The Playoffs

Load a couple of chairs in the car, some cold water.  (I’m too old for a six-pack.)

Put the Shark’s hat in there too, and don’t forget the camera.  It’s playoff time down in Chelmsford and our grandson is in the playoffs with his team, the Twins.  Last night they play the Yankees.  It’s a clutch game for Joe’s team.  They win, they go on and maybe repeat.  They lose, they go home and play video games, not real ones.

El Condor Pasa

I never played much ball after getting knocked out by a line drive when I was eight  in a PAL game back in the Bronx.  So, I got pretty good at watching.   I like that part of the game now, watching everything that goes on; even watching the other fans.  It was a small crowd sitting in the lengthening shadows of the thin line of trees, and across the field in the hot sun while sons, grandsons and one daughter took the field, or lined up to swing away and dream of fences left behind and green walls o’ertopped.

But, I was concentrating tonight on one guy, Jj Howard as he likes to be called, in left field where the Splendid Splinter roamed when I was a kid.  I have to tell him about that, and my brother’s scrapbook…a great heresy back then in the Bronx when Joltin’ Joe ruled and the Mick and Willie were in the wings.  His mother says he doesn’t much like the outfield, and really gets mad when she, who has a New York sense of humor, kids him about playing “Left Out”.

All Alone Am I

By the time he had his first turn at bat, the Yankees were up by two, and it appeared they were going to take the game away in the first two innings.  When Joe …oops Jj…stepped up, there was one man on for the Twins.  Joe walked and then stole second.  There was a lot of that, stealing second, stealing home on passed balls.  But, it wasn’t Joe’s turn.  The next kid up hit a zinger between first and second base.  The right fielder bobbled the ball and the next thing I know, Joe is standing on third.  I remember seeing him one minute jigging off first base, and I see nothing but heels and legs and dust until the clouds settle.  He died there.

The game gets interesting for me an inning or so later as Joe’s team makes up its mind to play, and they tie the score before letting the other side have a turn.  When nothing comes of that, the Twins come back and score a few more runs, hoping, I guess, to show the Yankees what baseball is all about.  Joe returns and looks real good swinging, but alas looking good counts only in the movies…and with his grandfather.

Looking Good

But an inning or two later he’s on first again, dancing and daring that dirty rat of a pitcher to try, just try, to pick him off.  I’m just a few yards away and I tell his mother he’s going.  “He never moves unless it’s stealing a base.  He loves it,” she says.  I can tell he does I’m thinking as I watch him getting ready.  Then he goes and all I see is heels again, and him running low, picking up speed.  He’s half way down the line to second and the pitch isn’t  in the catcher’s mitt yet.  He goes in standing up.

Jigging

On The Way

The rest of the game goes by, and we talk while the sun sets, crows stalk the outfield, the mosquitoes get ready to eat supper and the clouds roll in to give the place a bath later on.  Mariellen tells me we’re going to miss choir practice if they don’t hurry up.

You can’t hurry baseball which has no clock, no limits.  I can tell the kids are getting tired, and hungry.  Jeanne, our daughter, tells me most of them probably haven’t eaten before the game which is not a smart thing to do.  Joe is right in front of us, now, playing second base.  It is the top of the sixth, the last inning, and the Yankees are up for the last time.  The game has gotten close.  Our boys pulled ahead by two runs in the bottom of the fifth.  The Twins brought in the “big right hander” to close, and he is throwing the fastest balls of the night.  The wind the bats are stirring up is cooling off most of the town, blowing baby birds out of the trees behind us, creating tornadoes in Kansas.

His teammates are standing around talking to each other.  I’m dozing.

There’s two outs, now, and some kid who knows what to do in the batter’s box is up.  He looks like he wants to chop trees with his first two swings.  Then he waits for his pitch, which comes after two wobbly balls.  I am wondering whether the gunslinger still has ammo when he delivers a pretty good fast ball, a rope straight and true which Paul Bunyan at the plate wants to knock into the Pacific Ocean if he can.  What he does is catch the tiniest bit of the ball as it zips by and send it up and our towards that space between the pitcher and the second baseman, my boy Jj.

Joe waves everyone away, parks himself under it and allows the thing to float down and rest comfortably in his glove.

I’m kicking myself that I’d put the camera away, but I feel like singing.

Too late for that, though.

The Obligatory Pretty Girl Picture: Joe's Sister Julia

One thing more.  I liked the way the coaches coached.  No yelling, no going nuts on the sidelines.  Just coaching and encouragement.  Joe was pretty good at that, too, talking to his team mates.  Matter of fact, they all were.  Nice evening.  I think I’ll get season tickets next year.

WEEDING (A Story For The End Of Lent)

While nothing seemed necessary, everything was.

The old man walked slowly down the alley alongside the building.  It was no true alley he thought, but he had taken to calling it one.  It was really a driveway, a passage in England or Ireland, leading to the garage.  “True” alleys are narrow spaces between tall brick buildings.  To his left was the rectory, an old Victorian mansion.  On his right, a narrow space of struggling Bishop’s Weed and Periwinkle, some old trees and vibrant, vigorous, healthy invaders, weeds.  But this was an alley because he had named it “alley”.  It was a word from home, a place filled with alleys, “true” alleys; and so, an alley to him it became as he walked a bit unevenly, a bit gingerly down it.  He had work to do.

Long, long ago alleys figured in his life.  Alleys were hangouts, hiding places, respites from the summer heat; a place to play blackjack for pennies or nickel-dime poker, experiment with cigarettes and beer, joke with your buddies or begin to explore the differences between boys and girls; until Mrs. Third Floor Busy-body, the neighborhood conscience, called the “Super” and he chased everyone out into the sun.  Growing up he’d enjoyed being in the alleys of home, and didn’t even mind that the rest of the world might think of an “allee” as some tree lined avenue leading to a chateau in the French or English country side.  He didn’t mind, really, because he’d not come across that word until years later in college.  He’d spent a lot of time in alleys. He knew them well, those places of cool shade away from the light.

He entered the garage through the open door, the broken one which wouldn’t stay on its track so dust and leaves entered the place and had to be swept up and thrown away once in a while. The garage would look neat for another week or so, until the wind and rain filled it up again and the broom needed wielding on the floor.  There were two brooms in the garage.  Both had seen better days, had served well.  For that matter, so had the garage itself seen better days and served well.  The brooms stood just inside the broken door, leaned against the wall near some old garden tools which, if anything, had seen and served as much as the brooms.  One or two were dangled from sturdy old nails pounded long ago into the wooden beams, thick unfinished oak still showing the cuts made by the tools which gave them their roughly rectangular form.

There was an old hoe, a small headed gardening spade, a garden rake, an old claw hammer and a four tined haying fork still sharp and dangerous.  And there was his favorite, an ancient cultivator with a mantis shaped head angled back at about fifteen degrees from the shaft.  Slender, thin and deadly it looked.  It was.  Only an eighteen inch fragment of the shaft was left, split and sharp edged; a place of splinters as mean as snake bites if not properly handled.  Nevertheless, it was his favorite tool.  It had been his favorite before it broke, and it was his favorite still.  It looked mean and useful.  It was.

Maybe it was because he had to get closer to the work he did with it that he liked it more now. Maybe it was the satisfaction he felt doing all of that ripping and tearing.  He’d bend low, bracing himself, his left forearm on left thigh, and plunge the tool into the earth behind an invading weed, some unwanted plant, and pull away.  Young oaks and maple saplings, clumps of grass, all would yield.  Some went with no effort at all and lay where they were thrown a few feet aside wilting in the heat; dead on the field.  Others, the deeper rooted ones, needed several stabbing thrusts into the dirt, each plunge deeper into their tangled roots, deeper into the web of weeds and worse the old place was covered with and buried in.

The point would sink into the earth; then a pull, a strain of muscle and tendon and wood and steel against earth and stone and root; then the ripping sound, the feel of things breaking underneath, letting go, and, sometimes, an explosion of soil and lines of roots came ripping free from the earth.  The offensive weed’s tendrils had spread all over.  At first he was surprised at how far and how deep those things went.  But, why not?  They’d had all that time and all that neglect to “settle in”. Often old pieces of machinery, wire, tin cans and other debris dumped back there years ago came free, too.  This was no liberation, though.  This was their defeat.

The old man took his tools from the rusty nails on the garage walls and walked outside.  Shade covered most of the old lot.  There wasn’t as much shade as last year, when the place had been twilight dark at mid-day.  That was before he and some friends had removed nearly a hundred saplings and small trees, and about a ton of long buried junk; the bad memories of other days.  What a bonfire they’d made.  But there was more.  Oh, boy was there more.  “Begin anywhere,” he thought, and he bent to the work.

From a great height, with a great force, the weapon fell directly into his heart, deep and deeper still.  Full into flesh it fell penetrating beyond all boundaries into the center of self; an intelligent weapon, a seeker, purposeful, single minded.  It was made so. And it cut away.  And it dug away.  And it tore away, leaving heavy with the waste of wrong, bringing to light the years of neglect.  Removing itself it returned again into his heart, and again, each return deeper, each stay shorter, each leaving lighter with each wrong removed.

The old man looked around him as he straightened, slowly, from his posture of attack over the torn up ground.  His mantis-headed tool was polished now by the scouring earth, a clump of black soil clinging to its point.  Like an extension of his right hand it hunk from his fist at his side.  He looked around at the work and was satisfied.  Dead Amorites, Jebbuzites and Canaanites…  They lay all about on the field; the enemies of the Lord.

It was a start.  Only that he knew.

How Benedict Got Upstairs

I don’t remember how old I was, but it wasn’t so old that I could tie my own shoes, since I learned to do that the next summer.  I’ve never thought to remember how old I was when I learned to tie my own shoes, and Mama was always too busy to remember something like that for me.  By the time she noticed I wasn’t asking her for help; well not really asking, simply clip-clopping around with loose laces until she called me over to tie them.  “Come over here Mouse,” she’d say, turning away from peeling, or washing, or folding something.  I’d come over and stand, or hop, on one foot while she bent and twirled laces through her strong fingers until my shoes had pretty bows on them.  Sometimes, though, she’d have to switch them on my feet, just like she’d sometimes lift my shirt over my head, and put it back on, or turn my pants around.  She’d take my face in her hands, smile and say,”Try to remember, Mouse, to put the name in the back.”  Then she’d give me a hug and a kiss on the top of my head.  I can touch the spot sometimes and the memory comes back, smells, sounds, colors and all; and me dancing my one legged dance, or lifting my arms “way up to the sky” so she could put the shirt on with the name in the back; the right way.

The funny thing is that I don’t remember ever feeling uncomfortable in unlaced shoes, or back to front clothes, but I certainly felt better…inside and out…after Mama’s help.

I wasn’t much at trying to remember, of course.  I wonder now I sometimes didn’t do it the “right way” on purpose so’s she would notice and call me over, bend and fix and love, all in graceful but purposeful moves.  Mama never seemed to waste anything, even her moving from place to place.  She was sure of where she was going, sure of what she was doing and sure of why it needed doing.  But she moved as if she was dancing; always seeming to me like she was being moved by some spring breeze, or lifting and flying.  I would catch Papa, who was solid and steady, glancing up from whatever he might be about when he was home, watching her dance about the house, moving from place to place like a hummingbird, or a fall of water.  I like both of those things for the way they remind me of her

Papa was much older than Mama, a white topped mountain, like that picture of Mt. McKinley in an old magazine that I  took from the table one day and moved into my own little corner; near enough to keep an eye on the rest of my world and far enough to be alone when I wanted to be alone.  That wasn’t too often, but every once in a while, I’d notice Big Bear and Little Bear looking a bit sad and go over to sit down with them, and pat their heads and smile at them and give them a kiss.  Truck never needed kissing, but I would take out the cows from his back and arrange them in a row, or I’d play a tune on my piano.  This was often after Papa came home and had sat down in his chair.

Mama would bring him a glass of beer with the white foam on the top.  he’d let me take a sip of the beer and chuckle when I got the foam on my upper lip like a mustache.  “You’re on your way to being Santa Claus,” he’d say.  Or, he’d call me is Mustache Mouse.  Then he’d ask me if I learned any new tunes while he was away at work that day.  Of course I always answered yes, and went over to my place to play my latest “oeuvre”.  He’d smile from his chair, and tap his toe, keeping time.  When I had finished he’d always applaud and say,”Bravo, Mouse.  You are a young Beethoven.”

When I first heard him say that I answered, “I’m not a “bate hoven”.  I’m Mouse.”  He laughed out loud and beckoned me over.  I got up and waddled his way until he picked me up and said, “Of course you’re Mouse.  No one else could be.  But you are also a lot of other things.  You’re mama’s Mouse, and my Mouse.  You’re our little child and my Sunshine.”  Then he sang me the best song, the one that was mine,”You are my sun shine, my only sunshine…” and I forgot all about being upset at learning I was a “bate hoven”.

But, I wondered what a “bate hoven” might be, and thought it would be nice to be one if it made Papa happy.

One day, just after Mama had tied my shoes for me she said, “How do you feel, Mouse?”  “Fine, Mama,” I answered, and smiled.  “Except my belly stings.”  “Well, let’s just be careful.  Is it a sharp sting?”  “No, maybe it isn’t even a sting.  Maybe it’s an ache,” I answered.  “Is it your whole belly, or just a bit of it?”  “My whole belly, mama.  It started after breakfast.”  “OK, Mouse.  You go and get Bear and we’ll go upstairs to bed.  I want to take your temperature, too.”

We did all of that.  And when I was back in bed with Bear she came with water  and told me to stay in bed.  “Am I sick?”  “You have a slight fever, Mouse.  I’m going to call the doctor’s office now.  They may want me to bring you in.  Then I’m going to call Papa’s office and tell him.  Your job now is to rest.  I’ll be just downstairs.  You and Bear rest quietly.”  Bear was good at resting I knew, so I told him he could rest.  I would just lie there and wait to go to the doctor’s office.  She came back to wake me up and tell me that we were going to go to the doctor’s office.

“Can Bear come, too,” I wanted to know.  Bear very seldom stayed home with the others when I went out, but I do not think he had ever been to the doctor’s office before.  “I know he’d like it,” I continued.  Mama took a moment to think about that, and answered, “Well if you get him to promise he’ll be a good bear, and sit quietly in the car, and at the doctor’s office, he may come.  But you must be responsible for his behavior.  Will you promise?”  I said yes, and Mama helped me get dressed to go to the doctor’s.  Bear did not need to get dressed, I told her.  His fur would keep him warm.

The doctor told Mama that I had a flu, and he told her to keep me home and in bed.  I think this is what he told her, because I was not there when he asked her to come into his office and sent me with the nice lady who sits at the desk behind the glass to get a lolliepop.  Mama gave me a really big hug when I came back, and the doctor patted me on the head.  Then we left to go home.  On the way mama stopped at Doc Portnoy’s and got some bottles of medicine the doctor said I should take to get better.

When we got home that is just what she did.  She brought me upstairs and put me to bed with lots of toys around me.  It was the first time that I was sick, and had to stay in bed.  When Papa came home he came upstairs right away and told me he would miss me.  He asked if he could come and visit me each morning before he went to work, and every evening when he came home.  I wanted to know if he would tell me stories, make-up ones.  I had Mama to read books, but Papa always made up his stories.  After Mama had read the books one or two times I knew everything that would happen.  Of course that was good, since if there was a scary part, you could allow yourself to get sacred and know it would get better.

But with Papa, everything was different.  You never knew if a story was going to be scary, or happy or sad, or everything all jumbled up.  The best thing was that they were all about someone with the name of Mouse, who had to be me.  But, I was never sure, and that was the really good part.  Mouse did things I would never think of doing, but he also did things I hoped I would grow up some day and do.

Papa said that he’d come back after his supper and tell me a story.  I thanked him and sat back to wait.  Bear was sleeping so I closed my eyes, too and began to be very quiet.  I could hear Papa and Mama talking downstairs.  She said, “I’m so worried about our little Mouse, dear.  It’s such a dreadful thing to have.  I hope it leaves this house soon, and leaves our Mouse with no harm done.”  “Don’t worry, Dear,” Papa said in his soft voice that sounded like my snuggly blanket felt.  “Mouse will come through this just fine.  Tell me about your day.”

Up in my bed I settled down and listened, imagining Mama putting out her hand for Papa to hold just like they did whenever they told each other about “their day”.  I listened to hear what she would tell him about our ride back and forth to the doctor’s office and how good I was to Bear while we waited.   I listened for his voice saying, “Umm, hmm, and ‘Go on.’ “  But, instead all she said was, “Oh, goodness!  I completely forgot to tell you your sister is coming.  She’s accepted our offer to move in. She wants to visit first and discuss all the rest of the arrangements for her move. She’ll be here tonight!”

“Tonight?”  Papa sounded like he was yelling, “Fire!”.  I heard his chair scrape back and his heavy footsteps in the hallway.  “You make sure the guest room downstairs is ready for her, Dear.  I’m going out for cat food.”  With that the door opened and closed and Papa’s car soon started up.  He was going for the cat food.  Papa’s sister was also my Aunty-K, my favorite.  And, when she came she always stayed downstairs in the great big room in our basement where she could keep herself and her cat, Benedict, a big white cat who had a big white temper if he didn’t know you.  Once he bit Papa on his leg when he came into Aunty-K’s room downstairs.  He must have thought Papa was a burglar.  And Papa was very angry with Benedict for biting him when he thought they were friends.  At least that’s what Papa told me was the reason Aunty-K kept him down there on her visits

I think Papa was afraid of him, and that surprised me, because Papa wasn’t supposed to be afraid of anything.  He was happy that Aunty-K kept Benedict downstairs on her visits.  I know because I heard him tell Mama that he was sorry for that but he didn’t want Benedict biting me some day, too.  I didn’t think he would, but Papa said he was also a little nervous that he might have to have words with his sister about Benedict if he ever got out and upstairs and bit me.  I wondered what words he and Aunty-K would like to share if that happened.

Anyway, I loved Aunty-K.  She had a hundred different voices that she used all the time.  She could talk the way birds talk, and little animals and big ones.  And she could be a little girl and talk like that; a fresh little girl.  She loved to tell stories, and she loved to laugh.  Most of all she loved to laugh at simple things that just kind of happened, a bird missing a branch, a squirrel who tried to get into one of the bird feeders, a little baby who played with his food.  She would smile and laugh just like a kid at all of that stuff.  She never giggled, either.  She always just laughed out loud.

Well, with Papa gone, and Mama making noises way downstairs I didn’t think I would get any stories told to me, so I decided to go to sleep with Bear.

_____________________________________________________

I think I heard the doorbell ring, and I think I heard Aunty-K’s voice saying hello.  But, I’m not sure.  There were other sounds, too, all over the house and all around it, but I’m not sure.  Sometimes when noises happened in the night I would wake up and call for Mama.  She’d bring me a glass of water, the noises would go away,  and I would go back to sleep again.  The last thing I would feel would be Mama’s hand touching the side of my face, or her kiss.

I opened my eyes and called, “Mama.”  I called her again, but no one came from downstairs, and no one came from their room.  But the noise had stopped, so I closed my eyes and hugged Bear.  Then I heard someone call my name.  “It’s Mama,” I thought and I opened them.  But, someone else was there; not Mama but a pretty lady who was standing by my window in the soft light smiling at me.  I looked at her and smiled, too.  She was holding a big white cat in her arms.  The cat looked at her, then at me.  She put the cat down on my bed and he walked up to me and licked me on the hand I hand wrapped around Bear.  He licked Bear, too.  It tickled.

“Benedict isn’t supposed to be upstairs,” I whispered.  I did not want anyone to hear because if they knew, Aunty-K and Papa would have their words, and Benedict might be in trouble.  “It will be all right,” was all she said.  “Benedict will be with you.  Don’t be afraid.”  “I’m not afraid,” I told her.  “You will get better, soon.  Remember me, and remember Benedict when you grow up.  He is pure.  Be like him and remember me.”  She put out her hand and said, “Benedict stay with her.”  He sat very still and wrinkled his brow, looking very serious.  He nodded his head once and turned back to me.

Then I couldn’t see her anymore because Benedict laid down on my head and began to lick my eyebrows.  Sometimes cats can be silly.  When I sat up to get him off me, the lady was gone.  Benedict settled back on my pillow and looked at me with his big golden eyes.  Then he put his head between his paws and closed his eyes.  Well, one of them.  The other kept looking at me until I put my head down next to him.  He put a paw on my neck, licked it and me, and we both went to sleep.

There were no more noises.

There were no more noises during the night, that is.  There was noise in the morning though.  I woke up to hear the doorbell ringing, and Mama and Papa both going downstairs.  As I sat up in bed with Bear in my arms and Benedict still lying quietly on the pillow, I heard the door open and Mama and papa yell, “Aunty-K!  Where have you been!”  Then Mama said, “Are you all right?” And Papa said, “We were about to call the police.  What on earth happened to you?  You’re a mess.”
“Now don’t have a fit.  I’m all right.  I stopped on the way for a cup of coffee, and when I got back to the car, Benedict was gone.  I think he’s gone for good, too.  I looked all over that place for him, and even slid down a hill into a little creek.  That’s why I look such a mess.”  “Oh, poor Benedict,” said Mama.  “That’s what’s got me most upset.  I can’t understand it.  I always lock the door, and he was in the carrier, too.  Someone must have taken him,” Aunty Kay said, and everyone was quiet for a moment.  Then she said,” I’m gonna miss that cat.  I swear he knew right from wrong.  But, I’m all right and I’ll be just fine after I sit down and have a cup of coffee.” said Aunty-K.  I could hear Papa carrying her things through the door and putting them on the floor.

Mama said, “We had just awakened and I was on my way down to do that very thing when you rang the doorbell.  Come into the kitchen.”  There were footsteps and soon I heard cups and spoons clinking.  I heard Papa’s voice in the kitchen, and decided I should go down and tell them about the lady.  I was a bit worried about Benedict being upstairs, and wondered whether I should leave him or wake him up and bring him with me.

When I got to the kitchen they were all there, Mama, Papa and Aunty-K.  She sat in a chair at the table while Mama and Papa stood patting her back and holding her hands.  I heard her say, “I feel awful that you invite me to come and live with you, and the first thing I do is cause all of this upset with Mouse sick upstairs.  Oh, I could just sit down and cry for a week.”  “Now, this isn’t anything to get upset about.  Someone will find Benedict and either give him a good home, or bring him back to us,” said Papa.  I stood waiting for him to finish to tell them all that is just what happened.

“But, our little Mouse,” began Aunty-K, “I never knew..”  She stopped speaking and started crying very hard.  Mama turned to Papa and looked at him.  That was when she saw me standing there watching and waiting.  “Mouse,” she nearly screamed, and ran towards me.  “You shouldn’t be out of bed, Dear.  You are very, very sick.”  She bent to pick me up as Papa and Aunty-K turned and came over to me, Aunty-K trying to smile through her tears and Papa looking very concerned.

“Here, Dear,” he said, holding out his arms for me, “I’ll take Mouse back to bed.”  That was when I said, “No.  I fell very good, everyone.  I just came to say hello and to tell you something.  Please put me down, Mama.”  That surprised them I could see.  For a moment everyone was silent.  papa looked at Mama and Aunty-K.  Mama looked at Papa and Aunty-K.  Aunty-K looked at Mama and Papa.  Then all of them looked at me.  I smiled and wiggled to get down.  Mama bent over and let me stand on the floor.  Everything was quiet.

Just then from upstairs there was a very loud “MEOW!”

Benedict Listens to the Lady

The Saugus Review of Literature and High Art

The Saugus Review of Literature is a little known, but precedent setting and prize winning scholarly journal making something of a name for itself publishing reviews of and the actual works of writers and poets on the very edge of their genres.  Its scholarship and style is at once challenging and of impeccable quality.  I have been a subscriber to SRL since I discovered a copy on the seat next to me one night on the Red Line coming home from a Celtics game at the old Boston Garden.  I recommend SRL to any one of you interested in reading good works and expanding your knowledge of the many exciting things taking place these days in the arts and scholarship.

I know the Editor-in-Chief, Salome O’Hara, and it is from her that I received permission to publish here on this blog a review of two short poems by the  Alsatian poet Jean Flhond.  The author of the review, Prof. Seamus Moulinis is Emeritus Professor of Recent English Literature at The Catholic University of Highbridge, Sacred Heart College in Pinewood, NY.  The article follows:

“Jean Fhlond appeared in print for the first time several years ago in a little magazine published by the Brothers of Eternal Depression, a group of men devoted to doing what they could to help those who have discovered, as Peggy Lee sings in her famous song, that there is no real answer to the question “Is That All There Is“, but to keep dancing.  Fhlond’s work is a courageous and ground breaking exploration of man’s confronting that truth in all its many dimensions, with all its many challenges. 

He is a little known pre-post modernist, a student one might say of Rimbaud; a man claimed by the Germans because he spent much of his writing life in a particular beer hall in Munich, Das Grosse Beir.  There he carried on an unrequited relationship with one of the waitresses Dollie Braunwurst.   She was totally German, but with a truly Gallic heart; enjoying his attentions, but enjoying more spurning them.

My aim here is to show how Flhond is in the tradition of the better known French modernist poets, and not only that influences a large number of recent European poets.  I will limit myself to analysis of two of his most recent published works: “struggle” and  “end”. 

A word, before we examine the text of each poem, about the titles themselves   One observes first the absence of any upper case type in the titles.  Though Fhlond was a master typist, it is known that he was quite aware of the tides of style.  The lower case titles are an homage to a.a.commungs, the American poet of the early to mid-twentieth century whose whimsicality and originality in structure and word formation did much to free others from the strait jacket of classical form, grammar and  sense.  Commungs was a poet for the people and about the people in every time and place, especially the American West, as can be seen in his most popular poem, “anynight down inna little kowtown”, at once a satire on life in a frontier town and a homage to the Asian-Americans who worked on the Trans-Continental Railroad.  Now, to the works themselves…

The titles of Fhlond’s two poems contain much more than two words; already we are brought into the poems’ themes and the poet’s ideas about life.  These words themselves tell a story, and demand of the reader his whole attention.  As Fhlond’s work matured, his sense of brevity and compression,; his desire to do more with less became his driving inspiration.  Indeed it could be said that he was the first “compressed poet”, spawning a generation of followers.  His final book,  “Z” consists of one page, with the letter in lower case at the upper right corner of the page.  During an interview with Myles Pynchetown for The Poet Speaks on the CBC program Literate Lives, Fhlond explained his purpose in writing, his poetics, “I am looking for the soul of an idea, an essential telling of experience in which I come at once from the beginning of all concepts to the end.  I believe I have found it in this, my final poem, “Z”, at once the title of a work and the work itself.  The poem was set at the very top of the right hand edge of the page to convey to the reader that it and all it means stand on a precipice and gaze into an abyss.  It is a metaphor of consciousness, and the meaning of existence.”

But that is tomorrow, in a matter of speaking.  The two poems I consider are from yesterday, still valuable as pointers toward the culmination, the completion of Fhlond’s art.

In the first: “struggle”, the poet approaches the universal condition of existence with compassion and deep understanding:

How often do we get up each morning
To find our slippers beyond reach?

In these two lines Fhlond establishes the primordial question Man asks of the universe, and thereby illustrates his confrontation with the limits of his creatureliness which he carries further into a bold statement that things are as they are because that is simply the way of it.  It is at once a summary of theological struggles and a bold recapitulation of Western philosophy:

We often from the table rise with flecks of food
Between our teeth..

He continues, courageously emphasizing the imperfectability of our situation, our radical limitations with the half rhymes of reach and teeth, the repetitiveness of often in lines one and three.  Taken together, the first four lines are a neat recapitulation our condition.  In every circumstance we will find ourselves overpowered by existence.  This is the opening statement of the poem.

In a series of shorter lines which bring the poem to its dramatic and hopeful conclusion Fhlond discovers for the reader the way to defeat life’s war against the living:

These burdens are not our own
Nor should they be.

The lines can be seen as an affirmation of community and an indictment of existence which demands too much of the individual.

We carry weight beyond
Our rated capacity.
All of this the universe knows
And appreciates.

Fhlond acknowledges our contribution to history, and argues for the proper understanding we must have of our place in it.  These lines are at once determined, courageous and hopeful.  Only human beings can know their limits and strike against them a blow which, even to an insensate universe, is worthy of recognition and appreciation.  Before and within a blind universe we are by chance consigned to act.  We must act with determination and grim purpose.  Our only satisfaction, and our fundamental meaning is found in struggle, even when it is a struggle against stiffness upon arising or little bits of poppy seeds in one’s dentures.  In that is found, Fhlond asserts, Man’s meaning and joy.

The second poem “end” is nothing less than Fhlond’s eschatology:

The garbage truck is as regular as the seasons used to be;
The reason I set out once a week for the curb
Dragging the big can along behind me down the drive
To set it there opposite my neighbor’s, near the mailbox
The night before the pickup is scheduled.
We’ve had no snow and it’s mid-December already,
Christmas a week or two away, one pink rose
On a little bush in the back yard, and the daisies look
Almost as good as they did two months ago.
Who knows what time of year it is, but I do know
The garbage needs to be put out every week
On Thursday, unless there’s a holiday.

Fhlond’s contribution here is to put into terms we all understand the laws of thermodynamics operating on separate systems, macro systems like the changing of seasons and micro systems like household waste; each of them related to the other. He has unified, if you will, the physical sciences with there immersion in the material with the Spirit of Man, joined them both and affirmed man’s nature as spirit and matter lifting the latter from mere temporality to eternity.  He has given us a reason to live, to continue, to overcome.

It is also an indictment of man’s impact on the environment and a poet’s prediction of the end, even with the periodic interruption of a “holiday”, a temporary reprieve from utter destruction and loss.  Nothing will prevent the end.  This is, finally, Fhlond’s triumph as an artist, joining hope and despair into one unitive whole.

The Land of the Running White Clouds, or Aotearoa, New Zealand, #6

When we left each other last, about a month ago, I gave you some hint of difficulty looming in this journey which I had already told you was going to be, so I thought at the time I wrote it, a leisurely stroll, a pleasant interlude.  I should have known better.  We were, after all, in California, a place where the laws of the universe do not seem to operate.

Our limo driver, a kindly Asian man who had driven us to our hotel only the day before was happy to drive us back this sunny afternoon to catch our connecting flight to Los Angeles.  We were to leave at about 3:00pm, plenty of time, so the folks who schedule these things thought when they set this up, for us to connect with an 8:00pm flight from LA to Auckland.  It was shortly after noon when we arrived at the gate for our flight to LA.

Now a word of truth.  The airport at Los Angeles, LAX, is, I am sure, where Charon went when he got his wings and gave up his boat after the trip to hell was brought into the modern age.  It, LAX, must be an ante-room to hell.  More precisely, I think it is hell’s own terminal; a bedlam and torture chamber combined, containing every known device to heighten travelers’ anxiety, drain the spirit and create acute and heart pounding confusion and fear, and frustrating, impotent anger. And that is what is good about it.

There is the center of confusion, mis-direction, lack of care and mindless activity.  It extends for hundreds of miles in every direction.

As I said, we had checked into the airport at San Francisco quite early.  We settled at the gate for the long wait.  After a while I got up to stroll about the terminal.  I was almost back at the gate where I had left Mariellen with our carry on bags, when my cell phone began to ring.  “Who could be calling me now?” I thought.  The phone call was from Mariellen, frantic because the people at the gate had paged her to tell her they had changed our flight, moving it up by an hour and a half…and it was being boarded as she spoke to me at another gate.  Another gate in another place in the terminal, somewhere north of Vancouver, CA.

We were still speaking on the phone when I spotted her just outside the gate area covered with bags and coats and what alls, glancing frantically in all directions, a look of anxiety and stress on her face that i had never seen before.  I was instantly sorry for every sin of my past life which I believed was responsible for this calamity, and promised lasting reform.  I waved.  She saw me and we began.  We literally ran through the terminal for pretty near a mile, carrying and dragging bags of several sorts until we reached the newly assigned gate and our flight, just in time.  They were closing up as we arrived sweaty and breathless.

One of the gate crew quickly explained the reason for the change.  Our connecting flight had been booked for us by the folks in New Zealand.  They had no idea what hell was like, and so figured two hours to connect  passengers from a San Francisco flight with a New Zealand flight leaving LA was quite enough time.  They had even built in about an hour long cushion.  The United people knew different.  In a tone of amazement, she told me that wouldn’t even leave us time to collect our baggage and board the shuttle for transfer from the domestic to the foreign terminal; let alone go through the security check once more (God bless Osama bin Laden!) , check in and flight boarding.  We would have only 1.5 hours for what she said would take at least three.  In answer to my question about whether anything could be done, she suggested that I become disabled.  That way they could have a special bus meet the plane and ferry us directly from it to the foreign terminal.

I wished later on in the day that flying through LAX (an oxymoronic term, accent on the last two syllables, if ever there was one) itself was a disability.  Well, it is, but…

Anyway, the plane landed.  We got our bags after a twenty minute wait at the baggage carousel in some large cell of a room, and after another twenty minutes of blind wandering found our way outside through a deluge of traffic, people, trafic and more traffic.  (Do not wonder if we asked directions.  We did.  No one could give us an answer beyond pointing toward a wall and mentioning that buses were on the other side of it.  “Look for the “A” bus,” they all said.)  We found a small foothold of safety in the stream of cars, cabs, buses, limos and everything but skateboards on a narrow island in the middle of this stream of gas and noise.  We were supposed to find that mysterious something called an “A” bus that would take us to all of the foreign terminals.

Above our heads lighted electric signs indicated where to stand for taxis, limos and buses labeled “B” through “G”.  Hundreds of yards away from us was our destination, the one “A” bus stop in the universe.  On we plodded, arriving just as one of them pulled away from the curb.  At least, I consoled myself as I gazed at it’s slowly fading rear end, we will be first in line for the next one to arrive.

HA!  The next one did not arrive for more than an hour.  Buses emblazoned with every possible letter in every possible alphabet arrived and left with infuriating regularity.  The crowd of increasingly nervous and desperate people grew around us until it seemed to be more than one bus full of travelers and tons of luggage.

I had taken to asking the drivers of the other shuttle buses whether or when an “A” bus would come by.  Some simply looked stupidly at me, like cattle on their way to the hammer thud that would drop them, closed the door and moved on.  I began to ask them if they’d be kind enough to bring something to eat and drink for us stranded here on the island in the sea.  I sugested to my fellow “strandees” that we consider hi-jacking a bus; a suggestion that met with growing and more serious approval as time passed.

One of the bus drivers, perhaps the only one with the power of speech, answered me.  “The problem is that the shift always changes around this time for the “A” bus; just when it really gets busy.”  I shouted, “ARE YOU &*^%*()# KIDDING ME!!!!  How stupid do you have to be to become a dispatcher here?”  The fellow smiled and shrugged.  That meant one of several things to me.  Either he had no idea how stupid that was, or he wasn’t yet that stupid but hoped to be and it embarrassed him, or he just didn’t care.

The wait continued.  I noticed several cabs parked at the curb behind us and walked over to one to ask what the fare would be to take us to the Air New Zealand terminal.  It was within reach, I learned, but I was not yet that desperate.  I’d try hi-jacking and face jail first.  I wondered whether he had a weekend job leading illegal immigrants over the border and through the desert a few hundred miles south of LA.

When I got back to the milling crowd and fought my way through to where Mariellen was I was approached by a man with a New Zealand accent.  He was there with his family, wife and three small children.  “How much is the taxi fare?” he asked me.  I told him and he smiled grimly.  His flight left for Auckland in an hour he said as they gathered up their luggage.  I wished him bon voyage and thought, “Another friend for the US.”, as he drove away in the cab, the driver smiling like a Cheshire cat.

When the bus finally arrived about twenty minutes later nearly fifty people piled on in cattle car fashion.  The absolutely horrible thing about it, horrible almost to the level of being downright evil is that I do not think we were more than a quarter mile from our destination all the while and could easily have walked there in fifteen minutes or less.  We simply drove to the end of the building where all domestic flights arrived and departed, made a left turn around a short curve and arrived at the international terminal, got off the bus and entered.  Walking through the garage would have been the easiest thing to do.

Of course, once inside the terminal we had to endure the boring stupidity of the TSA and its procedures.  Have I asked God to bless O.b.L.?

We finally arrived at out gate a bare fifteen minutes before boarding time, our time on the ground in LA being longer by almost an hour than the time it took us to fly to LA from San Francisco.  I spent that short time composing another “letter I will never send”; this time to the Mayor of Los Angeles upon whose smiling face I looked all during my time as a castaway on that traffic island.

It begins, “Dear Stupid,”

 

Little Guys and Dolls: The Great Race

I mean to write and tell you all about this when it happens two or three weeks ago, but life has a funny way of shunting my trains of thought onto a quiet siding while a few expresses roar down the track on their very important and attention grabbing way.

If you are not aware that St. Christopher’s School, which is where the little guys and dolls of this story go to school to learn about becoming good citizens and such like, wins big and is a few dozen “C” notes better off you should be.  They take a chance a couple of months ago on an offer from the outfit which runs the paper racket with the yellow and green dumpster down at the back of the parking lot near the school; which parking lot is also the playground where the little guys and dolls work off all that energy and give their teachers a chance for a blow. While the young scholars run around like chipmunks just before a snow storm, the teachers kick off their shoes and put up their feet; that is if they are smart.

Now, this is a two horse race they say between St. Chris and Infant Jesus School, another school for little guys and dolls with which I am not so closely connected but I know enough about to worry about them finishing ahead of m”nag”, to see who collects the most of what nobody wants, namely yesterday’s news, and we give you a little extra change for your effort.  “Such a deal,” my good friend Howie’s Uncle Max,  used to say,” you couldn’t get in a store!”   Uncle Max runs a pushcart down on Elizabeth Street in what used to be called Lower Manhattan but now has a dolled up name like SOHO or something no one else knows what it  is at all.  He sold old clothes and made a pretty good living off the stuff the “Swells” up-town, the top hat and white tie crowd, didn’t want anymore.  Uncle Max, a little guy, knew a deal.  He hung around with some Irish guys who worked the doors on the big houses where the “Swells” all lived.  When they drop off their old stuff, and most of the time it is a thing they wear once or twice, to Paddy or Mike at the door, they wait until Max comes around, gives them some spending money for the pile and brings it down to Elizabeth Street where people know what to do with it.

The funny thing is, Max says, the stuff he sells off his pushcart was made within spitting distance of his push cart.  He has a sister or two who does that stuff.  Max never wants a store with doors and walls.  He enjoys the open air, the free pickles from Morty’s barrels out in front and puts two sons through law school where they graduate and make a lot of money defending mobsters who live a few blocks away.

Anyway, back to the race.  Now Jack Daniels, who is from Brooklyn, which is part of New York City, which is the picture next to the word “deal” in the dictionary, has a big smile when he hears this.  Mr. D, as he is known to the denizens of the school and other citizens, says, “Saddle up the student body.”  Soon all over town little guys and dolls with bags, wagons, baskets and buckets appear at doors wearing their stable’s colors and say something like, “Got any paper for St. Chris?”  Two or three come to my door, even, their Mom’s standing outside near the road like a trainer at track side keeping an eye on his talent.

Now I know why God makes catalogs!   I drop an arful here and an armful there, and pretty soon the only paper in the house is Kleenex and the books I keep around for decorations.

In my dreams I see the little guys and dolls up on that paper horse in the St. Chris silks galloping around the club house turn and down the stretch to the finish line, low over the neck.  They stand up and wave at the finish, three lengths ahead of the competition which should have known better.

I am in the little room in the front of the rectory one bright day a couple of weeks ago and I happen to look out the window as the little guys and dolls flood out on their way home.  The joint is filled with them running into Moms and Dads, and the odd Grandfather or Grandmother.  All of a sudden it ain’t a parking lot any more.  It’s a Winner’s Circle!  I ask Linda, who is the glue that holds things together from day to day around the place, “Is that Jack Daniels out at the curb shaking hands and patting shouders and backs?”  “Sure is,” she says.  “They win the race with IJ and collect.”

There’s Mr. D at the curb in the bright sun looking like Nathan detroit on his wedding day, wearing a canary yellow blazer and bright yellow plaid slacks and I need welder’s glasses to look straight at him.  He’s glad handing the little guys and dolls like a Senator on election morning and if his smile ain’t as bright as his blazer then I’m a blind man which I may get to be if I don’t stop looking.   I am on my way to asking him what he thinks about today’s card when I think better of it.  I do not want to give the little guys and dolls notions, especially at this time of the year, about handicapping.

I walk back to the kitchen to build a salad and think, “What a grace…”

The Land of the Running White Clouds, or Aotearoa New Zealand #5

We slept soundly in the big bed in our room at the Howard Johnson’s on Camino Real in San Bruno, CA.  The previous day had been a long one, from 5:00am on the East Coast until Midnight on the West Coast, nearly 24 hours.  But Mariellen and I both woke up well rested early, and after dressing walked a few blocks to attend Mass at St. Robert’s Church.  Passing along the quiet residential streets I was reminded of similar walks I’d taken in new and strange places, our quiet conversation about the only other sound but birds and occasional passing cars.

It was Ascension Thursday, but the Mass was a daily Mass.  San Francisco, like many places, takes things easily, and has moved the feast to Sunday.  Our celebrant was an Irish priest, lending another level of newness and strangeness to the morning; and the congregation couldn’t have been more diverse, sprinkled as it was with Asians, Hispanics and what-alls, perhaps even another Irishman or two.  I remember the church as a large, open and attractive place, a concrete structure built perhaps fifty or so years ago, but not one of those spare and desolate emptinesses; a white building in the Spanish Mission style, I guess you might call it.

After Mass was over we walked back to the hotel, retracing our path through the quiet neighborhood, admiring all of the flowers and pretty houses.  On our way we met Max, a friendly and exuberant 1 year old Lab puppy who would have I am sure invited us to live with him.  I have rarely seen tails wag as eagerly as his did that morning.  The rest of the walk, after we declined Max’s enthusiastic kindnesses, was like a walk through a botanical garden; flowers, bird song and a few smiling faces once more being our only company.  I kept thinking of Eden and the world restored as we walked along.

Back at the hotel, we called Jay in his room and joined him for a light complimentary breakfast in a little nook just outside our quarters.  Then we packed and got ready for Joe, Mariellen’s brother, to arrive.  True to his word, and a bit early in fact, he showed up soon after breakfast to take us around the city for a quick your before we hopped on the plane for our connecting flight to Los Angeles, and he and Jay went waaay up north to Weed, yes Weed, CA.  We had stored our bags at the hotel (whose manager went out of his way, thank God, to help us) and took off with Joe into San Francisco with little delay.

He had done his homework on the drive down from Weed, way up near Mt. Shasta, and the front seat of his car we’d find filled with maps and brochures and printed out directions from point to point of all the places he had picked for us to see.  Good fellow that he is, though, he was open to detours from his chosen route, and Mariellen, with her Supple gene for “another good idea” in fine working order made the suggestion that we visit the Golden Gate Park.

Joe took us right there, and I applauded her suggestion after we entered the place.

Somewhere in the middle of Golden Gate Park

It is, I think, larger than Central Park, and certainly makes the Boston Common look like someone’s back yard.  And, it is filled with treats for the eye, including a small herd of Bison…tame enough to be ridden..not.  But they were having a bit of a lie down when we finally arrived after zig-zagging all over the park in search of them for most of a precious hour of sight seeing time.  Time in which I felt, not for the last time during this trip, like an Israelite in Sinai.  What we finally did see were several hairy large brown lumps at the back of a wire fenced enclosure.  Standing outside looking in I wondered why Buffalo Bill had wasted so much time on them.  My last thought as we drove away was of big brown Schmoos.  We did visit one or two more attractions, mini-parks within the larger one, both of them quite pretty: a Japanese Garden and a Chinese one.

At the Chinese Garden, the Bridge Over Untroubled Waters

Though I did look, I could find neither bamboo or ginger root in either place.  There were a few geese and other waterfowl who seemed quite content to stay exactly where they were.  After a look and a few pictures we left to find our venue for lunch, a place Joe had chosen called The Cliff House.

Sitting now in the Patriot House in Devonport, Auckland, on Queen Victoria Street, and writing this while having a pint of Kilkenny Irish Beer that lunch seems a million miles away, but I remember it for this reason.  It was the first sign I had, clear and bold, that despite some rough spots along the way this trip was going to be a good one.  Jow had told us a bit about the place he was taking us; that the Cliff House was long a popular spot, the food good, the location spectacular, and that it was always crowded.  I worried about that, and our time constraints has he turned onto the road toward the place, and worried even more when I saw the curb lined with cars all the way up the hill.  It was right in the middle of the lunch time rush.  I figured that our wait was going to be at least a half hour.

Joe dropped us off at the door and then went to find a parking place, either in San Diego or Honolulu I figured.  I walked in, told the nice lady we were a party of four, and just as I was about to ask for a couple of cots and blankies she said, “This way, please.”  Just inside we were seated right at a window opening on the wide ocean and beneath a hpoto of a young Jimmy Stewart looking great in a suit with shoulders as wide as he was tall, with lapels the size of the Nile Delta.

You need a reservation for a table on the rocks.

Joe soon joined us. He found a spot just down the hill from the restaurant, and we had a delightful lunch during which I took a mere 60 or 70 photos.

After lunch we drove next to the Golden gate bridge for a look at it half covered in fog, a very dramatic sight.

The Little Mermaid from Copenhagen sometimes visits that rock.

It was, really, our last stop in San Francisco.  We’d spent a lot of time wandering through Golden gate Park and needed to get back to the hotel, collect our gear, kiss goodbye and leave Dodge before sunset.  Not before, though, Brother Joseph took us up Nob Hill in his car, and back down again.  Then we had a particularly interesting meander through the downtown streets.  It seems that one cannot make a left turn in SF, a place J>E> Hoover of happy memory would love for that alone.  Dogged perseverance, remarkably even tempered throughout, and the laws of probability operating in our favor we did find what I think was the one remaining legal left hand turn in the city.  Soon we were back at the hotel.

We collected our baggage.  We hugged.  We slapped each other on the back, growled, grunted and swore we loved each other forever.  Nah!  Brother Joseph sprawled on the couch in the lobby and we called the limo to come get us.

"Nah. Joe sprawled on the couch while we collected our bags."

Then we said, “See you soon.”  They left.  We left and were taken away by our friendly Asian limo driver to the airpoer for our flight to Los Angeles.  We were on the brink of death, well, not death so much as serious annoyance, but didn’t know it.

The Land of the Running White Clouds, or Aotearoa, New Zealand, #4

After watching Mt. Shasta slip by thousands of feet below me, and trying to follow the meander of the Sacramento River down California to the sea, I concentrated on preparing for landing, making sure my shoes were on, the book I hadn’t bothered to read was stowed away and my camera, too.  Then I sat back and waited, watched and listened as we came in over the bay and landed quite smoothly in San Francisco.  It took us only about twenty minutes to collect our bags and get connected with a shuttle to our hotel, a HOJO’s Express on Camino Real (not so) in San Bruno (the saint would have something to say about that, I thought.)

I was surprised, and so was Mariellen, at how neat and clean the place was.  I’d been steeling myself for much worse (not quite a fleabag, but near enough), and have been in much worse at twice the price, $48.00.  We checked in, but had to wait a short while before jay’s room next door to ours was ready.  I amused myself contemplating the view out our window, the backyard of several row houses and a dentist’s office.  Then we took the shuttle back to the airport and caught the BART train into downtown ‘Frisco.  We had a date to meet Mariellen’s and Jay’s nephew Mike Supple and his wife Melinda for supper.  Since it was only mid-afternoon we had a couple of hours to spend and decided it would be nice spending them exploring some of the city.

We took the train to the nearest stop to the Embarcadero, to broad avenue fronting the harbor, turning ourselves around once or twice before finally deciding which way was the right way to go.  We were on Market Street and decided that the clock tower in the distance was our destination.  I remembered seeing it in some movie or other and connected it with the Embarcadero in my dim recollection of the film.

Not a yellow brick road, but the next best thing.

Or, maybe it was my imagination.  Maybe I simply figured it would make a great “farewell” or “welcome home” shot.  In any event, we’d told Mike and Melinda that we’d meet them on Fisherman’s Wharf…and so.  I remember, now, that Fisherman’s Wharf was about a mile or so down the way from Market Street.  The day was lovely, though, and cool.

Funnily enough, It might have been a day in San Diego, bright dry and breezy.  I hadn’t expected that at all, thinking fog and misery when I thought of San Francisco weather.  Perhaps that’s only the visitors, though because I saw no sign of the natives in awe of the sun, breezy coolness and brilliant light.  They seemed as if this was just another sunny day; scads of them jogging everywhere, not a raincoat or umbrella in sight, and who wasn’t running was skateboarding, cycling or strolling hand in hand…s0metimes in the oddest combinations.

When we reached the Embarcadero I figured we had a little more than an hour for a leisurely stroll down to Fisherman’s Wharf from Market Street.  That was just great because the street was the perfect place for a mid-afternoon walk.  We wandered out onto the piers, along the water side.

The Lady and The Dock

What was once a working sea port was now filled with businesses, little bistros, restaurants, harbor cruise boats and the odd lawyer’s office or bank. Traffic along the avenue included a fleet of LRV’s harvested from similar places all over the globe.

Next Stop? Anywhere.

This one was from Philadelphia Suburban Transit, but there were cars from as far away as Sydney, Australia, still working long after the places they served had done with them in favor of the good old automobile and its conveniences.

One of the businesses operating out of the old piers is a place called TCHO, a chocolate manufacturer.  We stopped into their “store”, a little place hardly bigger than a large closet, and sampled several tasty and very interesting chocolate candies; one of which started off tasting sour and tart and finished sweetly at the back of my throat.  I found myself seized with desire to possess all of it.  Alas, too expensive, we satisfied ourselves with several small squares for Mike and Melinda.

Who we met shortly after near the aquarium.  They called Mariellen on her cell to say that they’d made great time from San Jose, the National Geek and Dweeb Sanctuary and location of the Pocket Protector Museum.  If smiling, holding hands and occasional shy and secretive glances at one another is a sign of something going on, happiness in each other’s presence, well then, M&M prove the point that love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage.

They drove us over to the Mission District, once a rather unfavorable place, now becoming “discovered”.  There they took us to a little Mexican restaurant called Puerto Alegre,

Mike and Melinda at Puerto Alegre

a neighborhood joint with good food and a couple of guys who came in off the street to sing and play for spare change.  (Unfortunately, Mike informed us, the “discovery” of the place was ruining it, taking away some of its cruddy look and charm, cleaning it up for the “polo” set.)  We did eat a good meal, mine being a kind of seafood stew, a Mexican bouillabaise, which gave me a couple of ideas for my next try at the rectory, adding some cilantro and tomatoes to the broth.  The house Margaritas were darn good, too and I was glad I wasn’t driving.

After the meal we wandered back to the garage where Mike had parked the car.  I discovered that the “Mission” hadn’t been completely discovered and sanitized.  We passed a few shipwrecks, human “road kill” flattened by passing life I thought, living tears on the streets hiding in doorways.  One of them approached me, asking for a dollar, four quarters, explaining that she had AIDS and needed to get to a clinic.  When I showed her I only had a five dollar bill she changed her story to being entirely without money.  Just around the corner I heard our street musicians singing some dolorous Spanish song.

Singing some dolorous Spanish song...

God alone knows why but I thought of that story about St. Peter and the beggar.  I gave her the five bucks thinking all the while I wanted to do better by her.  Melinda commented that I’d let her fool me with her story.  I answered that I’d grown up in New York and knew from the beginning how little truth was being told; and knew, too, that she needed five dollars more than me.

We were soon back at our hotel fondly saying good night to the youngsters, wishing them well and opening the house to them when/if they come East.  I told Mike that I’d like to link to his site: SUPPLEWINE.COM.  He said that would be fine as long as I warn my friends that it’s pitched to a younger demographic.  Now, you’re warned.

You see, Mike is something of a “phenom” in the wine business, a fellow who earned the nickname “The Palate” when he was in college and know more about wine that I’ll ever know.

Kevin In The Morning

The voice on the other end of the line is deep and has a thick very authentic Brooklyn, New York accent.   “Hi, Kevin, ” I say.  and he booms back in his inimitable fashion, “Pete!  How Ya doing?”

How long has it been?  Five years? Ten years?  More?  I am not sure.  But, really, no time has passed.  We are together by phone, and nothing has separated us.  He mentions the time we arrested John Yancy, a black dope peddler, in Harlem one cool evening, and he carried him down several flights of stairs, dumping him in the back of the car, and, as an ominous crowd gathers, urges me to “Get the hell outta here!”  That was back in the late ’60′s when cops were getting shot not too far away, and two white guys “kidnapping” one black guy did not look like something which should be done without a battalion of black clad troops and a few tanks.  But, what did we know?

I remember the sunny afternoon on First Avenue when he clotheslined some guy running away from us and I, chasing him, stepped on his head just as he hit the ground.  Someone else scooped him from the street, threw him into the car just pulling up, and we all piled in on top, driving off while the well dressed folks stopped and gaped, trying to figure out what had just happened to their world. It took about ten seconds, after we’d been watching and waiting for about two hours.

Today, they’d have roped off Midtown and evacuated all the people.  helicopters would be all over the place, sirens day and night, searchlights, stun grenades, smoke bombs.  After a day or so the guy would give up, and MSNBC would break down the set and go off somewhere else for continuous coverage of another disaster, catastrophe, chariot race or what all.

What did we know?

“Where are you?  What are you doing, now,” I ask.  He’s down in Georgia, Brunswick, GA, to be exact, the only Catholic surrounded by Baptists for miles around.  “I gotta be careful on Sunday, Pete,” he says.  “I gotta be careful going out to mow the lawn and have a beer.  All them eyes on me.”  I give him the name of another fellow, another Irishman, another Catholic who has to be careful in the same way down there, and tell him to get in touch.  This guy is from Indiana, a Bobby Knight fan, an old prosecutor.  They’ll get along I say to myself.

This guy got his picture on the cover of some magazine years ago after he made a big deal case.  His boss was on the cover, too, which is strange because his boss didn’t think the case was the right kind of thing to spend time on.  Matter of fact, no one but him and one lone guy in the IRS wanted the case made.  Until it was made.  Then the defendant pays a $500,000.00 fine from their petty change account, and walks out the door.  See what I mean?

What did he know?

Then Kevin says something serious to me.  “I was working for the Children’s Court, Pete.  The judge down here was an ex-FBI agent.  I couldn’t take it anymore.  All these kids coming in raped by their uncles, their older brothers, and nobody’s doing a damn thing about it.  You know?,”   He says, “I wanted to grab a few of them and give them a beating.  I had to leave.  There was one girl who kept having kids, one a year.  She gives them up for foster care, but makes a living out of the money she gets when she’s pregnant.  And, no one does a thing about it.  Don’t talk to me about foster care, either.  That’s a racket, and no one cares.”  As he talks I’m thinking about another guy I used to know in one of the sheriff’s offices up here in Cow Hampshire, from some place like Alabama originally; another good guy.

The first time I meet him is in this big office in the new county courthouse, not too far from the county jail, and he’s surrounded by boxes and boxes of smut; evidence in a case against a guy who…; well I’ll leave all that alone. He tells me that his office sees this kind of stuff more than anything else.  He’s sick of it and wishes he could get lost in a nice murder case, or some boat owner smuggling dope in from a mother ship off the coast.  But, there’s only one other detective in the whole department.

Back in the present, I’m listening to Kevin going on about life down South; about him and his wife Judy, and his little dog; about how he goes for walks along the beach, and talks to the folks he meets, and nets shrimp from the shore.  “Pete, they’re the biggest juiciest shrimp you ever ate!  They’re great!”, he rumbles.

I’m smiling as he says goodbye, and we promise to call and stay in touch, and love each other forever.  I have a picture in my mind of Kevin about forty years ago in the middle of some street in Brooklyn where we spent four days and nights back then waiting for a shipment of heroin from Spain to leave the dock so we could follow it and arrest the rats who smuggled the stuff here.  There’s Kevin in the morning.  It’s early, and it’s cool and the sun is bright, the sky is blue and clear.  He has a football in his big hand, and the rest of us are down the street.

What did we know?

The Land of the Running White Clouds, or Aotearoa, New Zealand #3

The first day of the trip had ended when the lights went out away across the room on Mariellen’s side, and, as I lay wide awake wondering whether or when I’d get to sleep, I thought about the many miles ahead and tried to imagine what the next weeks held for us.  That adventure of the mind did the trick, eventually, and I drifted off.

I was wide awake at 4:00am, and grimly facing what I knew would be a very long day.  My first thoughts were that a shower at that time would be a hostile act towards all the still sleeping people in the house.  How many that might have been given the comings and goings of last night wasn’t at all clear to me.

So I lay on my back in my narrow twin bed, listening to Mariellen’s regular breathing in the far distance, occasionally glancing at the clock all the way over there on the other side of her own separate bed while begrudging her those soft metronomic sighs of deep and peaceful sleep, and begrudging the same in everyone else in the house.  Her little alarm clock woke her at 5:00am and she went downstairs to make us some coffee.  I took it as sign and permission to leave my own narrowing little bed.  It was after all her own brother’s house.  I leapt from bed, showered, dressed and joined her downstairs.

We grazed a little breakfast over the next hour or so, people appearing from time to time, and then came the sweet goodbyes of our hostess, the half awake handshakes of sons Will and Jack, and Maddy’s rather harried and distracted courtesy of the occasion as she herself made final preparations for her cold, windy and wet school camping trip in Maine.  She’d explained that it was a requirement of all the students.  I thought I would have chosen a school more carefully; one which required its students to spend three days inside some snug roost drinking tea, watching a warm and toasty fire and reading good books.  Mercifully, I kept my counsel.

Instead I tinkered with my injured camera, hoping that I’d only imagined what had happened yesterday afternoon.  But, it was one of those hopes that are hopeless at their birth, a hope against grim reality, a vain imagining, a fairy tale.   I wrote a short note to Mary asking that she mail the camera and its case to our friend Joanna in New York City who had promised to have the camera repaired, and left her $20.00 for packing and postage.

Bill, God love him, was  to drive us to the airport after we had collected Jay, Mariellen’s brother, from his place just a little way down the street.  Jay was going with us as far as San Francisco where another Supple brother, Joseph, would meet him and take him up north for a while.  I was picking up bags and lugging them to the car when Bill walked by, camera and note in one hand and my twenty in the other which he stuffed in my hand.  “You’ll probably have need of this,” he said, walking by.  “I’ll take care of the camera.”

One tends to listen to Bill.  I thanked him; once again considering how good it was of God to bring Mariellen and her family into my life.

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The drive in was on almost empty roads; another occasion for my thanks, being a little nervous about time and such.  While Bill worked the short cuts he knew so well I thought of him “traffic surfing” the way a person catches the crest of a wave and, out in front of the pile up behind us, shoots in easily and alone.

The thought was erased when we arrived at Terminal C where we were to catch the first of the six flights this trip would require of us.  Several dozen cars, several hundred people and several thousand pieces of luggage all crowded into a space half the size of a gridiron.  We were walking for the outdoor baggage check in when Bill, whose firm handshake still ached me, warned us off.  I think his cry was, “They charge you, there!”  Visions of 20 dollar bills fluttering away flashed before my mind, and we turned toward the doors.

We went inside to the Jet Blue check-in counters stretching the length of the back wall.  The size of the crowd wasn’t really a worry since it moved along steadily to the baggage check-in counters, each station along them manned and ready; a welcome sight and strange compared to the one or two agents lolling behind most others I have seen.  Several “crowd handlers” stood by directing passengers to available agents.  We were soon through that, facing the next barrier to the door of our airplane, the dreaded “security check”.

Shoeless and belt less we faced the clueless.  Well why not pick on ‘em, poor folks, the dalits of the traveler’s world.  They keep us from getting as quickly as possible to the gate where we may sprawl uncomfortably in seats designed by hateful people for legless midgets until our flight is called; in this case about forty-five minutes later.

Sitting there reflecting about the first few hours of the actual journey I offered a small prayer of thanks that things had gone so well with the TSA folks (Thousands Standing Around), especially since Jay, Mariellen’s brother, was himself concerned.  He hadn’t been on a plane since 9/11 and had wondered a bit about the whole process.

Mariellen produced her Kindle, where she was fast collecting everything written by man with the possible exception of Hammurabi’s Code and the Manhattan White Pages, and quietly read.  We shared a snack from the bag of goodies we’d prepared for the flight, Jet Blue having no meal service.  I wandered, read headlines, recoiled from sticker shock at the magazine, book and bottled water prices, gawked at people and tried to look the bored and disinterested traveler.  So much time.  So little to do.

Several centuries later the bright voice announced the good news.  Our flight to San Francisco was being boarded, by passengers and one “Service Animal”, a dog accompanying one of us humans.  I was grateful for this bit of clarifying information…

One of the flight attendants grumbled to another at the presence of this animal among all the people.  The “grumbelee” answered, “What could I do?  It’s a service animal, and I had to let them aboard!”  I pictured the S.A and its serviced human in separate cages in the baggage hold if permission wasn’t granted.  As my boarding pass was being scanned by the upset attendant I tried my best to calm her down.  “You know, that is what they call husbands, don’t you; service animals?”  The Rule Enforcer laughed and said, “I need one of them.  Where can I get one?”  She glanced over at Mariellen and asked if she could rent me.

Fortunately the press of the crowd pushed us past them or I might be doing the dishes in Saugus instead of sitting in a comfortable bed in Paihia, NZ, writing these words.

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Well, about all I can say for the flight to San Francisco is that it happened.  Jay was happy with the many TV stations available, and happier still that they came to him on the screen fixed into the back of the seat in front of him.  Mariellen fell into her Kindle, only surfacing from time to time for air and a look around.  She was reading the Mahabharata, I think.  I dozed until served one of the roast beef sandwiches we’d prepared for the flight, and then dozed some more.

We were in an almost brand new airplane, I think, something from the Boeing showroom with a lot of the number seven in its name.  The seats were wide and spaced far apart.  The crew was young and helpful.  I did not see a walker or a cane among them.  None of them dribbled.  None of them seemed to have loose dentures or back problems.  Aside from those shortcomings, the flight was as normal as every other one I have taken recently.  Properly prepared for things like that, you may actually enjoy Jet Blue.

In the row in front of us were two women traveling with a young girl of five or six who had some kind of developmental disorder.  During the flight from time to time she would stand up in one of their laps and peek over the seat to look around.  I tried saying hello, touching her hand or smiling and waving at her.  There was no reaction or indication that she noticed there was someone touching her or trying to communicate with her.  I was affected by this, and the devotion the two women showed her, offering a prayer for them all.

The Girl On The Plane

For a while towards the end of the flight I amused myself looking down at the world below, at all the brown and the very little green, at all the snow along the mountain ridges.  As we began our descent towards San Francisco I saw the whole of Lake Shasta below with the mountain from which it takes its name, and the dam which created it.  I didn’t know then that in a couple of weeks I’d be on the lake, inside the dam and near enough to the mountain to understand how some folks all those years ago…and today…make a big deal about mountains; climbing them, living near them and just standing around looking at them in all of their purple mountained majesty.

Mt. Shasta from about 25 miles away