Travelers

With all the attention the movie version of The Odyssey has been receiving my thoughts have turned to another intrepid traveler, Barry Lopez.

Homer’s Odysseus met with every possible temptation, threat and struggle to return home. On one level it is a triumph over what we now call PTSD. Ten years recovery, after ten years as a warrior.

It could also be read as a testosterone-driven adventure for young adults. But it is better understood as an allegory with his ordeals representing a series of psychological states of mind. Each challenge is met with ingenuity, courage, expediency and reason, asserting himself against the fury of the gods. Ultimately, there is a yearning, above all else, for the feminine principle in order to gain his full humanity. 

Barry Lopez died six years ago. His genius ranged from great writing to geology, anthropology and photography, with a fearless exploration of harsh ecosystems, from equatorial deserts to polar tundras. He lived with arctic wolves and survived forty feet waves around Antarctica, as well as witnessing the wonder of one hundred kangaroos leaping in the Australian Outback.

Unlike Odysseus he wasn't seduced by lotus or sirens. He didn't need Circe to lure him into untamed and unknown. His quest was for the felt experience and the people who live on that margins of survival. He walked into an old-growth rainforest to feel the sense of being lost. At the same time he tested himself enduring spatial closeness. 

His brilliance as a writer cannot be overstated. He was able to transport readers to confront their elemental selves and discover their own inner wilderness. His body of work erases categories. He was an essayist, author of eight works of fiction and winner of the National Book Award for non-fiction. His final book, Horizons reads like a memoir as he recounts six of his previous excursions into nether regions.

Above all else he was a humanitarian with a voice both urgent and lyrical. He wrote of the perils facing our planet even as he delivered affirmations with a reverence for life. I heard echoes of Thoreau and Loren Eiseley, as he noted that undisturbed land not only heals but brings a state of transcendence, releasing us to appreciate the wonder of otherness. He warned that violence to the earth, as in mining or drilling, begets violence to ourselves.

Lopez showed us that constancy is an illusion. The Yupik and Inuit now live with an existential threat of an environment in transition. It has been widely written about but it can only be experienced by being there as Lopez was. His witness adds a new dimension. What is regarded as a dreaded phenomenon to scientists was a numinous moment in time to Lopez. How these people strategize their survival and the thousands of indigenous folks who fought extinction before them, warrant our first-hand attention. We have much to learn from them.

Through his contact with indigenous people from pole to pole, he was able to re-dream the world for us. Against our xenophobia, he pled for diversity, for hard listening to the aborigines and trampled people everywhere, the wisdom revealed in their storytelling. Their art aspires to converse, and such a conversation is imperative. 

It isn't my intention to conflate the lives of Odysseus and Lopez. One was, arguably, the prototype of modern man in an epic poem and the other a real life national treasure. The former made his way to his imagined home after vanquishing all manner of foe while our contemporary polymath found his home among inhospitable locations on the map.   

Barry Lopez's voice embodies the human predicament and a fierce defense of our planet along with a certain poetic cadence aligned with the pulse of the earth.

 

Monarchs

No, not him again. True, they both have a thing for Mexico and favor orange with darkness around their edges, but the ones I’m thinking of have wings and they flap across the border, undocumented. As far as I know none are rapists.

Our subspecies potentate just prances around his gold-gilt bathrooms eyeing spigots and hurls verbal spitballs or gets ridden around the greens putting balls into holes.

Aside from all the other ills of this fragile planet, monarch butterflies are facing eviction from their winter home. The next time your order avocado toast, think again. The fir trees where millions go to cuddle in the winter, are being systematically cut down. Farmers on that land are planting avocado trees in their place. There is no money in butterflies but Mexico produces 80% of the world’s guacamole which fed sports fans while watching the World Cup. There were more tree stumps left than goals scored.

Here I am, trying to catch the butterfly of the moment even though the best I can do is note all the flutterbys I failed to net. Why butter, I wonder? Flutter is better than butter, so say I and now I know the answer though I wish I could withdraw the question: Because their excrement looks like butter says Google, as if it were flying cows. From now on I’ll take my toast dry, thank you, and that could be my butterfly moment with patterns made by my toaster oven on the low-carb, high fiber Keto bread, but hold the excrement, and besides what other species is named after their poop, I ask you?

Monarchs migrate 3,000 miles from eastern Canada to the High Sierras in Mexico. However it takes 4-5 generations for a round trip. They feast on toxic milkweed. Apparently, one creature's poison is another's banquet. Predators find out that monarchs are devoutly to be avoided.

They are defenseless, however, against human predators with our nets and pins. We seem to have cultivated predation into an artform. I can’t imagine that butterflies enjoy being pinned. After all, life is short enough orchestrating their choreography among the wildflowers. Their lifespan is about 6-8 weeks. They must die of exhaustion, a week being a decade but who's counting?

I wonder if their brief days are a frenzy or are there patterns, as in toast, we can't see? Jesus, is that you, Jesus or is it Walt Whitman? To be permitted to hold my gaze into those leaves of grass if only for a split nanosecond, seems to me a better use of butter as they flutter by. Put me on the wings of the lepidoptera as it dreams of its past life as a caterpillar, then a chrysalis; always on the verge of its next incarnation.

The Lost Language Of Chirps

It's come to this. Most of my friends have hearing aids. The rest don't know what they're missing. We get to hear utensils drop in restaurants, highly amplified. We also are treated to closed captioning not only for what is being said by humans but for howls and snarls of lurking beasts as well bird's honks, hoots, twirps and chirps. Not that we hear them but we are told they're happening.

Birds chirping seem to be the obligatory opening lines for detective stories set in bucolic England. It translates to, You'll never guess what's about to happen in this quaint Cotswold village. If nameless birds aren't chirping then gulls must be screeching. I prefer the chirp where I can be lulled into somnambulance. 

If the scene is set in Brooklyn we might get boids choiping particularly on Turd Avenue and Turdy-Turd St. Then we’re in for 90 minutes of crooked cops, back alleys, a topless dancer going to night school for a law degree and a car chase destroying a dozen fruit stands and pushcarts. Is that a chirp or a garbage truck backing up?

However nothing compares to the sunny hamlets with thatched roofs, riddled with crime and no one does it as well as the Brits. Their supply of detective stories is inexhaustible. Tough-gentle, scruffy-clean cut, oversized-frail, alcoholic-teetotalers, clergymen, classicists, hard or soft-boiled.

People with fully functioning ears may not know that a chirping bird is often sufficient to set off a mild-mannered septuagenarian on a killer rampage. Who knew what evil lurked behind those bake sales and cricket matches? Maybe it was the white suits that drove Fitzroy Fitzmorris to plot the demise of the former Lieutenant of the 3rd Fusiliers and local headmaster.

For the first 40 minutes every one of the eleven suspects interviewed tells whooping lies. As the truth is grudgingly revealed it becomes clear, from the couch, who the murderer is…..only to be dashed as his body turns up bludgeoned with a fire iron. 

Suddenly each face changes, birds stop chirping and crows start cawing accompanied by organ music. The Detective Inspector overhears a conversation at the pub and has an epiphany. Everyone is to gather in the library. He methodically eliminates the culprits one by one until……..yes, we say, he didn’t fool me for a minute. It is, of course, the retired benign viscount whose cunning chess moves are played, in human scale, out on the village green. The inspector then returns to take tea with his perfect wife and birds can be heard chirping once more.

Of course, the chirping birds knew all along who did the dastardly deed. If we were fluent in the lost language of chirps we could have saved ourselves all this sleuthing.

The formula, set in Albion stone, is reaffirmed. Order has been restored. Truth will out. The gardens are untrammeled. Songs can be heard from the pub. On the lawn of the manor house a croquet ball has been hit squarely through a portal. We shall, for reasons unknown, sleep well tonight.

Deprived are those without captioning. They have to do their crime-solving without benefit of bird calls. Only we hearing impaired get to know that birds are chirping once again.

World Cup Fans In The Stands

I tried to care about the World Cup but suddenly nothing happened. Like Trump at Madison Square Garden during Knicks basketball playoff game, I nodded off. Yet every time I woke up, I had missed something; a penalty shot, a free kick, maybe even a goal. Perhaps if I took the time to learn what an off-side or an infraction is, it might help. But I'm too ossified to enthuse about men, once again, throwing, kicking or clubbing balls into holes. Yes, it is better than throwing each other into pits, but still.

Go ahead, call me an Ugly American. 3.5 to 5 billion soccer fans can't be wrong. On the other hand, McDonalds sells 76 burgers every second, world-wide. They go for up to $25 at a World Cup match. When they sold 300 hundred billion they stopped counting. At my age big numbers no longer impress.

I'm not one to sneer over sports events. We get to chose our alternative universe. Baseball is in my bloodstream. I can watch a game and write a blog at the same time. I don't scoff at slow. Runs are hard to come by; the average game has about 6-7. 

Basketball has become a too high-scoring game with each team averaging over 100 hundred points. I can handle the last 2 minutes. Football keeps my attention with 30-50 points scored between the 2 teams.  

Fandom makes no sense. I know, I'm one of them. It is an exercise in the irrational which taps into the reptilian brain. It strikes me that the phenomenology of being an avid fan is more pronounced today than ever before. Passions have been sublimated into identification with a particular jersey. Stadiums are bursting with cheers and jeers. The throng is living or dying vicariously with the fate of their team. And yet, nothing in real life changes.

Of course, the fan knows this. We will go home (or get up from the couch) and register the elation or dejection for an hour or two. For those who bet, it's different story. An estimated 50 billion dollars has been wagered on this World Cup. Go figure!

On some level, fans are players in this theater of the absurd. It is a meta world enacting grievances as if the outcome will redress those complaints.

I am taken in by the crowd screaming, praying, rising en masse with each turn, projecting their imagined selves onto the field. The image of 60,000 ardent souls wearing the colors of their team's uniforms, coiled in expectation, is an arresting sight. From a distance it is a Pointillist painting or a Pollock action drip, a splattering of red or smear of green on the canvas. The painter might discover an abstract splash from his palette to capture the vortex of shoe and ball headed for the open net. Or possibly the head of a leaping player altering the trajectory of the soccer ball. 

Half the fans will get drunk in revelry. The other half may also drown their sorrows in drink, cursing missed calls, the refs and their fallen idols who let them down, just like life itself.

Berra Not Serra

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choice Words

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

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

The only aristocracy is that of consciousness. 

D.H. Lawrence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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All children are poets

until they stop reaching for

butterflies that are not there. Dunya Mikhail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Independence Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

  

Straddling Two Worlds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By The Dawn's Early Light

Up at five.

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

Waking does not end the dream.

Reviewing that embryonic summer of ’32, 

umbilically speaking.

Half awake but woke and half in pillowed drift,

turning swords to words,

over my head in this stream of streams,

a hummingbird in strenuous stillness,

ashore to find my loom of hanging threads.

I do everything I never ever...

Run three miles,  Fifty push-ups.

Pilates, Tai Chi, Yoga …no sweat.

Pedal to Patagonia on stationary bike.

Walk the dog I don’t have.

Water my pet rock, Feed the fish,

Listen to Art Pepper.

Prune the herb garden.

Thinking about Johnny Mercer songs.

Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe.

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

Tempus ... big hands ... fugit.

This Train Was Made For Glory. Midnight Special.

Planning my afterlife.

The java is roasted, the bagel is toasted.

An occasional rhyme happens

in this familiar chaos I call order

to meet another ho-hum day.

Last train to Clarkesville.

 

All Happening At The Market

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

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

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

There goes Walt Whitman hearing America's yawp through leaves of grass. I’m listening to Benny Goodman's clarinet Sing, Sing, Sing.

There are no women to come and go speaking of Michelangelo or even Joe DiMaggio. Where have you gone, Clifton Fadiman? We need your Information, Please. Answers are in Jeopardy.

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

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

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

 

Fathering

At age thirty, in 1963, I was the father of three daughters. There is no rehearsal for the human drama known as parenting. It is all improvisational theater. My wife and I stumbled and bumbled our way along. Having children, you hear a calling for your nature to nurture.

At the same time, we were discovering ourselves. She was taking courses in college while I was trying to come to terms with my chosen profession. My own education was limited to Pharmacy with very little exposure to the humanities. I found myself getting a smattering of knowledge from my wife’s school books. She was a sociology major. I even wrote some of her term papers. 

While struggling with who we were, Janice was born in 1962 with a profound hearing loss. We chose to enroll her in the John Tracy Clinic where for four years she learned to lip-read and speak. Oralism became her first language. Signing came later. Whether this was the wise choice remains an unanswered question. In any case, mothering and fathering took on an enhanced role. We taught her every word she knew at that time. 

Janice hears through her eyes. When she entered the public school system at age six her receptive language expanded through signing with her new friends. Her special needs reset our attention given to her sisters, Shari and Lauren. 

I look back through an opaque lens. So much is a blur. Shari was tasked, too early, to take on household chores and baby-sitting. Her mother was overwhelmed. I did much of the laundry and shopping while working six days a week. What held us together, I hear you ask. 

Lauren had her own special needs as a middle child. I remember her difficulty with math and how I devised some crazy way for her to never forget that 8 plus 6 is 14. Then there was her dancing, in the living room, to music from Zorba the Greek. I passed along my love of Gilbert and Sullivan. Words became a fascination for her along with history. She was the only Caucasian in her black history class.

Shari grew up with a strong sense of herself. She was an excellent student. I witnessed her world becoming wider the evening I took her to a Joan Baez concert. Her first job was at a donut shop which opened at 4 AM. catering to truckers. I drove her. She is the only one of us who learned sign language and fingerspelling. Did we deprive her of a part of her childhood by burdening her early on? Another question I can pose to myself but not answer. 

It pleases me so much that all my daughters have access to their inner worlds. Shari has rendered her imaginative life onto canvases. Lauren writes with verve and wit and Janice has a lively curiosity about the world as she probes her own inscape. 

I take great pride in each one though I cannot take credit. They took in the good stuff and ran with it far beyond my reach. I have no great formulas or insights on how to be a father other than to be myself and model that behavior. Whatever values and the even temperament I possess, were probably bequeathed to me by my father. 

Daddys are supposed to set the world right. By that measure, I have failed miserably. The schoolyard bully who ran with scissors and threw spitballs is running the country while those who played well with others seem doomed. I can only hope that the rubble of democracy I have left my children contains some soft clay and seeds sufficient to repair the wreckage. 

I'd like to believe they all got the message that, to a certain extent, life is malleable and they can be their own sculptors.

Now I turn to Janice, Lauren and Shari to care for me as the future presents itself. Where did they ever learn to be so caring, wise and loving? I look to them each for their unique form of daughtering. 

Speaking About Talking

The last time I spoke was a few weeks ago at Mavis' 97th party when I read a few of my rambles. Speaking is planned, talking is what we do over a bagel or a Chinese chicken salad. I'm just saying.

There's a line in the Maltese Falcon when Sydney Greenstreet says to Bogart, I love to talk to a man who loves to talk. He then laughs his enormous guffaw. I too love to talk. I can't say enough about it. Even more, I enjoy listening. An interchange is a beautiful thing, sometimes a found poem when it flows spontaneously.

Here is a phone conversation I had with a dear friend who died about 10 years ago.

She……Hello, Peggy?

Me…….This is Norm

She……Why do you sound funny?

Me…….I’m in the shower.

She……What are you doing there?

Me…… Next to washing …..I do some of my best thinking in the shower.

She……Maybe you should wake up in the shower.

Me…… I’ve been here since last Thursday.

She……I think you’re clean by now.

Me…    A microscope shows all the organisms in our eyebrows and fingernails.

She…… And some of them are good bacteria, I’ll bet.

Me…… I wish they were labeled.

She……All creatures great and small.

Me……As we speak, trillions of microbes are going down the drain.

She……Sounds like my portfolio.

Me-       I don't even have a portfolio.

She……Failure makes you try harder.

Me…….What are we talking about? I suppose you want to speak to Peggy.

She……I forgot why I'm calling.

Me…….That’s OK. I forgot why I’m in the shower. Peggy is in the bathtub.

She........Is she thinking, too, or just getting clean?

He…….. I can hear her singing.

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I can almost hear the first known conversation spoken in grunts and gesticulations around the fire. Your cave or mine? Have I got a headache. You’re getting old. You’re 23…. Tomorrow, you hunt and I’ll gather.

The greatest leap forward was Bell's invention of Hello. Prior to Hello people didn’t know how to break the ice. Now they say What’s happening? or just Hey. If the next sentence is about the weather, you're off to a bad start. Yet, much can be said for non-verbal communication; it beats non-communicative verbiage.

Marina Abramovits, the conceptual artist, conversed wordlessly  with folks from one minute to several hours as they wished. This took place at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010. A friend of mine waited in line for seven hours to have her audience. A few seconds of eye contact brought tears to both their eyes.

So much can be expressed through our eyes, facial gestures and body language. Even in normal discourse silence is essential. As the old adage goes, If you have nothing to say the very least you can do is shut up.

On the other hand, one wonders how so little can be said in so many words. But enough about Trump. 

How many times have I overheard a monologue in a restaurant where two or three people are seated at a nearby table and only one voice is audible?

Nothing beats soulful communing; discourse without self-censure. Layers are peeled back in self-discovery just in being present for each other.

Talking to friends in an honest exchange, sharing new ideas or revelations is, itself, a subversive act. Kindred spirits in conversation create a form of resistance against a repressive regime. 

Crickets and Cicadas

Poets have been writing about cicadas since Euripedes sent his toga to Eumenides for repair, and the other day I overheard someone in line at the market speaking about crickets. I have now learned that cicadas are a completely different species from crickets. They sing by day while the crickets croon by the light of the silvery moon.

You may not care about such things but I imagine a cricket, with no sense of direction, wouldn’t be looked upon kindly in a throng of cicadas. They might serenade him to an early demise.

I always thought cicadas were the highfalutin name used by college graduates, heavily in debt and needing to show something for all that, while the rest of us just say crickets.

Marlon Brando has a great line in On the Waterfront when Eva Marie Saint suggests that he move to the country. He says, Naw, da crickets make me noivous.

He would never have said cicadas. They are related to leafhoppers and spittlebugs (you have to love them for that) and crickets have no such lineage. Neither are they in the locust family in spite of the Bob Dylan song.

Both of them sing as best they can. Male crickets have that instrument on their wings, and there's the rub, while male cicadas have their noise-makers on their tummies. When a swarm of them lets loose they can reach 90 decibels. Females have better things to do. It turns out those chirps come from troubadors crooning their repertoire of mating songs. 

I gave up singing in the 6^th grade when I was designated a Listener. Nothing cricket about that. I’m so tone deaf I have to lip-synch Happy Birthday. If I had wings to rub together, I might have been invited to more parties. I can hardly wait for my next incarnation.

The most famous cricket is, of course, Jiminy Cricket which I always took as one of those euphemisms for Jesus Christ along with Jeepers Creepers or Jumping Jehoshaphat. Some crickets can jump as high as five feet which is higher than Jehoshaphat.

People actually grow crickets in farms. Who knew? They can be used to increase protein intake for livestock. Sort of like Ensure-Plus. They also make Good Bait… one of my favorite jazz tunes.

In fact, cicadas are on the menu throughout Asia. Beware of what you order from column B. I’m told, they taste like mushy asparagus and can never be mistaken for beef broccoli.

I’m glad we’ve cleared up all these matters. Now I’m ready for those summer nights when a choir of either one or both can chirp me back to my misspent youth, suddenly lit by fireflies in the deep silence when crickets hesitate.

Taking A Deep Breath

I read somewhere that we hold thousands of smells in our olfactory vault. I wonder if I can trace my way back from today’s burnt bagel to yesterday’s gasoline fumes at the pump….and back ninety-three years to my first diaper change. I think it was on a Thursday but I really don't want to talk about it.

Donald has provided us with the malodorous stench of arrogance, degeneracy and malice. I need to clear my lungs. The flower section of Trader Joe's has many spring blossoms and some have no odor at all. Both the orchids and tulips have traded vivid colors for scent. Even those hot-house roses come to us deodorized. I feel cheated. My nose leads me to the stargazers to take a deep whiff.

Peggy first wrote her poems in a notebook with a number two pencil. I’m the guy who sharpened them. I admit getting a temporary high from the shavings. Not high enough to write my own poem but often achieving a height sufficient to write a blog.

I’m seldom hungry………until I see and smell the plate. That wakes my salivary glands and I get in trouble trying to subdue the flow. As I write this I’m thinking of the rhubarb crumble I recently devoured. Speaking of food I’m the only one I know, outside of my daughters, who doesn’t like feta cheese. In fact I can’t stand it. My brain registers it as vomit. Blame it on a blemish in my double helix.

Among other vapors I could live without are newly laid black top, coconut, rancid acacia and asafetida. I don’t expect anyone to connect with the last two. They transport me back to those years in pharmacy. In my days at my father’s drugstore, there were no glued labels. The pharmacist made his own out of acacia powder dissolved in water turned upside-down with gauze covering the opening of a wide-mouth jar. After a week or two it stunk and that rancidity has never left me. Asafetida is a gummy substance used to ward off evil spirits which emits a pungent odor one wants to run from out of the room along with the spirits.

Childhood fills my nostrils. There were faint vapors of chalk mixed with bubble-gum from baseball cards. (I was so dumb I saved the gum and chewed on the cards.) Airplane glue got me for a short time. Neatsfoot oil soaking into a leather mitt. Citronella to repel mosquitoes. Licorice or wild cherry syrup in cough medicine made respiratory infections not all that bad. The eucalyptus and compound tincture of benzoin in the vaporizer took away our suffering. My father’s store breathed a curious mixture of aromatics which he carried on his body … a smidge of Evening in Paris perfume comingled with tuna fish from the sandwich board along with malt from the fountain and all this triturated by the overhead fan with crude drugs leaking from the apothecary jars, sometimes sulfurous, mostly warming, ancient, botanical, and slightly intoxicating.

Subways smelled of sweat especially with raised arms holding onto dangling straps. The straw seats retained traces of everyone who sat there. We inhaled each other and exhaled our communal air. Maybe we even got to like what we smelled recognizing a whiff of ourselves in the mix.

Then there was Mrs. Spizzeri’s parmesan cheese cooking on the second floor from which I dashed holding my breath on the way to the sanctuary of my apartment 3 FB in our four-story walk-up. Today I love eggplant parmesan which tells me how far one comes away from those first foreign aversions before our noses accommodate and finally embrace them.

Our inspirational leader has mastered the art of deceit. But I'd like to believe that Truth always passes the sniff test. I cannot define it but I know it when I smell it.

Simple Times

Whether the late 1930s and 1940s really were simpler times, or I only thought so as seen through child's eyes, remains an unanswered question. 

I never got around to asking my father what he thought. He may have yearned for 1910 when it was an even simpler time.

Socrates complained that the youth of his day had bad manners, contempt for authority and disrespected elders. I imagine he also longed for those simple times of Homer.

Are those the years Donald is yearning for or, at least, peddling as paradise, when it is actually closer to the American mythos. While sloganeering to make us great, he is, in fact, making America grate.

We idealized the past because we had no idea of the troubles behind our innocence. I was blind to the hardships leading up to the war, the bestiality of the Holocaust and the imagined threat of nuclear annihilation.

World history and personal history have a way of conflating in one’s mind. I like to believe that America came of age exactly when I did. I was a good boy and the U.S. were the good guys. 

The simplistic patriotism of the forties yielded to a more ambiguous post-war, cold-war decade just as I was disabused of thinking I had all the answers. Hollywood grew nuanced along with me. Suddenly the good, clean-cut detective had a back story. He was a recovering alcoholic or fathered a child he abandoned in Italy. And the villain had a good heart beneath his grizzled veneer.

The broadcast-journalist, Tom Brokaw, called those men and women who endured unimaginable tough times both during the Depression, then later as G.I.’s, as The Greatest Generation. If they were the greatest I would have to settle for being only the goodest. We behaved ourselves, conforming as we did, until the sixties when we unconformed, got iconoclastic and less simple.

Simpler times may be another way of expressing a longing for youth itself, particularly for those who never grew up. The seismic changes that have quaked us into today’s world create a certain nostalgia for those snows of yesteryear. 

Much as I find history compelling, there is a trap romanticizing the past. In the 17^th century nostalgia was regarded as an affliction, a form of melancholia prevalent among sailors who  couldn't wait to return home. Maybe we are all rowing to Eden.

One day I’ll ask my grandchildren if millennials think of these times as simple. They probably won’t entertain such thoughts till they reach middle age and look back having lost their simple child’s eyes. By that time mobile phones will have been implanted in newborn’s fingers at birth. It’s really a simple procedure.  

In The Middle Of the Air

When those in human bondage looked down they saw cotton. When they looked up they saw sweet chariots coming for to carry them home. 

Ezekiel saw the wheel / Way up in the middle of the air / Ezekiel saw the wheel way in the middle of the air

Little wheel run by faith / Big wheel run by the grace of God / Ezekiel saw the wheel way in the middle of the air.

Now you never can tell what Ezekiel will do / way in the middle of the air / He lie about me / He lie about you / way in the middle of the air.

They may also have seen Lucifer falling from grace. According to Mormons Lucifer was Jesus’ brother. Not so, say everyone else. After all, only begotten sons generally don’t have brothers. Especially to rival them. Lucifer was no ordinary sort. When he fell, he landed with a thud not unlike Humpty-Dumpty who was too much for all the King’s horses and men.

Lucifer was one of those pagan figures appropriated by the Christians to suit their fable. He was, in fact, the name for Venus, the morning star which seemed to fall out of sight daily. The New Testament took his beauty, his brightness and worldly brilliance and consigned him to eternal deviltry. How dare his curiosity which can lead to defiance. 

Lucifer also takes the rap for Adam munching on that forbidden apple. Have a piece of fruit, he said, and for that gets a sentence of life plus forever. The lesson is, don’t mess with the fiction on the all-time bestseller list.

Icarus was another mythological young man who dared to defy authority. His father, Daedalus, warned his boy not to fly too close to the sun or his feathered wings held together by wax would melt. The accepted lesson seems to be that Icarus displayed hubris and paid the ultimate price. The way I see it the kid showed gumption. Who listens to their father? Fathers are yesterday’s news. The next generation pushes the envelope. How else would we have Saran Wrap?

If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him…is the name of a great book by Sheldon Kopp. Kill him metaphorically, of course. Listen to authority and then go beyond. Listen to yourself.   

Icarus was out there investigating the middle of the air and then took the plunge. But there is more to the legend. Breughel, the Elder, painted the scene depicting the legs of a figure going into the sea while a plowman is tending his field, oblivious to the important splash in the water.  Benign neglect? Calloused indifference? There is a Flemish saying, And the farmer continues to plow, describing man’s indifference to human suffering.

In 1938 W.H. Auden took that theme and ran with it. In his poem, Musee des Beaux-Arts, the poet imagines several Breughel paintings showing townfolk ice skating, playing or doing chores and never looking up to the middle of the air. Auden was dismayed at the rise of Nazism on the eve of World War II. His poem was a cautionary tale of wanton disregard for the peril at hand.

This is my long way around to warn a somnolent American public of the imperative to vote in the primary coming up and then again in November. (The expected turnout is 38% in California). Too many voters seem uninformed or complacent, busy in the counting house counting all their money or at the table eating bread and honey. We are in great peril.

Now is not the time to caulk the bathtub or become a no-show because our Democratic candidates are less than perfect. 

The Devil Donald and his sycophants with their brimstone of malice and mendacity must be defeated. To his supporters I say, question authority. The man at the podium is a false idol with no chariot to deliver you. He lie about you. He lie about himself.

Pickled Herring

My thoughts are turning to pickled herring. This is what happens to nonagenarians. I'm thinking how Mavis can’t get enough of it and Adele and most of my other friends who, at least, never said a bad word about the stuff...except for Judy who has my condolences.

It may be a generational matter. My daughters have also shown no inclination for herring, but they all have other redeeming qualities.   

And then there is Putin who looked in the mirror one morning and saw Pushkin eating pickled herring. Napoleon might have conquered Russia if he didn’t run short of herring to feed his marauding troops. When invading Russia one is advised to pack sufficient barrels of pickled herring along with warm underwear, but not in the same suitcase. I’m sure the Russians never run out when they gobble up territory on their western flank.

Danes are crazy for the stuff and Latvians and Estonians. If I were stuck on the Monopoly board on Baltic, which is my lot, pickled herring would be a staple as it is for those folks in northern waters.

When I used to put out pickled herring for our Sunday Salon, back in the day, it was always the first to vanish. I wonder if some friends brought Zip-lock bags and slipped a few bits and pieces into their pockets.

Schmaltz herring is also worthy of mention....all those consonants supported by a single vowel. It is herring at its most plump, just before spawning. Best devoured with sour cream, dark bread, potato and onions. It offers transit right back to the shtetl. 

Herring is not a bottom feeder as some creatures so designated to vacuum the ocean floor. Knowing herring as I do I might presume that is beneath them. They feed largely on plankton rendering them low in carbs and high in an alphabet of vitamins including the all-important D and Omega oil without which one can expect to die a day or two earlier than previously fated.

Some like it split, salted and smoked which goes under the name, kippered herring. If I were a herring I’d much prefer being pickled. However the kippered variety had been the breakfast of Brits for centuries which may have kept the empire from falling. When it did fall, Kippers also fell out of favor. By the 70s, due to its association with the past, it was no longer part of the full English breakfast, replaced by eggs, bangers and blood pudding. What a loss. However it is now making a comeback as those rebellious Boomers are getting aged themselves

The purpose of this tribute to pickled herring is to fill up the page on a subject I really knew nothing about. Here's a tidbit to drop at a dinner party sure to get you reinvited: herring don't get to be called by that name until they mature from being merely sardines. In fact, there is no single fish named sardine. They can be any tiny fish. Whether there is an initiation or Bar Mitzvah to earn herring-hood from sardine-ness has not yet been determined.

Carrots-Recycled

 I ran into Smart & Final the other day and came out finally not so smart. In my haste, I passed the produce section and remembered that we had run out of carrots. I grabbed a package and got home to discover I had just purchased 26 carrots. It must be the industrial size for restaurants. The average American eats 10,866 in a lifetime. This should make up any deficit I may have had.

I do love carrots as much as the next guy. I like to peel them. I like to dip them in whatever dip we happen to have. I enjoy the way they crunch and how noble I feel eating them instead of one of those unmentionable sweet snacks for which I have a special tooth.

For the past three days I’ve been eating carrots at the rate of Bugs Bunny. I remember, as a kid, hearing that carrots were good for the eyes. It made sense; I’d never seen a rabbit wearing glasses. Research shows that rabbits really don’t eat carrots; another lie I’d been raised on and swallowed. Now, after my eleventh carrot, I’m beginning to lose my taste for them.

This must be the source of food-phobias. A dear friend of mine dislikes all fruits except apples. I’m imagining he was trapped under a truck-load of peaches, apricots and plums as a child and was traumatized. How else to explain anyone disliking summer fruit? One day I may trace my hatred of coconuts. If I were shipwrecked and floated on an orange crate to a desert island with a coconut grove I would pass it by and take my chances.

But I digress. The subject is carrots. If I weren’t so busy blabbering, I’d bake a carrot cake. I just looked it up. There are 943 recipes for carrot cake. The average one lists 13 ingredients and carrots are the tenth, behind flour, sugar and cream cheese. Each serving adds 47 grams of carbohydrates to one’s diet. Forget it.

If you take the wrong freeway and find yourself in the Hebrides, Scotland toward the end of September you might wonder why carrots are being dug up by the locals. It is, of course, to celebrate Michaelmas. Wild carrots are ritually gathered. It is an occasion for revelry and why not, I ask you?

Carrots translate to some fairly strange words in other countries. Spain calls them zanahoria. In China they are huluobo and marchew in Poland. Remember this. It could come in handy one day.

Starlings seek out wild carrots which kill certain mites in their nests. The carrot contains a compound that repels mites and inhibits their egg-laying abilities. How starlings know to choose parasite-deterring plants like the wild carrot remains a mystery. I might go on a starling hunt tomorrow and drop some carrot-mush in their flight-path. Then again parasites need love too. Let the birds fend for themselves. Better not mess with Mother Nature.

Final thought: If I had 26 karats instead of carrots I'd be a rich man but I'd rather remain lucky instead.

Certain Words

Apart from their unfortunate attachments, two of my favorite words are syphilis and diphtheria.  Their mellifluous sounds roll off the tongue. However, their baggage consigns them to the unutterable column. Such a waste of lyricism.

Emergent, is another word I admire not for saying but for what it contains. It has urgency, even emergency. It is dynamic, seeded with something new.

Also, hiding in emergent is the word merge. I’m all for it. The way column A drifts over to column B. Sweet and sour, hot and pungent. Some films, seemingly big, are also notable for small moments. Amid the high decibels and extravagant (extra vagrant) production, are artful scenes, possibly memorable.

Could it be that categories are our feeble way of trying to organize the chaos?

 If you think you know me, you don’t know the half. Apple-pears and fusion food. Hybrid gender. Hybrid cars. Quantum particles, Quantum waves. 

For the unknowing eye baseball is boring; football, brutal and basketball is swagger. For those of us with arrested development like myself, basketball is balletic, football is chess with fractures and baseball, life itself.

When Donald first reared his artificial head I saw Bozo the Clown, P.T. Barnum, then Jim Jones, Huey Long and finally Adolf or Benito. The question still remains: handcuffs or straight jacket or both? His mouth is a weapon of mass destruction. The soulless manipulator and mindless sociopath have merged, and we must now confront our underbelly.

In the literary world a memoir is likely to have as much fiction as a novel and a biography can be cherry-picked into a hagiography. Some narrative poetry reads like a conversational anecdote.

I started writing poetry about fifty years ago in between labels as a pharmacist. After my work found its way into literary journals, I began to question what made this a poem and not a paragraph. There began the merging. Some words sing; some need line breaks but others shed the stanza and are comfortable as prose or blogs. There may be poetry hiding in the sentences.

My first book is entitled The Marriage of Everything. I see life as a web of connective tissue. The rose with its petals; the rose with its nettles. Life can be both enhancing and death-defying. The two in a melodic dirge. The Streets of Laredo. Mack the Knife.

In the merging, what emerges is not necessarily progressive. Maybe we needed this historical moment to pause, value what we cherish and experience its fragility as the fabric trembles. Latent strains of racism and misogyny have been uncaged and legitimized. The malady of our times is as malignant as syphilis or diphtheria.