My Cane

I didn't need it until this morning. The pain in my hip began a couple of days ago, but, as usual, I said to myself, tough it out. It'll pass. But, it hasn't passed. In fact, it traveled down the rest of my leg and stayed there. It's there now - hip to calf. Where I completely ignored that cane before, I automatically reach for it now. I reached for it right from the git-go this morning which in itself was unusual because my kids and wife have been on me to use the cane for weeks, but the thing had a tendency to get lost a lot or else I simply refused to use it. Only old people need canes, right? People who could fall. Only the infirm. Right? Geez.

There's history here. My father had a degenerative bone condition called Paget's. His bones became fragile and misshapen. Before he needed to use two aluminum forearm crutches he used this one: a classic, handsome, amber colored, bamboo model.Its rubber tip made no noise compared to the aluminum others which gave off a distinctive, metallic clank every time they touched the floor. Clank. Clank. Clank. Clank. You knew my father was there.

Once, years ago, I was in a carrel doing research at the downtown Los Angeles public library, a very handsome place. At the time, my father had been dead for decades. Although, I certainly thought about him from time to time, he was in no physical way a part of my life. Cut to the chase. I was in the carrel when whatever I was reading rendered me groggy enough to lay my head down on the desk and drift into sleep.It was against library rules, but I couldn't help it. I went deep asleep. Out. Then. Clank. Clank. Clank. Clank. The metallic jangle of his crutches punctured my sleep. He was there. He was alive. My breath caught. My heart jumped. He was walking by. My father was walking by!...Except it wasn't my father at all but a little, old lady with two aluminum crutches of her own. Clank. Clank. Clank. Clank. She disappeared around a corner, and her clanks went with her. For an instant my father was as alive as he'd ever been. It startled me to my marrow, as deep as it could go. In the time it takes a quark to disappear, my father breathed again, but it was just a little, old lady walking by. Just a little, old lady walking by, but she set off every synapse in my system when she did.

The Foreman Side

So far I've only written about my mother's side of the family, the Hermansons - the Hatfields and the McCoys side - tales of my mother are a large part of that lore, as most of my friends can tell you. Here's a story. A true one. Another true one. Opening night. My first for hire directing job. She's there. Lizzie Foreman. My mother. Give her credit. She never missed an event. "Well, Mom, how'd y'like it?"

                  "I thought it was very nice, dear, but wouldn't it have been better if your fiance' had been there?"

                 "Mom, I don't have a fiance'."

                  "My point."

So, I, being righteously infuriated, scream, "I directed Carousel and that's all you've got to say - where's my girlfriend?"

                    "Fiance'."

                    "Get outta my face. Go back to the hotel. I do not need this shit." 

With that I turned around and walked away. A few days later I get a letter.

                    "Dearest Son: I just want you to know that all mothers dearly love their children and are proud of them, even if they are mentally retarded. Love and kisses, Mother."

Grow up with that.

But the Foreman side - ten brothers and sisters - was equally eccentric and worth a few words of their own. Fasten your seat belts. Here's the first of them.

Just because she wore Uncle Mitchell's underwear didn't make Aunt Gertie a lesbian. Here's the story on that one. Early on, at the turn of the twentieth century, when they were kids on Smallwood Street back in Baltimore, Aunt Gertie was the Foreman family extrovert, always singing and dancing around the house, the latest lyrics, the latest steps. Came adolescence and with it acne, terrible acne, pimples that turned purple, oozed and would not go away, cheeks ripe with fruit gone bad. She was a misery. No solace whatsoever until the day she heard about this new gizmo specifically designed to treat acne with x-rays focused on the ravaged skin. They were not wealthy people but my grandparents were determined that Gertie should get the treatment, and so she did. One side of her face was smooth as creamery pudding. The other side was burnt nut brown, her entire cheek, burnt nut brown. Bad calibration. Something. Nut brown. A recluse at fifteen, she rarely left the house again. 

I don't know if Uncle Mitchell were her older or younger brother, but they were close in age. A twin brother to Uncle Mitchell - Uncle Millard - died young. Mitchell was as introverted as Gertie was extroverted.  If Gertie were prosecco, Mitchell was buttermilk. She would whoop and holler and splash me with a kiss whenever I came to visit while Uncle Mitchell would simply smile meekly from his seat on the sofa and say, "Hi, there, Stevie." In retrospect, I think Uncle Mitchell was gay. I have no evidence to this effect except the accumulated cues of a lifetime of observation. Uncle Mitchell did that? Oh, yeah. Uh, huh. And that? I see. And that? I get it. If it looks like a duck...

So

Aunt Gertie and Uncle Mitchell continued to live together until Mitchell's death, and even then Gertie continued to live in the same house. Once, when she was taken to the hospital, she asked my mother to pack a kit bag for her which is when my mother discovered Mitchell's gotkes in Gertie's underwear drawer. When questioned Gertie didn't flinch. She saw no point in spending money for something already so accessible.

How they got to where they did is another story. It began somewhere near Vitebsk, inside the Pale, Lithuania.My grandfather, Louis, had an older brother who was shot in the back by the cossacks because he refused to sign up for the Russian army. Louis and another brother took note, ran away from Russia, and somehow landed in Baltimore where Louis procured a horse and wagon and started a teamster business. My grand uncle, Louis' brother, decided the pickings were better out west so that's where he went and wound up working on the railroad. Come payday the paymaster doesn't call out his name but does call out the name of a worker who had dropped dead the day before. My granduncle's hand shot right up. He took the dead man's paycheck and the dead man's name. Right there and then an entire branch of the Foreman family disappeared. Gone for a paycheck.

Listening to Pachelbel's Canon in D Major

I did the unthinkable: I allowed myself to do nothing all day but listen to this one piece of music, this one specific piece of music, a variety of interpretations but still the same exquisite composition, music I find mercilessly beautiful. I allowed myself to do nothing but listen. Actually, willed myself was closer to the truth. I went on YouTube, pressed go, and was instantly presented with hours worth of nothing but the Canon. I wanted so badly to be lost in the music, to feel it pulsate through me, and I did, for stretches and more, but guilt kept seeping through the seams, perhaps as one version transited to another, so for an instant I wasn't engaged with music but silence. "Aren't you supposed to be doing something?" yaps the little beast on my shoulder. "Don't you have a bill to pay or a phone call to return or an appointment to make, or a book overdue...?"  Dontcha? Dontcha? Dontcha? "You're not doing anything." 

"I am. I'm listening." 

"Like I said..."  

Like a tincture, I feel that maybe, just maybe, if I soak in it long enough by osmosis it'll somehow seep in, somehow infuse. And then what? Then maybe, just maybe, some of my words will have some of that music that the Canon in D does. Beautiful words can do that for me. 

I learned a new one this morning, way before I even got out of bed. Jamie was beside me, up early as usual, on her IPad, her morning cruise. I touched her hip to let her know I was awake. "Listen to this," she said, "I found a new word." 

Apricity.

The warmth of the sun in Winter.

From the Latin, apricus - from the sun. It was briefly popular around 1600 but faded quickly. Don't think about the word so much as the feeling it evokes. Imagine: an icicle day, a bleak and dreary sky but then, of an instant, the sun breaks through the gristle and, for a little while - one brief spell  - there is warmth. 

Isn't there a metaphor floating around here somewhere? Hope, for example - hope being the notion that circumstances will change, hope being that distant glow from a dismal sky. 

The Canon is what's possible. 

Two Part Invention by Madeleine L'Engle

January 16, 2024

It's twenty-two and falling, and will go down into single digits tonight. Below zero is in the offing. Yes, ma'am, it's cold out there which means that in here the thrum of space heaters permeates the air. Yes, we have a fireplace, but this is a big house, and a single fireplace just won't do it. Outside, where it's freezing it is also quiet, and I want to be there. Where it's quiet. Wait a minute, not exactly quiet, but out there where the creek runs under the small bridge across from my house. I took my grandson there yesterday and taught him to listen for his name in the water. I want to hear my name in it now. 

Ice doilies dangle in the water from the hems of shore line rocks. My parka is blizzard proof. Jamie bought it for me for my birthday. You can stand in the midst of a squall and know it's freezing but not feel it, not feel the discomfort of it but solely the exuberance of the whirling snow. Of course, these are not survival conditions - this is not Jack London weather - just the little bridge over the creek in front of the house. I'm not trying to make a fire in a snow storm. I'm not tempting frostbite. Just trying to blend with the weather, to embrace it, not defy it, to stand in its midst, to know the cold and not be bothered by it.

Cold like this is a pugnacious son of a bitch. It seeks out every opening - every zipper left unzipped - feints to the left, clobbers with a right. I stand in the middle of the bridge and bellow, "Come 'n' get me!" and, oh, boy, does it try! I feel it huffing and puffing out there, trying to get in, but this parka fends off every attack. For an instant I feel like a wild animal whose thick fur beats back each gust. I do. I bellow into the wind, not crazy like King Lear but with the gusto of a cowboy on a bronco. Up drafts and down drafts. Cross currents and undercurrents. This wind. Open to this wind. It's the breath of the world. I lose my boundaries in it and with that all sense of self, all the chatter and bric-a-brac, just the creek beneath my feet calling my name. 

January 12, 2024

Blue stone is a common rock up here, used for steps and stoops and patios, so valued it has been transported hundreds of miles for its smooth, strong qualities, able to cooperate with a spectrum of colors.  Outside this day is what I call blue stone weather, the air a tinge of slate blue. It's cold but not crisp and certainly not clear. One needs to peer through the air, to penetrate it, to see through to the other side except there is no other side,just an eternity of trees. I've watched it go light to dark for years now, and once again, outside a window I've looked through thousands of times, dark is creeping back to light. The planet pursues its predictable path, and I watch the sun helpless to do anything except marvel that I've another year in the hopper. 

November 28, 1953 - My Bar Mitzvah

I still wear the ring on the fourth finger of my right hand. SF in gold with a diamond. Some day it will go to my son. His initials are the same as mine. The diamond was one of three brought to this country by my maternal grandmother, Katie Rose Norinsky, when she emigrated from Russia to North Fork, West Virginia late in the nineteenth century. How she got there is another story, so why not tell it now? Or why not tell it again, as I'm sure I've told it before. Nu? Why not?

It all began when Tante Pesha and Misha Lazer got married in some backwater Lithuanian shtetl somewhere near Vitebsk. It was a marriage doomed from the git-go. Everybody said so, and everybody was right. Three months later Misha Lazer disappeared, took off without a clue except his absence. Pesha wailed and woed so much the family finally sent Shlomochaim, my grandfather, to track him down and bring him back. Which he did. In a whorehouse in Lublin. Truth. Somehow he managed to get him back to Pesha and the shtetl near Vitebsk. 

He was a great story teller, this Misha Lazer. He'd had adventures and loved to boast of them. Why he ever married was beyond any of us. Even Pesha. Why? One of his favorite stories was about the old rebbe who married a scrumptious young woman, years younger. Their wedding night, predictably, was a disaster, if you consider the disaster that nothing happened. And nothing happened night after night until the elder rebbe went to a modern younger one (but still a rebbe) for advice. His advice: hire a gorgeous hunk, a gentile, in particular, and have him watch while he waves a towel over you. Fireworks! So that night the elder rebbe and his scrumptious bride got to it with the gorgeous hunk watching and waving...still nothing. That towel flapped like a carwash and still nothing. Frustrated. Needing more advice, he goes back to the younger rebbe who tells him this time let the gorgeous hunk mount your wife and you stand there waving the towel. Such wisdom! That night the rebbe and his wife do as they have been advised. The gorgeous hunk mounts the scrumptious bride, and the old rebbe stands there waving a towel over them. Well, after a minute, the scrumptious bride begins to moan then moan some more then moan some more higher and higher more and more until she explodes with pleasure. The walls shake. The floorboards pop. The bed trembles. "You see, putz," says the old rebbe, as full of himself as a Passover goose, "Dot's de vay to vave a towel!"

As you may infer, Misha Lazer was not a man to sit still for long, and so it was that one day he was gone again. I'm going to make a long story short. They sent my grandfather, Shlomochaim, to bring him back. Which he did one more time, and then there was a third escape at which my grandfather drew the line. They must have entered the United States through Galveston, Texas because my grandfather found Misha Lazer in a whorehouse in Cinder Bottom, West Virginia. This time my grandfather sent for the family to come to the United States which eventually they did. Misha Lazer was fine with all this until he learned Pesha was on the next ship. Off he went, and, to this day, no one knows where because my grandfather refused to go after him.

And that's how they got to West Virginia, right there on the Kentucky border, territory of the Hatfields and the McCoys. They were tough Jews, all right. My mother was actually delivered by Dr. Hatfield of that famous warring family. Those who knew her knew she lived up to her deliverer. 

Thoughts on Thanksgiving, 2023

The trees are naked and vulnerable, not full and proud as they were only months ago. Summer trees make me think of British gunnery sergeants with their chests proudly puffed out. Winter trees make me think of that stone corpse writhing in agony in Pompeii, twisted limbs, trying uselessly to protect himself from the fiery ash falling from the sky. However, this, ironically, makes me think of the most beautiful thing I experienced while living in Italy. 

I had taken it into my mind that I wanted to write a screenplay. Yet, since it was the very early seventies, nobody knew much about such a thing although everybody had advice. After listening to a variety of opinions, I decided the best thing to do would be to go live some place where they didn't speak English. I spread a map of the world out on the floor and went through damn near every city in the known universe from Abu Dhabi to Zanzibar before deciding on Florence. Why Florence? I had staged managed for Edward Albee just a few years prior at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, and so I knew enough Italian to ask for the men's room but not enough to entertain anything serious like, e.g,  criticism of my screenplay. Hey, it was 1972. You didn't know any more than I did. 

So - my ambition at full court press - I jumped on Icelandic Airlines, trained down from Luxembourg, got an apartment, and moved in with all my dreams intact. Once one got used to the constant aroma of horse manure, each step and every street was charming. It was as if I'd been painted into a work of art - Sunday In The Park With Stephen. I was there in the grand tradition of glorious ex-patriotism, subject to few rules but my own. 

Since I've been a gym rat all my life, I figured there had to be one in Florence, and there was, basically, right around the corner. Nothing fancy. More like a small garage. Ratty work out clothes. No cruising. Just a few guys pumping vintage iron and babbling incessantly. Point is: in order to get to the gym I had to pass by a building called the Academia. Who cares? Right? Well, folks, the Academia had one and only one inhabitant: Michelangelo's David. Nowadays people need to book tickets months maybe years in advance for the opportunity of spending maybe an hour with the David, yet I got to see him every day, casually, walking by, dodging inside, a minute or an hour, my choice, for a year. 

I became addicted to my visits with him, his warrior grace, the way he dominated the space around him. His beauty itself was lethal. I'd see that penetrating stare focus on a point in the distance, studying something crucial, the enemy, his height, his girth. I'd see the round stone in his free hand and wonder about its weight, wonder which river he got it from, wonder if he used special stones for special purposes or shaped his own, wondered which one would kill Goliath? What must he have been thinking? I'd do his monologue. "Goliath's helmet has a flaw above the brow, and, if I can penetrate that flaw, I've got him." His sling is over his shoulder. He seems calm and pensive. Is he calculating trajectory? Wind factor? Distance to target? His is not the face of an innocent.