Category Archives: Reminiscence

Autumn Leaves

Posted on June 6, 2010 by | 2 Comments

Here in Henderson, Nevada the summer heat has arrived with a vengeance, 106 to be exact and it will be like that on and off, I imagine, for weeks. When I open the front door I am met by a blast of air straight from a kiln. Luckily I am often indoors writing and editing stories, trying to make a book happen.  Usually I work out for about an hour at a local community gym and return quickly. The autumn leaves for this blog allude to the days I am spending, sometimes or most times not living, for writing is not living, it is a mere displacement of concerns I have about myself. I see each day pass into a kind of regular monotony which has not escaped my notice. The heat, the monotonous and variable dullness jane and I come across here in Henderson makes me fantasize of ending the rest of my days in Florence — and why not? At least in Florence my inability to speak Italian might make me feel isolation is caused by a language barrier; here in Henderson speaking English doesn’t much help for this is a transient state with a transient population, exceedingly conservative, numb-skulled and Palinesque. ( A confederacy of dunces.) I miss the vitality and exchange of a New York street.

The next door neighbor is a fellow New Yorker (Italian) and we share our ethnicities as we would in New York City, blowing oxygen into each other’s mouths while we mutually moan the loss of the spice and vigor of urban living. We speak in code, rather we speak in tongues and those who listen only grasp a glimmer of what we are saying — the shrugs, the attitudes, the perceptions, the street smarts, the prejudices — the smell of a subway, the good-natured rudeness, the savvy, the kibitizing, what a good bagel should taste like, what good lox, onion and cream cheese give to that holy bagel, the beauty of a bialy, breakfast in a Greek Diner, a Carvel custard, a malted if you can find it, laced with Horlick’s powder (the secret ingredient), an egg cream which has no egg or cream in it except the chilled seltzer hitting into milk and chocolate syrup. We share experiences and we both become animated here in this dessicated desert fit for Gabby Hayes. Recently Jane and I went to the Carnegie deli on the strip and had a corned beef and pastrami sandwich which is called a Woody Allen, nothing like having a sandwich named after a molester. However, the knish we ordered came cold. (Jane has yet to eat a kasha knish.) Freud argued that hysterics suffer from reminiscences — you bet we do! It is 5:14 AM and I just noticed it is light outside while I ramble on about loss — and intent.

I have morbid thoughts about time, death and dying, the famous last words, the rosebuds I could whisper and the orneriness of my self – my stone reading: “Get your rocks off here,” or “Thank god, it’s over,”  nothing so splendid as Kazantzakis’ epitaph: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” What a mensch! I reminisce in a non-nostalgic, unsentimental way of the days lived, those to come, the irregularities of living, its inconsistencies, the repetitive patterns, the losses, the sorrows, things I can never change and my failures as a father — mostly. That is the thing I would do much better. The race is nearly over, no cheering crowds, no encouraging waves, just the loneliness of the long distance runner. Realizing that over all these years I could have died at any moment and the only life I have is today and no more, I think on these things, struggling, always struggling, the metaphor of my personal life, to attain some completion, some sense of order or meaning but realizing that there is probably no such thing and that the most I can do is to emulate the fly or the cat or the donkey — be in the moment, for really that is all there is. I think not of heaven nor hell, human constructs and insidious dead ends; I think of the eons of evolution and ejaculation that led to my momentary spurt and this slivver of time I have been given by nature. I will be gone, guillotined and no longer ever be. When I see my son for my 70th birthday which is dramatically hard to conceive but it is coming soon, I will gently remind him to see me more often as this may be the last decade I may be given.  I need not have eternity. I would like to be some few cells in his cortex, a memory if that, of someone who bumped into his life and will bump out. Oh, what a grand game of billiards we unwillingly are part of!

I suppose I am better in mind and feeling than in reality for a cancer scare would mightily rattle my bones. But it will end, kindly or in agony, but it will end. I think I fear the dying process more than death itself. All this could be a bowl of fluff for we cannot predict our behaviors; we are not that consistent. And ultimately it is just words forming together, coalescing like white corpuscles to stave off infection, which I rally here — so bravely written! Who am I kidding? When death looms, all bets are off. On that merry note, feeling neither despair or depression, just seeking clarity as dawn is here, I leave you, reader to ponder your own mortality, for I do it on a daily basis — and you?

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Diastema

Posted on April 22, 2010 by | 2 Comments

When the dentist labeled the marked gap between my two front teeth as “diastema,” I didn’t quite get it, thinking that he had said diaspora. After the confusion lifted, we both chuckled as I explained to this 38- year-old Mormon dentist what the diaspora was, it too, in its way, a marked gap. Here I am correcting at 69 the diastema between my front top two teeth that I have lived with for decades. My parents never did see to that or perhaps, to be fair, they had  been told that it was non repairable — dentristy in the 40s being in the Stone Age. (When was the last time you heard a dentist say, “rinse.”) In any case I said to the dentist that I didn’t want a chiclet for my two front teeth, they having begun to chip off at the bottom from decades of wear and gnaw. I asked that some space be left in between and the artist he was, the good dentist crafted and carved and sculpted the temporary pair I am wearing today. In fact I will be going to a lab to get a custom shade so that all looks well. Yes, I did use the line from “Marathon Man,” some place during the procedure — “Is it safe?” Of course, the assistant had no idea what we were giggling about, just the usual generation gap — I don’t use all the gizmos thrown at us and she doesn’t watch all the old movies –we are even.

My sense of self required a space between my teeth although for years I personally disliked the gap. So after six decades necessity makes me take care of myself and install two crowns, leaving a slight space to remind me that I am who I am. All those family photographs with my guarded smile is now “rescinded.” I will go to my grave newly reshaped. The earliest photograph of me as a prepubescent was taken by a professonal photographer. And in the smile the front two teeth are missing. I don’t remember if they had fallen out and new growth was coming in. I do dimly recall, very dimly, that I had cut or damaged my two teeth while jumping up and down on a bed with a baby bottle in my right hand; perhaps then. In any case I grew up with a diasthema. Would anything have changed if I had no space between my teeth? Perhaps. However, my father had a space between the same teeth and my son has one as well, but not as marked as was mine. In chatting with the dentist I shared that in classic Freudian dream analysis, the tooth is a penile symbol. He retorted, “Are you telling me I am a homosexual?” I had in no way meant that, but hmmm to his response. And so what?

I have about a week or so to determine if I like the look of these new temporary teeth before I go to the more permanent porcelain set. The space has been reduced and I may ask the good dentist to tinker here and there before the final choice is made. All this is humorous at this point in time and age. It is as if I am entering a new period of life, emerging into newer decades of life, all of which is a delusion. Remarkable, is it not? to keep working on or restoring body parts or even ways of thinking as we move into decline — is this American? is it cultural? And is it a kind of amusing human foible? Reminds me of the old cockers who exercise in the local gym as if they want to be in top condition when they come to die, the unstated mentality of their efforts. I exercise for now and not then, knowing all is wisp and wind. Surely I associate to Dickens, for these are the best of times and the worst of times for me.

So I chose to repair these chipping teeth which were calving like glaciers and endured those infamous shots to the mouth and the grinding away of the teeth I had, enduring the odor of bone being reduced and shaped and configured into stubs which would hold new replacements. Bone gives way to porcelain and I am crowned cosmetically, cautioned not to chew corn or eat taffy, ridiculous admonitions to me in any case. Taffy? I can’t make head or tail of this peculiar event, for I have been repaired and I cannot dole out the consequences of this after so many decades of being who I am. I had to put myself into a painful situation in order to get along dentally. Since I have the early makings of a cataract and the beginning of macular degeneration I wonder what other procedures are in the future. Another definition of the future might be the anxiety one feels in the present and a definition of the past might be the anxiety we live with in the present, like the arithmetical carrying over of a number, for surely life is a seamless flow and flux and change its engine. I end here.

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Dan Wakefield, New York in the Fifties

Posted on February 20, 2010 by | 2 Comments

I’ve read Wakefield’s book twice, for I “grew up” in the Fifties. I purposely did so to refresh my memory of the times. In 1950 I was 10 and by 1960 I was 20, when I first saw La Dolce Vita. I can go many different ways with this blog but I will simply immerse myself into my associations and remembrances. In 1957 I went with Stan Edelman, both of us about 17,  to Greenwich Village. I recall that I picked up Finnegan’s Wake in a book store and was put off by the gibberish, it seemed to me, that ran for pages — who knew I was interrupting a dream? We roamed the village and I especially recall going into an artist’s quarters who had posted a sign at the door that he was having a showing of his photographs. To go upstairs, to have cheese and a cracker, to browse, sublimely innocent and feeling sublimely safe, reflects upon a time in which riding the subway and being invited into  an artist’s home was not unnatural. It is a very pleasant memory of a different time and sensibility.

When I was in the village we caught a performance by an eccentric monologist called Brother Theodore; he was strange, bizarre and ranted and raved about Quadrupedism if I recall correctly — that man should go on all fours. Much later, very much later I learned he had been ransomed from Dachau for about one dollar for giving up the rights to the family fortune which was in the millions. Years later he got the public’s attention with visits to David Letterman — imagine Lenny Bruce doing standup in a death camp and you have Brother Theodore. At 17 I imagined he represented the offbeat and eccentric part of the village. In 1957 he was way out there. It was a good day to see him — just on a lark, my first adolescent outing to Greenwich Village.

I was too young, naive and immature to haunt the streets and crooked byways of the village at a time in which psychoanalyis was the predominant treatment for artists and painters, when jazz was laying down its New York roots, Mailer was writing about the “white negro” and Salinger’s stories were avidly looked forward to in the New Yorker. I missed Ginsberg and Kerouac, the Beats and Leroi Jones, later Imamu Biraku, writing his poetry and plays. I was in a dream state, emerging from but not engaging my world. It was the period of Eisenhower, panty raids, the 1955 Chevrolet Impala, the astounding Studebaker Golden Hawk — priceless styling to my eyes; it was a period in which there was silent passing in hallways in high school (!) and a white stripe down the corridors that you could not cross over. Air raid sirens warned us to crawl beneath our wooden desks and protestors were arrested in Times Square for not taking cover in assigned shelters. All this was around me but I was not a participant. It was a period in which people refused to sign petitions lest they be thought of as agitators or Commies — it was the McCarthy period.

Conditioning and conformity were all about and I was saturated in it.  The Lonely Crowd, The Organization Man, and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit spoke to that period. It wasn’t until the rapturous Sixties that I roused myself from slumber. Each one of us must know what it is to be asleep in life and then what it is to become aware. We are amazed at how we slumbered while fully awake, whatever that is. I went to a highly stratified high school, Jamaica High School, in fact. You knew your place in that school; we had tracks such as academic, commercial and general and in subtle and overt ways were reminded of that. Grades above all. The gifted were fawned over and coddled, principal and teacher pets.You just knew you were less or lesser than. I only recently discovered that Stephen Jay Gould and Michael Savage (he had another name, then)  were there between 1955 to 1958.

For me it was the golden age of cars — the DeSoto, the heavy beetle-like Hudson, the Nash Rambler, the wraparound windshields and fins, the 1954 Pontiac Bonneville that I drooled over,  the sleek and futuristic Studebaker designed by Raymond Loewy; the Chrysler Imperial and the early Ford Thunderbird; the movies of the Fifties had the latent undercurrent of doom — “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “Them!” — ants changed into monsters by A-bomb blasts, “The Forbidden Planet,” “Ivanhoe,” “Demetrius and the Gladiator,” “East of Eden,” “Giant,” “The Ten Commandments,” “It Came from Outer Space,” “The Searchers,” “The Unforgiven,” and so on. In movie houses at the time Duncan yo-yo contests were held;  maestros performed amazing feats with this ancient toy. Duncan was the best yo yo, Cheerio came in a close second. Jeans were called dungarees and crew cuts were in. If you saw a rare instance of a black man and a white woman on the street one gawked. Mother-of-pearl cufflinks were fashionable as well as charcoal gray suits ( the Windsor knot  was for ties)  and one always wore leather shoes — Regal or Florsheim, to wit – London Character if you had the bucks. I recall leather shoes for $18 in a shoe store window and I couldn’t afford them. We wore “sneakers,” then, either Converse or Keds. One resoled shoes and did not throw them out.Taps on the heels and tips prevented wear and made a melodious sound on pavement. Choices were limited, which as I look back, was a good thing: in reasonable doses, abstinence creates character.

As I recall, I sensed a kind of ennui, a kind of boring stasis was in the air. That is why Kennedy was met with such pleasure for he was one of the first “pop” presidents, although very much of the Fifties himself. The story goes that Mr. Clean was modeled after Eisenhower — I found him terminally dull. Sputnik in 1957 announced a new age and I recall seeing it in the afternoon skies after school with my friends.   At 4 p.m. I’d go into the house and see Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and envied the young people of my age who were not shy enough to have girlfriends and knew how to dance. On Saturdays I stayed in bed watching cowboy flics from the thirties — Buck Jones, Bob Steele, Hopalong Cassidy, Tex Ritter, Ken and Kermit Maynard filled airspace on TV; The Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon serials held me enraptured — the Clay People, Emperor Ming, the Merciless. Films saturated my frontal lobes — forever.  Amid the constancy, conformity, regularity of that world the seeds of the Sixties were being sown. Ferment was in the Village, that was for sure; psychoanalysis was on its wane, giving way to the Primal Screams of the Sixties.

Wakefield was in his mid-twenties, living and working in the Village while I was emerging — he had 10 years on me. I awoke in the Sixties and acted out as well. So I was a transitional young man who could not or who was not aware enough to see the world about me; it takes a long time to grow up and we often end our years still immature, still yearning, still wishing, wanting and often still unaware of ourselves first, and of course, by definition, unaware of those close to us. No man goes to his grave fully aware. We couldn’t handle that. It is not valued. Not in this culture in any case.

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I’m Getting Married in the Morning

Posted on January 7, 2010 by | 1 Comment

It is 8:15 or so, Nevada time (Tuesday). I’m dressed, and Jane is “getting ready.” Cameras are at hand, papers for signing at the chapel are about. We need to pick up her corsage at the florist before we head out to the Chapel on the Corner, a nondescript little hut on a nondescript Nevada street near a courthouse. What can you say about the street’s name, “Basic”? (How did I ever end up in Nevada?) Jane, as always, is in good spirits for she is a very optimistic person and given her neanderthalish family it is always remarkable how individuals manage to surmount their adversities without even being aware of the malignancies. Who of us ever realizes the real context of our early lives or our present living? An imaginative old age seens to be an answer in which one reflects back. This morning I am thinking about my 69 years and the circumstances that have made me. No methodology and no analysis can do it justice. I am not bewildered by my life but I am not a little astonished at what I have and what I have not made of it. As I wrote to my son, Jordan, last night, who is about to quit his job and enter a risky journey to reclaim his young life and to precipitate a personal adventure, for he is fed up with the grind and how this culture, any culture, drives you mad, he is entering “the unexplored country” (Hamlet).

It is Wednesday. The marriage went off without a hitch, although jerk forgot to put film in his retro camera (just love that old man anxiety); however, enough shots were taken with Jane’s digital and we videotaped ourselves at the chapel as well as interviewed one another when we got home which is hilarious to watch. It has been a kind of tradition since we toured Spain and Portugal in 2007 to end our day with a mutual interview about the day’s events. It reminds me now since I’m up to my throat in reading Peter Gay’s biography of Freud (really good, masterly, and very lucidly presented) of the “day’s residues” which serve to make up the manifest aspect of dreams. In any case a few comments about the minister and ceremony.

Kathy, the woman minister, made a simple non-denominational service free of most cant and religiosity which is what we asked her to do. Bright, intelligent, a Southern woman, she was going to helicopter to the Grand Canyon after our ceremony. A 45 minute trip, eight hours round trip by car, she has been performing marriages there for several years. We paid for a witness who was from the East coast and so I spoke East coast to him and we got along. We both miss pastrami sandwiches. It was a light hearted ceremony, brief, short, friendly with good cheer among us all. As is my way, I kibitzed with Kathy which is my way of bringing people into my circle so that we interact in a more friendly way and it worked. Kathy who performed the service and Sheila the florist who made Jane’s delightful corsage made the day smoothly flow by like a meandering, lazy and bucolic river.

We spent the late morning at a local casino losing money, my most recent vice, and having dinner out at a local eatery which we favor. We will honeymoon at the new CityCenter on the strip which is a light year away from the other theme-based hotel/casinos — New York, New York, Excalibur and the like. We will be staying at the Aria for a few days, relishing the magnificent shopping and the resplendent art work interlaced throughout this hotel and the entire complex — Henry Moore, Maya Lin, et al. Imagine Fifth Avenue shopping and the Plaza and you have a taste of it all, 8.5. billion worth. Jane and I spend our days writing, computing, her preparing for the next semester and my rewriting  a book of short stories to be published this spring. I married a very special woman who has the graceful elan vital of a gazelle and she has married a grumpy, ornery but not a mean-hearted bull elephant. And they lived happily ever after — Jane has mentioned to me that in fairy tales we never have a look in or at or an eyeful or earful of what those days between the prince and princess are like after they wed.

I’ll keep you posted.

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“Me and Orson,” A Homage to the Great Welles

Posted on December 21, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Anything about Welles I am attracted to, perversely so. His treatment at the clammy hands of the boors and philistines of his time continues to this day. The twin morons of his time, Hedda Hopper and especially Louella Parsons, gossip columnists, went after him —often at the behest of Hearst and his caged canary, Marion Davies –and savaged Welles. Their malign influence went on for decades. What I find perverse in me is the satisfaction knowing full well how this culture goes after its artists, how we always fear and dread intelligence of a high order. It has been so for centuries; it is in the fabric of Homo sapiens. Watching “Me and Orson” brought back all the movie trivia and mental memorabilia I have about Welles. Interestingly, the movie is based on a fiction by a New Jersey English teacher, “Me and Orson.” I imagine it to be a delightful conceit.

One scene that touched me was Welles reading Tarkington’s “The Magnificent Ambersons” while riding in a New York cab. Reading passages that touched him, for Welles lost both his father and mother before he was sixteen, foreshadowed the movie that was to be made. What is little known was that Welles read two books a day, or so the legend says; wrote theater reviews in England by age 16 and was proclaimed a genius very early on, his alcoholic father and artistic mother not imposing reasonable parental controls on him. In an interview he once said that he was so used to being adulated as a genius while growing up that it was normal for him to assume so. In the movie his petulance and arrogance is brought out all the while we esteem his genius, an interesting dilemma for any individuals in relationship with him. In a memoir by his daughter Christopher Welles, just released, she mentions that he decided to call her Christopher because he liked the name; she describes his frequent absences which she resented but when he appeared he charmed her socks off and what a charmer he was. On a long ago TV show talk show he told the exceedingly overweight Oliver Reed words to the effect that as an actor he filled  space in film, meant as a compliment. It depends on how you take that. Outlandish and endearing in the same moment, I have a sweet tooth for the man. I firmly believe he had the purest integrity as an artist and for that I admire him. After all, how many times do you need to write “Hamlet”? His achievements continued long after his early masterpiece. I run to his defense. I need not.

I went to Google and discovered his daughter’s recent book, and  I came across a real fascinating fact. He had an older brother, Richard, diagnosed as a schizophrenic and institutionalized; Welles sent him a stipend for as long as he lived. Ten years older than Orson, he was released years later and seemed to get his life in order. So here is the Welles family, one son a genius and one diagnosed as schizophrenic, a mother who was a pianist with artistic leanings and a father who was an inventor and alcoholic. The conundrum of two sons so vastly different must have been not only puzzling but demoralizing for the parents and one wonders if the “other” played a subliminal part in Welles’ cinematic and theatrical productions. I wonder what it might be like to write about Orson from the point of view of Richard — Welles would put him to work at the back of the theater at times. What are brothers except our other selves in different semblances, our doppelgangers. It is the same womb. I wonder if he had the same deep voice as Orson. I am now wondering a lot about Richard.

The movie reveals fictionally the manipulative and cunning Welles, a prick, exactly, but it also captures that which is redeemable and majestic about the man. Part enfant terrible, genius, how is one to deal with that? How do we all deal with geniuses or the exquisiitely gifted in this culture? I am pondering that as I write. I believe we tear them down for they represent on many levels what we have not allowed ourselves to become or what we resent for not having — or just human envy and spite. Teachers do this regularly in schools; religious “leaders” shut down the dissenters like stepping on a biblical snake’s head. I really do feel that it goes beyond the artistic to something deeper which is only an intuitive conviction based on no known empirical facts and consequently I believe it to be true — human beings are fearful of the light, preferring the dark and shadows; human beings are threatened by that which is gifted or exquisitely intelligent for it creates an unwanted awe. Rather than sheltering one self beneath the overhead leaves of the tree next to an annointed one, we dread to sidle up to genius and we flee instead. I have sidled up to one or two great minds in my life and I found the human ambrosia wonderful — I actually grew as a person. Adopt an artist and bathe in the juices.

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Two Hundredth Blog — More Spit in the Ocean

Posted on December 15, 2009 by | 1 Comment

That’s the title of this blog; now let’s get on with it. The Hanukah candles are lit by this atheist who respects the immense Jewish contribution to humanity. I can even say the prayers in Hebrew, 56 years after my bar mtzvah. Oh, the power of conditioning and how sweet it is and can be in certain instances. I am also writing a few paragraphs about snow for my Homage to K, a riff on Kafka trying his hand on writing about the Holocaust. (Oh, the grandiosity.) Can you just imagine what he’d have to say about the Holocaust, but I refer you to my last blog about him. I am entering emails of European scholars into a database, quite diligently, quite laboriously, for the next edition of the tetralogy which has been sent off to the printer. At least 3000 individuals will get a gander at my PR email which goes out in January. Hopefully the cover will appear here and other goodies as Jane is quite well versed in this cybershit I humor and hope never to master — why allow it to creep into my brain cells?

Jane Elizabeth Holt has decided that we will wed very early in January. Realizing that as a Jewish man and a future Jewish husband my ancestral instincts, an inflamed sciatic nerve, genetically tell me to take care of my new bride. She will now be covered by my medical plan. Given that she will pay in 2010 almost $300 monthly for her anemic plan, one without a prescription plan (!) at all but just a plan for dire circumstances, she will now be protected by my teachers’ plan which will provide ample coverage. (What altruism on my part.) I remove from her brow the burden of being poorly insured not to say that she finds the payments burdensome. And what do I get for all this? I get Jane, poor girl. She is my built-in hospice, literary editor, amanuensis, pragmatist, lover, jack Mormon who adores all things Jewish, especially Jewish men. She is delighted to find out that this actor or that writer is Jewish for she is one of the few people I have come across who are not darkly inhabited by prejudice.

She is studying to be a librarian which she recently acted upon and while  engrossed in her studies I “meekly” prowl about the house unattended to, unloved, uncared for, doing my Larry David impressions. Jewish men need care: water us, feed us, schtoop us occasionally and we are contented cats. With a first class mind, I enjoy that at 51 she is cutting through her studies like a hot knife through butter. Our mutual dream is that she gets work so that we can finance a tour to Israel before I croak, visit the Wall where I will weep and collapse into terminal ethnicity. I enjoy these quaint atavistic traits I own. In any case we will pick one of those sleazy Vegas chapels and have some clerk in sleazoid fashion pronounce whatever jargon makes us a couple. We have been together three years and in effect, we are married, heart and soul — poor girl. What I keep telling Jane, although she has two masters, is that she should think beyond being a librarian, because in spirit she is a writer who will become a librarian. However, my sense of her is that she would make a very sharp therapist — sensitive, excellent memory, huge plasma webs of feeling, the ability to thread together random thoughts into a tapestry of a kind. Like a very good therapist, she would provide a superlative “hold” for her clients. And the best trait of all — a cosmic ability to laugh at herself. I enjoy the tinkling laughter she has.

And so this potpourri of daily living comes to a close.

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Jane Is Away

Posted on September 7, 2009 by | 1 Comment

While Jane is off to Utah for a meeting of new students gathered for a degree in library science, I sit home here in Nevada trying to arrange my day, trying to fill in the spaces left by her leaving. Once again, I am alone for a while and wondering an old man’s thoughts, I suppose — the what ifs. You imagine them, I need not explain. At this juncture in my life having a partner is critical for me. I am feeling more dependent on the Other. I am not as strong as I thought I was. The realization is one of many I am having of late about myself and life as well. Realizing I need the Other, Jane, and the presence of my son more frequently than he can manage — or realizes, I sense the lengthening shadows coming across my lawn. Chronology destroys all of us, but it is durationally that we can live intensely or meaningfully. I am trying to create as much as I can because I know in creation time passes fleetingly and one does not sense one’s age. I am also feeling how often I deluded myself, as I reflect, of how imperfect I was as a father, sometimes highly insensitive, of how mistakes I made damaged my life, perhaps others, of how failures in my own psychological life made scaring impact of others.

Realizing that regrets do nothing for one, for they cannot release you from the errors made, what I am left with, in instances, is a deep sense of grief for what I have done to others first, and then to myself. Although my parenting was poor, I am responsible, mostly, for the choices I’ve made. And often they were not good ones. So as I wither I see more vigorously and clearly the errors of my life. And what is to be made of them? I am not sure. I know that guilt is irrelevant here. I realize that self-mortification is not a wholesome choice. Turning to a god in prayer is an unbelievable self-hoax and the ailment of the species, for I believe the responsibility is not to be given to an omniscient being, particularly the sad ones the species has promulgated for its own relief. I seek of late how best to come to terms with my human foibles, mistakes and stupid behaviors.

I think I may near something comforting for me. I just sensed here while writing that if I remember the lost ones in my life I pay them the respect and homage and care I may have not afforded them while they lived. If I have to be crucified, let me be crucified on the cross of memory. If you want eternal life, brethren, hope that your children or spouse will remember you long after you are gone. It would move me deeply if my son or Jane carried me in their minds until their days were over. I can feel this or say this freely because Caryn, my daughter, Rochelle, my wife, now more than 10 years gone, are as present in my mind and thoughts on a daily basis as ever. I don’t recall events so much as critical parts of our relationships, often some of these make me morose because of personal failure on my part. I cannot help that, it is what it is. I think sometimes that on my deathbed what Rosebud might I say, what final image would shatter my dying mind so that I had to say it and then be gone forever. I am not sure what I might say, a few come to mind for me to reflect upon. I am besotted with a crazed or mistaken notion that I need to leave something behind for those who knew me. Apparently I am of late more concerned with dying than with living, although I can make the case they are very much the same.

It turned out that I became the self-appointed recorder, the writer, of the Freese family. In a long essay I gave my son there are pages of descriptions of family members I grew up with and that he has no idea ever existed. I collected all the photographs I had and in that same essay tried to give something of who these people were. He may never read it. However, I had to record that. When I look at all these people long since gone, I wonder, like a Holocaust survivor, how much was lost, what context and human glue is now gone. And so, unlike the paranoid Pharoahs, who extended their efforts on the enslaved efforts of others to go to the other world I reach out in the autumn of my years to those who are alive and vibrant about me. I seek solace and comfort in their well-being. I continue to write in order to define who I am, for I am as fuzzy and unclear as the bottom of a Coke bottle. I am infected with knowledge. Useless. I am coated with sophistication. Eunuch. I sing smarts like a flirty castrati. But who I am is vastly unknown to me. We really are gross ignorances trying to make our way in this world. Someone, perhaps rightly, labeled me as a seeker, for he detected the search in me, the nagging quest to arrive. Imagine a needle in the middle, if there is such a thing, of this universe, a needle millions and millions of miles in length. At the tip of the needle is my squirming body.

Vanity of vanities, I write to be remembered. What a foolish self-assigned task!

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I’ve Been Working On The Railroad

Posted on September 4, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Wending her way through my collection of short stories on the Holocaust, Jane is formulating, in mind, what she intends to write in her introduction to the new book, hopefully published in Spring 2010. What I discovered when writing these stories is that as I crept toward an understanding that I could translate into writer’s words, that very understanding backed off and off, like receding waters. I just couldn’t grasp it and had to settle for approximations of what I thought I knew or had fathomed. Consequently I am dissatisfied with my efforts except for one or two stories. I associate to breaking off a piece of peanut brittle, messy, awkward, angular and shattering better stuff off the hand than on.

So as a defense mechanism, I have ”deceived” myself — accepting what I have written as the best shard I can make. Most if not all the stories have been written within six months or so and I am suspicious that they do not have the gravitas they should carry if I had written them over a period of years which I did with my last collection — thirty years of gravitas. However, I must write and I will not torture myself over how well or not time saturates a writer’s efforts. The grim reaper is using his sickle at my rear and I am running as fast as I can to complete the loose ends we all have if we are aware of time’s guillotine. Look, some of us need golf; I need to write. I am on my last eight holes, really the last four. I’ll take a birdy, an eagle is beyond me. I have always maintained that I write not for my children so much — you don’t count — as for myself. Writing mirrors who I am and I’d like to get a non-distorted image of myself before I croak. Why, you may ask? Can you handle the truth? My taproot is in Judaism and I am a secular atheist who admires the ethos I emanate from. The answer is: I am a Jew. I have to know. Ridiculous quest, is it not? Oh, but the side dishes are wonderful — crinkle-cut fries, round potato knish, sour tomatoes and pickles and the New York waiter’s thumb in your glass as he gives you water.

Some of the stories, perhaps most, are surreal for in that heightened awareness, I believe, I can assess or paint in the characteristics of the Holocaust that I need to get to, rather, that concern me.  For instance, terror is hard to write about; it is worst to experience, of course. I find it hard to describe terror and so I try to approach it indirectly, to slyly hint at it. Film directors have that issue as well. Although they show pictures in motion, only a few directors can make you feel the atmosphere. Just today I had to turn off “Schindler’s List” because it began to creep into me, especially the early scenes when ther Jews are moving into the Warsaw Ghetto, having been evicted from their homes which would now be taken over by the Germans. I felt something in me, the feeling of having been selected, of having been picked out, of having been geeked out of the matrix of a society and I quickly associated to present events in this country and the latent menace in events — the fears of Obama speaking to children; Birthers; the dangerous lunacies of a Glen Beck; the adamant polarization in this nation and the scariest thing of all to me — the abyssmal knowledge of Americans about their founding documents and their own history. I believe that in my community for perhaps 50 miles in any direction there is not one American who  can name a socialist of the 19th century or the 20th , for that matter.The last twenty years must have produced a bumper crop of moronic teachers. In my mind a great teacher takes on the PTA, the principal and the community if need be. OK, go down in flames but what a war story to tell your own children decades from now. I once told a group of kids in an eighth grade class that the Declaration of Independence was progaganda; of course, it was and being a history major I had really a significant amount of essays and papers on that subject, especially by the great historian Carl Becker (look him up). Well, I did get shit; a few parents took their kids out of my class. I guess I was an early socialist in Elmont, Long Island, a Progressive, as Beck terms it. Naive and new at my “profession,” I quickly learned that the truth does not set you free. Awareness sets you free. As I look back on my desperate years as a teacher, I am glad I made waves but blood pressure is not a happy consequence nor suppressing rage and anger at the buffoons who run our schools for the buffoons who procreate conditioned little creatures called “students.” I do digress.

Things are not that dire in this nation but we do have one man carnivorously biting off the tip of another man’s pinky at a town hall meeting. However, you may know that canaries were used in English mines in the 19th century for the purposes of alerting miners of methane gas in the tunnels. If the canary died, get out. I am going out here on a limb but if there is a spate of swastikas across synagogue walls, for civilized dialoguing this summer of ’09 seems to be disappearing, it is symptomatic of the hatreds being spawn at this moment. Cooler heads are not winning the moment. I sense a rage that is primal without censorship or inhibition which to me connotes the thin pie crust we term civilization, the basic rules we need to get by with. I give you a dollar and ask for change. You give me a quart of the milk; the response is disturbing and psychotic. The Jew is society’s canary; kill him and it is time to emigrate.

All this colors revisiting my little book of stories, crosshatching my characters with feelings and ideas, motives, fears and quirks. I sally forth against Holocaust deniers or revisionists, the same hater, writing satirically, scathingly about the mind and its mind set that denies such an event. I excavate, I eviscerate, I plumb, I leap into that slime pit and try to return to the surface world with some insight of what makes a fellow human being deny such facts; but wait a minute. Did you ever speak to someone who looks just like you, shops, eats, farts, dates, sees the movies and is completely psychotic?  Not a few therapists adhere to the thesis that most of the world’s population is psychotic if we examine the criteria we use to diagnose clients (see the DSM IV).

I tried my hand writing about such a revisionist and sadly enough my reach exceeds my grasp. I may not have written a good story, but a well-intended one. I’ll let Jane correct and emend that and if it does not work, I will dispense with. However, the search inward brought me some personal insights. Tell me, when was the last time a golfer walked off a course with an insight other than he did or did not play the ninth hole well? Don’t you get it, reader, I don’t have much time and while I search and seek and attempt to determine my life’s course of action the sands pour through the glass. And what did you do today?  I personally have no time to be lint in eternity’s pocket. Ultimately I will be an iota, but while here, while alive and kicking, while aware to the best I can be, I am kicking ass.

Adieu.

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Posted in Commentary, Culture, Reminiscence

The Return Of The Repressed: At 69

Posted on July 25, 2009 by | Leave a comment

I am 69 now, and how have I reached this age? I was aware all the time. Interiorly I could be 20, 40, even 50, but time has brought me to this point ineluctably. Fascinating, for the exterior self has weathered, grown not a little creaky and grayer and less efficient, yet the edifice stands. That is only part of it. The shock of 69 is still with me. I have lived perhaps too long.

Inside I feel not so old, perhaps more mature, perhaps. Inside I have not been weathered. I have been stressed and tested. I have endured great adversity. Death and dying are now more imminent than ever, although always present at any time in life. That far off place which we think of when we are younger now seems very close by or next store, like the neighbor. Time has run down my leg like piss, largely unseen and unfelt.

Suddenly, goes the cliche, I’ve reached an age that alarms or makes me realize more than ever I am mortal man. No longer can I play the game that growing older is over there. I realize it is here, in my face, in spades. I cannot run. I cannot hide, as time manipulates me into the cognizance of 69, not 39, or 49. It is not melancholy, I feel. I don’t rue much, for I know that much of our lives are unlived. We have been damn fortunate to have just been given existence, although the awareness of it more than harries us throughout our lives. I am only slightly encouraged by my writing, or creativity, which forever makes me age-free — or young, for words and thinking express durational time, sweet time, and not the arc of chronology.

I have asked my son who lives in Chicago to try to see me more often, as time is short and we need to engage one another, for he and I know one another and yet we are ignorant of each other. No man knows himself, and no man can know another. The best we can share are our impressions and approximations — our defined illusions — of the other.

I live with the knowledge that I have had a good run, so many die at earlier ages. Grateful for that, I take philosophic comfort in that I could absent the world having done a few good things with my life. It was a fast crapshoot and the dice skittered and bounced crazily and smacked against the wall, for it was a good throw and I didn’t come up deuces.

At 69 reminds me that I must consider and reflect even more as I near my end. I must resolve not to seek pleasure so much as resolution, completion and loving more than I can at this time. Jane is much younger than me and in that is my last throw of the dice. If i can pass the torch on to her, I would be very satisfied. And what is that torch? To be freer than she is now, to be more creative than what she is now, to attain a greater sense of awareness and to always struggle to reach what she cannot. For these injunctions have driven me. They are good ones. Perhaps they would embolden her.

This maddening expression of life, this spark between birth and death is agonizingly unfathomable. In a peculiar way we do not own our lives for the on/off switch is held by someone or something elsewhere. For some life is continuous, heaven and a hereafter — oh! you cowards! You wish to continue, you greedy people. For me it is bewildering to have the moment and then to be snuffed out. It is a cosmic tease, perhaps an axiom of time and space, for we do see and we are aware and the only creature on this planet to contemplate its end. A devilish, a fiendish existence — and wonderful and majestic as well,  has been given to each of us; perhaps this explains metaphorically why we cry at birth, really wail. Whatever, that is what is.

Eventually no one survives to remember us in all our spastic glory and evanescence. What is to be made of all this? Look up at the night sky until you cannot take the implications of it any longer for it contains great terror, loneliness and dreadful sadness. Perhaps the best we have is love for one another as we go down into the sea.

We all will be gone. My last wish is not heaven or meaning, but an awareness that grasps my hand and wishes me love, bon voyage and peace as I wade into my eternal rest — unless, that is, I come back as a giraffe. Who knows? We assuredly don’t.

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Posted in Commentary, Philosophy, Reminiscence

We Are Mastering Adversity

Posted on July 17, 2009 by | 1 Comment

A series of calamities, small  letter “c,” have befallen us, as we Lewis and Clark Nevada; we are now sleeping off the floor, the window blinds are all in, the new couch was delivered and almost damaged in the house (!), delivered by klutz and putz. While this goes on, we make merry for our mutual sanity by buying accessories — throw pillows, bedroom lamps, and venture at day’s end to The District — last night was Ben and Jerry’s. What we enjoy is coffee, a pastry and plopping down on bistro rattan chairs to watch the world go by. A real pleasure.

Jane has connected the new computer I got from my son. So change makes me learn Vista, although  Jordan has told me that in Septemeber a new upgrade will improve the system, whatever. With computer up, I can now get back to my new book of short stories and begin to work on my new edition of the tetralogy. I am in our new den and the light is soft and good and so a new beginning for this old fart. Jane has purchased a wireless mouse for me which is a delight; clearly she is of the generation who first lived and learned with computers. She is not intimidated by them while I scream eek! The house is shaping up, we are settling down, things are going into place so that we are feeling at home.

As I write, Jane received word that her house has been sold and monies will be transferred into her account. It has been a rough journey, given all the paperwork and buffoons involved with that blizzard of paper. What is the difference between us and a third world country? Answer: Our arrogant belief that we are not. When the carpet layers came to our house, one revealed while chatting that he was from Guatamala. We spoke and he made the sage comment that givernments, including ours, are corrupt. The people just have to persevere. I agree. So no matter where you live, the morons and killers are in charge. Perhaps democracies are very good at deluding themselves that they are “better.” So, if you want to live as an American Yankee in Cabo, don’t worry about the Mexican cartels, for we have them in Congress. You can be murdered with a machete and machine gun, or take the other route and be killed by the absence of legislation. Choose your poison.

The last paragraph should come before I just noticed, but so what, for it is all stew of the mind. The temps are in three digits so we stayed in today emptying out cartons while my intellectual soulmate reads The Brothers Karamazov, probably the greatest novel ever written, they say. Jane and I went to the local library and gave them our books and offered to run workshops in an attempt to get known in the neighborhood, to volunteer and to make some literary connections. The real answer is to continue to write; serendipity is what I count upon, works all the time.

We are going for a late night swim or wading as the air is thickly heavy and dry. That is why I came here. The pool is around the block.

Adieu

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Posted in Commentary, Reminiscence