Today is the last day of the penultimate month of the last year of the first quarter of the 21st century.
I talked on the phone to my godson, who was moving a huge Lego sculpture prepatory to going to Alaska to serve as a cook on a boat, & this afternoon am going to see an English production of Oedipus at Studio 54. I could have written some version of this a hundred years ago & I hope people will be doing similar things a hundred years from now. Or next year, for that matter.
Well, the food, of course. But the messages of appreciation & friendship mean so much more than the (best-ever!) mashed potatoes. And the promise (well, hope) of snow next week topped off a lovely quiet neighborly day.
And today I went to an exercise class at my gym. So!
And my traditional holiday poem:
Thanksgiving Almost Found Poem
Many years we go to my grandmother's in Virginia.
My mother, father, aunts and at least two of my brothers are there.
My son has a football game that morning.
My daughter is home, but needs to get back to school this weekend.
My wife doesn't want to ride for nine hours and turn right back.
Sometimes I have gone alone, but not often.
A couple of neighbors were vying for our company.
One of those my daughter's boyfriend's family,
Which we did last year and had fun.
But this year it will be another family,
One we have visited on two or three other Thanksgivings.
I have a turkey freezing in the garage.
Nothing to do with it.
Ya got yer Venmo & yer Zelle & there's PayPal, crypto, & payday loan sharks or whatever they call themselves. Will cash cease to exist? They've just decided to stop making pennies & we've long since gone off the gold standard. What's an accountant's daughter to think?
When the second of us gets into bed, Lefty quickly jumps in between us, purring & snuggling. It's so cozy, the 3 of us in a loving tumble. For the last month I've been reading Moby-Dick out loud, usually lying in bed, usually with Johnny awake. Today I got into bed, & Lefty leaped in. I started to read Chapter 25 ("Postscript") & without a word, Lefty got up & left. I laid into him: What a philistine, my little friend! This is one of the greatest books ever written. He didn't care, he's had enough of literature.
I was hoping to find a sweater but they only had half a dozen & the only one I half-liked was a Ralph Lauren, which didn't seem authentically Scandinavian. I bought a marzipan pig, 2 Kvik Lunsj bars - sort of a Norwegian kitkat, & some ornaments as gifts. It was fun but too hot. I had to bolt.
Here's my suggestion: don't miss the Christmas Market at the Norwegian Seaman's Church this weekend. Marzipan, ornaments, sweaters, gnomes, homemade cookies, & a chance to practice your Norwegian (or not). I'm headed up there in a few minutes.
Loving & sad evening of tributes to Alice, with many laughs & stories & poems, both by her & about her. A large percentage met her in a workshop & it changed their relationship to poetry & to life.
I wrote a little play, called "Alice and Johnny at Phebe's: A play based on mail & memory." Johnny read the title, Bob Holman was Johnny, I was Alice, Edmund was "The Tall One," Shelley Kraut, wearing a sequined lace apron was a cocktail waitress at Phebe's (an East Village bar for decades, where Alice, Johnny, & others would hang out after seeing plays on 4th Street), and O'Malley & his friend were random bar-goers. It was a real olden-days affair, with props & costumes & a "cast of thousands," all for a 5-minute presentation. A hallmark of that time was overdoing everything.
Min katt Lefty
Den gale svarte katten min
vekker meg opp klokka ett
og to og tre og fire og fem
Den kjærlige katten min
kysser meg hver dag klokka ett
og to og tre og fire og fem
Den sultne sultende katten min
spiser og spiser klokka ett
og to og tre og fire og fem
Den kjempestore katten min
blir ikke større klokka ett -
han blir større og større hele tiden ...
Totally forgot about this little work, which I believe I read at the Poetry Project Marathon the year it was entirely online during the pandemic.
Translation:
My Cat Lefty
My crazy black cat wakes me up at one o'clock, two, three, four, & five.
My darling cat kisses me every day at one & two, three, four, & five
My hungry cat eats and eats at one, two, three, four, & five
My huge cat doesn't get larger at one - he gets bigger and bigger all the time.
It is never worth a first class man's time to express a majority opinion. By definition, there are plenty of others to do that.
~ G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology
Reading because Auden (I think it was Auden, it's usually Auden) said it was one of the best books on the creative process.
I'd had a different quote for today but I cut it from the file & then forgot to past it in. It was from an email or newsletter & is entirely gone. The gist was that you can replace a thing you lose but not time. Waste not a moment!
My feed just gave me:
I Have A Friend Above All Others, Sam Cooke
Cry To Me, Solomon Burke
I'm On The Firing Line, The Soul Stirrers
Jesus Gave Me Water, The Soul Stirrers
The Last Mile Of The Way, Soul Stirrers
Jock-o-Mo, Sugar Boy & His Cane Cutters
When New York Was Irish, Terence Winch (always makes me cry - it's Johnny's life & his New York, & it's all gone now)
Biloxi, Tom Rush Wrong
Texas Moon, Vincent Neil Emerson,
Carmelita, Warren Zevon
The Minstrel Boy, Wild Mountain Thyme
Pancho and Lefty, Willie & Waylon
Little Black Train, Woody Guthrie
What Did The Deep Sea Say? Woody Guthrie
Sugar Babe, The Youngbloods
Lonesome Valley, The Carter Family
It's a nice afternoon for a sad/happy cry, I guess.
I'm not sure how it came about ... I must have said I could sing... or that I had sung in a band... or that it might be fun... And voila, there I was at the Norwegian Church, singing alto (as it turns out) & learning songs for the holiday concert next month. Not something I ever expected to do! It was fun. I was OK, in fact fine given it was my first time in singing with a group. One of the songs is in Swedish.
I feel secretly smug being 70, like I know something the youngsters don't. I'm in the big kids club! I am older than Putin, Angela Merkel & I forget who else. Didn't I used to be the youngest just the other day? It's rather confusing & reading The Bow & the Lyre doesn't totally help, when Paz finishes several pages of argument with sentences like this:
Our condition consists in not being identified with anything in which it is incarnated, but also in not existing except by being incarnated in that which is not itself.
I don't think it would help to know what "it" is. Nonetheless, I'm loving his belief in poetry ~ I feel like I read this book when I was 14 & it determined the course of my life, which it did except I'm only reading it now.
Poem in the Classical Manner
I sing of legs & the man
Yes, & of what's in-between.
I found this in an email to Alice, where I said "Johnny & I wrote a poem!" So, apparently I have to give him credit.
I don't know what made me think of this. We were in St Paul for my brother's wedding. I was wearing a silver strapless dress (ooh lah la! "You're the sister from New York," my brother's friends said & it wasn't a question) & Johnny was in a sweater with leather patches on the shoulders.
My mother walked into our hotel room. Johnny! You have to get ready, she said, we have to leave in a minute.
There was a big storm in NYC, he told her, & I couldn't get my suit from the dry cleaners. This is what I'm wearing.
Without missing a beat, she said, You look wonderful! And meant it. I admired her ability to accept things as they are.
Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
~ Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 3
For no particular reason, I woke up a few days ago with the plan to read a chapter a day of Moby-Dick, out loud. It's so great! Greater than great! I've been reading it to Johnny, which makes it even more fun.
I don't even remember if I wrote about this or alluded to it or pretended none of this happened, but now that things are better — now that Johnny is better — I'll put down the story. On September 1, he fell & passed out & ended up in neuro ICU for 3 days. Since then he's fallen again, gotten lost, been unable to remember much. Last Sunday he went to bed & slept pretty much till Wednesday. And woke up himself.
That's the brief version, without all the frightening details.
He needed 2 months to recover from that concussion & to start hydrating a lot more, not overdo his exercise routine (what a guy!), & take it easier.
The relief! I felt the weight of worry (panic) fall off.
Is a plain slice from a not-at-all-gourmet joint really $4 now? I ordered & when he said $4.32 (with tax & cash discount), I couldn't do it. But then I wondered if that was what pizza costs now. I can't think of the last time I had a slice. I'm still staggering at the sticker shock of $2.75 for a slice.
Politics (the NYC mayoral election in particular)
Johnny's health (even though it's much better)
Parentheses (& my overuse of & reliance upon same)
Anybody's health (except the briefest recap)
Why I don't want to go to a very fun party (OK, because it's in Queens)
Laurence Sterne (even though I love him)
Dying
What's left? The weather (gorgeous), gossip (people do stuff they shouldn't), poetry (Zukofsky! Steve Carey!), lunch, the library, breakfast at B&H, friends who would protect me.
I love running into people. Yesterday it was B--. who lives nearby and is out & about all the time, but maybe I'm not, as I see him rarely. And in the morning it was an old friend from karate who lives on the Upper East Side but was canvassing in my district, someone full of plans & personality, always fun to catch up with, though it's been years since we've seen each other. And I met, by arrangement, another friend I hadn't seen in a year or 2. The sub-carpet of casual friends is just as necessary as the ones who are close.
Anyone who knows me at all probably knows that I love to vote almost as much as I love birthdays. Today was not one of my favorite Election Days. I have to hope that even those who are excited about Mamdani's youth & smile & plans would give a little pause given the fear that his anti-Zionism / antisemitism is causing in the Jewish community, & would also wonder if he's ready for the big time, given his lack of relevant experience. And those who prefer Cuomo have to vote with at least some trepidation at how divisive and past-his-prime he is. No woman has ever been mayor of New York - you can kind of see why when you know that a woman, no matter how attractive, with Mamdani's nigh-invisible résumé would have been laughed out of the race on day 1.
Liberty of any kind is never lost all at once.
~ David Hume
I've thought of that especially in the context of 1930s Germany. That each change came with a little breathing room, that people got used to what was missing before another right was taken away. If all the changes had happened at once, people would have been far more likely to protest. Which, I think, they are doing now.
Hardest working artist! She had a daily drawing practice as well as crocheting (as it were) wire sculptures & so much more. Big show at MoMA ~ glad to be a member because I plan to go several times, absorb everything, read everything. I have a dual membership: come with me!