Say "Cheese"

As my Uncle Georgie used to say, "There's always free cheese in a mouse trap."

I carry this picture in my wallet all the time

"In this picture, we are already fading. His arm fits perfectly around me, and I am nestled comfortably in the crook of his shoulder. I am 10. He had his first heart attack around the time I was born, and has been “watching it” ever since. Every few weeks, he and I go downtown to the pharmacy and pick up some pills and a bottle of medicine. We don’t use salt or real butter. We have been in this house for 4 years. I am 10, and he is 45, in seven years we will be separated from each other, some would have us believe for ever. My mother will continue to live in this house for 38 more years and counting: same address, same phone number, same house key.

He has been talking to people about me, asking if someone knows a piano teacher that will be gentle with my love of music and not kill it with drudgery of scales and exercises. Occasionally, he will bring out his “bobcat” tenor banjo, or his clarinet from high school days, and my sisters and I will squeal with laughter. He will soon buy an Oldsmobile convertible, something he’s wanted for a long time and mom and all of us kid him about.

It is Christmastime. I have just started serving mass at church. At Christmas, we change from black cassocks to red ones with intricate, starched surplices. In a few months, he and mom will buy me a full-size bicycle. It will get full-size use. It will be a warm, sunny, late-April morning I will remember many years later.


He loves to whistle. When we go for walks, he snaps his fingers in time to his whistling. In the morning, he wakes me up with singing as he makes coffee.


It is seven years later: October 18, 1969. I come home from playing at morning mass. It is a crisp, sunny Autumn Saturday , and I hear crying---screaming, really--- from the basement. He has collapsed and mom and I cannot revive him. I can smell the morning coffee we shared on his breath. The ambulance comes and takes him away.




Our basement is unique. Large wooden stairs coming down from the kitchen almost connect with cement steps going up and out to the back yard, where clean sheets used to dry in the wind on the clotheslines. In my mind that is how I think of it: stairs leading down and in, steps going up and outside, where the breeze makes everything fresh."

I see a lot of college-aged couples walking hand in hand, bundled against the cold.

Sweet indeed, those “Xmas break romances”: college students home for the holidays hooking up with other students, or friends left behind. There’s that “instant adult” feeling, mixed up with the short time lapse. A few weeks and then everyone splits. Those are the rules. I was blessed with two such relationships. With the first one, unfortunately, I didn’t understand that time limit shit, so I kinda got my heart scruffed up a bit. It’s really bittersweet. The romance culminated alongside the bandstand in the park, just a ways from the duck pond. No we weren’t on the stage. That would have been overdramatic, even for a music major and a psychology major!

So Long Ago, So Far Away...

Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example:'The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.
Her voice. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

------------Pablo Neruda

Brer Wolf"s Prayer

“Francis, Francis, do not destroy God’s prescribed order. The sheep feed on grass, the wolf on sheep ------ that’s the way God ordained it. Do not ask why; simply obey God’s will and leave me free to enter the sheepfolds whenever I feel the pinch of hunger. I say my prayers just like your holiness. I say: “Our Father, who reignest in the forests and hast commanded me to eat meat, thy will be done. Give me this day my daily sheep so that my stomach may be filled, and I shall glorify thy name. Great art thou, Lord, who hast created mutton so delicious. And when the day cometh that I shall die, grant, Lord, that I may be resurrected, and that with me may be resurrected all the sheep I have eaten ---------so that I may eat them again!”

Nikos Kazantzakis
“St. Francis”

And So It's Goodbye

And in the end, who wants the gnarly beast,
the snarly least- of- the- leasts,
who, though the Belle of his balls searched
under the matted hair and scarred skin
for the prince within,
was found to be unchanged by potions,
though strangely moved by oceans
and their tides,
and among the trees and shadows hides
so when the moon dances in the champagne,
pronouncing the world insane,
remembers a time of sun and love and
fire in the loin,
with a true princess, whose service he would
gladly join,
but gnarly beasts were even then, at the least,
unwanted?

Now that the first fine layer of snow has blanketed my tiny island, I have been blessed with a sheltered place to sleep: the convent attached to my old grade school, still occupied by The Passionate Sisters of St. Paul of the Cross (the motto on their coat of arms: "I preach Christ Crucified"--- but don't let that fool you, they're actually a fun bunch!)



I don't actually sleep in the convent (I don't think anyone would be comfortable with that.)But alongside the convent by their grotto and prayer garden is a doorway with a heating grate next to it.And it's quite cozy for me and Brer Wolf.I fall asleep to the sisters chanting "Salve Regina" and wake up to the "Benedictus." In exchange for the shelter and a little food, when the sistera have gone to teach. I clean the convent grounds and chapel---- the same chapel where I served mass when I was 10.




It's kinda like my relationship with God: I don't bother him and he doesn't bother me, and we'll settle accounts down the road.And it's been quite a road.

The Pond in December

"I see the children skating, I hear their happy song.
O, how my heart is aching. I'd love to sing along.
But it's a long, long time to remember
To the time when you were here.
It's a hard, hard time December.
It's a hard, hard time of the year.

Lord, I don't want to be alone when the snow begins to fly,
When the snow begins to fly."

Wolfen

Brer wolf has joined me on the island and environs, just like the St. Francis saga. The hound haunts me or does the haunter hound me?





I still remember some of the images from this 1981 film. It's really haunting.

It’s been a little boring since I quit smoking about 4 years ago. I used to enjoy “steppin’ out for a smoke”----- especially on winter nights when you could see every star in the sky. And I’ve had more than a few people tell me they started smoking again because they were bored.

I quit smoking when I had a heart attack and bypass surgery. That would have been enough for anyone with sense. But it took a nurse-practitioner to convince me. What can I say? She got money for schooling by winning the Miss Oklahoma pageant. No shit. When a beautiful and smart woman talks, I listen.

A few days after the operation, the surgical team was doing a “follow-up” exam. I asked the surgeon if he had seen anything unusual about my heart. He looked sort of surprised and averted his eyes.

“I’d say five clogged arteries are enough, wouldn’t you?”
After that, the whole crew left except for Jennifer, the nurse-practitioner.

“What did you expect us to find on your heart?” she said.
“Well, you’ll probably think it’s all these drugs talking, but … do you know the story about Queen Mary I of England? In 1558, the French defeated the English and took control of the port of Calais, she was devastated and said, ‘When I am dead and opened, you will find “Philip” (her husband) and “Calais” on my heart.’”

“That’s interesting. So what?”
“Well, about 10 years ago. I told a girl the same thing about her name.”


Jennifer took her prescription pad from her coat pocket and wrote on it. She tore off the sheet and handed it to me.
“Is this her name?”

“That’s her”, I sighed.

She smiled a bit.
“You need to quit smoking,” she said and left my room.

This is the saddest poem. I wish I had written it. I wish I didn't know how the poet felt. Sometimes my world is a very lonely place.



Pity, We Were A Good Invention

They amputated
Your thighs from my waist.
For me they are always
Surgeons. All of them.

They dismantled us
One from another. For me they are engineers.
Pity, We were a good and loving

Invention: an airplane made of man and woman,
Wings and all:
We soared a bit from the earth,
We flew a bit.


Yehuda Amichai

Everytime I stop by my sister's place to shower and do some laundry, she says the same thing: "Why don't you move in with me and Phil? How can live like a homeless person? You've got family, you know. We're your family."

Homeless? I've got a home. It's like the hobos of the 30's used to say: "I've got the whole star-filled sky for a ceiling, and God's fertile earth for a floor. I just don't have any use for walls." (My crazy Uncle Georgie used to say that all the time.)



"I met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, his cloak was out at the elbows, the water passed through his shoes, - and the stars through his soul." -----Victor Hugo