12/25/10 – random thoughts

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Lately I’ve been thinking about the realization that I’ve forgotten more then I remember. I cannot for the life of me remember what I got or gave two Christmases ago, and all but a handful of the presents I got from and gave to Marilyn.

Maybe I’m just at the moment experiencing the inevitable letdown, or lowering of my guard, after my – for me – hectic and full week and Christmas weekend.

I think about each of our uniquenesses, even my uniqueness, and that that uniqueness will be muted, and eventually dissipated as we will be.

Somehow, I think I am looking at this the wrong way. Or rather, that there is a way to look at this in a way that will create value, and even hope, in the face of it.
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11/27/10 – haiku

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days fall away like parsecs
time to time becomes
the space between galaxies
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10/16/10 – random thought

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“If you give this man a ride, sweet memory will die” – Jim Morrison, “Riders on the Storm”
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I am sure everyone my age has them, but those moments when, through some strange linkage of thoughts, I realize I have forgotten more than I remember, that I now remember conversations with no recollection of the other’s face, I feel so chillingly nervously close to the emptiness of death.
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poem 4/16/10 – Bay Rum

Today’s NaPoWriMo 2010 April Challenge from readwritepoem.org – Day #16 “what’s that smell?”

A bit off prompt, just a bit.  I was in fact thinking about this last night, looking over my cologne bottles on my bathroom sink… I had originally ended it with a zen-y verse about moments and memory, but I decided it didn’t need it.
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Bay Rum

– you stink good! –
always made me cringe
++++++inside, to be honest
but I never said so
let you

because I know
just a moment ago

a girl speaks to her father
springs to her tiptoes
hands pressed on his arm
++++++more yearning than
++++++holding, to him tender
++++++soft little white fingers
she lifts her face to his jaw
so strong!
++++++her shining blue eyes
++++++her indolent freckles
++++++her shimmery hair spills back
and her aquiline nose
still cutely curved
+++he thinks
flares and gulps, she sighs
and he smiles, maybe more to himself
and his little papoose squeals
++++++– you stink good! –

poem 4/8/10 – your Book of Days

This slipped away from today’s readwritepoem.org April poetry challenge “unusual love connection” metaphor prompt.  But then again, this is poetry, not coding.

I wonder what Marilyn would think, if she saw all I’ve written, and will still write, about her.  Flattered? more, stunned?

your Book of Days

Some rainy days
Now that you’re gone
I’ll sit quiet, touching eternal
holding your big Book of Days

Its thickened heft on my lap
all the leather cracked and noble
the pages filled dreaming inside
the warm brass lock
you never bothered to snap

I think you forgot about it
in how you rushed to leave
but I found it

Under all the ownerless things
squatting in your apartment
in the days after

Your mother and sister just
wanted to drop it
in a gray generic Hefty bag
lug it out to their car
so maybe later getting
away from here
too burdened they think
they’d release a knob
the amber light a door is ajar
quick close it the air whipping in
all your things all that bag spilling out
dashed to the edge of the road

Smacking in the gravel
the binding cracks
the innocent pages muddied
while your sister and mother
slip away angry or guilty
back to Columbus

and be done with you

But when they were picking
through the meds and curlers and oils
on the counter in your bathroom

hissing at your daring

I grabbed it
pushed it to the bottom
of the box I was carrying out
seven books, a carton of incense
postcards a scarf a little pillow
other things they wouldn’t understand

They couldn’t be bothered
with your Book of Days
and I wasn’t sure I’d understand
but at least I’d thought I’d want to

It’s raining today
and my thumb caresses
the warm brass lock
you never bothered to snap

poem 4/5/10 – the wife, the cherry pie, the baby

I registered with NaPoWriMo 2010, challenging myself to write a poem a every day in April, waiting for reply.

= = =

** Fine tune edited 5/4/10

(This is probably my worst nightmare)

the wife, the cherry pie, the baby

In the time before he breathes that
last one breath, finally
hollow, gasping
on the nursing home bed
he will tell the attendants
about the women, the affairs
before and after his vows
and about the wife, about that one day

She wore an apron, over a little blue dress
tied in lacy white, the crisp bow in back
when he got home from work
she had baked him a pie
cooling now on the kitchen windowsill
warm cherry red glazing
over the strips of crust, brown against
the ceramic white pie pan, the one
with the yellow and orange birds,
a wedding gift from her maid of honor
lifting it in her flowered quilted oven mitts
she turned and presented it to him

You’re going to be a father! –
her voice bright, not hesitant
but cracking a little, her smile eternal
proud of his hands proud of his body
and the future they shared
and are going to create

he doesn’t remember
the taste of the pie later, or the dinner they had
but he’ll tell the weekly sponger and
that woman, the one with the cold fingertips
who grunts every time she pushes his hip
to grab at the bedpan

About how he sat down
in the kitchen chair with the
red corduroy cushion tied on its seat
and stared at his wife’s belly
and leaned to it and kissed it
Adoring her always
that summer day

And they nod and say that’s nice
clenching their jaws but not hesitating
because they’ve glanced at the guest register
and they’ve seem his records
the family fields empty

And again they assure him
his wife, his son, his daughter
or his secret lost love
or that girl he never talked to
will come by tomorrow
I’m sure, tomorrow
okay?

letter to Marilyn

In case you’re worried about an obsession,  I’ve actually never written anything like this before…

Hi Marilyn,

It’s five years on now.  The world’s gotten busier and faster and more obnoxious.  More for the young who can keep up with it and push it ahead.

I saw to it that Rudy got a good home with a friend of mine.  He was fine, adjusted well.   He passed away a year ago, he was 15?  So sorry.

Remember that  young black junior senator who gave that rushed opening speech at the Democratic Convention, and I had no idea who he was?  Barack Obama.  He’s president now.  Really!   Things are tough, though – we’re in the worst economic situation since the Great Depression, and the middle class is still being eroded and things have gotten more money-driven – so the general feeling isn’t good.

I know you’d hate it, but I’ve reduced my beard down to a little “soul beard” under my lip, and I keep my hair cropped very short.  It’s mostly gray now and thinning, not male pattern but generally, so when it’s long it doesn’t look good anymore.  A couple years ago Kathy had a lumpectomy – it was malignant but completely excised and she was declared cancer-free, but she got chemo and radiation afterwards anyway as a precaution.  Of course, her hair fell out in clumps, and she had her head shaved and wore a wig.  As a surprise I got my head shaved too – turns out I have a decent shaped head, and with my hair mostly gray I actually looked younger bald.  I’m thinking of shaving it again this summer, but keeping it smooth is high maintenance (at least from a guy’s perspective).  And a funny thing – Kathy had started Weight Watchers just before it happened, and she lost so much weight from the chemo she hit her target and now goes for free!

The nieces and nephews are healthy.  Little Mikey is taller than I am now.  A couple years ago,  he had a speaking part, a few scenes,  in a movie about “the real” Saint Nicholas in Turkey in the 6th Century.   Togas, playing with wooden swords, and he had to keep his hair full and tousled for a couple years in case of  any reshoots.

Oh, and I had heart attack and ended up getting a quadruple bypass three years ago.  I flatlined on the operating table – I don’t know if we talked or not; they gave me a drug that would erase my memory, so in case they messed up the anesthesia and I ended up being awake during the surgery I wouldn’t remember anyway.  I’ve lost some weight and I work out now, swimming, like I did toward the end when we were together.   My energy level tends to be erratic now, and I’m not sleeping well.  I’m being fitted for a CPAP machine next week.

Oh, and after you passed away, you probably saved a marriage.  In California.  I’ll tell you more about that soon.

But for now, as I said, my energy level… *kiss*

memories of The Charleston Shufflers

Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot
But he’ll remember, with advantages
What feats he did that day.

Shakespeare, Henry V, St. Crispin’s Day Speech

I’ve been having “senior moments” lately.  Since my heart issue three years ago, but I guess it’s about time for me anyway.

Words on the tip of my tongue – my mind knows it knows the bon mot, I see the shape of it, but recollection slips around it, gets absorbed, like Star Trek phasor beams on an impenetrable force field.   I say good morning to someone at the office but say the name of someone I went to high school with a similar last name.  I smile at someone with a cheery “Hey! How’s things?” before I remember that their mother died last week.

I was taught that the brain remembers everything, no moment your mind registers ever gets deleted, just filed deeper and deeper, never gets lost.  Now I read that neuroscientists are rethinking that; that your memories do disappear, fade away as their tiny bits of static between neurons fizzes away, and neurons and ganglia die, reshape, peel away from the past like sunflowers seeking after the sun as it travels.

Recent research reveals Alzheimer’s is not the brain’s inability to remember or remember properly, but the opposite.  The weakening of the filters that gatekeep all that you brain holds so you can process and work through the present moment effectively and safely.  My imagination is so thorough that I worry I will remember things that I merely thought about – women I wanted to be with, plays I intended to write, yelling I wanted to do but held my tongue.

When my grandfather was in the last days of his life, laying in a nursing home bed, he recounted to my father how when he was a young man he played banjo in a  group called The Charleston Shufflers.  Sounds like it was fun, and I can picture my grandfather picking away, hunched around his banjo, bobbing his head to the rhythm, his concentration and his tight jaw hiding his exuberance, until he would suddenly look up with a big surprised-looking smile.  But my father told us he’d never heard of that before.  His father had played the ukulele when he would come across one, on a lark, but had never played or mentioned the banjo, never before mentioned playing with any group called The Charleston Shufflers.

One of the reasons I decided to write 365 blogs this year – as uneventful as my life has been and as dull as I’ve become – is to dig in and pin down like butterflies in a glass case what I forgot I forgot.

But as I write, life becomes story.  Life and story constantly grapple with each other in our media-driven world.  Or at least in my head, as I’ve said here before.

I bet you, if I make it to a nursing home bed, little to do all day and little to look forward to and my mind just wandering, I’ll remember how my father telling us about my grandfather’s errant memory of The Charleston Shufflers had brought back memories of myself listening to him skiffle on the banjo in some Depression Era dancehall 30 years before I was born.

walking to kindergarten again with Google Earth

I downloaded Google Earth and traced the route from my childhood home to my kindergarten school – from Sussex Street down Humber to East Delavan on Buffalo’s East Side.

This nostalgic journey was courtesy of a retweeted prompting from @zefrank (thanks @mjfrombuffalo) re his contributory project “a childhood walk”, http://www.zefrank.com/the_walk/

Amazingly, Sussex Street is still brick – at least it was when the cameraed Google truck rattled down it May 31, 2005.   The neighborhood was “transitioning” when we moved to Kenmore the summer after kindergarten, it must have been 1968. So I only spent kindergarten at (I think) School 23, now torn down, going to the afternoon sessions.   Walked home by the boy downstairs from us, in my memory he is adolescent, so much older than me.  But he was only in 2nd grade.  But now that I think of him, after so many decades without a thought of him,  I remember him being so tall, and with a man’s voice and stubbled chin. Odd.

The walk down Humber, a sidestreet ending at Sussex “running into” the house next to ours, was apparently longer than I remember, and I remember it as one long block down to East Delavan, the cross-street looks wrong.

The strangest thing looking at East Delavan Avenue, a secondary artery, which to my wide eyes and wider imagination was huge bustling metropolitan street. Cars and people, a cop as crossing guard sometimes in the afternoon when the school let out.   In reality that stretch is mostly residential, and it could not have changed much in the past 42 years.   But to chubby little 5-year-old me it was like downtown, or the magical furious energetic Big Cities I glimpsed on our black and white TV.   No, it’s two narrow lanes each way.  Just an ordinary Buffalo street with the occasional corner clustered with a couple businesses, churches, shops.

My kindergarten school was closed soon after we left, then torn down.   Now the site looks like it’s a community park – paved, fenced, some sculpture-like climbing equipment. Which is strange, because I remember the school’s playground was across the street, tiny and high-fenced – where there is now a church and its parking lot.

And sometimes my mother would walk with me while she carried Eileen, who is a year younger than me and back then was not expected to survive very long, a farther walk down East Delavan to Bailey – and that is such a longer walk than I remember, past factories with fenced parking lots, but a train viaduct I clearly remember has apparently been dismantled and the street underpass brought up to grade and paved smooth. The branch library we went to is still there on the far corner of Bailey. I used to sit in the polite circle for a storytime reading while my mother cradling Eileen would visit quietly with other young mothers

A very interesting exercise with Google Earth – if disappointingly unrevelatory for me. You should try it yourself.

poem

A poem I wrote maybe 15 years ago —

not three years older than me
she is a pretty little girl
and her flowering sundress
cannot contain her
long blonde hair swinging freely
arms and legs living by their own summer agendas

but I wasn’t really paying her attention
no one was
least not the driver

and then there is a moment
just another moment
a simple fact

and she freezes –
it all freezes
then snaps
and she hits the pavement

and we start again
but she has forgotten how to move
and I know she is no longer there