Dr. Metablog

De Sternuente, or, Of Sneezing

I enjoy fighting off a sneeze. It takes practice and concentration. When the sneeze urge emerges, without warning, the battle is joined. On the side of the sneeze -- dust or some other foreign particles passing through the nasal hairs, reaching  the nasal mucosa, releasing a flood of histamines which irritate the nerve cells and signal the brain to stimulate the trigeminal network and activate the pharyngeal and tracheal muscles, producing a noisy, 100-mile-an-hour blast of microbes and snot. On the side of restraint -- nothing but enormous personal discipline and the desire not to surrender to animal nature. There are some, who are less committed to mind-over-body, who employ the fingertips to pinch the end of the nose, or, alternatively, who press a knuckle against the philtrum, the infranasal depression which Shakespeare, curiously, called "the valley" -- but frankly, when it comes to resisting sternutation, digital success is only half a loaf. It's far more rewarding to think one's way to a rare victory in the lifelong sneezomachia. Not to sneeze is a triumph of the will.

Which is not to assert that a good sneeze gives no pleasure, if a person would give oneself over to it. It's simply that the sneeze, especially one of the window-rattling variety, is so entirely anarchic and inartistic, which might be why there is so slight a sneeze literature. Although hard to believe, it's a fact that Puck is the only character in all of Shakespeare's plays who deigns to mention the sneeze, and even he weakens its disruptive force by employing the archaism "neeze." The best-known literary sneeze (or, at least, the only one that comes to my mind) occurs in Pope's Rape of the Lock, when Belinda, ravished by Sir Plume's "glittering forfex," throws snuff in the baron's nose. Immediately "with starting tears each eye o'erflows,/ And the high dome re-echoes to his nose." Snuff artificially stimulates sneezing, which may or may not be be why Michael, Tsar of all the Russians, proposed amputating the noses of snuffers. Michael's contemporary, Pope Urban VIII, merely threatened excommunication. Some say that the practice of saying "God bless you" to sneezers originated with Pope Gregory the Great, and has to do with the superstition that the soul leaves the sneezing body, perhaps nasally.

Why is it that no one every says "God bless you" to farters, who are as much in need of divine intervention  as sneezers. Society demands that farting, though shameful (and belching, though comic), should be controlled; sneezing is, except for the most determined, uncontrollable.  

Remembering

Remembering, in a melancholy mood early this winter morning, some of the friends who left the room far too early: Arthur Oberg, Bernice Kliman, Bob Nero, Bob Pois, Bob Sklar, Curtis Barnes, David Gaillard, David Novarr, Ed Nolan, Eleanor Gottlieb, Gary Stahl, Herb Eldridge, Honi Haber, Howard Smokler, Ila Warner, Jonathon "Skip" Chase, Myrna Mikelberg Brown, Nancy Hill, Phyllis Eva Goss Murray, Peter Tasch, Renate Wood, Rob McIntosh, Rubin Rabinovitz, Shirley Johnston, Stephen Evans, Virgil Grillo.

Bird, Bigbird, and Little

One high noon, many years ago, when I was myself barely fledged, and was an undergraduate at a "large Eastern university,"  I spotted three well-known members of the humanities faculty on the hunt for lunch. They were Ephim Fogel, David Grossvogel, and Don Kleine. An unforgettable assemblage!  Fogel, Grossvogel and Kleine, I thought -- sounds like the name of a law firm invented by Tom Pynchon.

I had not reflected on this  -- to me  -- amusing incident until this week, when I was reading the bird book that I mentioned in a previous post. There I discovered that the largest known bird was the recently extinct elephant bird, a distant Madagascan cousin of the ostrich, which stood 10 feet tall and tipped the scale at 880 pounds. Its eggs were 3 feet in circumference and would have provided three chicken-size egg omelets for about 55 people. I also learned that the smallest bird is the bee hummingbird which the calipers says is two inches long and which weighs .06 of an ounce. Its egg is the size of a pea, which means than it would take a small flock of hummingbirds many days to make me a decent breakfast. 

Here's a bee hummingbird:

And here's an imaginative reconstruction of the elephant bird, a grossvogel if there ever was one.

 

They are not drawn to scale.

Birthday Gift Suggestions

I've been studying (or more exactly being dazzled by) the illustrations in a magnificent four-pound coffee-table extravaganza called The Horse From Cave Paintings to Modern Art. It was first published in France (Cheval dans l'art) in 2008 and came to me through the Abbeville Press on Varick Street in NYC and also through the generosity of our local public library (it's too expensive to purchase). The history of the horse in art begins with the Chauvet Cave and includes thousands of years of wonders. But I don't write merely to extol the book, however great it be. 

I call it to your attention because I have a birthday coming up soon and any number of my friends and relatives and readers of this blague have been asking me what I would like as a gift. This book has given me a few ideas. At the outset I'd like to say that I'm not really interested in the monumental paintings that fill most of the pages of the book: battle scenes, hunting scenes, royal processions. Not my cup of tea. Besides the fact that they are too large for the condo, most of them are a little on the pretentious side, frankly. I don't think they'd work with our understated decor.

However, I'd like to suggest that friends, relatives and constant readers might want to pool their pennies and present me with one of the smaller, more discreet objects. 

My first choice:  

It's known as the Chariot of the Sun sculpture. It's bronze with a little bit of gold leaf and was found a hundred years ago in a Danish bog, where it had apparently sat for about 3500 years. It might be a little the worse for wear but I don't mind. At three feet long and two feet high it would sit nicely on the dining room table. No longer bog-bound, it presently resides in the National Museet in Copenhagen but I'm sure the museum would entertain a reasonable offer. I think you can assume that unlike the callous Danes, I would treat the sculpture right and not stick it a swamp somewhere.

If the Chariot of the Sun is unavailable, or the Museet (the phone number for the "butikken" is 33 47 38 30) proves to be sticky to deal with, I have another suggestion. It's not as good, but good enough.

 It's Charlemagne.  A ninth-century bronze equestrian statuette. The picture is misleading because the statuette is only nine inches tall, which makes it just right for a window sill or the top of one of the stereo speakers. The rendering of the emperor himself is a little stiff, and the sword that should be in his right hand is missing, but the horse, imitating Roman models, is pretty damn good. Charlemagne and his horsey are in the Louvre just waiting for an offer. The statuette is so small that it shouldn't cost much.  

And please, friends, no tacky reproductions.

Silly Dreams

In last night's dream, I was back in college anxiously sitting a final exam in a literature course. I remember that the exam was titanically difficult and unnerving but I can recall only one specific question. "Discuss Ernest Hemingway's father's Buddhist leanings." I must say that my dreamatorium was working overtime to come up with that one. Also on the exam: I was presented with pictures and was asked to supply their literary significance. The one I remember was a photograph of a generic urban street with five unoccupied parking spaces. My answer to the question was this: "These spaces were left open when Ernest Hemingway and four of his friends left for the bar in order to get themselves soused." I remember thinking that my answer was pretty damn clever and should get me full marks. I also dreamed a short-answer quiz. In this case I can't recall the questions, but only that I gave as one of my answers the word "praestorium." I have no idea what "praestorium" means, except that it sounds like a portmanteau of the names of two ancient Roman officials (praetor and quaestor) with an attached (and redundant) noun suffix.

It's sad that fifty years after the fact I'm still dreaming about examinations. I'm thankful these recent dreams were foolish rather than nightmarish. Nevertheless, I think it's time to read up on Hemingway, a writer to whom I've clearly paid too little attention this last half-century. You never know when someone's going to ask a hard question about Hemingway or his father.

"Mr. Kripke"

When I was in graduate school (fifty years ago, believe it or not), I enrolled for a course called "Modern American Poetry." In the unthrilling days of yesteryear, "modern" still meant the generation of Eliot, and Pound. This particular course, however, was so up-to-the moment that it might have been called "last month's American poetry." Some of the poets whom we studied turned out to be mere flashes in the pan, and none of them, I think, ever came close to Yeats or Frost. Nevertheless, it was good to know about Olson and Hall and Bly and Snodgrass and Levertov. There were major omissions to the curriculum: Sylvia Plath had not yet flashed across the horizon, and Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso and Duncan were far too rude to have been invited to this particular party.

Our instructor was a genial man named John Lincoln Sweeney.  Altlough he was not a bristling-with-bibliography kind of academic celebrity, he knew everything about the subject and was famous as a supporter of poets and artists. I knew that he was "different" -- even my callow unsophisticated eye noticed the elegant bespoke suits and the aristocratic mien. At the Woodberry Poetry Library in Lamont, Sweeney was listed as "curator" but I have not doubt that he was also patron. Woodberry collected not only books but also records and audiotapes and films of poetry readings. It was a spectacular resource. There was a rumor that there were poetry gatherings at  Sweeney's mansion on Beacon Street, across the river, but I was never invited. Why would I have been?

Here's a photograph of Jack and Maire Sweeney:   

Sweeney's letters are nowhoused in the Trinity College, Dublin Library.  "Correspondents include Conrad Aiken, William Alfred, Padraic Colum, e.e. cummings, Richard Eberhart, Leon Edel, T.S. Eliot, Robert Fitzgerald, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Thomas Kinsella, Philip Larkin, Marianne Moore, Edwin and Willa Muir, Wallace Stevens, and Richard Wilbur." The paintings (Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse) were bequeathed to the National Gallery of Ireland.  

There were about twenty students in "Modern American Poetry." Nineteen of them were regular; one was irregular. Whenever "Mr. Kripke," whom I remember as an an exceedingly scruffy young fellow, signalled that he wanted to participate in the conversation, time stopped. Both the instructor and my classmates treated Mr. Kripke, who spoke in halting, awkward, and oracular tones, with extraordinary deference. "What's the deal?" I asked. "He's supposed to be very smart,"  I was told. I myself didn't understand a word that Mr. Kripke said during the entire semester. Not a single word. When I don't understand, it's hard for me to tell whether the speaker is spouting hot air, or I'm just not smart enough.

"Mr. Kripke" dropped from my consciousness. But just the other day, I noticed an advertisement in the NYRB for a colloquium honoring the achievement of Saul Kripke, Distinguished Professor at Princeton and at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Here's the scoop: according to wikipedia, "a recent poll conducted among philosophers ranked Saul Kripke among the top ten most important philosophers of the past 200 years." Top ten??  This is not trival praise. No wonder everyone stopped to listen. It was like having Michael Jordan in your gym class.

Kripke was apparently a prodigy who made important contributions to modal logic, whatever that is, while still in his teens..  For example:

A Kripke model is a triple , where is a Kripke frame, and is a relation between nodes of W and modal formulas, such that:

• if and only if ,
• if and only if or ,
• if and only if .

Which. frankly  I never doubted.

Mr. Kripke had a couple of branches of logic (and mathematics) named after him before he entered college. No wonder I didn't understand (and still wouldn't) what he was struggling to say. The most recent philosopher I can understand is John Locke, and then only the easy parts.  

In retrospect, that class in poetry had more drama than I gave it credit for.  Here was John Sweeney, civilized and be-boutonniered, acquaintance of Yeats, friend to every important poet in America.  And there was Saul Kripke, not only a mathematical and philosophical genius but also the son of "the only conservative rabbi in Omaha, Nebraska." 

And then there was me.   

Dog-faced Man

Here's a sad childhood memory.

Just around the corner from us, on Ditmas Avenue, there lived the ugliest man I've ever seen in my entire life. He was a small, always solitary old man. He was not deformed, just plain ugly.  His nose and mouth stuck way out, but his chin receded; he had very long canine teeth and the world's saddest eyes. He walked the ugliest little dog. 

I confess that when we passed in the street, I looked away, even though I was fascinated enough by his repulsion to steal a surreptitious backward glance. I imagine that everyone else avarted their eyes, and that the poor fellow lived in a world not only without friends, but without eye contact.

Later I learned that he made his living my exhibiting himself at a Coney Island freak show.  He was the "Dog-Faced Man."

This was the 1950s.  I hope that freak shows are a thing of the past. 

Downtown Bradford

When we arrived in Bradford, Vermont in 1967 (during the troubled waning years of the LBJ presidency), I remarked to Mrs. Dr. M., "this "downtown" looks like it hasn't changed a bit since the 1920s." The downtown was one block long then; it's no more extensive now, forty-four years later. And not much different.

We sat in the window of the Local Buzz, one of our newer enterprises (real coffee comes to Bradford, at last!) and watched the folks go by. Couples, the guy way too skinny and the lady way too fat. Young blonde guys, tattooed, trying desperately to grow their scruffy beards. An occasional suit -- a lawyer or insurance agent. Tourists in campers, looking mighty skeptical. An occasional gaggle of bicyclists, coming from somewhere, going elsewhere, all a-helmeted and bespandexed. But very few guys in "farmer greens."    

Nor have there been any new buildings to compromise the 1920s time-capsule. Stores have changed owners and purposes, of course. Gove (pronounced as in rove, not as in glove) and Bancroft was an independent pharmacy (the kind of place that had big old colored bottles in the window) that disappeared must be a quarter of a century ago and has been superseded by the new Kinney's out at the four corners (where also resides Orange County's only four-way traffic light). Similarly, Gove and Morrill, an independent hardware store, has been replaced with a shiny new Aubuchon (a northeastern chain). The old Gove and Morrill, three decades dead, was a great place of a young fellow to purchase his hardware needs. Lester Wakefield and Bart Morrill knew everything and gladly would they teach. They also had a bit of a machine shop in the basement and would drill out that rusted part for you, no charge. Their shop was a shrine of Yankee frugality. The Aubuchon employs what looks like minimum wage help -- the kids know how to run the Visa through the slot, but they know little else, so you're pretty much on your own.  I'm sure that Kinney's and Aubuchon make a better profit than the stores that they replaced.

And speaking of chains, we now have a Subway, which, I must be the most impoverished looking Subway in existence. Other eateries: Chan's House (the poorest, least authentic Chinese restaurant in the entire occident).  And another house, the House of Pizza, which replaced, many years ago, The Chimes (a semi-glorified diner). In between the Chimes and the pizza place, there was for a few controversial years at that corner location a breakfast shop that was run by very very young, robotic Stepford girls, reputed to be members of the harem of some charismatic off-brand far right Christian cultist. The food was marvelously inexpensive but the place was o so creepy.  

There's a second-hand bookshop, Booked Solid, that is loaded with romances and "genre" paperbacks; trade books that find their way to the shelves are accidental tourists.

Two banks where there used to be just one.

The Paradise Cafe, Bradford's first venture into culinary artistry, lasted a year or two but then devolved into the Richardson Insurance Agency, though it is my impression that Kermit Richardson himself has long since collected on his policy. Taylor-Palmer insurance is  still in the same white clapboard house that it inhabited half a century ago, and Hod Palmer, after a brief foray into gourmet cooking, has been restored to the world of his fathers. The Colatina, an out-of-the-can red-sauce Italian restaurant, is still in business, still enticing those Dartmouth boys to drive half an hour for some north of Hanover pizza. Perry Oil, which dominates its side of the street, is still going strong, still filling those propane tanks, and still run by genuine Perrys. Hill's, a kind of old-fashioned notion shop, like a Woolworth's  -- how come it hasn't been obliterated by a Target or a K-Mart? The Bradford Public Library, now reroofed, is a handsome Victorian Gothic building, but lacks books.   

"All is flux," Heraclitus used to say. But then he'd never been to downtown Bradford.    

Things I'll Miss

I'm reconciled to the idea that death comes to all, but nevertheless, there are a few earthly things that I'm genuinely going to miss.

Is there anything more wonderful, when you've been out early in the morning in the rain or in a heavy dew, and your feet are wet and cold, than returning home and putting on clean, dry socks, especially those excellent white cotton ones that they sell at Costco?  Definitely a moment that makes life worth living. And also: purchasing, opening and playing a new music cd -- preferably one that you've thought about acquiring for a long time. Another: watching young healthy athletic people run down the street, especially women with long ponytails a-bobbing. Also: the perennially pleasurably sound of a bat (wooden, not aluminum) connecting with a high, hard one. Rum raisin ice cream. A well-made glazed donut. The sight of the first soft, red peony of the year just as it breaks the ground. The waxy pink flower of the tamarack, always a surprise. My Swiss Felco #2 hand pruner (which our cousins across the sea call it a secateur), a friend for many seasons, which fits my hand perfectly and which if you give it an occasional oiling and sharpening, cuts absolutely true. The sound of rain on an uninsulated metal roof -- and also like the clickety-clack and pinging of the roof on a cloudy day when the sun comes in and out and the roof alternately expands and contracts -- it's an all-percussion symphony. The old downtown of an old city that I'm visiting for the first time. A one-year-old boy or girl learning to walk, at the stage when the strides are of unequal and inconsistent length, the child hovered over by admiring young parents, she with a hand outstretched, he recording the moment on tape; the child the center of the universe, thoroughly doted upon, as is exactly appropriate. A deep, luxurious weekend afternoon nap, so profound that when you wake up you don't know, for five seconds, where you are or what day it is. A sleep so deep that somnus imago mortis kicks in;  nothing more satisfying: the kind of thing that makes a guy want to live a few more years.

More on Lola's Language

Lola and I brought some windfall apples to the horses. The horses are Morgans, very friendly, but intimidatingly large to a 22-month-old child. We stood on one side of the gate, the horses trotted up to the other side as soon as we announced our presence. They like to lean over the fence and look in our pockets for apples. Lola said, "Back Mommy," which I construed to mean "I would now like to rejoin my mother back at the house." Lola is succinct, but she sure gets her point across. 

My Teachers, 1944-1956

My first twelve years of formal schooling were pretty much a bust. I blame my underachieving, unserious self. I was much more interested in punchball, the Dodgers, comic books, and radio serials than in the lessons, which were unchallenging and drab. At school I learned reading, writing and 'rithmetic, for which I'm grateful, and also a little Latin. I was an autodidact, not a student, right out of the gate. I liked to read and fortunately the Avenue J branch of the Brooklyn Public Library (though only a storefront) was within walking distance; so was the McDonald Avenue branch where, during high school, I worked for 75 cents an hour shelving books. I was an omnivorous reader and although I did not have a strong understanding or much of an imagination, I had an excellent memory. Reading saved me. Reading rescued me. "If it hadn't been for reading, we'd have been entirely at the mercy of sex."

I don't blame my teachers. A few had thrown in the towel, but most of them tried their best. They were overworked, underprepared, unsupported, and and in some cases prodigiously ignorant even of the subjects they taught. Tbe conditions under which they worked were not propitious. At P. S. 217 classrooms were designed (!!!) for 48 students (pupils, we were called in those days) but on high-attendance days, there were always a few unenthusiastic kids in improvised seats by the window. In most classes, lessons were taught; but in others, especially at Erasmus Hall High School, there was only disorder and hubbub -- and sometimes a tad of danger.   

My first grade teacher, Mrs. Callery was a diminutive gloomy woman. I remember telling my mother, "Mrs. Callery doesn't like me."  My mother said, "You must be kind to her. She lost four of her boys in the war" (it was 1944). I remember that I construed "lost" to mean "misplaced" and was therefore dumbfounded by Mrs. Callery's forgetfulness. White-haired Mrs. Sherwood, in third grade, left no impression except for her extreme aga (possibly 55), but Mrs. Cares (Sarah Cares!!, great name for a teacher) was quite kind. Mrs. Finsmith in fifth was a cipher, but Mrs. Donnelly, whose white hair was dyed a radiant blue, made it her business to make life as miserable for me as possible for me, and succeeded.  My favorite teacher in those early years was Mrs. McNulty, who insisted that we memorize fractions, decimals, and percentages, and taught us how to format a "friendly letter." In seventh grade, we went "departmental."  I remember Mr. Shapiro ('the bald headed hero") who spoke of "we scientists";  Mrs. Georgia Kieselbach, our aloof music teacher who had a trained operatic voice; Mr. Maxwell Proshan, a pathetic incompetent, and the twin (as I remember them) art teachers, Mrs. Nellis and Mrs. Ennis. At Erasmus Hall, I had good instruction in Latin from old Miss Beulah Withee and older Mr. Gabriel Cussen (who I now realize must have been an ex-priest) but bad lazy non-teaching from Harry Wedeck, a pretentious fake. Miss Goetschius, a biology teacher, complained to me more than once that I didn't know how to stipple. Mr. Lindlar, an ineffectual phyisics teacher, would mysteriously disappear between classes and return reeking of alcohol. An English teacher who was well-read and competent, Mrs. Harriet Felder, was an "Oxfordian" caught up the in conspiracy theory that Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare. My mathematics teachers were competent (Mr. Ebersman), angry as all shit (Mrs. Altschul), or suicidal (Mrs. Bonime). Walter Balletto, who whiled away our time teaching "Discussion English" was a major queen (which I didn't recognize at the time); I later learned that he lived with his mother and collected Kirsten Flagstad records. I remember also an art teacher, Mrs. Schauben, who kept her protruding ears in check with a thin rubber band; perhaps we weren't supposed to notice, but I've never forgotten. The gym teachers were simple-minded jokesters, although I remember thinking even then that the martinet Mr. Eis would have been more at home in the SS.  

It was, in retrospect, quite a zoo.  But I know that some of my coevals, who were smart enough to choose their teachers wisely and take it all seriously, managed to get themselves a decent education. My only success was to get out alive and move on.   

Reposted: Antimylarmonofilamentarianism

In 1895, my wise and courageous grandparents left the abysmal, backward Ukraine and struck out for the new world.  Nine years later, my father was born in a cold-water flat in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The date of his birth: December 22, 1904, exactly at the winter solstice. "And they called his name, Emanuel, God with us." If he had been born in the old country, before the Russian authorities imposed legal cognomina upon us, he would have been named Emanuel ben Isaiah -- his father's name appended to his own as a patronymic.

Despite his traditional moniker and his commitment to the essence of Judaism, my father was fiercely hostile to the religious irrationalities. His view -- and my grandfather Isaiah's even more strongly -- was that for a thousand years our lineage had been kept in poverty and darkness not just by the czars and the Cossacks but also by the rabbis. In politics my father and grandfather began as socialists and became New Dealers; in philosophy, they rejected theological doctrine and were among the children of the enlightenment whom Moses Mendelssohn had led to the promised land of evidence and reason. I doubt that any of my ancestors knew Karl Marx's sentence that "the criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism," but they spoke and acted as though such wisdom had been absorbed from the cradle. My brothers and I were taught to resist the exclusivity, superstition, and ceremony of religion.   

We now have a religious controversy in our peaceful, progressive, and largely secular western town. A group of orthodox Jews have petitioned the city council for permission to construct an eruv. What is an eruv? It’s a “symbolic boundary that allows orthodox Jews to carry things, including their own children, outside their home during the Sabbath." (Carrying is considered work, and orthodoxy's strict interpretation of religious law prohibits sabbatical labor.)  A latter-day eruv is constructed out of fishing line that is strung on utility poles; curiously, it may incorporate functioning electric and telephone wires. If you're within the lines, you're "in" your home.

I know that my forbears detested eruvim and similar expressions of irrational piety. I myself am not enraged by these useless but harmless superstitions. Constructing an eruv does not endanger our species; it's not like opposing contraception or prohibiting stem-cell research. An eruv consoles the believers and doesn't much bother the rest of us. Yet if there is a spirit in the sky, which I very much doubt, I would hope that he would not be so small-minded as to issue ukases about carrying infants on Saturdays; infants should be carried as much as they want, which is just about everywhere and always.  And if the god of Abraham and Isaac has become so narrow as to promulgate an inside/outside-the-home rule, I would hope that he would also be intelligent enough not to be flummoxed by such transparent trickery as hanging mylar filament on poles.   

I have no intuitive conception of god, but I think that the orthodox trivialize our human and shared longing for transcendence when they sanctify such petty practices. It would be far more pious for the orthodox to take every nickel spent to appease the Ancient of Days and bestow it on a poor Jewish family from Tashkent. If the eruvim-makers can't locate eligible Jews, there are Hondurans and Sudanese a-plenty who deserve their attention. When the believers re-direct their enthusiasm and their resources toward truly charitable enterprises, they will honor the universal immigrant experience and they will also practice the very worthy Jewish virtue of compassion. The effort spent to construct an eruv is a foolish waste of time.

Here's my father's view:  "It took us hundreds of years to fight our way out of the ghetto and they want to put themselves back in jail. If the rabbis had their way," he would say, "Mahler and Bernstein and Gershwin would play accordion in a klezmer band in Bialystok, Einstein would balance the books for a caftan maker in Kiev, and a hundred and fifty Jewish Nobel Prize winners would waste their days davening in a dim synagogue in Vilna."

I think it’s in a Wallace Markfield novel that an old Jewish guy confronts a group of twenty-something Jewish hippies/slackers in Miami Beach. After a heated discussion, he admonishes them:  "And don't ever be ashamed that you’re Jewish. It’s enough that I’m ashamed that you’re Jewish."

Which is pretty much how I feel about the eruvistas.  Well, not exactly ashamed.  Embarrassed, perhaps, by their superstitious infatuation with the "dark backward and abysm of time." 

My Life in Jokes* **

Why did the moron throw the clock out of the window?  Because he wanted to see time fly. &&&  How do you say "refrigerator" in Italian?  Ice-a box. &&& Why do fireman wear read suspenders?  To hold their pants up. &&& Knock-knock. Who's there?  Anita. Anita who?  Anita borrow a pencil. &&&  "Over the Cliff" by Hugo Furst. 'The Russian Surgeon's Revenge" by I. Kutchakokoff; "The Yellow Stream" by I. P. Daley?  &&& Guy is walking in the woods and meets a friend. The friend has a black eye and a bloody nose. "What happened to you?  "Guy beat me up." "Why?"  "I don't know. I was looking for hotel I'm supposed to stay at, and I came upon this man lying on top of a woman. I asked him, how far is the Olde Log inn and he jumped up and hit me."  &&&  Horse wants to try out for the Dodgers. Leo Durocher says, sure he's a horse but the Dodgers are in the dumps; let's see what he can do. "Can you throw?" Horse picks up a ball, walks to the pitching mound, and throws a 105 mile fastball right down the middle of the plate. "Can you hit?" Horse picks up a bat and steps to the plate. On the first swing, he hits a tremendous line drive off the scoreboard in right field. "Run," says Durocher. "Run," says the horse. "Why do you think I'm here?  If I could run I'd be at Hialeah." &&& Man is knocked down by a bus. He's lying in the road, bleeding to death. A friend comes by, says, Solly, how you doink? Solly says, "I make a living." &&&  Truman, Churchill, and Stalin are driving in a car down a narrow road. There's a cow in the middle of the road, blocking the way. Churchill gets out of the car, waves his hands and screams at the cow, but he can't get it to budge. Truman gets out, picks up a stick and starts beating the cow. It still won't move. Stalin gets out, walks up to the cow and whispers something into the cow's ear. The cow bolts and disappears into the woods. They get back into the car. Truman and Churchill say to Stalin, "What in the world did you say to the cow to get her to run like that. Stalin says, "I told her I'd put her on a collective farm." &&& Man is in a nightclub. Everyone's singing and dancing. He gets an urge to take a dump. Can't find the toilet. He's having a hard time holding it in. Waiter tells him the bathroom is upstairs.  He goes up to the next floor, can't find the toilet. He's about to explode.Finally he sees a hole in the floor. He squats and lets fly with a tremendous load. He gets dressed, goes downstairs. Everyone has disappeared; no music, no dancing, no drinking. He finds the waiter. "What happened?" Waiter says, "Where were you when the shit hit the fan?"  &&& The mayor of Muncie, Indiana is scheduled to preside at a ceremony honoring a local girl-made-good now called Lolita Lamour, but who grew up in Muncie under the name Flora Faye Fluck. But he's worried that he might mispronounce the name and embarrass himself. He practices:  Flora Faye Fluck. Flora Faye Fluck.  Finally, the big day arrives. The mayor makes his speech. "And here she is, ladies and gentleman, Lolita Lamour, known to all of her friends here in Muncie as Flora Faye Klunt." &&&  A man is walking on a beach. He comes upon a naked woman lying on the shore. He jumps on her, screws her, and continues on his way. After a half-a-mile he meets three or four members of a search party. One of them says, "A woman has drowned. Have you seen a dead body on the beach." Man says, "O my god. Was she dead?  I thought she was English."  &&&  An airplane is flying over the Atlantic Ocean.  Suddenly, the loudspeaker comes on. "This is your pilot. If you look out of the window on the right side of the plane, you can see smoke coming out of the #1 engine. If you look out the left side, you can see flames coming out of the #2 engine. Now look down. If you look closely, you can see a small life-raft floating in the ocean. I am speaking to you from that raft." &&& Searching for the meaning of life, a man travels to Tibet, climbs the highest mountain, comes to a monastery where the wisest man in the world lives. He asks the monk, "What is the meaning of life." The monk says, "life ... is a barrel."  The man goes back to Cleveland, thinks about it for five years. What does it mean, life is a barrel?  He can't figure it out, so he gets back on the boat, travels to Tibet, climbs the mountain, finds the monk, and asks him, "What did you mean, life is a barrel." The monk shrugs his shoulders. "OK, so life isn't a barrel." &&&  Old guy, maybe a bluesman, bottle of hooch in a brown paper bag, sits on a bench in the middle of the night, downtown, playing air-sax, nodding. Young fellow comes by, cheerful, asks him, "Crosstown buses run this way?"  Blues guy looks up, pauses for a second, and then drawls, "Doo--dah, doo-dah." &&& A man, 93, and his wife, 91, go to the rabbi and tell him that they're miserable and want a divorce. The rabbi says, "You've been unhappy all these years and you wait seventy years to get a divorce. What are you thinking?" Man says, "We wanted to wait until the children were all dead."  &&&  "My brain!  My second favorite organ." (W. Allen). &&&  Man goes to the rabbi in distress. He says that his wife is trying to poison him. "How do you know that?  "I saw her putting stuff in my coffee." Rabbi says, "It's got to be a mistake. I'll talk to her." Two days later, the rabbi calls him. "Your wife came in. I talked to her for three hours.Three hours straight I talk to her." "So what's your advice?" "Drink the poison." &&& Man goes to see his doctor. The doctor says, "I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that you have terminal cancer and you're going to be dead in a month." "So what's the good news." "Well," the doctor says, "You see that cute nurse over there. I finally fucked her." &&& An older guy is walking down the street. He meets a friend and they chat for a few minutes. Man starts to leave, turns back to his friend, and says, "By the way, when we met, was I walking north or south?" "You were going south." "Good," says the guy, "then I've already had my  lunch." &&& George W. Bush goes for dinner at the ADL where he's served a bowl of matzo ball soup. He looks at it suspiciously, but then, remembering all the strange foods he's eaten at ceremonial dinners, takes a bite. Not bad. He turns to his host: "Tell me," he says, "do the Jews eat any other part of the matzo, or only the balls?" &&& Two old guys are ritually washing a corpse.The first one says, "Look at the schlong on this guy. He's a horse." The second guy says, "It's just like mine." First guy says, "You have a dong like this. I don't believe it. I've never seen anything half as large."  The second guy says, "I said it was like mine. I didn't mean mine was just as large.  I meant mine is just as dead."  &&&  Knock-knock.  Who's there?  "Yo mama."  "Yo mama who." "Yo mama. This is no joke. Open the damn door and let me in."

 * All jokes are as remembered.  No websites or other research tools have been employed.

**  All jokes are genuine historical artefacts and many not conform to the highest standards of contemporary taste.

Fragment of a Genuine Telephone Conversation

The grand-daughter (now age eleven), studying the Darmstadt Madonna (1528) by Hans Holbein the Younger that is reproduced in q previous post:  "It doesn't look like Madonna."

Grandpa:  "I think it may be a different Madonna."

How to Harvest Me

Yesterday I renewed my expired driver's license. I was worried about the eye exam because of the cataracts, but I passed easily. Believe me, the bar for visual acuity not set very high.

On my previous license, "hair" was "brown";  this time, it's "gray."

The clerk asked, "Are you willing to be an organ donor?"  "Sure," I answered, "but I don't know whether  anyone would want my organs."

Surely no one would want my myopic, be-cataracted eyes. Nor my ears (although they would be  supplemented with an expensive set of hearing aids at no extra charge). My heart?  Well, if it came with a "Use at Own Risk" label and a whole library of erratic ECG printouts. Certainly not my spine, which was a "second" or "factory reject" ight from the womb. I would not recommend it even at a severe markdown. My liver -- I think I can recommend my liver. It's barely been used and should command a premium. My prostate -- now there's a bargain in the making. A prostate is supposed to be the size of a walnut, but mine is more like a potato, perhaps a Yukon Gold -- and yet as far as I know it is cancer free. It could be chopped up and transplanted into three or four men.

My best organ, if it's an organ, is definitely my knees, both right and left.  I'm at the age where knee-replacement is commonplace, but I have the knees of a twenty-five year old: flexible, functioning, pain-free, even if somewhat prone to hyperextension. Some linebacker who's abused his own would be overjoyed to extend his career with an perfectly wonderful set of knees.  Or a basketball player, preferably someone who wants to regain his "hops." Maybe, in someone else's body, my knees could finally win the trophies and renown that they deserve.   

 

Lola's Language at Eighteen Months

Her language consists mostly of nouns: "baby" -- both herself and her beloved doll; "wawa" (water);  "mommy";  "daddy"; "ayi" (Chinese for aunt);  "didi" (Chinese jiějie, older sister); "paopao" (Chinese, grandmother); "pock" (pocket); "book"; "ball": "eye"; "nose" etc.  Her words are occasionally less specified than they will soon become; for example, "duck" seems to mean "bird." At the zoo, she identified an emu as a duck. Similarly, "gogo" (Chinese for dog), means mammal, even including the zoo's llama. "Up" can mean either up or down; it seems to signify a change of position. "No" occasionallly means "yes"; she seems to conceive it as a response to a question. There is, however, no ambiguity to her very definitive "mine."

When she slid down the slide in the park, her audience exclaimed "whee."  Lola responded, "I do whee," understanding "whee" to be the name of the action rather than an exclamation of pleasure. 

A Very Distressing Memory

There's been a re-birth of nativism in the "give me your tired, your poor" land that I love. The right-wingers, who need someone to hate, have decided that anti-Hispanic and anti-Muslim noise-making is just what our beleaguered country needs right now.

All of which brought to mind a painful memory. Sometime in the 1970s, I was sitting in a coffee room at the U. -- a rare event for me -- and a group of people were recalling happy moments from their various childhoods. One of the participants was a grey-haired woman perhaps 15 years older than I. She was a secretary or administrative assistant at not mine but some other department. She was a kindly, competent, unpretentious woman with whom I occasionally exhanged a few words of greeting or business.

 I can't remember exactly what the other participants ibn the discussion remembered from their early days -- probably hunting trips with dad, hitting the winning single in a softball game, a romp with the family dog -- but I will never forget what Masako recalled: "When I was in the internment camp in Utah, one day Marian Anderson came to sing for us."

 

Certified Dialogue Transcribed Verbatim from Real Life

Telephone conversation with an eighty-two year old cousin. 

"Evreryone down here, all they ever talk about is their pains, their doctors, their diets, their diseases.  Now I have something to talk about.  For years I went to this doctor, maybe forty years, he's almost as old as I am  Every time I go into see him, with a sore knee or pains in the chest or whatever, he'd look at it, and he'd say, 'what can you expect at your age?  You're lucky to be alive.'  I'd go in with a sore throat.  He'd say, 'Can you swallow. So what it hurts. You're too old to worry.' If I had a headache, he'd say, 'whatever happens, happens.  You're old, enjoy the day.' Finally he retired. He took a job as a dance instructor on a cruise ship. I'm not kidding. He leads exercises or something. So I went to a younger doctor. He listens to me breathe, pokes around a bit, puts me in the hospital, and now I have three stents." 

Haircuts: A Lifetime of Sweating in the Chair

When I was a child, haircuts were perpetrated at Joe's Barber Shop on Coney Island Avenue. It was a pleasant place: there were wall-to-wall mirrors on either side of Joe Montuori's shop, and a boy sitting in the chair could lose himself in the series of infinitely-regressing images. Joe always had a friend or two in the shop with whom he spoke incomprehensible rapid-fire Italian. The haircutting itself was an ordeal. Joe charged 75 cents a head, but my mother had driven a bargain: three haircuts (myself and my two brothers) for $1.80. Joe revenged himself on me by a) working the electric buzzer as rapidly as possible, and b) frequently re-arranging the angle of my head with a blow from the heel of his hand. Back home, my mother would sigh and say, "Turn around. Let's see what he did to you this time."

I'm not big on personal adornment, and, perhaps because of my early hair-chopping experiences, I've never been comfortable in the barber's seat. As soon as the cloth is fastened around my neck I feel hogtied and hopeless. "What are they going to do to me today?" Once, on the west side of Manhattan, in the late 1960s, when my hair was rather long (it seems absurd that you could signal your opposition to the war in Vietnam by letting your hair grow, but such was the case), I walked into a shop and asked the barber to "leave it long." He immediately transformed me into a rabid supporter of carpet-bombing. Also in New York: when I naively wandered into a shop with a specialized clientele, a hair technician employing a razor and a variety of gels and lotions turned me into someone whose hair was giving off signals with which the rest of his body was not in accord. In Hanover, New Hampshire, in an upstairs 'salon,' the barber suddenly stopped work, drew back, studied me for fifteen or twenty seconds, and asked, "Are you Jewish." I mumbled something about not really wanting to discuss my ethnicity with him, whereupon he launched into a disquisition of which I understood not much and remember less, except that that it involved prophecy, the Book of Isaiah, and The Hatching of the Egg. He hauled out his heavily annotated King James Version and pointed me to various passages underlined in coded colors. As it happens, I'm more conversant than most people with scripture, and so I can assert with moderate authority that his reading of the Bible was -- how shall I say -- original. It took me an hour to extricate myself from his insistent and wayward scholarship: fifteen minutes of hair-cutting and forty-five minutes of exegetical enthusiasm.   

For a decade or so, when our finances were perilous, my wife cut my hair. There were some benefits (a guy could cop a feel while being ministered to) but I must admit that although my good woman was earnest and effective, she never fully mastered tonsorial technique. She had the habit of yanking upwards on the strands with the scissors, with the result that each snip produced a stab of pain -- although nothing more intense than might have been alleviated by the injection of a dozen or score shots of novocaine directly into the scalp. And then there were the ear nicks.

After a while, I returned hair responsibility to the world of commerce. I had success for many years with Liz of Chicago Hair across town. Liz was good at her work and respected my multiple cowlicks. But then she started to raise her prices. When she reached $20, I would just hand her the Visa and ask her not to tell me what she charged. When she went to $30, I retaliated by spacing the haircuts further and further apart in order to keep my annual cost constant. But when she broached the $40 barrier, the puritan in me rebelled. I started to patronize the cheap ($14) barbershop across the street from the college. There's a rotating staff and it's hit-and-miss: sometimes the results are acceptable, sometimes disastrous.   

When I come home from the expedition, my wife says, "Let's see what they've done to you today."

And then she sighs. 

What My Father Ate

Sardines, by the tinful. Herrings, canned, either in wine sauce or in tomato sauce. Whitefish. Lima beans which came into the house dried but which were soaked to plump up, then boiled and mashed (not for me, if I could possibly avoid them). Potatoes in any form, but usually mashed and buttered. No chicken or lamb chops, but lots of tongue. (When I left home, I vowed never to eat tongue again, and I've kept the faith.)  Chopped chicken liver. Steak, when we could afford it. Roast pork with applesauce. Delicatessen meats -- salami, baloney, corned beef, frankfurters. Baked beans, courtesy of Heinz. Apples, right down to the stem. Chocolate in any form, but especially white chocolate. Halvah, a particular favorite. Dates and figs, dried. Black radishes and onions, covered with gribbinis. Tschav, borsht with huge helpings of sour cream. Corn on the cob. No alcohol, nary a drop. On hot days, no beer, but instead iced tea or iced coffee. Cheese, either Velveeta or swiss. Good bread -- pumpernickel or rye. Crumb cake direct  from Ebinger's Bakery. Bacon and two eggs, sunnyside up or soft-boiled. Cream o' Wheat. Swee-Touch-Nee tea. On Sunday morning, bagels and rolls, warm from the oven, eaten while reading the Times (25 cents) and the Eagle (10 cents). Ice cream, the more exotic the flavor the better.

Whores

This reminiscence will not mean much to anyone but my born-and-bred-in-Brooklyn readers. 

One of my smart schoolyard buddies, Jimmy Nolan, won a scholarship to Columbia.  He was a year or two older than I, and the first of our gang/crowd to venture out of the neighborhood.  The summer after his first college year, we were sitting in front of the candy store, drinking egg creams and practicing our spitting, when someone asked Jimmy "what's it like up there."  "Up there" was the far north, Morningside Heights, in Manhattan, where Columbia was located -- the end of the earth, kind of.  Jimmy said, "You might not believe this, but up there they pronounce "hua," "hor."

I remember thinking, why would they do so?  Don't they know any better?

When "Blackened" Meant "Burnt"

I made my pilgrimage to the new sixty-six thousand square feet Whole Foods (sometimes called Whole Wallet) out there on east Pearl Street.  It's gigantic and, to my semi-ancient eyes, exotic, especially when compared to the corner groceries of my youth.  Five hundred varieties of cheese, not one of them  Velveeta Processed Cheese Product.  An olive bar.  Sushi, arugala, radicchio, tofu, tofutti, orange roughy.  Herb-encrusted tilapia.  Hundreds and perhaps thousands of foods that had not swum into my ken, or anyone's ken, back there in 1950s Flatbush.  Eating has changed, and so has food-shopping.  Nothing Norman Rockwell-y about Whole Foods. No kids clutching their hard-earned quarters, salivating at the candy counter.  

When I was a small boy, my mother would occasionally send me to pick up an item or two at Mr. Fox's musty three hundred square foot grocery on Ditmas Avenue.  A quarter of a pound of salami, perhaps, or some Del Monte sliced peaches in heavy syrup.  When I stood at the public side of the wooden counter, I was too short to be visible to Mr. Fox so I either had to jump up and down and wave my hand, or wait until a full-grown customer would politely point downward and say, "I believe he's next."  "I'm sorry, sonny. Vat can I do for you." 

Mr. Fox was a broad-faced, heavy-bearded, jowly individual who smelled of pickles and sauerkraut.  Mrs. Fox was, to use the current euphemism, "ample" or "comfortable."  Memorably ample.  It's hard for me to imagine how they made a living out of that tiny shop, but in fact they were probably no poorer than anyone else in our immigrant neighborhood.

The assignment to fetch something from Fox's Grocery was always stressful.  I remember one time when my grandmother, who lived around the corner from us on Coney Island Avenue, was getting ready to cook up several score of blintzes for an extended family get-together.  I was sent to buy two pounds of "farmer's cheese."  Mr. Fox refused to sell it to me.  "No one buys two pounds of farmer's cheese."  I could not persuade him and returned home mortified and empty-handed.  A shopping failure.  At Whole Foods, there's no one to decline a purchase.  Nor any unaccompanied minors, for that matter.  Children don't go out alone, much to their loss. 

(A note to my grandchildren, who will be incredulous.   At Fox's Grocery, there was no scanner or computer or adding machine.  Mr. Fox knew the price of everything in the shop.  "How much for a can of beans, Mr. Fox."  He would gather your items (no "self-service" in those day), set them on the counter and then, in a thick pencil, list the prices on the side of the bag.  And then (I know this is unbelievable) total up the figures, by hand, mumbling all the while.  Not only that -- he was paid not with a credit card, but with "money."  Honest to Pete.)

A Gosse-Pearlman Xmas (reposted)

The voluminous works of Edmund Gosse are not much read nowadays except by specialists in Edwardian literature, but Father and Son (1907) remains one of the all-time great autobiographies. 

Gosse's father, the biologist Philip Henry Gosse, whom Charles Darwin once called "an honest hodcarrier of science," was a leader of the Plymouth Brethren, a very strict, very puritanical branch of English Protestantism.  According to his son, P. H. Gosse held the view that the celebration of Christmas was "nothing less than an act of idolatry. The very word is Popish,' he used to exclaim, 'Christ's Mass!'  Then he would adduce the antiquity of the so-called feast, adapted from horrible heathen rites, and itself a soiled relic of the abominable Yule-Tide. He would denounce the horrors of Christmas until it almost made me [that is, son Edmund the autobiographer] blush to look at a hollyberry."  One year, young Edmund secretly ate some Christmas plum-pudding that had been offered to him by 'rebellious' servants.  Overcome with guilt and stomach-ache, he fled to his father, crying out "Oh! Papa, Papa, I have eaten of flesh offered to idols!"   Philip Henry then "ran with me into the midst of the startled servants, seized what remained of the pudding,... and ran till we reached the dust-heap, when he flung the idolatrous confectionery on to the middle of the ashes, and then raked it deep down into the mass."  Only an accomplished comic writer (steeped in Dickens) could have invented a phrase as marvelous as "idolatrous confectionery," where the triviality of the noun undermines the high seriousness of the adjective.

Objections to Christmas celebrations, though not always expressed as vigorously as father Gosse's, are a longstanding tradition.  The aggressive hawking of Christmas by right-wing fundamentalists is of recent origin. The genuine sons and daughters of the Reformation would have abhorred the materialism, the consumerism, and the tactless triumphalism of many contemporary Christians.

This is not to say that all "holiday season" celebrations are inherently offensive.  I myself honor two traditions, both musical.  The first is that I try extremely hard to avoid the odious "little drummer boy."  It takes work to do so;  I have to boycot the radio, the television, shopping malls, and department stores between Hallowe'en and New Year's Day  -- but it's well worth it.

A second custom is to listen every year to The Messiah.  The performance of choice is of course the extremely intelligent Pearlman version (Boston Baroque Orchestra and Chorus-- Martin Pearlman, Conductor [Telarc 80322]).

Blessings and honor and glory be unto George Frederick Handel and to his unsurpassed oratorio.

Favorite Garments, A Lifetime List

Sometime in the early 1950s I was given a great gift:  a hand-knitted gray-and-white Norwegian sweater.  It may have been a bit too large for me, but I wore it almost every day through high school and college and for many years thereafter.  True,  it became a little ratty around the waist, but my mother-in-law, a skilled knitter, was able to repair it, and did so, more than once.  The leather elbow patches were my own contribution, and if they were not exactly symmetrically placed, so what?   I disagreed with those who felt that the beauty of the garment was compromised by the vivid mustard stain on the right sleeve.  I was still wearing the sweater in the 1980s, when my daughter begged it.  Of course I gave it to her, but I now believe that she was in surreptitious league with other members of my family to get the sweater out of my hands and off my back.  I've never seen her wear it.

It was in the 1970s that I received another important garment gift -- a Guatemalan shirt -- a camisa -- of the sort worn in Todos Santos:  a multicolored embroidered --  or is it brocaded  -- piece of fabric attached to a blue-and-white striped shift that hung down to mid-thigh -- very convenient for use as towel or hot cloth.  I loved that shirt and wore it even to teach.  It's possible that some people dismissed me as an eccentric or that others presumed that I was making an anti-colonial statement, but in fact I just thought the shirt was comfortable and handsome.  I remember overhearing  a student -- one of the brainless ones -- who hated college, hated literature, and hated me -- mumble under his breath (in those days I could still hear), "Well, at least he's not a dull dresser." I don't know what became of the camisa.  I suspect that it was desaparecido.

Another favorite garment was a yellow leather shirt jacket which I wore until it shredded.  This jacket ran into trouble on a cross-country trip when it was packed on top of the car, under a canvas.  It lay too close to a dyed leather coat (not mine) and during a flash Nebraska rainstorm was thoroughly soaked and acquired a large purple stain.  I didn't mind, because the stain was in the back, but I bowed to social pressure and gave it up, which was a shame, because I didn't get more than twenty years use out of it.  And then there was that lovely orange-brown corduroy jacket that I bought at the Presbyterian thrift store for $2.00.  That was real beauty.  So was the tailored denim suit coat which I have vainly tried to replace -- they just don't make them like that any more. 

STill another memorable garment:  a green hooded cotton sweatshirt that, after I had worn it for a decade or so, was nicely broken in. It had lots of wear left in it, but I made the dreadful error of mentioning to  my daughter-in-law that, wearing it, I had twice been taken for a homeless person. She snatched the sweatshirt away from me and threw it into the garbage (I rescued it for rags). She then immediately went out and bought me a perfectly lovely new Carhartt hooded sweatshirt, very high quality, with a zipper and everything, which I have worn every day during the cold months for two seasons and which will, within a dozen or so years, no doubt become quite comfortable. 

Season's Greetings

In the summer of 1963, we were somewhere in southern Illinios on our first cross-country adventure (the first of many).  I was not an experienced driver and the Nash Rambler was not a superb-handling car.  We were driving a two-lane, and it was raining hard , and something happened (can't remember what) that caused me to brake much too hard. The car spun out of control, first swinging into the oncoming lane (empty, thank you very much) and then rotating into a three or four foot ditch on the right side of the road.

I was grateful to be alive but I knew that I was in a predicament.  How to get the Rambler back on the road? 

Within a minute, a small truck pulled up behind me.  A hale-fellow Elks-Lions-Rotary-Presbyterian kind of guy stepped out, assessed the situation, hitched a cable to the Rambler and winched us out of the ditch.  Took him two minutes max.  He said, "you OK?" and drove off.

Many thanks to that man.  

In 1984, I had to fly from Lebanon, New Hampshire to Salt Lake City through Boston.  We were fogged in at Lebanon and I didn't arrive at Logan until a few minutes before my next leg was about to leave.  Logan consisted then (probably still does) of half-a-dozen separate terminals linked by a bus line.  I went up to a man in a uniform and I asked him where, in the jumble, would I find Continental.  I told him that I had less than twenty minutes to board.  He said, "wait right here.  I'll get you there on time."  He was not a policeman, as I thought, but a uniformed chauffeur to some Rich Person.  After a few minutes he returned, having launced his employer.  He took me to his extra-long Cadillac limousine and speeded me to my terminal.

Many thanks to that man

And to all the other anonymous people who have helped me with life's travels and travails.  

Am I becoming sentimental?   

Trains, Planes and Buses

My first railroad (not subway) trip was in 1945 -- a New York Central train from NYC to Glens Falls, New York.  I was dazzled but queasy;  it was a coal-burning engine and the smoke was both visible and smellable.  I spent my infant time looking out the window and studying the adjacent set of tracks as they combined and separated -- a most vivid memory.  I was born into a sedentary family and have no further recollection of being in a train again until 1952 when Aunt Mollie took me to Washington. We ate dinner on the train, a marvelous luxury.  in 1956, testing my adolescent independence, I voyaged to Ithaca on the old Lehigh Valley R. R. (the "Leaky V.), then in its dotage and quite seedy.  During the late 1950s,  I occasionally rode up to Utica NY on the NY Central.  The round-trip fare was an astonishingly steep $20.50, or half a week's work.  But afterwards it was almost all automobiles.  I don't know that I was on a train again until 1975-76, when I commuted weekly from Canterbury (second class with the accompaniment of Cadbury chocolates) to Charing Cross station.  Calais to Paris, 1976. I can remember also Lugano to Florence to Rome, c. 1990, and Stockholm to Copenhagen a decade later.  NYC to DC, on Amtrak, many times around the turn of the new millenium.  Not a great deal of train travel, but then, as we all know, the railroads are a glorious but dying institution, at least in the US.  Nor adventuresome either:  no Orient Express or Trans-Siberian.  Planes?  My first trip was from NYC to Ithaca, on a 12 seat Mohawk -- perhaps to this day my smallest plane and bumpiest flight.  Many, many trips from Boston to NYC (Eastern Airlines), from Logan to LaGuardia and back.  A dozen or so jumps across the water to Europe, all of them accompanied with headaches and disorientation.  My longest so far:  Denver to Port Elizabeth, South Africa.  To Hawaii and back. To San Jose, Costa Rica.  Innumerable, far too many,  domestic flights from Denver to NYC, Denver to Oakland, Denver to DC -- all highly routinized.  At first, decades ago, flying was romantic;  dinner was served;  people dressed up for the experience.  Now it's being sardined into a grudging Greyhound in the sky, with bodyscans and shoe checks to boot.  And waste:  all that time and money thrown into the sea looking for plastic explosives secreted in  my retired-teacher/ grandpa orifices.  

The word Greyhound reminds me those horrible 1950s trips (midnight to 8am) from the Port Authority on 34th and 8th to Ithaca with "rest stops" in East Stroudsburg and Scranton at 3am, with no food available except rancid sandwiches from the slot machines.  I cannot shake the memory of the awful smell of spoiled tuna, gas fumes, eructations and flatulence on those filthy cramped buses.  Nor of the degenerate displaying his private parts in the men's room in Hackettstown, New Jersey one slushy night.     

But put me in a car on a two-lane anywhere west of the Mississippi, with no particular place to go, and I'm one happy guy.  

Cherry pie in Hannibal, Missouri or breakfast at the Jesse James Cafe in Casey, Iowa.  Bliss!

Dentists I Have Known

When I was a child, there were two neighborhood dentists.  One was named Caress and the other was named Yankowitz.  My parents chose Nathan Caress, possibly for onomastic reasons, but they might have made a mistake;  Nathan Caress should have been called Nathan Butcher.  Dentistry sixty years ago was much inferior to dentistry today, especially in our dark corner of the universe.  There was no anaesthetics, no novacaine.  Baby teeth that developed cavities were summarily yankowitzed with a pair of what looked like industrial pliers.  Adult teeth that needed repair were excavated with a low-speed mechanical drill, then sterilized with carbolic acid, and filled with a mercury compound that has over the years not doubt lowered my IQ by dozens or scores of points. Dentistry was painful. No, it wasn't painful, it was torture.  Dr. Caress, whose office was in the living room of his house on Rugby Road, had a big black ugly mole on his left cheek. I studied that mole for many too many hours.

Sometime in my early teens I was sent to an orthodontist, Irving Pollack, who had a very official suite of rooms in a high-rise on Joralemon Street, a subway ride away.  I am grateful to him because, although he made a miserable adolescence even more miserable, his "appliances" helped keep my mismatched, askew anthology of teeth in my head.  In fact, I have all but one of them to this day.  

No thanks to my next dentist, T. Gorfein of Cambridge, Massachusetts, a genuine criminal who asserted that I had twenty-two cavities and set out to fill them. I left him after a couple of weeks, not because I was wise enough to suspect that he was  a cheat, but because while he was working on me, he called over his assistant and said -- genuine historical quote coming here -- "Would you look at that sucker bleed."  At the university clinic, the dentist to whom I was assigned could find only two cavities, which she (my first female practitioner) painlessly filled. I must have had other dental experiences before Colorado's Amiot and Johnson, both of whom were competent but both of whom insisted on talking Republican nonsense to defenseless me while my mouth was filled with equipment and fat fingers. Johnson left a crown too high, causing enormous pain; searching for an alternative for his ham-handedness, I remembered that I had bus-commuted with a dental student who seemed intelligent. She became a dentista of high regard for many years until she took very early retirement from the trade -- I never knew why. She sold her practice to another competent woman who charges outrageous sky high prices for her services, but keeps me healthy.

So the score as we head into overtime:  one fake tooth, two root canal jobs, a couple of tender spots, two unerupted wisdom teeth waiting to cause trouble, but unabated ability to eat and enjoy corn on the cob. Nevertheless, lots of residual Caress-caused nervousness every time I need to see someone in the tooth business.  

More tooth news:

First Week in the West, August 1969

Our final stop on the road westward was Gothenburg, Nebraska.  We set up the old canvas tent in a park in the heart of town and slept to the screeching of cicadas (a sound new to me).  (In those days we couldn't possibly have afforded the $10 or $15 for a motel.)  By noon the next day we had reached Crook, Colorado (population 128 in 2000 but considerably more in 1969 -- the town was then large enough to support a restaurant and a gas station).  We ate lunch but when we got back into the green Dodge station wagon, purchased ($2500) for our new life in the Rockies, we discovered that something had gone terribly wrong with the gears and that the car would only go backwards.  I worried that we were going to be stuck in Crook with two boys under four years old while we waited for a transmission part to be trucked in from Detroit.  Filled with financial trepidation, I backed the car around the block (there was only one block, fortunately) to the town's lone mechanic.  He said he'd "take a look."  He did, got himself a great big screwdriver and banged away under the hood for a few minutes.  "Fixed it."  When he charged me $1.00 for the service, I began to think well of Colorado.  We piled back into the car and continued with the last 150 miles of the trip, gazing at the mountains in the distance and the arid steppes, populated only by the occasional cow -- with nary a human being in view.  

We made it to Boulder sometime in that  same afternoon.  It took a while to find the house we had rented by mail.  We missed it on the first pass and drove by the old Pioneer Cemetery, which became our first landmark.  We had no idea that we had rented a cute small 1915 arts and crafts bungalow with the original fir woodwork still intact -- what a change from our Manhattan apartment overlooking Broadway.  Our few sticks of furniture were delayed in transit (and would be for three weeks), so we all slept on air mattresses for the while.   

The Daughter (at whose request I am writing this reminiscence), was conceived before the furniture arrived.

Our landlord and next-door neighbor was Jack David Angus Ogilvy, a rangy cowboy and professor of Anglo-Saxon who was, contrary to all expectations, a distant relative of the queen of England.   (Was it 1969 or the next year that I met Jack's cousin, a pimply English boy named Angus, known across the sea as Lord Ogilvy?).  That was a surprise.  Another surprise:  the alley behind our house was bordered with a huge crop of wild plums.  The boys discovered the plums very soon after our arrival.

I was taken by surprise by the Colorado light.  I had always lived in the cloudy east, and that bright western sun was a complete surprise.  High altitude, no humidity, and very big sky.  I'm still not quite used to it.  

Boulder was not the sophosticated, foodie, high-tech, trendy town it has become.  It was all white bread, the downtown unMalled and still dominated by banks, car dealerships, Valentine's Hardware, Smith's Shoes, a big old Woolworth's and wide empty streets.   There were only a few restaurants -- I remember the Harbin Inn, a mediocre Chinese joint, and the Gondolier ditto but Italian (still in business but much changed).  And our favorite, the Aristocrat, a breakfast place with portions that could remedy in a single sitting those dangerous drops in cholesterol.

On our first day in town, we drove by Boulder High School.  Mrs. Dr. M. said, "That's where I want to teach when I go back to teaching."  Which she did, for many years.   

More on My Brain

How come my friend Ken W. can hike for three days in the mountains, dig a hole and cache his supplies, and then, the next summer, return to the exact spot to retrieve his stuff, while I can't turn around twice without getting lost?  Why is it that my college roommate, Allan K., could draw a detailed map of any place on earth from memory, while my friend Ellen P., equally intelligent, cannot remember whether Kansas is north or south of Nebraska or east or west of Missouri, or whether Wales is on the east coast or the west coast of Great Britain?  How come some people have perfect pitch and others can't tell if one note is higher or lower than another?  Why is it that some people who can't tie their shoelaces are brilliant at mathematics?

How does it happen that there are baseball players who can take a quick look at a ball coming off a bat and run to the spot where it's going to land and stick out a glove and catch it?  How do they instantaneously calculate and plot their course?  Why did I, as a youth, start in, veer left, turn right, and then circle about in hopeless confusion? 

Why is it that the only act of the human brain at which I am naturally superior, gifted even unto genius is one of the least important?  I refer, of course, to speling! 

Somnus Imago Mortis

It's an ancient commonplace -- sleep is the image of death.  In some versions, it's a preparation for death: God has provided us with sleep to get us ready for our inevitable end.  "Somnus imago mortis" is all over Shakespeare:  "sleep thou ape of death,"  "death-counterfeiting sleep," etc.

My own personal sleep is so wracked with awakenings and nightmares and night-sweats and fluff in the lung and a feverish tongue that I can't easily think of it as a preparation for anything.  For me, sleep is rather a task, an effort, than a period of oblivion.  I want my tombstone to be inscribed with the motto, "No more insomnia, forever."

But just six weeks ago, I experienced a pure "somnus imago mortis" moment.  I was on a gurney, drugged, prepared for surgery.  I was wheeled into a room.  Time came to a complete halt.  And then several hours later I was awakened. Nothing -- nothing -- intervened from the time that I was put under until the moment when I came to. (Perhaps there was an amnesic in the drug cocktail -- I wouldn't know.)

It was such a profound and eventless sleep that it has, in fact, prepared me for the sleep of death.  There was not a whisper, not a thought, nothing.  Now, at last, I know how it will be.

In the hospital, there was a very welcome rebirth.  But why, then, does the phrase, "I have been half in love with easeful death" continue to resonate in my brain?