldn’t talk him out of. My favorite customer was Oscar Levant. In his lugubrious voice he would phone for early refills on his favorite sedative, Paraldehyde, which fell out of favor decades ago. I’d hate to think I contributed to his delinquency.

He really didn’t need my help plunging from wunderkind piano virtuoso, composer, radio star of Information Please, actor, author, and wit to mental patient stung by his own acerbic tongue as if he quipped himself to death. He was one of the most quotable entertainers in town, e.g. In some situations I was difficult, in odd moments impossible, in rare occasions loathsome but at my best unapproachably great.

Oscar Levant never won an Oscar but Oscar Homolka, the Viennese-born character actor, got a nomination for his supporting role in I Remember Mama…a movie I’d sooner forget. Oscar Peterson was another Oscar I saw several times when he performed at Birdland back in the early 50s. His fingers moved on the keyboard effortlessly yet so dazzlingly I was carried away with the cigarette smoke.

Oscar Hammerstein II was possibly the most famous Oscar of them all in my lifetime. His grandfather, Oscar the first, born 1850, made a fortune in cigars but also built eleven theaters mostly in what came to be known as Times Square. Oscar, the younger, won two Oscars for best song. He wrote hundreds too numerous to mention collaborating first with Jerome Kern in Showboat and later with Richard Rodgers. Hammerstein also mentored Stephen Sondheim who has taken musical theater far beyond Oscar’s reach.

Oscar, he of Academy Award fame, owes its origins to the stuff legends are made of. There are at least four claims to the naming from Bette Davis to Walt Disney to Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky, to Margaret Herrick, librarian of the Motion Picture Arts and Science. She is said to have looked at it back in 1931 and thought it bore a resemblance to her uncle, Oscar.

With apologies to Oscar Wilde, Oscar de la Renta, Oskar Werner and  Oscar Robertson, I have almost depleted my store of Oscars. Not a bad gallery of dignitaries. The name has never ranked high among boy’s names; it is now 175^th in popularity with about 1500 new Oscars in maternity wards each year. One version of its genesis derives from the French word for Golden City which would be apt for the 8.5 lb. trophy.

Finally a nod to Oscar Mayer Weiners whose jingle was once suggested to replace the Star Spangled Banner as our national anthem.  It works for me.

Dreadful Times

Bombs dropping. Carnage in the streets. People fleeing. Dictators violating international law. A country is divided. A sense of dread across the world. Then as now.

This could be the present or the future but I am describing the past. It is late summer, 1940. Hitler has unleashed the blitzkrieg over England. Poland has fallen in the east and Belgium and France are occupied by the Nazis.

The U.S. is receiving refugees and the first peacetime draft is underway. Roosevelt has started to aid England with the Lend Lease program but the tenor of our country is half isolationist.

In a three-story brownstone in Brooklyn Heights by the East River there lived W.C. Auden, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Paul and Jane Bowles, Carson McCullers and Gypsy Rose Lee. This Bohemian-like enclave was the brain-child of George Davis, the flamboyant raconteur editor of Harper’s Bazaar magazine. In a single issue of that magazine Davis published Collette, Elizabeth Bishop, Katharine Anne Porter and Stephen Spender.

Over the next 18 months this address was, arguably, the hub of American literati living a communal style fueled by the urgency of war. This moment in history is so well-captured by Sherill Tippins in her 2005 book The February House.

All-night parties included Aaron Copland, George Balanchine, William Saroyan, Kurt Weil and Lotte Lenya, the three children of Thomas Mann, Salvadore Dali and Richard Wright who later moved in.

Carson McCullers was the toast of the town having just published The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter at age 23. Britten was working on his operetta, Paul Bunyan and Gypsy Rose Lee started her first novel, G-String Murders. It was a hive of creative minds.

Rent was $75/month shared equally by the residents. The Depression was still being felt for some while Gypsy Rose Lee earned $4,000/week from Mike Todd’s extravaganza at the World’s Fair.

At the same time, the British emigres, Auden, Britten and Isherwood were being denounced as cowards by their homeland. Britten made his way back to England in 1942 but Auden remained and became an American citizen. He was struggling with his loss of faith, which I take to mean faith in the human race. The book includes conversations between Auden and the theologian Reinhold Neibuhr.

I was alive through all this but my experience as a child was the sense of a struggle between the forces of good and evil and we were the good guys. By age ten (1943) I never doubted our victory over fascism. After all, I was buying war bonds, collecting tin foil and even knitting squares for blankets. Two of my closest friends were German refugees. With those clandestine meetings on the other side of my bedroom wall, I went to sleep driving Nazis from Stalingrad.

Auden and others were also conflicted with the role of an artist / writer in dreaded times as is the case today. In his original poem “1939” the last line rings true for me. We must love one another or die. He later changed it to read, love one another and die. In the final version he omitted the line altogether. It still has resonance 87 years later. Without love we die inside. 

Two Moroccan Films

Casablanca. Say that word and the Bogart / Bergman movie comes to mind even though it was shot in the Warner Bros studio in Burbank.

My two favorite films seen recently were shot in Casablanca and directed by the Moroccan born Maryam Touzani. Adam (2019) and The Blue Caftan (2022) are everything American filmmakers seem unable to achieve. Without deafening noise, explosions or sci-fi confections, each touches the souls of their characters. Nor is there any psychological probing on display.

It is through unspoken gestures that the camera, alone, reveals moments of a life-changing dimension. In Adam we see a widow’s face carrying the weight of the world, slowly melt as she rediscovers joy in her eyes while her body moves to the rhythms of Moroccan music.

In another scene we witness her reawakening while kneading dough. Her hands take on a sensuality. In its sweep, the camera transports us as we align with Touzani’s close-ups and a spirited humanity emerges.

The power of these films is in its simplicity. In the Blue Caftan, the complex heroic character of the husband is revealed wordlessly, only through the language of cinema. 

At the same time, each of these films is quietly subversive as one challenges the conventions of the male domination which consign women into a circumscribed life. In the surprising final scene of the other, the potency of love overwhelms a societal taboo.

American story-telling is most-often accompanied with bombast appropriate for a pre-adolescent brain. The operative word is power. Violence is obligatory as befits a nation out to police the planet, accompanied by high decibels as if to wake our numbed senses whose attention must be wrested from their smartphones.  

I found the two Moroccan movies on Kanopy, a free streaming site offered by local libraries. Touzani's latest film, Calle Malaga, will soon be available on streaming.

 

 

 

 

 

Like A Virus, Mutating

People and viruses mutate. Our President has devolved since his first term from the man-child with a penchant for nastiness to an egomaniacal miscreant unfettered to our foundational precepts. In a sense, humans are just oversized microorganisms, capable of even greater virulence. Fortunately our species has developed a brain and an ethos, albeit not evenly distributed.

Viruses need to keep mutating to survive the onslaught of modern medicine. This year's influenza virus seems impervious to the vaccine which was based on last year's version. One such colony has found a homeland in my throat, nose and sinuses.

Not all viruses are bad viruses. In fact, some protect us. But in this case I rely on my immune system which is, unfortunately, already compromised. However, I'm awaiting the cavalry of antibodies to drive out the pathogens.

Turning toward our delusional Commander-in-Chief, his muscular view of the world, however compensatory it may be, threatens to ignite a regional if not a global war. He and his circle exhibit a callous indifference to human suffering. All the signs were there in his first administration but he was restrained by wiser and more experienced advisors. They have now been replaced by sycophants. 

It may well be that authoritarianism is not simply imposed on a people but it taps into a latent impulse of a constituency to be herded like sheep, told what to do, where not to stray and when to say Bah.

I expect my flu virus will soon find me inhospitable and move on. Yet in a larger sense we are all infected by this new order that has uncaged the beast within; which legitimizes violence, mocks intellect, villifies dissenters, and defiles the office of the presidency. 

The immune system of our social contract is now under assault  from within. Like an autoimmune disorder, our core values are being overthrown. In terms of virology, an immunosuppressant is called for. I have no prescription to remedy this, except resistance, whatever form that may take.

 

    

Time To Give It Up

After agonizing hours of deliberation, vacillation and a distinct shrug from my vast constituency, I have decided not to run for Governor. We’ve had a family conference including the pet rock and the dog I don’t have plus a random sampling of customers waiting in line at Costco. 

The sense is that the field is already too crowded with an ex-congreswomen, two ex-mayors, an ex-cabinet secretary, ex-controller, a sitting congressman, a billionaire and assorted others totaling nine candidates.

Perhaps the propitious time has passed me by. I peaked too early having served as wardrobe monitor in kindergarten. (I excelled at sorting galoshes). I was elected milk monitor in 1^st grade and designated pencil monitor in 2^nd grade. Let it be noted that I did not embezzle any of those pennies, nor is it true that I got high on wood shavings. In 7^th grade I was chosen to receive the gift left by the 8^th grade upon graduation and in 8^th grade I was the one presenting the token gift thus demonstrating my ability to give and take. One might say I flamed out in early adolescence.

Now that I have dropped out we need seven other Democrats to take one for the team. Give it up. Flip a coin or have a food fight but the field of worthy names must be whittled down to two. 

The Primary is a mere three months away; this is serious stuff. Apparently none of them are polling more than 20%. By splitting the pie into so many slices, the two Republican candidates are quite possibly going to be the only names on the final ballot. That's the way our California primary system works. It is not one from each party but the two highest vote-getters. This could be a tragedy caused by oversized egos. I'm waiting to hear them drop.

It also pains me to watch the field of Democrats attack each other; all fodder for the Repugnants. There is only one issue for this election and for the ones around the country coming up in November, and again in 2028. That is electability. Who can reach the critical mass of voters with electile dysfunction; too busy taking photos of their french toast to realize where their bread is buttered.

Who would vote for anyone from a party who supports a man whose early record reveals that he ran with scissors, didn't play well with others and threw spitballs? The malignancy of Trump which has metastasized into every aspect of his reign cries out for full triage, an urgency to reverse the wreckage of our democracy. A vote for a Republican is a vote for another sycophant. 

An internecine squabble among Democrats ensures a Republican victory.Those who give it up will be celebrated as martyrs. They can join me playing with galoshes and sharpening pencils.

 

Boxes

My first job, age twelve, was delivering hats on the subway from Queens to Manhattan.  The man in the change booth knew the weight of twenty nickels for a buck. I needed only two for a round trip on the F train. Maneuvering three or four big boxes became part of my skill-set.                           

I never saw the feathered flowers Mrs. Danziger had fashioned or the artistry she sculpted from velvet and scraps of ribbon. She lived below us in apt. 2-F. A quarter a box was my pay. Soon I would be rich.

New Yorkers in straw seats wore their subway faces, assured of anonymity, staring into defeat or dreaming of the next stop off the map. I was the kid behind those boxes in that August heat of 1945. One hand gripped the straps while I disappeared, ground up by the overhead fan. In the whoosh and whir we went from Jackson Heights under the East River to a city that buzzed in a long afternoon.

I emerged on Lexington Avenue, proud of how I mastered the Manhattan grid, scooting from one swanky address to another, unseen, as I darted from Bloomingdale's to Bergdorf Goodman or Saks Fifth Avenue.

No longer twelve, I was now going on thirteen that summer when something died in me and something was born. Yahweh, was gone when FDR died. Death everywhere: depraved, bestial acts revealed, mass graves, Hiroshima, burned flesh. Going on thirteen was a secular bar mitzvah. I was initiated in the crush of it all.

I started thinking outside my boxes of divisions I hadn't noticed before. The well-dressed walked through the front door and soared with the uniformed elevator operator announcing women's apparel and notions. Sometimes a great notion. Others, like me, were relegated to the rear entrance and got yanked up with the freight. No spiffy regalia, no notions, no ceiling to protect me.

To think I could disappear in a sweaty subway. To know I had crossed that river. To believe I would not be crushed in the lift was an act of faith. To imagine I could live my life with the perils of indifferent streets. I would make my way with Mrs. Danziger’s creations, her felt and lace, her flight from the shtetl, refugee to these safe shores in her plumed birds, her deliverance.

Hats and words weigh next to nothing. I still carry an invisible box weightlessly. Millinery birds and words on the wing and always that elevator up and the risk of climbing.

Olympics

Blame the Greeks…….or credit them. The coming together of nations is both a giant step for humankind and also one which soon devolves into a divisive competition. Seen from the space station, an astronaut recently commented on how our planet looks. There are no borders; just, arguably, six distinct land masses. What we call a map of the world is just a construct of jagged lines left over from tribal times or by regal decree.

The Olympics foster nationalistic rivalries at the same time as it joins athletes in camaraderie. Who will receive the most gold, silver and bronze? Which country will have their flag raised and anthem sung? Do I care?

There is also something unnatural about the events. It’s the precision, the exactitude, slavishness to the clock, the scale and the rigidity of the straight line. There are no straight lines in Nature. Think trees and rocks. Hopi Indians knew to punch a tiny hole of imperfection in their pots so as not to compete with the gods.

Why punish the body to fit the ideal? I raise my glass to messy humanity. Bring on the Deviationist, the Revisionist! Why does a young person train eight hours a day for years and return home in disgrace having been nosed out by four-one-hundredths of a second? Why must mastery of the body be quantified? Does a wobble or a bobble signify the measure of a person? 

How is it that a nation of gifted and devoted athletes can bring their resources and passion to excel but cannot find the will or concern to serve their homeless and disadvantaged citizens?

I watch and they all look wonderful. I still can’t tell a toe-loop from an axel from a Salchow. They spin, they split, they soar and sometimes they spill. So what? Let it be an exhibition instead. Ice dancing is an art and artists shouldn’t be in competition and be scored. Do we pit Matisse against Picasso or Van Gogh? I hope not. Virginia Wolff declined an O.B.E. reminding the committee that her mother taught her never to accept candy from strangers.

Of all the measurements of speed, endurance and accuracy the least defensible has to be the Biathlon which combines cross-country skiing with rifle shooting. After the spate of massacres we have endured one wonders how the hell this paramilitary exercise is to be prized and honored.

Celebrate them all and skip to the closing ceremony. Melt the medals. The winners are those who made new friendships, who found kindred spirits from distant lands, embraced their rivals; for everything beyond the judge’s hypercritical scrutiny.

After watching for a couple of hours, I can feel the judge from Kazakhstan over my shoulder, taking off points for the way I tie my shoes or whether the toast is burnt. Next event: Tooth Brushing.

This is my slalom down the white page. Sisyphus just passed me on the way up.

 

Footnotes To History

Since we no longer have a president but a quasi-monarch instead, it wouldn’t hurt to resurrect some of our least-known occupants of the White House. I nominate John Tyler, our tenth president,  for this honor, and with good reason. It is better to die virtually unknown than it is to live in infamy as will be the fate of the present occupant.

In spite of his undistinguished legacy of achievements, Tyler holds several records that will never be matched. 

Most astonishing is the fact that he is the only person to have been born in the 18^th century (1790) , and have a grandson in the 21^st century. The offspring, aged 97, passed away last summer, ending a link spanning four centuries.

Tyler was the father of 15 children; one short of a football plus a basketball team. He is the answer to the question: Who is the only president to have married during his presidency?

Tyler’s first wife died on a ship in the Potomac when a new cannon went off killing her and a prominent orator. Who do you suppose married the daughter of that speaker? You betcha. She gave birth to his last 8 children.

Perhaps fathering babies distracted him from bending the country toward justice and equality. In fact, he was disowned by his own Whig Party. However he gave new meaning to the notion of a more perfect union.

Tyler took office in 1841 when William Henry Harrison died one month after taking the oath as our newly elected President. The campaign slogan of the day was: Tippecanoe and Tyler Too. Harrison was a national hero for having killed the Indian chief Tecumseh in the War of 1812. It seems that genocide was a popular pastime in the 19th century.

Tecumseh was a brilliant orator, himself, who fought, in vain, to unite the Native American tribes in resistance to U.S. expansion. Another footnote to history is the fact that Gen. Wm. T. Sherman, whose decisive march through Atlanta ending the Civil War, was given Tecumseh as his middle name.   

History is a continuum and all this is part of our national fabric. Ten of our first twelve presidents, including Tyler, were slaveholders; the exceptions being the two Adams. Our tapestry is woven with many ignoble threads. History ignored, invites the peril we now endure.