Lunch With Friends

Four of us happily here not in Sudan order sub Saharan sand-
wiches triple-decker crisp fries in friendly fire we sit al fresco
commune with chopped salad green imperialism of oil
and vinegar how it colonizes the caramelized walnuts
talk of Tripoli to Tribeca enhanced interruptions suicide road
side burger blood-rare clots the streets no boots on the ground
round just bodies collaterally damaged with intelligent failure
drone remotely controlled missed the misbegot tempers rise and
plunge like Dow’s got the jitters while we sip iced tea talk bomb-
bastically as pensions are lost fortunes made topical tropical far
from barricades even as bulls and grizzlies gorge and gnaw. Who’s
wealthy stays wealthy and who’s Standard & Poor stays standard and
poor so much to chew on and on our plates full of subsidized crops
there’s a genetically tampered tomato gets us juiced while the suits
foxtrot on FOX over which tea is right enough for Iowans to round up
the bus-boy with undocumented arms up his sleeve refills our cups
clears our scraps one eye watching to make a run past border cops
while we chat umbrella cool Bachmann confers with God knows who
sending his wrath for you know what all we’ve been and all we’ve not.
Big government and who needs them I ask you says to evacuate
it’s on the move exactly where and when up from unrecognized Cuba
here comes Goodnight Irene. Check please keep the change. Climate
is as climate does no change and dumb is dumb and woe is we
Noah’s in his ark on the warm Atlantic soup in a boat of split pea.

Stellar Event

It only happens every 10,000 years or so. We’re talking about a super-massive black hole swallowing a star. Beware of these dark spaces in the galaxy. If a careless sun strays too close it can be devoured and slurped, followed by radiation jet burps. No table manners. With the gravitational pull of a million suns, these holes can’t be taken anywhere.

Personally I seldom leave my neighborhood anymore. Many a time I’ve been devoured on the 405, sucked into a super-massive snarl and luckily spit out on the nearest off-ramp.

One fine morning about twenty years ago I became my own Sig Alert. I was driving to work minding my own business in the slow lane (my favorite lane) when a car to my left suddenly decided the next ramp was his destination. He swerved in front of me. In order to avoid hitting him I had to make my own ramp which turned out to be about 50 feet into the landscaping up a hill. I finally stopped in front of a tree.

A mile of cars had to slow down thanking God it was me and not them. When I resumed my place in the parking lot we call a freeway I heard myself reported as a spin-off causing a back-up. My fifteen minutes of infamy, sucked into the morning traffic news that grinds out flashes of sizzling tips to motorists of what to avoid in their orbit to nowhere.

A man is called to the personnel office. He is told that his job is now in Asia at a fraction of his salary. All the oxygen leaves this black hole of a room. The arc of his life has been violated. He hears nothing else but static and that he is now a fraction of the person who walked through the door. He is disappeared; sucked into a vast silence.

Or it might work the other way. Ecstasy, the word derived from being out of stasis. We fall in love and travel to another realm as if lifted by the orchestra of a million celestial bodies. We happily relinquish our grip. We are buoyed as if drawn in, inspired by a deep breath and returned to what feels like home, yet unremembered, a place of belonging, having been met.

A sun, the size of ours, in the constellation Draco is vacuumed into dark nothingness, a lamp extinguished in the night sky. The event is captured on film by our satellite observatory. Somewhere a fishing boat is trawling on a river with just an apostrophe of a moon overhead. Its navigation guided by a writer at his desk lit by a candle. The writer helps light the way and when the wick burns down who will guide the commerce of the world?

A life fully lived is dangerous. Growing up we leave Eden. We find our center and prowl the suburbs, the far reaches. We may get a glimpse of the black hole and risk getting close. In the approach we are enlivened the way a heart grows by being broken. Relationships, convictions, discovery of self are all a dare. To not voyage out or within is to shrivel. Better to leave a trace before our bulb goes out.

Peeves and Gripes

Showers with little water pressure…most often found in B&Bs or motels where they leave the light on for you…..or in my bathroom. I want water with conviction, with needles.

Movies which all critics loved; my friends can’t stop praising, Peggy is crazy about. I was bored, irritated. Maybe I didn’t get it. Maybe I got it and still…

Politicians who side-step good questions and do it so well. Do members of both parties go to some secret night school in the sub-basement to learn how not to answer directly and spend two minutes doing it?

Stains that don’t come out with dry cleaning; in fact they are now permanently set because you, like a dummy, didn’t just wash the damn thing.

V-neck undershirts that aren’t V-necked enough so that a diagonal of white shows beneath your black shirt.

Waiters in Italian restaurants who are probably from Brooklyn but took a course to learn how to speak with an Italian accent.

The person entering his car in slow motion in a parking garage backing up 11 other well-intentioned cars….like mine

Cantaloupe which look ready from without but taste unripe within. Peachy looking peaches which are mealy. Tasteless tomatoes.

Firecrackers still going off at midnight on July 6th.

Movie songs which have had their melody carefully removed…if they ever had one.

Sunday morning panel discussions in which both parties have their talking points and dispatch themselves on every channel saying the same thing.

Ballgames I record decided in the final two minutes beyond the recorded time.

Laugh-tracks. Unfunny stand-up comics. Comedians who can’t get over how funny they are. Old jokes told badly. Bad jokes told well. Nostalgia told over and over……….unless it’s my own; even my own; particularly my own.

Baseball players who spit. Do they do this at home, too?

Bloggers with nothing to say except complaints…….

Five Point Eight

What rattles Easterners in 22 states would barely toss the salad or stir the tea out here in the wide-open West. A 5.8 wouldn’t interrupt a waiter auditioning the specials but it might get the attention of folks in a crowded elevator. Now Easterners can imagine how we sleep every night under the dining room table in our wet suits, clutching an earthquake kit, checking our supply of bottle water, and a good waterproofed book. They’ll get the hang of it. The lemurs in the National Zoo knew about it 15 minutes before the Richter scale. We need our benign quakes every now and then to lift us out of complacency. It may take a cosmic event to wake us from our atomized life.

The last big one in Los Angeles introduced us to our new neighbors on the stairwell. The word, cleave works both ways. Temblors pry open our eyes and reposition our perch, even one or two degrees. I wonder if Eric Cantor has been moved enough to now recognize the role of government since the gods have conspired to target his district as the epicenter. What mischief-makers they can be. 

One might argue that we already have too many fissures in our society with fault lines, financially, culturally, politically and generationally. All these are dwarfed by cataclysmic events. The god of carnage is met by the god of grace and survival. Buried deep inside are those better angels we keep hearing about. Natural disasters are something like wars in exotic places. In recent years I’ve become aware of Mogadishu, Kismayo, Strebrenitsa and now Bengasi. I was similarly amazed to see that Detroit and Cleveland were so close to Virginia; at least proximate enough to know the feeling of a swaying chandelier. Out here in shake & bake country we tend to forget how squashed together those blotches of states are in New England. Thanks for the Geography 101 lesson. My friend on Long Island thought, so this is how a stroke feels while others reported a transitory attack of vertigo. Next time they will know it’s just a domestic quarrel of the gods throwing tectonic plates.

Telephone Conversation

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…….Someone sent me an e-mail with photos from an electron microscope showing 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……..Maybe you should hang up so I can call Standard & Poor for a re-evaluation.

She……I wonder why they say “Triple A” or “Double A plus.” Why not say 100, 99, 98.

Me……I like the “Double A plus.” It makes failure sound like something wonderful.

She……Failure makes you try harder.

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

She……I forgot what I was calling about.

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.

They Didn't Give Up Their Day Jobs

It’s a good thing William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens or Franz Kafka stuck it out. It didn’t seem to limit their output; in fact they mined their professions in quite different ways.

Stevens was a Modernist poet who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955. He died that summer having worked up until his death as a lawyer for Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co. He was offered a faculty position at Harvard but declined because it would have interfered with his post at the insurance company.

His desk job as vice president of Hartford Insurance was what Stevens called, his necessary angel. He regarded reality as an essential grounding for his imaginative flights. Without it maybe he would have written in tongues from cloud nine. As it is, Stevens’ body of work is both cerebral and sensual; sometimes silly, other times it resists interpretation almost successfully.

A few years ago Peggy and I made a pilgrimage to his Hartford home; a modest house on an upscale block. He is said to have walked to his office and back each day, about a mile, rain or shine. There is a story of someone offering him a lift one day which he accepted provided there would be no talking. Apparently when his work day ended he switched immediately to his transcendent mode and guarded that time fiercely.

Dr. Williams was a Rutherford, New Jersey general practitioner. He didn’t write so much about his medical experience but it made him a close listener and observer. His poetry picked up the cadences of ordinary speech. Many contemporary poets, including Allen Ginsberg, are his heirs. Williams was a descendent of Whitman in terms of his plain language and inclusiveness.

I once met a woman who was delivered by Dr. Williams. Imagine being brought into this world by the pre-eminent poet; first seen by his knowing eyes. That would be better than a signed first edition. I wonder if she carries that specialness around with her.

I expect Franz Kafka labored, not happily, at his job with the Workers Accident Insurance Company. Yet he was able to transform the tedium and detached nature of the work into high art. He captured the predicament of twentieth century man. Kafka grasped the existential despair of bureaucracy and the labyrinthine path which separates man from the consequences of his job.

It is remarkable how these writers found the creative energy, after a day’s toil, to give us the gift of their genius. Most poets in America are forced into academia. Yet Ted Kooser, a former Poet Laureate, was also in the insurance business and Philip Levine still draws upon his days on the assembly line in Detroit.

In South America it isn’t uncommon for writers to hold political office. Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa saw no division or distraction from their chosen art form.

The closer an artist can live in the working world the more enriched is his work, provided he doesn’t get sucked up in the workaday mindlessness and conventions. The writer/poet/artist lives both in and outside the circle. Too far inside blunts consciousness, too far removed blinds and deafens the scribe.

And then there is Emily Dickinson………….

Back To School

Late-August and some schools are already in session. Makes me think of those old days when we got ourselves ready to shift gears from summer lassitude to the chill of regimentation and rules like bricks upon rules. Early on there was a wardrobe rule and sitting-up-straight rule; no-talking and a sort of dress code. All of this was accepted without protest as long as we had new back-to-school shoes along with some hand-me-downs that felt like new.

Everyone was equipped with a three-hole notebook, reinforcements, ink eradicator, ruler, fountain pen and 2 or 3 sharpened pencils with erasers. We also needed book covers for the textbooks that hadn’t changed in fifty years.

Nowadays I imagine the back-to-school supplies (for high-schoolers) include an i-Pad, i-Pod, i-phone with 100 apps and possibly a box of condoms….along with ripped jeans, nose ring, tattoos and T-shirts all chosen with a careful disregard.

Returning to class might also have been a way of comparing myself to my classmates and generally suffering by the comparison. Voices had changed. Some of us were 4 ft. 10 and other 6 ft. 2. Suddenly I noticed girls. A few had learned the mating dance over the summer. Where was I? Maybe they found the meaning of life while I was learning how to hit a curveball. By eighth grade a few boys had started to shave. Some girls were almost women.

My most dreaded class was always English Composition with the first assignment to write what we did on our summer vacation. In point of fact I did nothing or could think of anything noteworthy. I hadn’t yet learned the truths that emerge from fabrication. I could have told about my trip exploring Africa with Captain Spaulding and how I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got there I’ll never know.

Or I might have written about my summer of neighborhood mischief. I was 11, no matter how you looked at it, with a nose for trouble (my middle name), when I started trailing Mr. Rios. He was a cross between Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman. When he dashed I flew after him in my new Keds. When he stopped to tie his shoelaces, I froze into invisibility. He led me down into the subway underworld where I might meet the Deadend kids or the Hardy Boys and with a little luck, the Boppsy Twins and Nancy Drew. Instead I was led into the laboratory of the mad scientist with his frothing flasks and bubbling beakers. I can’t give away the ending as I saved Gotham from the unthinkable.

When I was twelve, plus or minus, Peggy was twice my age. Now, of course, she is considerably younger than I. Back in1945 I worked for a woman in my building who designed hats and fashioned floral decorations for them. I was paid 25 cents a delivery plus a nickel to and from Manhattan, about 6 subway stops from Forest Hills. On a sticky August afternoon I would board the train with 4 or 5 weightless hat boxes. I was weightless, too, dreaming (retrospectively) of meeting Peggy on her way to the ballet. In that wind-rush tunnel I might have Ballanchined her with a pas-de-deux. Will you wait for me, I asked and she said yes even if it takes 34 years. And so I emerged on Lexington Ave. having crossed the waters into my new world.