January 23, 2022

         Winter has been stalking us for awhile but it didn’t pounce until a couple of days ago when the howling squalls that paralyzed so much of the country settled onto our valley and transformed these hills into a whisper of Paradise. The creek. That’s what you hear. The creek. In places where the ice is translucent, the currents swirl under it in gracefully shifting patterns oddly like the curtain dance of the  Northern Lights.

We prepared for the worst, of course: power outage, falling trees, downed and twitching power lines, wind damage, no phone service, no internet, and crossed our fingers to ward off some emergency we couldn’t see coming. We filled containers with water to drink and the bathtub with water to flush; lanterns in every room; portable generators charged; flashlights in pockets; salt on the steps; Forester parked facing out. We were ready. The local road crews were ready. Each inch means more overtime. The wind blew. The snow fell. The worst came and went, leaving us unscathed with two feet of new snow, one full moon, and a landscape that could have been Narnia.

It’s always been a challenge to live here - a drafty old farm house in the boonies - especially so now that we’re older (I did use the chainsaw yesterday to cut some firewood, although that, according to my RN daughter, is no longer an option). But, the peace and beauty of this place is too valuable to kvetch about the downside. There really is no downside, just a bunch of hard work. But, so what? Stop procrastinating. Get up on that roof, boychik! Yes, it used to be, “So, what?”, only, let’s be honest, these days it’s more “Oy, vey!” Lucky for me that Jamie’s such a good sport. We’re a “fur piece” from Hollywood. She traded in her high heels years ago. “Hi, Ho, the glamorous life…”. 

For years a snowfall such as this sent me out into the woods dawn ‘til dusk. What you can see and hear in all that stillness! Now, I think, I’d better get the walk shovelled for the FedEx guy delivering the paper towels from Walmart and hope I make it back to the porch. But, I am telling you folks, a snowfall like this one, a fire blazing in the hearth, a snifter of Port, a companion of forty-four years with beautiful green eyes who loves me even when I’m acting like an asshole, and two dogs. Hard to beat, huh? And I don’t have to go to Aruba.

    So, the question remains. A neighbor, a local, now deceased, but at the age of 91 drove himself an hour away to the hospital while he was in the midst of a heart attack. Those folks were some tough breed. Used to be our local hospital had to send out for band-aids. Nice people, caring and   very nice, but it hasn’t gotten a lot more medically adept since we moved here nearly forty years ago (Medicare does not cover “bleedings”). So far, our one emergency, mine, was handled beautifully by our local paramedics. Still, we’re a long way away. I tell myself the thirteen steps to the second floor bedroom are great exercise, as is planting stuff, minor repair stuff, hauling wood and whatever else gotta get hauled around here, but it is getting harder, and that’s a bummer (That dates me, doesn’t it? Bummer). I know, like preparing for the storm, preparing for the future ought to be a no-brainer except when one has no idea what that future is supposed to be. Is this where Zen kicks in? “I’ll deal with it when it gets here?” But, what is it, exactly, that is going to get here? And when is all this whatever supposed to happen? Conspiracy theories welcome.

December 25, 2021

 Oy, vey!

Another tree. Another wreath on the door. More red ribbons around the coach lights. Boombox carols in the air. Ham and sweets for dinner. Again. Tradition. Latkes were last month. Biscuits and gravy the morning of the 23rd. Fried chicken that night. Challah last night. And now?

Oy, vey!

Mulled wine not Manischewitz?

How?

Fall in love and find out. I married an Irish Catholic. She married a Russian Jew. 44 years in 2022. Believe it or not (I’m joking), it took some compromise to get us here. I never had a tree inside of anywhere I had a roof, not one tree, and certainly not a Christmas tree. She had never sat through a Yom Kippur service let alone no food or drink for 24 hours. She thought no food or drink was only on Fridays. So, here we are.

I’m in my office. Out the door three steps to my right is our living room. Even though this year’s firewood hasn’t been fully cured, a fire roars in the fireplace. It helps to  have this napalm like concoction to squeeze on the logs. My son has Chet Atkins playing Xmas music on his computer. My daughter helps her nephew navigate his myriad of toys. Sweet smells from the kitchen: ham and corn pudding on their way. My family is happy, and, I’m thinking, maybe I am, too. It’s taken me a lifetime but I think I’m beginning to get it, just as I think, at this age, that I have finally learned how to write and what to write about, and why I need to write about it. No coincidence. The place where I wrote from then is not the place I write from now.

(In some other life I once went out with a woman who said, “coinkidink”. One “coinkidink”. That was it.)

Everyone waited until Dorian, aged three, woke up because we wanted to see his face when he saw a brightly lit tree surrounded and stacked with all shapes of things wrapped with ribbons and a kaleidoscope of party paper. He spent a few seconds being stunned by the lights and a crystal that caught them. Unlike the Hanukkah menorah, he could not blow these out. Then, practical little creature that he is, he turned to a colorful mock-up of a kitchen complete with appliances and ware. My daughter and my son’s good friend had spent hours the night before putting it and everything else all together. It made me think of trying to put all that gear together when my kids were small: instructions translated by someone with English as a fifth language, screw holes a hair off, a threaded screw, one too few bolts in the bag. Drove me nuts but gives me pleasure watching my kids do it. It also made me think of it as a sign of the times. When my daughter was Dorian’s age we gave her a toy kitchen set that magnetized her from the time her eyes registered what it was. My son was given a train set. I’m sure you get my point. 

So, I’m sitting there this morning in my father’s chair - the same one I’ve been toting around since his death 60+ years ago - watching this little three ring circus, noting that my grandson was given a kitchen set but nowhere was there one of those small plastic basketball hoop set-ups. To be sure there were building blocks, construction stuff, race car tracks, and a plastic razor kit - Shave With Grandpa. I’m not suggesting these couldn’t or wouldn’t be used by a little girl, simply noting that there was no visible jock paraphernalia, and that mock-up kitchen really got him. Plastic taco, anyone? You would be surprised. I wouldn’t kid ya.

The thing is, they are happy in there. The living room is happy. This house is happy. If it could dance it would, not the kazatzka or a mazurka, not the Lindy or a do-si-do, but a waltz in some soft tempo. If it could sing, well, it seems to be doing just that right now, all the ages and voices and an occasional bark from one of the dogs, silence outside, all one. Joe Cocker sang, “You are so beautiful to me, yes, you are, you are so beautiful to me…” Elvis sang, “Love me tender, love me sweet, never let me go, you have made my days complete, and I love you so.”

Bury me with this shit eating grin on my face.

As much as I have admired Joan Didion, I don’t think she would have admired me. Too sentimental. Perhaps too much chicken shmaltz on Shabbos as a kid or too many junkets to Sammy’s Roumanian Steak House on the Lower East Side. But, I have very smart, very big hearted Jewish friends who have an edge I don’t. An observation not a criticism. For a long time I wished I had that edge, and tried to, only I wasn’t an adept. It had to come as naturally as which hand you use, yet it didn’t, not to me. I’m not usually naive, only at critical moments when it really matters. Of course, this “flaw”  became another good reason to beat myself up. I wouldn’t say I’m a bleeding heart, but I do admit to needing the occasional tourniquet. Fine. Because I don’t care anymore. This “flaw”  has been known to fight for its right of return. A quick, full frontal counterattack drives it back. Dickens was sentimental. I should be so lucky, although I admit not being able to get through more than half of “Oliver Twist”.

I was raised in a violent household where we were taught “happiness is for idiots” aka “only idiots are happy.” My mother damned Portnoy’s Complaint as a batch of lies, especially that scene where his mother threatens him with a knife because he wouldn't

eat his liver. So, I reminded her, “Wait a minute, Mom, you forget, you once hit me with a knife because I wouldn’t eat my eggs.”

“I didn’t forget,” she shrugged, “I had to get you to eat your eggs somehow.”

Happiness is for idiots.

I swear.

Anyway, the point is, this happiness stuff: I could get used to it - that brush of butterflies fluttering happily in my belly, happily, I said, nothing fearful about them, just the trilleto of gossamer wings drawing light.

Just one of those things. 

Gossamer wings. Drawing light.

Just one of those crazy things. 

Water Starts In Wild Places

 My Godson, Reuben Sack, wrote this line: “Water Starts in Wild Places.” It got me thinking.

Is it true that every drop of water on earth has already been everywhere on earth a drop of water could ever be - above and below - every nook, each cranny - every crack and fissure, every undiscovered drip on the entire planet? Everywhere? Even the Gobi? A Cosmic Recycle? Somewhere I learned that.

I keep a sketch on my bulletin board of a whimsical little boy with his elbows on his knees next to a little stream. Its caption: everybody should be quiet near a little stream and listen. Except for the fact that, as a little boy, I always thought I was fat, it could have been me. 

I stand on a small bridge crossing the creek in front of our house, and I begin to listen. The rush of Spring melt charges down the mountains taking no prisoners as it thunders through its channel. Trout get fat. The banks roar no matter where you walk. Summer water is quieter, still deep enough to cushion the sound, strong enough to chop water over rocks. Now, you can walk the banks and, if you listen hard, if you keep the flow in your ears, the water will tell you what’s beneath it. Come Fall the water feels lazier, flowing along, meandering at leisure. There’s less, so you can hear it better. Fresh water flows hoof deep over the flats. The deer will drink here. Come winter with its deepest snowfall under the full moon, come then a great hush. Is it any wonder? Is it any wonder at all? The creek is right underneath me. I fancy I can feel it’s vibrations through the soles of my boots. Its banks are too deep in snow for me to walk, so I stand on the little bridge and listen to the trickle of distant water right there beneath my feet.

This is why I write. I write to hear the water.

Poppa Took My Hand

           I finally wrote “The End” to novel #4 - “Been A Bad Ol’ Booger But He’s Come ‘n’ Gone”.  It’s a grandfather-granddaughter story that still needs work. The following is another excerpt. 

Please stay tuned.

Poppa took my hand and led me through the copse of ancient hemlocks as if I needed his protection. It was early spring. Daffodils had come up but lilacs were still a week away, mountain laurel three weeks from that. Jays were gone. Chickadees back. A blue heron fished the creek. We had to spray the dumpster with ammonia to keep a hungry bear at bay. Coyotes ambushed a raccoon near the chicken coop. All that was left of it were strands of grey and white hair. Coyotes eat everything but a gland in the anus. No sign of that, either. A morsel for something else. 

Poppa normally never hesitated to talk about anything at all, but this morning he stayed silent as we walked, setting his feet as if he were hunting, almost reverent, unwilling to disturb the peace. We stopped at the edge of a clearing where Poppa indicated something out there with his chin. I couldn’t see what he wanted me to see, but I followed him as he walked into the clearing until...There. Unclear to me until I moved closer. I had never seen anything like this before or since. Poppa had, but once. The racks and bones of two massive deer, thick-necked bucks with ten point racks, stout as cudgels, tangled, twisted, ultimately locked together, trapped, having fought until they died, socket to socket, smack against each other’s sight and smell, socket to socket, until they died. Much of the rest of them had been strewn about the clearing, vandalized by varmints, but those two skulls, now blind, remained, for eternity, locked in mortal combat.

A few days later, I found this on an index card that had fallen on the kitchen floor.

Talk to me of death

And I will tell you of a woodland dance

Hemlocks - a thick grove of them

A fitting place

A pas de deux - both dead

Like Romeo and Juliet

Only rivals

Beams eight points and ten

Thick as cudgels

Entangled by their horns

     And not their hearts

Titans locked in deadly battle

Crashing heads

Bucking for the “A” list

Eighteen tines tangled and trapped

Eye socket to eye socket

Call this place 

     Ozymandias

Someone with that name

Ruled over ancient ruins

This inscription left

  On a piece of stone:

“Look on my works and despair.”

Seed unspread

Scattered bones

Picked clean

Antlers gnawed by mites

     With yellow teeth

Ozymandias

  “Look on my works and despair”

Scattered bones don’t even get that.

VETERANS DAY 11/11/2021

 

USMC  18 years old

BOXING ??????? 11-12-2021

 

In boxing exists a condition known as “the championship rounds”, the time that comes in a fight when the fighter must dig as deeply as ever to keep fighting with all his heart and soul, must dig in more than he ever imagined he could, than he ever imagined was even possible in this world. The final two rounds of the match are the championship rounds. No matter how hurt, how tired, how exhausted, how much your arms ache to drop by your sides, how unable you are to keep slipping punches, how unable you are to do anything but fight back with a ferocity you worked to acquire – there is no urge to give up, no desire to do anything but keep at it until it is stopped. He does not break (unlike a certain recently appointed supreme court justice) but pushes himself towards his goal with all his heart because that’s where it’s at, the heart, that’s where it comes from, the heart.

The will can give out, but not the heart.

There are three minutes from my life that I value more than most. Freddie Brown, Roberto Duran’s corner man, trained me at Gleason’s Gym in the early 70’s. Freddie was a tough old bird, an ex-fighter himself with a career that left his nose on the wrong side of his face. Freddie was a banger. He stood there and fought it out. I don’t know that Freddie was ever knocked off his feet. I do know that every three minutes he was in there he’d fight as if they were his last, ‘cause that’s what y’do.

When I’d do something he liked, Freddie would dip into the pocket of the ancient cardigan he always wore and hand me a piece of hard candy. “Fighters are like race horses,” he told me, “They do somethin’ good, you give ‘em somethin’ sweet.” “Kill the body, and the head will follow” was another one of his truisms. “Punches in bunches” was a good one, too. But the best? “Don’t think about what he’s gonna do to you. Think about what you’re gonna do to him.”

So, one day Freddie agrees to a match-up between me and a guy 15 years younger than me prepping for a professional fight. I was not a pro, just a gym rat who happened to like being around boxers. In fact, when I first met the woman who would become my wife, we were talking about it – this was not something she could fathom - and I found myself on the defensive stating that I didn’t do it for money. “Why else would you do it?”, she wanted to know. Good question. Forty years later she continues to ask good questions. “Because it’s there,” still seems to be about the best answer I can come up with.

This kid’s face, I swear, displayed all the tenderness of a concentration camp guard. OK. Let’s do this. Bell rings.

Guy rips from his corner, immediately clips me flush on the chin, sending me flying backwards and off-balance. “Don’t fall,” I kept saying to myself. “Just get to those ropes, balance, bounce back.” Do it. An act of will. I stayed on my feet, hit the ropes, balanced myself, sling shot back out there. It was raw survival. Adolph comes at me. This was it. He’s doing his Joe Frazier – hunched low, bobbing, weaving, coming forward, both hands cutting loose. Get killed, or…I began firing jabs at him, jab after jab, jab after jab – bam, bam, bam – Keep him away. Don’t let him get close. Jab. Jab. Jab. Because if he does he’ll kill me. Jab! Jab! Double up on that jab! Bam. Bam. BamBam. What right hand? Just keep jabbing. Bell rings. I’m still standing. He looks disgusted. I walk back to my corner. Tough.

Lesson’s learned?

MARINES=ASSAULT TROOPS

 CORRECTED COPY  -  sorry, folks

One of the sureties of my life on this earth is that I will never be welterweight champion of the world. I wasn't very good at it, but there you go. One of the proudest days of my life is the day I finally "got" the hook off the jab. 

I liked hanging out in gyms where members were there for survival not style. Gleason's. The Wild Card. The Left Hook. Kronk's in Detroit where Tommy Hearns trained, Fifth Street in Miami where Muhammad Ali learned to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.  I didn't know any LA gyms, yet, so my first month in LA I joined the Beverly Hills Health Club. I was new out there so what did I know? Two things I remember: flabby guys sitting in white steam cabinets with their heads sticking out smoking cigars, and Sid Caesar asked me to spot him on a bench press. His own weight. Pretty good. Then I discovered the Left Hook and the Wild Card, where the pros go, and things got serious.

I cannot imagine any other athlete with the conditioning of a boxer. You see more six packs in a boxing gym than you do at the local bodega. Shadow box with yourself in front of a mirror for three minutes then see how you feel. These guys train for thirty-six, but it's not merely physical conditioning that gets them through. Ring IQ is what does it: the ability to continually assess what you're up against, calculate the opponent's timing, check his foot work and balance, change your angles, exploit openings, stuff your fear - you box; you don't fight.

Jews and fists? The Yiddishe Kopf a thing of the past? Shtetls and Dybbuks were their types of games. Seriously. Shtetls and Dybbuks. That's what they were called in those eastern European villages. But, Jews and Fists? Boxing  may not have been in shtetl DNA, but then there were the likes of Benny Leonard,  Maxie Rosenblum, Battling Levinsky, Abe Goldstein, Max Baer, Jewish guys with noses that looked like California and fists that turned the other cheek. 

When we first began to date Jamie was stunned when she found out I did this thing. ""Why would anybody do this? ", she wondered? "I don't do it for the money,"I said, almost apologetically. "Then why do it at all?" she shot back. I enjoyed being in the ring. I wasn't there to hurt anybody. I simply liked the challenge. refining as many defensive maneuvers as possible to avoid getting hit. Not so different from my revelation in the Marines that I really didn't want to hurt anybody. So why do these things, you ask? You tell me. I still don't know, and it's getting late. Now that I know for certain that the welterweight belt is out of reach, I can sleep.

Some More Book In Progress - 11/7/2021 - Been A Bad Ol' Booger But He's Come 'n' Gone

        Driving is a good time for dreaming. Tires churn things up.  My plane was hours late getting into the airport, stupid stuff, like we had to disembark because they forgot to weigh the plane without passengers. Does anybody out there even know they did that? Dumb as dumb could be. I was bone tired and just wanted my bed.

    Nurses Without Borders had sent me up the Yukon giving measles vaccinations and flu shots to kids in isolated Athapaskan villages, Eagle and Circle being two of them. When we finally landed after an unexpected and unexplained stop somewhere in the boonies of Saskatchewan, I was too worn out to drive the hundred miles home. I picked up my car and spent the night at a friend’s. Next morning I’d do some grocery shopping, stock up on books at the local bookstore, and drive home to my mountains for some R & R.

    RuAnne first called me when I was in the shower, so I couldn’t hear the ring. Next time she called I was toweling down. The phone slipped out of my wet hand and clattered to the floor. It was not easy to get a grip on, but somehow triggered “talk”. 

 “Hey, Teddy, that you? You there? Theodora! Pick the hell up.”

`    “I’m here. I’m here.”

    “Why aren’t you here?”

  “Because I didn’t want to die on the highway last night.”

   “It’s RuAnne”.

“No kidding. I’m on my way. Just got out of the shower.”

”They don’t have showers in igloos?”

    “Stop it, Ru. Cut to the chase.”

    “You won’t believe this one.”

“Try me.”

“State Police - Trooper Colby? - You know him. He's been here before - we get a call come get Gramps. They had him at the station. He’d gone down to the highway, stretched a logging chain across the road. Sat down behind it on a barrel with a shotgun across his lap. Had that old dog of his by his side. Buster Fleabag. Colby was really nice to him, asked him kindly,
                    “Whatcha doin’, Poppa?” 

         “Keepin’ the furriners out,” Poppa said, deadly serious.

             “I believe the country’s grateful for your service, sir, but it’s safe to go now. We got everything under control."

    Poppa asked him if he was sure and Colby assured him he was, then Poppa thanked him and just went along, no problem. They called me to come down to the station house to fetch him. I got there, he and Colby were playing chess.”

     “Where’s Poppa now?”

     “Back here. Workin’ on another bird house.”

    “What’s it this time?”

    “The Taj.”

    “Majal?”

    “You know another Taj?”

Poppa was Michelangelo in wood. At some point, he decided he wanted to create bird houses in the form of classical structures, like the Taj but also St. Peter’s in Rome, Stonehenge outside of London, Ellis Island in New York harbor, the Bastille in Paris, France and such, even a termite mound and an Apache wickiup. Sold them for a fortune. If something struck him, he’d find a way to do it. If something didn’t, he wouldn’t. You never could figure out what Poppa was going to do next, even, they tell me, when he was younger, but what he would do mostly made some sense if you thought about it much which I did.  Poppa had been all over the world, seen so much, took it all in. He didn’t just see what he saw, he thought hard about it: who built it; why; materials used; materials quarried...He saw what was never written, the souls of the folks who thought of these things, the souls of the people who needed these things, the lives of the workers who laid the stones at the tops of tall towers, the thousand year myths that gave rise to it all. He never just visited places, he worked in them - dug wells, taught school, tilled fields, held babies, dug bodies out of mudslides, repaired roofs shredded by monsoons. Poppa was a civil engineer by training, a doer of good deeds by constitution. He dreamed of  building roads where there weren’t any.