A Jewish merchant was traveling from Pinsk to Minsk. Another Jewish merchant was travelling from Minsk to Pinsk. Of course, they run into each other on the road. They know each other. They greet. So, one merchant asks the other,”How’s by you?” The other shrugs and answers, “Nu? How should I be?”
My reward? As in "Go to my"? Pass. Where am I going? My reward is already here - a tolerant, forgiving miracle of a partner of 42 years, our two children, one boy, one girl, our two and a half year old rambunctious hunk of championship grandson, two dogs, a beloved mutt and a big, black, sixty pound doodle, all right now under one roof - my roof, our roof. Brother and sister still spry and healthy. Best friends on the way. Oh yeah, let’s not forget the two goats and four horses out back. My Goddaughter and her mate bought the place only a few yards away across the creek. We're the ones with the goats. They’re the ones with the horses. Setting up shop in the Catskills, the irony being that we all once lived a quick block away from each other in Hancock Park. Very posh. BTW: “port out starboard home” - POSH. I love to do detective work on words - how they evolved, what they’ve come to mean. I was accepted by the University of Chicago as a PhD candidate in Linguistics. When I learned that linguistics was more concerned with how the tongue works rather than where the words came from, and that I had to take Latin, I bailed. Yale came next; Morgan State before that. The point of all this is that I refuse to “go to my reward”. Kickin’ and screamin’ be my middle name. Why go anywhere else? Joy! Joy! Joy! Gimme all y'got.
What I find hardest to believe is that I’ve had the life I’ve had. I wanted to be a writer, and I'm a writer. It's been a life often propelled by happenstance, but mostly by choice, not always good ones, but good enough to have made it worthwhile. There were crossroads, and I was fortunate to have found them. Sometimes they were guarded by the Black Knight from Monty Python. Other times were genuine shit shows. The punch that knocks you out is the punch you don't see. Sometimes you're out on your feet, stumbling around, with people asking you if you're all right, only you can't figure out why they're asking you such a stupid question.
It hasn’t always been easy but it's never been boring - so many interesting people, so many challenges, so many books and boxing matches, some heartaches, more than I bargained for, some delicious happenings, more than I bargained for. My curiosity took me places I always wanted to go and places I didn't know were there. My intellect helped me make sense of it all, at least, sometimes, it did. There were times I could have been killed, once by a charging sperm whale, once by knife on the streets of New York. The whale was not serious. The knife was. Survival experiences. Aesthetic experiences. Intellectual experiences. Dumb experiences. Experiences where I was an asshole. See what I mean? Interesting.
I've been fortunate. I can talk to anybody and have, and that includes a desert prospector, a sitting president (smack dab in the White House, no less), an Alaskan trapper, Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, Captain Tschirgi, USMC, Robert Lowell, Freddie Brown, Jane Fonda, a homeless lady with no teeth and a retired playmate with breasts the eighth and ninth wonders of the world. I don't feel superior or entitled or inferior or undeserving, just pleased to be doing what I do - listening. Maybe this is why I've always loved books more than movies. A beloved Uncle Milton once gave me this advice,"If you want other people to find you interesting, get them to talk about themselves". Really. What could be more fascinating than you? I enjoy listening to the adventures of other people, their accents, their quirks, prejudices which are not mine, poses, desires. I can spin a yarn with the best of 'em and will with a wink and a nod, but I'd much prefer you show me yours.
I was three, maybe four when I had my first true writing experience. I was raised in a brick semi-detached house with lots of trees around. 3814 W. Rogers Ave., Baltimore 15, Maryland, Mohawk 2729. I remember it well, details like jumping up and down on a sofa in the club basement to the tune of "Cement Mixer, Putty, Putty" on the radio, and a breakfast nook where I sat across from Uncle Milton when he visited from New York. We had our midnight snacks - slugs of Hebrew National salami and and talks from places of love so good and pure, so never felt before, gone dormant until a father and his son brought them back to life, and a grandson who is life itself.
My first writing experience, ca, 1944. My three year old self somehow came up with the idea that if he kneeled on the seat and "wrote" in the air above the nook, scribbles and lines and circles and wavy stuff, up, down, back, forth, every morning of the year, on Xmas morning the "letters" would appear in many colors right there in the air. My parents, being Jewish, did not celebrate Christmas, so upbringing had nothing to do with this. It was my secret. I remember rushing down stairs to the nook that morning, all excited, only to be disappointed to see that nothing was there. Not one squiggle. Blank space. Nothing. My writer's life may have begun right then and there - write the stuff, send it out, wait for an answer, get an answer, get over it. However, there are times when the proper answer does come, and, along with it, comes the goodness of the feeling I had when writing those letters in the first place, decades and decades and decades ago when I was barely here.
end
PS
You can stop here or...
What follows is completely off the subject, or maybe it isn't. My old friend, Paul, used to refer to this type of construction as "a graceless segue". Your call.
Jamie is Catholic, and so, we have a Christmas tree. It took me awhile to get past my discomfort with having one in my own home, but, know what? Get over it. She's your wife.
The other day, my grandson, daughter, wife, self, and Joe, the black doodle, trudged up the mountain in deep snow to cut a tree Jamie had targeted this past summer. We'd been watching it grow, a young spruce, fresh and perky, just the other side of a stone wall above the creek. Dorian, two and a half, bodacious as could be, was a trooper, fearless, determined, oblivious to the twenty degree cold, endlessly curious. Madden cut the tree down and we headed back. True to the shlemiel I seem to have become, I lost my balance crossing the wall and went down. Fortunately, I was able to grab a nearby sapling to break the fall. No problem, except figuring out how to get up again. Just then, this thirty month old little person turned around, saw me, said, "Poppa, help?", and held out his hand to help me up. "Poppa, help?"
So, you tell me: is this completely off the subject?
(NOTE: Yiddish lexicon - the shlemiel spills the soup on the shlemazel.)
