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. 

Names

I have always had a knack for remembering names. I can recite all our presidents in order, everybody in my elementary school class including all the teachers I’ve ever had, plus the entire roster of the 1941 Brooklyn Dodgers. Hold down the applause; it is just a quirk from my formative years. We don't get to choose what fluff has stuck to the marrow.

However, nomenclature is not my strong suit. I don’t know the names of trees or birds, a birch from a beech or a swallow from a sparrow. Nor can I repeat lines from Shakespeare. I have squandered my faculty. 

Now I am beginning to drop names; not in the sense of impressing anyone, but I’m losing my access to caption certain faces. Yesterday I lost David Foster Wallace and Angela Lansbury. They return to me in 5-10 minutes, but that lapse is disquieting.

Aging is a bumpy road; that one never taken before. Some days I’m an intrepid traveler heading into an imagined safe unknown. Giggling over the all of it and grateful for having been fully met. 

Other times, I feel my architecture withering, long out of warranty and beyond its shelf life. Now I wonder if I’m losing a marble or two, and what potholes are around the corner? No severe tire damage yet.

Can I blame it all on Trump? Only if I regarded him as an inspirational leader. Instead, I’ve been witness to a certifiably failed human being. It’s a rare moment in history when such mindlessness is on full display.

This is my own journey, rounding third on the way home. It can take years; baseball has no clock. We arrive where we started, weary but wiser or, at least, experienced having circled the bases with stories to be told.  

Perhaps I am a knight-errant like that man from La Mancha tilting windmills, lost in time. Are Spencer Tracy and Greer Garson still dead? Why can't I vote for Gregory Peck as President? 

Settle down, Norm, the doctor will be in to see you in a few minutes. What's his name again?

Surviving Donald

I'm writing this from inside my bubble where I live with my closest friends and family striving for enhanced normalcy. We daily supply oxygen for each other which keeps us from going numb.

During this seismic reign of terror tectonic plates have shifted. Uttering his name has me gagging so much I require three Heimlich maneuvers to expel the syllables. It feels as if we, along with seventy-five million others, have been locked inside the trunk of car as it is going over a cliff in slo-mo.

Universities have been pillaged. Laboratories, shuttered. Language, degraded. Civility, mocked. Founding documents, scraped.

Yet outside the window I'm blessed with many non-deciduous trees. Green leaves are clinging with the same tenacity my circle of friends hold to a belief that the mind of spring will return us to saner times.

Here I am at the breakfast table enjoying the yellow-orange tulips bursting their incandescence as the dry bulbs are quenched by Handel’s Water Music.

The table is filled with glass and bowl, cup and plate, grains and berries with boxes in a spectrum of colors. Rembrandt might find a pattern in the jumble the way Rauschenberg would see it as collage or Pollack might give it a splatter with a yellow streak. It was all invisible to me until just now. Thank you for that, Donald.

In my Trump-free state I am listening to a Julian Barnes book being read via Audible from the library, but interest is waning over Flaubert's Parrot. 

I should also know the names of birds. Then I could report which one it was that just chased away a crow four times its size. I suppose the natural state of Nature is strife. The hummingbird is constantly darting away from predators. Does the cut worm forgive the plow? Adversity drives adaptation. The bough struggles for a sliver of sun, not unlike us in the bubble, listening hard for that sweet sound of grace.

At the same time, I bow to those at the barricades. Resistance is exhausting but so is it exhilarating and sometimes, as now, necessary. They are my proxy as I write. This page is written on my perch not far from the fray.

Youth, Enlightenment and the Whole Damn Thing

Is it true that history seems to be the subject young Americans find most irrelevant as if anything that happened before the internet is prehistory? Not so, my daughter says.

Am I wrong to think that a generation is being brought up thinking that Blacks were happily jamming in cotton fields and indigenous people all ran casinos while Aristotle was in Lincoln's cabinet and Joan of Arc married Noah? 

In fact, Gen Z and Millennials do care, in broad terms, about getting the chronicle right, so I'm told. I am heartened to be corrected. 

With this in mind, I spin the great wheel, and it lands on 1688. No, that wasn't the number of cheeseburgers sold in the first hour of the newest McDonald's or the combined I.Q. of any 20 red state senators.                           

1688 is the year Holland invaded England with 400 ships including a new King and Queen and 20,000 of their closest friends. Strong winds sped their journey across the Channel while the British fleet was stuck in the Thames estuary by that same gust. William & Mary deposed James II and that ended the Papist rule in England forever.

The Brits call the whole takeover The Glorious Revolution. To be sure the new monarchs were welcomed by most. William of Orange brought significant changes into Britain, but oranges were not one of them. They were introduced a century before. 

Under his reign, the stock market was established. He made innovations in horticulture, encouraged scientific inquiry (optics and astronomy), philosophy and the Arts. The reign of William and Mary triggered the Age of Enlightenment which led to our Democracy.

It is a fact that the rate of illiteracy is much higher in Southern Europe than in Northern Europe. This has been true since the Protestant Reformation which took hold in Great Britain, Germany, The Netherlands and Scandinavia. Bible reading was encouraged, while Portugal, Spain and Italy discouraged literacy under the grip of the Vatican.  

A case could be made that governments then (as now) are instruments of business interests. The British East India Co. swapped with the Dutch East India Co. In one of the great swindles of history the Dutch, under duress, traded Manhattan for Suriname in South America.

It was John Locke, the 17th century British philosopher, whose ideas about a social contract directly found their way into our Declaration of Independence. What evolved into our unique Democracy has always been dependent on some measure of participation. These days we are witness to its fragility due, in part, to a misinformed public, all the more ironic in this age of so-called connectivity. The slumbering masses are distributed among all age groups but there was a surge to the right among first time voters in 2024.

I must learn not to paint with such a broad brush, however if history and civics were valued now as they were in decades past, our electorate would hold candidates to a higher standard and understand that legislation affects their well-being. It just might dawn on low-information voters that their health care and Social Security are more important than conspiracy theories or empty panaceas directed against an imagined enemy. 

Perhaps a massive reawakening is happening. The significant turnout under harsh weather in Minneapolis, including young people, is proof enough that I have wrongly consigned a generation to a shared dunce cap. They have shown up to register the defense of the 1st amendment guaranteeing their right to assemblage and dissent. 

The dictatorship we fought against in 1776, again in WWII and now in our midst must be defeated at the polls in November. The dissolution of our Democracy would be a betrayal of our Founders.