You Jump off the Big Red Chair

You jump off the big red chair and come by me as I sit back on a Sunday evening watching Inspector Lewis on PBS.

You come up beside me and look me in the eye.  I have heard that dogs don’t like to look anyone in the eye or be looked in the eye.  If they do, it means war.

We’ve been doing this for years and I certainly don’t sense war.  I just feel a tug. An emotional tug.  I hear a quiet whine.

I scratch behind your ears and tell you how much I love you.

You give me a blink, just a sort of double wink, a squint.  The look of love.

“I love you, Boom.  I love you so much.”

You go to get some affection from Chris.

Fishing Against Type

Question in the Logic Section of an IQ test:

Two people get into a boat.

One, an introvert, patient, long suffering, an avid fan of the Los Angeles Times Saturday Crossword and the New York Times Sunday Crossword,

all sudokus in any paper and a patient listener waiting for Will Shorts’ puzzle on NPR’s Sunday Edition on the way to church.

The Other demands when Lee Ann Hansen introduces the Puzzle Master, “Turn that thing off. I can’t stand these puzzles.”  He’s kidding, sort of.

Extraverted, impulsive, impatient, one whose professor once said that he should have glue put on his study chair so that he would spend some time, any time, with the subject.

They listen.

The one listens patiently and thinks along with the game player on the phone.

The other pushes the pedal to the metal and grates at what he experiences as the convoluted, distorted, twisted, tortured logic of the puzzle and announces, “I don’t have time for this.”

Understandably, the one gets a lot more answers correct than the other one in the car.

One smiles.  The other grinds his teeth.

Oh, yeah, the boat. You get the idea.

These two go out to fish.  The question: Which will be more patient while fishing, the one or the other?

Wrong.

The one, after baiting the hook and putting it in the water and waiting announces, “They aren’t biting.”

The other, who couldn’t wait to get on the water and upon shoving off breathes a sigh of relief, says, “Give it some time, dear.”

Some time passes.  No bites.  They move and move again. No bites.

“What are we doing?” asks one.

“Fishing,” says the other.

“No.”

“Yes. We are sitting here enjoying the day and waiting for the fish to bite.”

“I should have brought a crossword puzzle.”

Then she got a bite.  “Yes, yes, yes!”  One blue gill after another. “I love this. I could do this forever.”

“Thank heaven the fish started biting,” the other mumbles to himself.  “Now we can just sit here till the sun goes down.”

See, further evidence that life is just a puzzle.

e.e. or E.E.?

In college I was introduced to e.e. cummings and I thought the way he spelled his name was way cool, but

e.e. cummings didn’t necessarily want his name in lower case.

Some critics thought it to be for poetic reasons.

His partner said she thought it was because he was such a modest person and conveyed that periodically

and that there isn’t a reason to spell his name that way regularly.

He was E. E. Cummings, proud son of his father, who died suddenly, tragically in an auto accident.

His mother stood there, blood spurting from her neck, wiping her dress as if wondering where the wetness was coming from

not letting anyone take her anywhere until she approached the body of her husband and said, “Bring a blanket. Cover this man. He was a fine man; show some dignity.”

Then she let them take her to the hospital.

He was that kind of a husband; he was that kind of a man; I guess to E.E. he was that kind of a father.

What’s a kid to do but be proud of Edward Estlin, the name that kind of a father thought of or agreed to?

E. E. was the least he could do and as a father’s son, it is what he was willing to give.

She Doesn’t Own a Gun, But….

This person I know doesn’t own a gun (I’m pretty sure.),

Didn’t spank her kids who worked through some excruciatingly exasperating adolescent passages to become, well, pretty productive young adults

(She always said that discipline was a matter of tone.),

Eschews violence on TV, greets people with “Namaste” and an ever present authentic smile, and enjoys NPR, the talk shows and the classical music, on the radio in her

fuel efficient, squeaky clean emissions emitting hybrid.

Which brings me to the point – her driving.

This morning I saw her slide right through a stop sign and then across a bike path, looking neither left nor right, at the corner of the road.

Thank God I was behind her and there weren’t any cyclists crossing from either direction.

I remembered once when I was in front and she ran up my car’s rear end. I wished that I had had that bumper sticker that said, “Unless You’re a Hemorrhoid Get off My Ass.”  I can’t say that to this gentle soul.

She puts the pedal to the metal in a most fuel inefficient way cutting her gas mileage down to, say, thirty miles per gallon while going sixty in a forty-five mph zone;

She brakes a lot because she never leaves a car length for every ten miles per hour;

She never leaves a car length; she crosses solid yellow lines; she passes on hills and I don’t mean on the way down.

So, should I tell this flower-child like pacifistically inclined mom that when she is on the road,

She is Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jan Claude Van Damme all rolled into

Lethal Weapon 1, 2, 3 and 4?

Maybe if I prefaced any remarks by holding up two fingers in a peace sign….

Maybe next time I see her in my rear view mirror, I’ll just pull over quickly and let her pass.

She’ll never see me; I know this because we will be listening to the same show.

She’ll be really focused on what Terry Gross is asking her child/adolescent psychologist guest.

I Saw Caroline Kennedy on the Dave Letterman Show

I saw Caroline Kennedy on the Dave Letterman show.

She carried herself with approachability and dignity as befitting the daughter of American royalty.

Her father’s quickness came through with clever repartee. Sometimes Dave didn’t know what was coming.

He took it well and did homage to the memory. No snotty-ness as he is sometimes known to do so well.  Respect.  She has been through so much.  Be sensitive, Dave.  Be careful.

She spoke of the book she has written about her mother’s taped memoirs.

You could just tell that she had been really close to her Mummy, as she called her.

When Dave spoke of her father, she would respectfully but insistently turn the talk to Mummy, Mummy behind the always presentable façade, the witty, the spontaneous Jacqueline, that’s line not lin as in Jack-a-line like Caro-line not lin, thank you very much. Mummy Jack-a-line.

She spoke of her brother when asked and she listed his naughty but nice qualities. She kept a safe distance between her and her beautiful, mischievous brother before the public eye.

Dave wanted to talk about the events, the turning points, the things that meant so much to him as a teen when her father was killed.

She was courteous.  She was her mother’s daughter.

She spoke of the dead — her father, her Mummy, her brother.

At one point, she alluded to the fact that they were not there. She spoke very softly; you could hardly hear.

They could have been.  They all could have been.  They all could have been around for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

They wouldn’t have been that old, especially her brother John. People live a lot longer than the rest of her immediate family — did.

I thought of her uncles, dead, too. Others in the family now dead, by virtue of age.

I wondered about the lines in her face, premature for someone in her early fifties

and what she thought of when she walked off stage away from the cheers and clapping and all alone got into the long, black car which took her home.

Some Places I Walk Carefully

Hiking on the trails on the north side of Piestewa Peak,

Walking on the streets of downtown Chicago,

Sauntering along Eighth Street in Holland, and

Shuffling down Main Street in Douglas,

I watch the way directly in front of me

because I don’t want to

slip on a rock or step on a rattler in the desert,

trip over somebody directly in front of me who stops to look at the architecture on State,

get in the way of a foursome heading right for me with no intention of moving over on             Eighth St. or

catch the eye of an obviously very important person weekending from the North Shore             who looks away very quickly  and

tosses her hair back and forth as if to wave me off on an otherwise glorious Indian               Summer Sunday in Douglas.

I just got out of church and I still wish she had gone north to Lake Geneva instead of             south and then east and north driving very, very fast, of course.

The Groaners

I finished walking nine holes of golf this afternoon and almost
immediately I started groaning as in groan, groan, groan.

I bent over the little Weber grill at the camp-site. Groan, groan, groan.

Will the rib-eye taste tastier if I groan a bit more?

We ate inside the EggCamper because it was getting cold outside in the October Indian Summer.

I cut into the steak and I heard a groan emanating from the floor.

Boomer, the ninety-five year old Chocolate Lab, who had just finished a really nice bowl of really great dog food recommended by our vet, groaned as if on his last leg.

“Are you complaining or are you content?”

Groan, groan, groan.

Me, too.

Ordering a Hit

The President of the United States ordered the assassination

of two citizens of the United States. Recently, he got his wish.

The President is a constitutional scholar who graduated from Harvard and taught at the University of Chicago.

It doesn’t get much better than that.  He is one of the best and the brightest.

The citizens he ordered killed were fundamentalist Islamist terrorists.

I guess that makes it a-okay, because just about everybody is cheering the effort.

I’m a grouchy, curmudgeon of a Christian.

Should I be concerned that one of the best and brightest constitutional scholars

who happens to be the most powerful person alive might order a hit on me?

One of the Reasons I Like Writing Poetry

One of the reasons I like writing poetry is that poets get respect but hardly anyone tastes the poetic pudding by reading what poets write.

There isn’t a lot of pressure here, because so few crack a cover.

Oh, they get a lot of lip service.  Everyone describes poets as the truth tellers of life.

You hear that from preachers, who also always mention “artists” in the same sentence, just before they quote Rilke, Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins or e e cummings, hoping their parishioners will think their pastor is chuck full of profundity.

Maybe being tagged truth tellers is, in part, why poets don’t get read much.

Who wants to be told the truth especially if it rubs? “Ah, there’s the rub.”

“I beg your pardon!”

When was the last time anyone sat down with Homer, the Greek, or Ovid, the Roman or Virgil or Will Shakespeare or Ferlinghetti, for that matter, and said, “What I really liked was….”?

A former fraternity brother of mine who teaches Shakespeare and has written several very scholarly books on the Bard, which hardly anyone reads, does.

And my brother-in-law’s friend who is a retired classics professor in Scotland who also writes books, which are equally unread, does, too.

Others, like they, read poetry and write books parsing mythic hexameter and iambic pentameter, debating whether or not it was really Will who wrote all that great stuff,

and how much greater the Greek poets were than the Romans with the exception of Seneca, while still wondering if he was a dramatist who wrote poetry or a poet who wrote drama.

Poets get the poet’s corner in the bookstore where they take up as little room as possible with slim volumes, often self-published.

Short story writers don’t get much more attention. They live next door in anthologies of some year’s best picked by other professors who write scholarly books hardly anyone reads.

During the day, in the bookstore, the poets and short-story writers remain really quiet giving the impression they are above the fray. Once in awhile there is a hushed sneeze from all the dust on their covers. No one notices.

But, like Toy Store, the authors of the books come alive after the customers and employees have gone home.

It’s Book Store.

If you were there and very, very quiet and unnoticed and if you listened very intently, you would hear from off in the corner three rooms away,

Poets, amen’d by short-story writers, in a high pitched voice calling to those whose New York Times’ Best Seller books sit on the table facing the door for everyone to see, immediately, as they enter the store.

“You best sellers may be more popular, but we are the true artists; we are the truth tellers.  We are real rogues and mavericky not you, Sarah.”

The soothing, calming voice of the Self-help section replies, “Namaste, Shalom, Salaam, my little brothers and sisters off in the small dusty section.

Do not let your smallness and obscurity obscure your vision of the beauty of your inner self. We highly recommend a colon cleanse and yoga.”

Sarah’s bust is big and bold and shiny on the cover of the book that someone else wrote.

She looks out the front door across the street to the Bank of America and winks that really great Saturday Night Live Tina Fey wink.

Wanting to Hit the Save Button for Them But Can’t

Recently, I started blogging poems especially featuring Boomer, the Chocolate Lab

and our life together with Chris, Boomer’s mistress who seconds as my wife

in Boomer’s eyes.

It’s a new venture, a birthing, a baptism of sorts, that which might lead

to confirmation and then, hopefully, a long life time faith commitment.

It’s exciting and scary like marriage, which we enter with unbelievable anticipation and apprehension.

Yesterday was Friday and two recent college graduates got off work early,

hopped into an SUV driven by a buddy who just got into town, picked up their tux’s,

hit the wet patch, flew into a ditch and shot out again directly into the side of a house.

The brother of the bride and the groom-to-be died instantly.  The best buddy driver will

recover…physically.

Birth, baptism, confirmation, anticipation, apprehension.

I am apprehensive that the poems will die; three young adults filled with anticipation hadn’t  lived long enough to have apprehension.

They missed the rehearsal on Friday; they missed the rehearsal dinner. It’s Saturday and the now former bride-to-be has missed the wedding.

The pastor sits in his study writing a funeral meditation instead of delivering a wedding meditation. He thinks of the name of a good therapist.

The reception has been cancelled; the funeral is being planned.

A mother puts away a bridal gown.

These words were penned on a napkin in a restaurant on Saturday afternoon.

On the way home an oncoming car crossed the centerline at the curve I have always feared. My car swerved to the right, the tires blew up gravel; I guided the car back onto the road. I drive mostly with anticipation and apprehension.

The picture of the crushed SUV shot through my mind’s eye.

I sit giving birth to this by transferring the words to a Word document.  In apprehension, I confirm the birth by hitting the save button before its life might be taken away.

I can only hit the save button for words; I can’t hit the save button for them.